How community is helping us reinvent Value Creation in MENA

Zeina Choucair
BECO Capital
Published in
3 min readMay 23, 2018

We invest in entrepreneurs, not in businesses. This has been BECO’s philosophy since the start of its funding activities back in 2014.

On January 15, 2018, BECO’s entrepreneur-focused stance was translated into the addition of a new component to its Value Creation team: Community. By Community we mean the network of companies within our portfolio, in other words, the familia.

Brittany Laughlin, Partner at Lattice Ventures, hits the bull’s eye in her book titled ‘How Community Can Scale to Successful Exit’, when she states that the rise of the VC Community role illustrates an increased focus on how VCs can deliver more value to portfolio companies. Not only does this focus on expanding value ensure better outcomes of the existing portfolio, it also creates a competitive advantage for the VC in a world where writing a check is no longer a specialized skill.

Immense value can be added by creating and nurturing a community, not only for our entrepreneurs, but also for BECO.

On the one hand, we take into account that startups face many of the same challenges and we therefore design community-focused events that cater to their needs in terms of learning, networking, partnership enablement, etc…

The BECO Familia in 2016

On the other hand, a buzzing community will help us attract talented entrepreneurs which would constitute a competitive advantage in a world where funding has become a commodity.

I was inspired to write this piece following a very successful community event we organized on Monday March 26th, Breakfast with BECO.

Breakfast with BECO was designed to build relationships between BECO and various corporate industries, which will bridge the gap between the latter and our portfolio companies.

The first Breakfast that took place in January was titled ‘The State of the Automotive Industry in MENA’, and gathered key OEMs alongside automotive portfolio companies Careem, SellAnyCar, Syarah, and Dubicars for a morning full of insights and discussions.

On March 26, we hosted the second Breakfast that tackled ‘The State of the Fintech Industry in MENA’ in the presence of major banks and Fintech portfolio companies Ajar Online, Bayzat, and WahedInvest. Both sessions paved the way for promising partnerships between portfolio companies and the corporate sector, and we could not be any prouder.

You can click here to read about about Insights with BECO, another exciting Community activity we’ve been holding to nurture the learning of our entrepreneurs through the shared expertise of world-class experts.

It has been incredibly interesting and rewarding to contribute to the building of the BECO community. The rise of Community Managers in VCs is an extremely new phenomenon, and I must state I am very proud to be part of BECO Capital’s avant-garde efforts in reinventing value creation in the MENA tech ecosystem.

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