10 Hot Takes On Startup Culture With Abdallah Abu-Sheikh
One of the leading tech entrepreneurs in the MENA region, Abdallah Abu-Sheikh is renowned worldwide for launching pioneering, future-proofed platforms with sustainability, mobility and digitalisation at their core. His unconventional strategies and strong business ethics have also gained him international recognition, as have his appearances as a global keynote speaker at platforms such as TEDx.
RIZEK, a localised digital marketplace launched in 2020, is among his most successful projects. It secured more than $10 million in funds and was ranked as one of the Most-Funded Start-ups in the Middle East by Forbes ME. His latest venture, BARQ, is a unique tech-driven network of electric vehicles crafted to serve the MENA region’s last mile delivery sector.
Abdallah stepped up to the mic on The Change Officer Podcast to share his fascinating perspective on startup culture, what it takes to be a successful founder, and how to most effectively foster talent in startups. His episode, “A Brutal Truth About Creating The Next Big Thing” can be found here.
Do you have what it takes to make it in startup culture? Keep reading to dig into 10 of Abdallah’s industry insider insights into this hot topic.
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#1 On juggling multiple priorities
“Everybody thinks we need to be “on top of it”. You don’t need to be on top of things. Being on top of things means you’re adding more weight to things. So things are lighter when you’re not on top of them.”
When it comes to prioritising in running your company, you need to consider your goals. For example, if your targets are purely financial, you will almost always find that there are others who are better situated to enable your business to make more money than you are. They will keep their eye on the financial metrics without any sentimental attachment to how they feel about the company. Is your purpose to run the business, to be as operationally involved as possible? In that case, you will likely want to be involved for a longer period of time. Don't allow yourself to be struck down by "founder poison". Pick the best people for meeting your goals, and allow them to lead the business in the direction that it is supposed to go.
#2 On running a business
“I try to make myself negligible in the business cycle I am running. I try to remove all dependency on me as much as possible because I’ve learned over the years that the best businesses are self-sufficient businesses.”
Your business is put in a compromised position if it is completely dependent on you to run. Yes, in the beginning you as the founder will be doing everything from posting on social media to attending pitch meetings. However, you also need to have that acumen to realise at what point you need to start disconnecting. That doesn’t mean you just disappear, but it does mean there has be a gradual process of breaking the business into modules that are handed to different people. As subject matter experts come in to take on all those various tasks and your involvement decreases, you can start thinking about how and where you’re going to invest your time to maximise your impact.
#3 On delegation
“Great talent will only operate if you give it a great challenge. If you keep all the interesting stuff to yourself and get everyone else to run chores, great talent will not stick. Great talent is fuelled by challenge.”
No individual founder is good at absolutely everything. Consider the likes of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. There is a lot of great talent that works with founders such as them. These valuable individuals will not shine unless they are given the opportunity to rise to the occasion by overcoming difficulty. If you want great talent to stay in your company, you need to create the space for them to apply their minds, use their skills and solve complex problems.
#4 On making mistakes
“You need to pass on the bigger challenges to other people, and you need to be super okay with watching them make mistakes. Up until you became a founder you made a lot of mistakes. That’s why you became who you are.”
You need to respect your staff and give your talent the space to make mistakes. They need a chance to grow into their own management style. Some founders make the common mistake of hiring managers with the expectation that they will operate exactly the same way and share the same school of thought. Everyone has different management styles. As a founder, you need to incubate their growth into their own way of managing their team. Failure is an vinaluable tool for growth. Throwing challenges at your staff and giving them the space to fail can be a deeply rewarding process. Failure means they are learning, and when you realise how powerful this process is, you can find joy in seeing them make mistakes and learn from those mistakes.
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#5 On female leadership
“I do not agree with the whole segregation of women leaders and men leaders. Leaders are leaders. It doesn’t matter what their sexual orientations are. But I believe women do a better job. They have a lot more natural empathy.”
Abdallah is a keen promoter of woman-identifying entrepreneurs and has undertaken to try to hire as many female leaders in his companies as possible. For the better part of his life, he has believed that women make more natural leaders than men due to their increased capacity for empathy. He has seen them display more natural loyalty and stick by their teams when tackling problems, and this nurturing facet is why he believes they make excellent managers. He is impressed by their patience, capacity to juggle a myriad of priorities, and how easily they can put their egos aside to make things happen with their company’s best interests in mind.
#6 On competitive spirit
“You can be super competitive and super respectful. You can be super ferocious, super brutal, but super respectful of the people you work with, and super involved in taking care of what they actually need. ”
In this fast-paced world, it could be argued that incompetence and underperformance should not be entertained. The talent pool out there is huge, and the simple fact is that there is always someone on your heels. You can be tough. You can be ferocious. You can pursue achievement with single-minded focus. However, do not confuse competitive spirit with impoliteness — you can be relentless in chasing after your goals and the company’s targets while still being respectful of your colleagues and doing your part as a member of a team.
#7 On working environment
“There is a huge movement toward promoting this marshmallow concept of a workplace where everything is people sliding down slides and sitting on beanbags and playing video games and things are all pink and butterflies and rainbows and there are no problems. Business has never historically been conducted like that — and not just business, any challenge.”
Challenge by necessity is difficult, particularly in startup culture. A startup is all about beginning something from scratch. This means that often you don’t have resources, time or many of the other things that make life comfortable. A mistake that many make in startup culture is joining an organisation pursuing rapid growth while still seeking their comfort to be the top priority. Consider the company’s mission and what they are trying to achieve. Is this a mission and a goal that you believe in? What are you willing to invest and sacrifice to see it come to fruition?
#8 On uncomfortability
“The best of ideas grow out of a place of challenge, of discomfort, very high levels of discomfort. If you look at Steve Jobs starting out of a garage, or if you look at Elon Musk sleeping and showering at the gym. They’re not the friendliest of people because they understand they’re not here to be everyone’s best friend — they’re here to get the job done.”
Abdallah believes that toxic productivity may be, at least in part, a response to the rise of what he calls a “work culture of incompetence”. As a founder, you’ve been put in the position where other people are entrusting you with their money to reach a certain target, financial or otherwise. Spending time and effort worrying about people’s emotions and how they are feeling is something he cannot reconcile with an environment where a certain level of tenacity and “brutality” is required to achieve the goals that have been set. However, refer back to Point #6. You can be ferocious and still support those in your team.
#9 On workplace culture
“Culture is built on top of achievement. If you achieve together, you have a culture together. Whatever your culture is, if it does not achieve, it is useless.”
In environments of rapid growth, culture is most significantly and lastingly born out of accomplishing your goals as a team. Just look at big players like Uber and Tesla. Uber’s culture was based on the fact that they managed to deliver the biggest logistics company of the last two decades. The culture of Tesla was built on the fact that they managed to build the biggest vehicle business of the last century. If you want to create a culture that means something and has staying power, ask yourself: what is my culture achieving?
#10 On growing together
“People who suffer together, stay together. It’s not people who sit on beanbags together. We need to suffer together to grow together. Otherwise, this whole business is going to shut down, and at that point, no beanbag is going to save your life. ”
These days, our feeds on LinkedIn are flooded with media documenting teams doing fun activities together (see Point #7 about beanbags and slides and video games and the like). Ultimately, superfluous nice-to-have’s like these are not what pulls a team together. The glue that makes steams stick is trust. If you can trust that your teammates are going to give their 100% to achieving the company’s goals and vice versa, it doesn’t matter if they don’t maybe communicate with you in the way you prefer or if they greeted you nicely that morning. Knowing that they are as committed as you are and willing to step in to help in the ways that truly matter will be the determining factor in whether your team lasts or not.
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