the Arab world because its e-mail service supported Arabic and it offered 15 megabytes of storage space at a time when Hotmail offered only 1MB and Yahoo offered 2MB.
Because of the entrepreneurial skills I had acquired during my experience with IslamWay.com, AbdulRahman offered me a job overseeing marketing and sales. Without a moment’s hesitation I accepted. We worked hard to spread Gawab’s services further in the Arab world. Eventually we managed to reach two million users and secure sustainable revenue by selling advertisements as well as hosting e-mail solutions for businesses and other websites. As Gawab. com grew, so did my paycheck. I became responsible for a team of twelve employees who dealt with clients in different parts of the Arab world. It was fun doing business with people you never met, thanks to the Internet. The growth of the company was exciting, and so was a six-figure offer of a buyout pitched by an Arab investor.
Working at Gawab gave me my first real sense of professional responsibility. Anything related to marketing and sales came to me. I was even responsible for accounting and cash management. It seemed everything was happening at once: in addition to spending long days at Gawab and many hours studying during my final two years at the university, I had become a father: Ilka and I were blessed with a baby girl in January 2003. We argued about who would choose the name; Ilka strategically allied with my mother and eventually got her way. We gave our beautiful little girl the name Isra.
I was ecstatic about being a father. It was strange for everyone else at school, since none of them had children. In general, many colleagues found me quite strange. Some saw that I rushed into decisions and actions without fully contemplating the consequences. They were right. It is in my blood. And not just that: I have always wanted to swim against the current.
Time quickly went by; Isra turned one, and I officially became a computer engineer in June 2004. Because I was a father, I felt even more responsibility to excel, in order to provide for my family. I scored my highest grades during the last year of school, yet my overall grade of 64 percent was “unsatisfactory.”
During my work at Gawab and a few months after graduation, I decided to study for an MBA. My job put me in charge of the company’s sales and marketing, and I realized how much knowledge I needed — I could not just read a few books and get up to speed. I needed experienced mentors and a vigorous education in business. My first choice was the American University in Cairo, which has a top-quality MBA program, though it charges high tuition fees. It would mean spending over 60 percent of my annual income on my education. As far as I was concerned, the cost did not matter much, as it was an investment that I trusted would reap returns after a few short years. Yet the university made it clear that I was not a strong candidate. My undergraduate grades were not high enough.
I wrote a long letter to the university explaining the reasons behind my low grades. The general system of education in Egypt was to blame, I claimed. I had missed exams during the first year of electrical engineering, then again during the first half of the third year, when I was in the United States, which had unfairly penalized me. I also explained the distractions of my work and early marriage, and I stressed my attempts to overcome them. One of my dearest university professors, Dr. Ahmed Darwish, who was the Egyptian minister of administrative development at the time, even wrote a letter of recommendation for me.
One of the requirements for acceptance at AUC’s MBA program was to score a minimum of 500 points on the GMAT. The director of admissions told me that if I was very serious about my application, I should score higher to compensate for my low grades. She said my score should not fall below 550, the average score of their applicants. I took it as a challenge. After two months of intense preparation I scored a 680, which was very high compared to the scores of my Egyptian peers. A short while later, I was finally accepted. I pledged to the admissions office that I would prove my worth and score the highest grades in all my classes.
Two years and sixteen courses later, I graduated with a 4.0 grade point average, the highest possible. I would start each workday at Gawab, travel from there to the university to attend classes, then spend long hours at the library to study. Achieving straight A’s became of the utmost importance to me, even though it would have little effect on my career. Yet I did it. My self-confidence was redeemed. I proved to myself that I was not a failure. Ilka was supportive above and beyond the call of duty and stood behind me throughout. She knew that it was my own personal challenge, and despite the fact that I spent little time with her and our daughter, she always encouraged me to keep studying and focusing on my school projects.
The experience of the MBA program at AUC was crucial. Learning the science behind marketing was key to my career progress, and later on was vital to my online activism. The combination of marketing and a concentration in finance enabled me to understand how to study market needs, design products that address those needs, and promote them to target audiences. The finance classes introduced me to the world of business; since I came from an engineering background, this taught me a lot about how to run businesses financially. Little did I know that only a few years later, all this piled-up experience would come in quite handy in promoting a product I had never seen myself marketing: democracy and freedom!
In 2005, during the first year of my MBA, I had the startup bug. It was then that I met a major Arab investor in the field of technology — a chance meeting that I attribute solely to divine assistance. Mohamed Rasheed al-Ballaa was an engineer and a major stakeholder in the National Technology Group. Headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, NTG is a multinational conglomerate with more than twenty specialized information and communication technology (ICT) businesses in the Middle East and North Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the United States. To my delight, al-Ballaa was impressed with my web experience and listened to me pitch a cars portal for the Arab world similar to AutoTrader.com. He invited me to visit his company’s branch in the United Arab Emirates to discuss the project further.
Instead of offering to finance a startup, however, al-Ballaa offered to hire me. He wanted to expand aggressively into the Internet business in multiple ways, and effectively gave me the opportunity to be part of a larger team with a mission to help what he believed would change the face of the Arab web. The offer was quite enticing, since my entrepreneurial dream would be partially fulfilled with very little financial risk and my efforts would ultimately have more impact given al-Ballaa’s ambitious vision.
After I started working at NTG, I found al-Ballaa to be a model Arab investor. He treated me like a son, to the extent that my colleagues started to refer to me jokingly as Wael al-Ballaa.
One of the companies established by NTG was Mubasher, a Middle Eastern version of Reuters and Bloomberg financial solutions, which provided Arab stock market investors with web-based screens displaying real-time prices to facilitate buying and selling decisions. Al-Ballaa knew the importance of research and economic news for investors. He asked me to take the helm in starting a Cairo-based company to support Mubasher with data and analysis. I was not yet twenty-five.
At the time I knew nothing about the media, or publishing, or even the stock market. I was so ignorant that I did not even know the difference between a stock and a bond. I began avidly reading everything I could get my hands on about stock markets, and decided to take finance-related courses in my MBA. The company was established, and I quickly assembled a team. Needless to say, I was committed to the Internet generation. Most team members were fresh graduates in business and mass communications; I much preferred them to the experienced researchers, who were nowhere near as digitally engaged.
Mohamed al-Ballaa was extremely supportive of the project’s launch, both financially and morally. When Mubasher.info was launched, it quickly became one of the main destinations for many small Arab investors seeking information and news on listed companies.
This experience had a profound effect on me. I was heading a large team of more than 120 people. We were always seeking ways to develop and innovate. I tried every possible means to motivate the team to give the company their absolute best. I constantly urged all the employees to improve their own skills and the work environment. The site had more than one million visitors per month, and its reputation spread around the globe. We launched an English version. Several international stock market websites and companies began using our portal as one of their reliable sources for news and information. As a result, the company