Hello World Africa
I am often described as a startup evangelist but a better definition of who I am is probably an ecosystem builder, or at least a contributor to the great African Startup & Innovation Community takeoff.
Reason behind this specification is chiefly because I feel myself and I daily live as a strong worker, deploying projects toward specific goals that I set to myself just like the entrepreneur I’ve always been, rather than writing books and participating to seminars (only).
I was born in a modest yet loveful environment, in the very North of Africa – in the City of Casablanca-, at the specific early tipping point of technology reach in the continent.
The day I met Jack Ma at the presidential Palace in Lomé, Togo
Moroccan lifestyle is made of opportunities to seize to develop value for yourself, and people who matters to you, eventually society, so I decided to make this technology landscape mine by developing strong dev & tech skills, as an autodidact first then as an engineer. This was my social fire escape and the one I promote now for the greater African society.
But to do so I needed to be one step ahead of what was happening in here, always with years of delay, to be able to imagine & build the solution the country needed beforehand. So I’ve traveled a lot, with few means and no network outside the country. I yet, because I have no shame to dare contact people, met incredible mindsets such as Bill Gates, Jack Ma & Satya Nadella.
This brilliant mindset taught me in seconds what school never did – what is it to be an entrepreneur and what it takes in terms of sacrifice to make things happen, to build products, to generate value.
So I’ve tried, in more than 5 countries, to create something. I’ve failed. I’ve learned. I’ve tried again and sometimes I did succeed. When you fail, you lose everything but experience, when you succeed, you win the means to share your experience with those who need it, which is key for African entrepreneurs.
With Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft during Viva tech in Paris
With Virginia Rometti, at the time CEO of the IBM group at Viva Tech in Paris.
With Ronaldo Mouchawar, co-founder of souq, which was bought by Amazon
Some photos of my years spent in Silicon Valley
I wish I had, at the time I was building tech ventures, the ability to join a real ecosystem full of incubators, angels, ideas, labs, where corporates and startups collaborate, develop synergies and disrupt markets. None of these existed here. How hell would people less lucky than I was be able to gain experience, to understand the right mindset, not to be afraid of unlocking their ideas.
So I decided it was my mission to build it. Or at least to contribute to its foundations. So I’ve started fighting the old school way of thinking and deployed all my energy, building accelerators and networks around the continent, convincing governments and NGO to trust in Africa, pushing local entrepreneurs beyond their limits – and trust me, limits in developing countries tend to be hard to overcome.
I am today an entrepreneur, an investor and I lead acceleration programs & structures in the whole continent & beyond. But what a challenge, what a long journey to pursue, but at the same time, how proud are we when we witness entrepreneurs we helped reach global markets.
We love building ventures in Africa, not because it is easy, but because it is hard. And because it is hard, succeeding in here requires much more energy than anywhere else, leading to a true south-north reverse innovation pattern, where local solutions meet global value propositions and markets.
My name is Mehdi Alaoui, I definitely think that I am not an evangelist. Just a dreamer who happens to have met bright people, trying to ignite and consolidate years of hard African entrepreneurship experience into a growing ecosystem, as a giveback for the help I had at the time.