It all started one day when I was visiting a museum in New York with Marwa Cheikh Youssef and I received a call from a friend who was working at Microsoft at the time.
He told me that he has a budget of $20,000 and that he would like to carry out a marketing action with developers. And I immediately had a flash saying why not launch a Hackathon and suggest to these young developers to use my Screendy platform to imagine solutions and why not even set up their own startups. So we organized this hackathon and it was a great success.
So I thought why not do that in my country? I also thought that entrepreneurship is a path, a way of living. You can take this path very early, in your childhood. You can also start at retirement. But as failure is part of the learning path, better start soon. So I’ve founded Hack&Pitch NGO to raise entrepreneurship awareness at the University level, deploying entrepreneurship seminars, Hackathons, competitions & bootcamps in more than 100 universities and institutions across the 12 regions of Morocco, and I was so happy to do it, because we were able to discover incredible young talents, who have nothing to envy to the talents of Silicon Valley.
Seeing all the impact we have been able to create, Hack&Pitch has carried out actions even beyond Morocco, in Africa, such as in Senegal, in Mali, Burkina Faso, Jordan… Today, I handed over the torch to Marwa, who has taken this association to another dimension with her team, always with the mission of creating even more impact and inspiring its young aspiring entrepreneurs.
Today, Hack&Pitch has inspired more than 40,000 young people, organized more than 180 events, with +8,000 participants, +2,000 innovative projects and +25 success stories.
Seeing all the impact that we were able to create with this young people, seeing young students who started with an idea and who today are real success stories having managed to raise funds, gave me the faith to go even further.
I needed to set up a structure that acts globally, that supports start-ups from start to finish. So that’s when I decided to create LaStartupStation which is now is my tech entrepreneurship ecosystem builder flagship, a unique place I almost live in along with startups, corporates, NGOs, gov institutions, tech giants and whoever wanna build something new. It is a startup accelerator with a strong angel & VC network, orchestrated by Scalarator program batches & animated by open innovation programs to build trust, opportunities & synergies between accelerated startups and large organizations.