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BUSINESS whizz-kid Ryaan Sharif, who helped Bahrain attract almost $300m worth of foreign investment, is paving the way for tomorrow’s entrepreneurs to make the grade and push on along the pathway to success.
The 33-year-old former St Christopher’s School pupil is heading one of four start-up accelerators recently established in the kingdom, aimed at helping guide young talent with their fledgling business ideas and attract further investment to enable them to grow and prosper.
Ryaan, who lives in Amwaj Islands, had a successful and secure position as senior manager of manufacturing & logistics – business development at the Economic Development Board (EDB) but decided to take on a fresh challenge as managing director of Flat6Labs Bahrain.
“I have two main roles in managing this operation,” he said. “On the mentorship side, I need to be able to guide the start-ups, constantly listen to them pitch, fine tune their presentations, highlight their strong points as well as improve on weaker points for them to be ‘presenter ready’ for venture capitalists.
“I also need to drive this business, make sure we are getting a large number of applications – quality applications – and react with the private sector. My base of contacts I have brought with me from my time in the EDB, from working in that space, can help. I have a very strong idea of what each company needs in Bahrain and will try to plug their challenges with solutions from these new businesses.
“Also, I will eventually be opening a fund which we will want to encourage corporates to put money into.”
The first eight chosen start-ups representing multiple sectors such as education, ecommerce, gaming, hospitality and healthcare have moved into a plush office suite located on the 15th floor of the National Bank of Bahrain (NBB) towers in Manama, as reported in last week’s GulfWeekly.
They are currently going through the final process stage and will each receive $30,000 in cash seed funding along with a host of perks. They embark on a 16-week mentorship-driven accelerator programme to transform their ideas into investment-ready companies.
At the end of every cycle a Demo Day will be held, where graduating companies showcase their start-ups to a host of potential investors and partners.
Ryaan and his team appear well-equipped to show them the way with the help and guidance of numerous mentors from home and abroad who have, as the saying goes, ‘been there and done that’ and, most importantly, are still doing it.
His Bahraini dad, Abdulrahman, 69, is a former business development executive, notably involved in the setting up of Etihad Airways, and Welsh expat mum Janet, is a former primary school teacher who also ran a pre-school nursery. They are both enjoying their retirement in Durrat. His elder brother, Rashad, 36, described as a ‘techie’, works for Google Play.
Ryaan attended St Chris until 16, before starting sixth form in England at Dene Close boarding school, Cheltenham. He went to complete a three-year BAECon Economics degree course, specialising in finance, at Manchester University.
On graduating he worked for a web-browsing tech start-up called Start Now based in London, driving revenue through advertising before moving back to Bahrain for a three-year stint with Ernst & Young, the multi-national professional services firm, in transaction advisory, developing business plans, carrying out feasibility studies and due diligences.
A seven-year stint at EDB Bahrain followed, which he can proudly record on his CV as personally attracting 42 companies and has accounted for $282million dollars’ worth of inward investment and created 2,015 jobs.
“It was a tough decision to leave,” he admits. “There were a lot of things on the table for me at the time but I was approached by a recruitment consultant – they explained the Flat6Labs Bahrain job – and for me, what made me super excited, was that I knew how much effort from being at the EDB has gone into supporting start-ups – there’s a whole national economic strategy related to it.”
The move, he says, has been inspired by His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, Crown Prince, Deputy Supreme Commander and First Deputy Prime Minister, to encourage and support Bahraini entrepreneurs to set up their own businesses.
From bringing bright young minds together for meetings and discussions, the natural progression was to attract accelerators to drive their ideas forward and establish incubators, places with support staff and equipment made available at low rent to new small businesses.
Flat6Labs, established in 2011, boasts locations in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Lebanon, Tunisia, as well as Bahrain, with a new addition launching in Morocco soon.
Its network of locations enables its start-ups access to more than 300 mentors and cross- border business and legal support for start-ups to scale their business into the respective markets of its locations.
The Bahrain wing is poised to support and invest in around 40 local and international start-ups and entrepreneurs through its acceleration model, developed in association with Tamkeen, the governmental organisation supporting the kingdom’s private sector.
“An accelerator takes a start-up and tries to accelerate the business,” explains Ryaan. “You’re kick-starting an idea, taking a simple business idea and making it into a bankable business. That’s the best way of putting it.
“The way you do that is that you put them on a four-month programme - training, mentorship and coaching. That’s the three forms of support that we provide.
We have given them a co-working space to work with the other start-ups as well, so they can have a registered office, based in the building.
“Each of these eight companies will be registered in this office for up to a year and later on they will splinter off and actually have their own office spaces outside.
“The financing is provided by Tamkeen but rather than giving out grants directly to start-ups without checking whether the business is going to fail or has a chance to succeed, they are entrusting in people like ourselves to invest in talent. The ones that have been chosen after a proper, well thought out process and ones that really fill a gap in the market.
“We feel we’re serving a purpose or a need that has been missing in the past.”
Up to 250 wannabe entrepreneurs applied online for a chance at support, where their submitted ideas were scrutinised with a fine toothcomb. The team carried out video conferencing calls and numerous interviews, before dwindling the applications down to around 20.
Obviously the local operation is committed to take on a certain number of Bahraini start-ups but not solely, as Ryaan, explains, they don’t want to limit their scope and ‘cross-learning’ is an important element of the concept.
One of the ‘first cycle’ start-ups is an online training platform originating from Switzerland, for example.
The initial 20 faced a ‘boot camp’ and a speaker from Silicon Valley was called in to sort out the fledgling finalists.
Ryaan compared it to the US TV programme Shark Tank and the UK’s Dragon’s Den, in which budding entrepreneurs get the chance to bring their dreams to fruition in reality shows. They present their ideas to the sharks in the tank - five titans of industry who made their own dreams a reality and turned their ideas into lucrative empires.
“Basically, during that session we are judging two things; one, does the business serve a need that is currently missing and, do we think this business is going to be profitable going forward,” he said, “and, two, the character of the person, do they have the business acumen and do they have the motivation to want to make it succeed.
“If we are putting our money into something we need to be comfortable that this person will be able to drive the business forward.”
In return for the $30,000 investment Flat6Labs Bahrain take between five to 10 per cent equity in each start-up – the actual amount depends on the maturity of the business.
“I have two guys out there with more than 100,000 downloads already,” Ryaan explained, “so they are in a much stronger position than perhaps another that has only just started. Some of them are already generating revenues.
“It has to be a sustainable enterprise – the thing is that we are somewhat taking a risk but it’s a more calculated risk because we have already analysed – we have our own methodology of what could potentially be a success and what’s not going to be a success. But, at the same time, if they were to go directly right now to a venture capitalist the VC wouldn’t, in my opinion, give them the time of day.
“The key thing for us is to be close to the VCs and the private equity companies (PEs).
“That’s basically what we are doing over the next four months, getting them pitch-ready for something we call a Demo Day which happens right at the end of the cycle. We invite all the PEs, the VCs and other high-net individuals so that they can present their business plans to these people and, hopefully for us, the outcome will be that the company will be valued even higher.
“We call it ‘follow on funding’, but that is what Flat6Labs Bahrain’s end game should be … but there is one thing that should be documented, for a lot of our investments we are investing over a 10-year cycle … so we’re in it for the long game. We stay in, we guide them - we want them to succeed.”
Soon Ryaan’s attention will also be focused on bring some of Bahrain’s major companies on board with a working investment partnership.
“Now that’s one of the stronger reasons why I’ve been brought here to be MD,” he believes. “I understand and appreciate some of the private sector needs and have a kind of good feeling about who may be willing to put some money into a fund.
“In Bahrain now there are corporates that are very interested in this but, number one, they don’t really understand it, and number two, they have money to put into it but they do not have time to do it on a corporate level.”
He offered an example of a well-known construction company which has recently built a shopping mall and noticed running costs increasing as result of a reduction in electricity subsidies.
“The running costs of operating an air conditioning unit within that shopping mall has become astronomically higher,” he said. “A start-up might have a solution where it is able to manage the electricity flow, for example, of an air conditioning unit a lot more efficiently. Now, the corporate, like a construction company, might be interested in acquiring such technology.
“Looking at construction solutions, let’s say, they might prefer to put cash with an accelerator like ourselves in order for us to try and identify solutions to their challenges.
“The ‘sell’ would be, tell us what your issues are, put some money into our accelerator, and we will try and tease out the obvious gaps that you have in your businesses and try to find a solution.
“In theory, if they are putting money into the fund, our start-ups, the company would have some ownership in the company to provide solutions and, in the second round of funding, if they incorporated the solution into one of their shopping malls, for example, and it takes off really well, there might be more willingness for the company to go into the second or third round of funding, saying, you know what, let’s take even more equity in this because it’s really interesting.”
It’s not too far-fetched a suggestion. Incidentally, only this week, it was reported how a British start-up, which won a Best Mobile App digital award last year, has teamed up with this year’s sponsor of the contest’s Best Digital Marketing Communication section.
Ideal Boilers has instructed Sauce to design another brilliant mobile app which aims to help engineers know what tools and parts to take with them to call-outs before they set off.
“Once you’ve got an example, a case study where a start-up has fixed a problem for X company, it’s a lot easier for that small business to start rolling out and winning contract after contract,” said Ryaan.
“We need to get close to the corporates, hoping that they will put money into the fund to invest in the success of this accelerator and, hopefully, becoming stronger shareholders in some of these start-ups – larger corporates supporting smaller Bahraini businesses, that’s the intention.”
On the personal note, he’s already on a winning run, engaged to Swedish expat lawyer Johanna Brolin, 31, group legal officer at Bahrain’s telecom giant Batelco. They will be tying the knot next summer.
Ryaan was once asked by magazine editor Katy Gillett if he had one wish in the world, what would it be? He replied: to own Manchester United. That might be a tad ambitious as the Red Devils top the table of the world’s 20 richest football clubs.
However, he’d probably be just as happy if one of his fledging start-ups grew big enough to sponsor the team’s shirts.
All rise for the promise of future enterprises
A high-level Bahrain business delegation, led by the Startup Bahrain initiative, Bahrain Economic Development Board (EDB), Tamkeen (Labour Fund), Ministry of Industry Commerce and Tourism - as well as start-up accelerators Brinc, C5 and the Nest - attended the recent leading business and entrepreneurship event in Asia RISE Hong Kong Summit.
They were able to showcase the kingdom’s growing experience in providing a fertile, supportive environment that empowers start-ups and stimulates their growth. In addition, a special pavilion was devoted to shed light on Bahrain’s ecosystem.
More than 350 speakers from the world’s largest companies, including Microsoft and Amazon, as well as start-ups from around the world, showcased their expertise bringing together 15,000 entrepreneurs from around 100 countries.
John Kilmartin, executive director of ICT at the EDB, said: “Conferences such as RISE Hong Kong are great platforms to promote Bahrain’s start-up ecosystem and the milestones achieved in attracting and supporting start-ups in the kingdom.
Startup Bahrain, in cooperation with Tamkeen, sponsored five Bahraini start-up founders to attend the conference with the objective of growing their businesses. While in Hong Kong the delegation will take part in two other events, the first organised by Brinc and the second one is by Metta’s Members’ Club, organised by Nest, a Hong Kong-based corporate accelerator.
Tamkeen’s COO Qusay Al Arayedh added: “Attending such global event widens opportunities to learn from best practices, as well as to showcase the Bahraini model of start-up ecosystem and exchange expertise.”
StartupBahrain is a community initiative made up of start-ups, corporates, investors, incubators, educational institutions and the Bahrain government to promote a start-up culture in Bahrain. Efforts are being made on six pillars – community, incubators & accelerators, funding, talent, corporate and policy and regulation – to make Bahrain ‘a great place’ to startup and scale companies regionally and globally.
Representatives from Startup Bahrain took part in a number of global start-ups events in 2017 including Web Summit Lisbon, Step Dubai, Rise Up Cairo, Arabnet Ryiadh, in an effort to boost the entrepreneurship sector in the kingdom.
Brinc will be staging a Demo Day this afternoon to show off its first cohort acceleration programme teams before they ‘graduate’.
Attendees will get a first look at the start-ups, meet the founders and network with other top-tier investors, corporate strategists and members of the media.
In this cohort, out of nearly 200 applicants, seven teams reached the ramp-up phase and only three Brinc MENA Spring 2018 teams made it to the final round. They are:
Smart Nakheel which is building a smart device to solve a major agricultural problem for date palm farmers, detecting costly infestations.
ALGO is using IoT to improve the in-store shopping experience, getting rid of the headaches of queues.
And, Time Control Technologies is a real-time B2B tool for contractors to enhance productivity and monitor the workforce.
The event will take place at the Brinc Batelco IoT Hub based at Bab Al Bahrain.
