Talks

Loom Cairo investor pitch

Pitch · AUC Venture Lab · Cairo, Egypt · 22 June 2025

The investor pitch for Loom Cairo, on stage at AUC Venture Lab. The argument: Egyptian local fashion is a $4bn market that you cannot actually shop, because finding one t-shirt means opening twenty brand sites, and every aggregator that tried to fix it shipped stale inventory, too few brands, or no curation.

Loom’s answer was technical rather than editorial: an algorithm that ingests and labels product data off any local brand site, which is what let it carry 21,000 items against the next competitor’s 16,000 while still holding the brands with real equity. The traction slide at the time: 4,700 active users, 76% returning, 180% month-over-month MAU growth, 3.5-minute average retention against a market average of two. The ask was $150K for 10%.

Gnosis demo day presentation

Speaker · Dell Summer Academy · Cairo, Egypt · 8 September 2022

The closing presentation of Dell’s Summer Academy, for a team project called Gnosis, after the Greek for knowledge through observation. The pitch starts from Ebbinghaus: high-school students forget something like 95% of what they were taught, so the resources spent teaching them are mostly spent twice. In Egypt that sits on top of a second split, where the education that works is priced out of reach and the education people can afford doesn’t.

The part worth keeping is that the team ran design thinking at it and landed somewhere other than where they started. The obvious culprits (disengaged students, disengaged teachers, underfunding) didn’t survive contact with the research. What was left was pedagogy: the discipline of how information is conveyed, which most teachers are never taught and many can’t name. Gnosis was the response, built around a lecture engine that walks an educator through designing a lecture against pedagogical principles rather than leaving them to reinvent it.

The MENA Data Desert

Moderator · Creative Industry Summit · Cairo, Egypt · 8 June 2026

A panel on building brands in a region that doesn’t hand you the numbers: no reliable market data, no benchmarks worth trusting, and decisions that have to get made anyway. I moderated.

On it: Sherif El Madany, Marketing Director at Mountain View; Rokaya El Maraashly, Managing Director at TAC Universe; Ahmed ElBatt, Strategy & Planning Director at Peace Cake; and Samar Abdelaal of Awe Research, the summit’s research partner. A client-side marketer, an agency MD, a strategy director and a researcher: four different places to be standing when the numbers aren’t there, which is the only reason a panel on this beats one person saying it.

Where I steered it: off the complaint and onto the method. The easy version of this session is forty minutes of agreeing that MENA data is bad. The useful version is what each of them actually does on a Monday without it: what you can infer, what you have to go and measure yourself, and which decisions you make anyway rather than waiting for a number that is never arriving. Insight as the thing that reduces uncertainty enough to move, not as the line item you fund once there's budget spare.

TNN Live

Host · E7kky · Cairo, Egypt · 1 May 2026

TNN’s first live event, hosted by E7kky: an outdoor stage, an audience, and the creators people scroll past on their For You page standing in front of them. I hosted it.

The recording is TNN’s own coverage of the night, cut in the show’s nightly format (correspondent lower-thirds, headline slugs, the ticker) so it doubles as a demonstration of the thing the event was celebrating. Segments run through Amina Ayoub on founder honesty, Aseel Bahjat’s 981K-view normal day, and Mazoonit, a game built to push women’s participation in investing to 50%.