Twenty years in tech and social entrepreneurship across MENA and other growth markets. Told backwards, from what I am building now to where it started.
Where the two halves of my career finally do the same job: consulting on the hardest community problems, and building the products that answer them.
AI is what makes the pace possible; data is what makes the calls right. Ambitious community and growth goals, delivered in weeks rather than quarters, built from inside the system rather than observed from outside it.
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Swaplyst connects people with peers and organizations through volunteering, internships, and skill exchange. It is the question Nakhwah asked in 2009, answered with everything I have learned since and everything AI now makes possible.
It launched at Web Summit in Lisbon, on a stand, in front of people who could use it that day.
Vibe coded from the first idea to the App Store and Google Play. First product out of the studio. More coming.
Live swaplyst.com
Entrepreneur Middle East
Swaplyst: Founder of Nakhwah revives his volunteer-matching vision 16 years later
Brought in for community engagement and data at Abu Dhabi’s media hub. The role kept expanding until it included digital communications end to end, the website, the campaigns and the content, plus a member database, a product line, a podcast, and a revenue target.
A community event I designed from nothing. Forty attendees, nine of them influencers whose combined reach passed four hundred thousand. Small rooms, chosen carefully, still beat big lists.
Hosting twofour54's Community Talks meant interviewing the people I usually work behind: creators, founders, operators. Twenty years of asking people what they need, finally on the record, in Arabic and in English.
Strategy, pricing, operations, growth, for individuals and for businesses. Podcast production on one side, design on the other. I built the booking platform it runs on, which took the admin work down to a fraction of what it had been.
Fifteen years after starting Nakhwah, on a stage in Dubai, arguing the same thing: volunteering is infrastructure, not charity, and it needs to be built like infrastructure.
A full-time remit at twofour54 never meant putting that down. The two threads ran in parallel the whole time, which is why the studio exists now.
A media hub is judged by its own media, so the new site had to hold up as the front door for everyone the business wanted to attract.
I managed it from planning through to the day it went live.
Owning digital meant the website, the social channels, the email, and the content moving through all three.
It is the quiet half of community work. People arrive through a channel long before they walk into a room.
Sales, partnerships, and the pipeline behind them, including AD Gaming. Large events and space takeovers closed, digital campaigns feeding them, and a budget that moved to whatever was working.
A perks portal brought members in and gave them a reason to keep coming back. Onboarding ran through it, and everything it collected landed in one central database on Airtable.
Attract, onboard, engage, report. Four jobs that had been done by hand, in four different places, running as one cycle instead.
The same problem on a bigger platform, with the portfolio of a sovereign investor behind it. It ran in parallel with twofour54 until 2025; the ecosystem work never stopped when the day job changed.
Programs designed and delivered with VCs, corporates, and universities, plus the pricing and lease model for ADQ Ventures' co-working space and the daily operations that kept it running.
Destination Abu Dhabi filmed a piece on Further, the venture builder ADQ anchored with a $200 million fund to co-found companies in fintech, digital assets and supply chain.
Most of what I do inside an ecosystem is invisible by design: the data, the introductions, the programmes that make a portfolio feel like a place. Every so often a camera turns up and it is worth pointing at.
Community data infrastructure for ADQ's venture platform, evaluated and implemented end to end, working across the portfolio with Further, Alpha Wave Incubation, and Flat6Labs.
I moved to Abu Dhabi to help open a tech ecosystem from an empty room, and stayed to build the machinery underneath it.
Mentorship, workshops, pitch events, and the introductions to VCs, corporates, and universities that founders actually needed. Value creation is a soft phrase for a hard, specific job.
Airtable at the center, wired into Slack, Mailchimp, forms, and the reporting layer leadership used to make calls. An onboarding form that invited a new member to Slack and added them to the mailing list without anyone touching it.
Most organizations either stay manual or over-engineer. The tool was sitting there the whole time.
I helped choose which startups came in, which platforms we ran on, and what the place would feel like to belong to. Sourcing and screening on one side, the whole member experience on the other.
Five years at the center of the region's startup story, running the programs and writing the coverage that shaped how MENA talked about itself.
Fikra Labs put four travel and tourism corporates in the same programme: ADNEC, Etihad, Miral and the Department of Culture and Tourism, powered by Wamda.
Four weeks of acceleration, and the winners left with 100,000 dollars each in equity investment and a partner to build it with. Corporate entrepreneurship works when the corporate has to sign something at the end.
Wamda
Abu Dhabi’s travel and tourism leaders award $100k to four Fikra Labs winners
Most start-ups here treat social as a broadcast channel and skip the part the name promises. Community is the product of talking back.
Corporate entrepreneurship programs, incubation tracks, and competitions that gave regional companies a real reason to work with founders rather than talk about them.
Running community at Wamda meant running the writing too: articles, interviews and campaigns aimed at founders across the region, in Arabic and in English.
The pieces I signed myself were the ones arguing that social enterprise is not charity with better branding, and that the region needs it to work as a business.
Mix N' Mentor, end to end, seven cities a year from 2012 to 2019: Amman, Dubai, Cairo, Riyadh, Beirut and wherever else the region was building.
Founders in a room with the people who could actually help them, and me in the back making sure the right two were talking.
The Arab world's first volunteering network, and a decade of my life. Everything the region came to know me for started here.
Nakhwah closed its decade having matched more than nineteen thousand volunteers across seventeen Arab countries. A number I still measure new work against.
Misk Foundation, alongside UNESCO and the NGO liaison committee. Five years of running rooms for other people meant occasionally being the one on the platform.
The Emirates Foundation Youth Philanthropy Summit, back to back: youth, sustainability and leadership in 2015, then Arab solutions driving the alternative revolution in 2016.
Panels are where you find out whether the thing you keep saying in meetings holds up in front of a room.
Coverage that went past the founder story and into the mechanics: how you measure social impact when the connection is made online and kept offline, and why a small market is a good place to start and a hard place to grow.
Forbes listed me among its global social entrepreneurs; Takreem named me Young Entrepreneur of the Year. Two lists in twelve months, for work that had been quiet for five.
Ashoka elects people it expects to keep going for decades. That framing changed how I thought about the work: less about one platform, more about the pattern underneath it.
The King Abdullah II Award for Youth Innovation and Achievement, presented at the World Economic Forum on the Dead Sea.
Awards do not build anything, but they open doors that stay closed to a founder in their twenties.
I built the answer myself: concept, MVP, and every iteration after it. Nakhwah matched people to the causes that needed them, across borders, at a time when almost nothing in the region did.
Run alongside Nakhwah, for organizations with real impact and no way to talk about it.
NGOs, social enterprises, international organizations. Strategy, digital campaigns, media relations, social advertising. It taught me to say a complicated thing plainly, in two languages.
Two years that made everything after them possible. I learned what a product costs to build by building two of them.
I was in the room when Jawaker started, and I am the one who picked the name.
Then I built the first playing table: a card table rendered in a browser, for people who wanted to play the games they grew up with. That table became the core of the product; the product became one of the largest casual gaming platforms in the region.
Straight out of computer science at PSUT, on the core team building Akhtaboot on Ruby on Rails, for a region with no real way to look for work online.
