In this episode, we sit down with Fouad Jeryes, co-founder and Chief Business Officer at Maqsam, MENA's AI-powered cloud communications platform. Fouad has been building in the region for over a decade, from co-founding CashBasha (one of Jordan's most trafficked e-commerce sites before its acquisition) to helping launch Oasis 500, Jordan's first tech accelerator, to running Amman Tech Tuesdays for ten years, bringing together over 40,000 attendees across the Jordanian startup ecosystem.

We cover:

– Why Maqsam's competitors are their best salespeople, and how customers keep migrating after poor experiences elsewhere.
– Why most Arabic language accuracy benchmarks are nonsense, and why resolution rates are the only metric that actually matters.
– Fouad's co-founder relationship with Sinan Taifour, why it's lasted longer than most marriages, and why being different is the whole point.
– Why Maqsam has stayed deliberately quiet on fundraising while building a profitable, capital-efficient business.
– What it actually means to build a MENA company as a Jordanian founder based in Riyadh, and why the question "are you a Saudi company" misses the point entirely.
– Fouad's take on AGI, why he thinks it's much further away than the headlines suggest, and why voice will be the last interface we ever use.

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Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction
03:00 - The Genesis of CashBasha and Building for the Region
06:00 - Why MENA's Fragmentation is Actually the Opportunity
10:00 - A Co-Founder Relationship That's Outlasted Most Marriages
14:00 - Why Maqsam Never Pivoted to AI
15:00 - AI Will Replace Jobs and We Should Be Comfortable With That
19:00 - OpenClaw, Prompt Injection, and the Dark Time Ahead
23:00 - Voice is the Last Interface We'll Ever Use
28:00 - Why Arabic Accuracy Benchmarks are Complete BS
37:00 - Why Maqsam Stayed Deliberately Quiet on Fundraising
39:00 - Our Competitors are Our Best Salespeople
47:00 - Moving to Riyadh and Playing Where Ronaldo Plays
49:00 - "Are You Guys a Saudi Company?" and the MENA Identity Crisis

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Thank you to the partners who make this possible:

• Sarwa – An all-in-one investing and money-management platform. It brings together do-it-yourself trading in stocks, ETFs, crypto, and options with Sarwa Trade, hands-off investing with Sarwa Invest, and high-yield estimated returns with Sarwa Save.

👉 Register using this link to be eligible for a $200 bonus when you fund $5,000 across your Sarwa accounts within three months of signing up:
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Sarwa is regulated by the ADGM Financial Services Regulatory Authority. All investing involves risk. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

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Transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/db87419a/transcript.txt

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Today's guest is Talal Hasan, a lawyer turned venture capitalist turned climate tech founder who has spent the better part of a decade chasing a rather ambitious goal: turning carbon dioxide into rock. His journey started in the Omani investment world, helping set up the venture capital arm for the Sultanate's sovereign wealth fund, but a 2018 discovery about a massive dead zone in the Arabian Sea sent him down a rabbit hole that would eventually lead to 44.01.

Named after the molecular mass of CO2, 44.01 is an Oman-based carbon mineralisation company that accelerates a natural process where ultramafic rock absorbs carbon dioxide and converts it into solid carbonate minerals, and it turns out the Arabian Peninsula has some of the largest surface-level deposits of exactly this rock anywhere in the world. What normally takes decades in nature, Talal and his team are doing in months.

The company most recently raised a $42M Series A from a cap table that reads like a climate tech fantasy draft: Equinor Ventures, Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Sumitomo, Air Liquide, and a personal nod from Sam Altman's Apollo Projects for good measure. They're now scaling from pilot projects with ADNOC and Masdar to commercial operations, with plans to export the technology they've developed in the Gulf to formations in Norway, Canada, and beyond.

We get into the Peter Kelemen article that sparked the idea, what it takes to convince the world that drilling into rock is actually the answer to climate change, and why transportation logistics might be the real constraint on scaling carbon removal globally.

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Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction
03:00 - The Arabian Sea Dead Zone Discovery
05:00 - From Venture Capitalist to Climate Founder
08:00 - The Peter Keleman Moment
13:00 - Why Oman's Geology is Perfect
19:00 - Accelerating Nature: Decades to Months
24:00 - Addressing the Greenwashing Question
30:00 - Building Proprietary Mineralization Technology
36:00 - The ADNOC Partnership Strategy
41:00 - Exporting Hard Tech from MENA
45:00 - The Long-Term Investment Thesis
47:00 - Taking 44.01 Global

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Thank you to the partners who make this possible:

• Sarwa – An all-in-one investing and money-management platform. It brings together do-it-yourself trading in stocks, ETFs, crypto, and options with Sarwa Trade, hands-off investing with Sarwa Invest, and high-yield estimated returns with Sarwa Save.

👉 Register using this link to be eligible for a $200 bonus when you fund $5,000 across your Sarwa accounts within three months of signing up:
https://www.sarwa.co/register?promoCode=FWDSTART

Promo code: FWDSTART

Sarwa is regulated by the ADGM Financial Services Regulatory Authority. All investing involves risk. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

-----------------------------------------------

Transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/416fda01/transcript.txt

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Follow Jamie Lane on LinkedIn:
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Today's guest is Djamel Mohand, a Rocket Internet alumnus who landed in Saudi Arabia over a decade ago, back when relocating to the Kingdom for tech was rather less fashionable than it is today. What was supposed to be a six-month stint turned into ten years of building businesses across the region, most notably as COO at Foodics, where he helped scale the restaurant management platform to over 30,000 restaurants across 25 countries.

Earlier this year he stepped away to start something new: Governata, a Saudi-based data governance platform that just raised a $4 million seed round from investors including Joa Capital, Sanabil Accelerator by 500 Global, and Plug and Play. Data governance is not exactly the sexiest pitch in the world, and Djamel will be the first to admit it. But his thesis is essentially this: everyone is talking about AI adoption, but very few organisations have their data house in order to actually make it work. Governata is positioning itself as that foundational layer, the Arabic-first, Saudi-built platform designed to get enterprises AI-ready rather than just AI-curious.

We get into the Rocket Internet origin story, what he learned scaling Foodics, and why the gap between having a data policy and actually implementing one is where the real opportunity lies.

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Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction

03:00 - From France to Saudi: Djamel's Origin Story

05:30 - Rocket Internet Baptism of Fire

08:00 - The Culture of Extreme Fairness

10:30 - The First Ride Hailing Wars

15:00 - Pricing Agility as a Competitive Weapon

17:30 - Kitopi: 400 Employees in Nine Months

21:00 - How Saudi's Regulatory Approach Actually Works

25:00 - Discovering the Data Governance Problem

32:00 - Leaving Foodics to Start Governata

43:30 - The Enterprise Sales Playbook

53:00 - Arabic-First and Global Ambitions

-----------------------------------------------

Thank you to the partners who make this possible:

• Sarwa – An all-in-one investing and money-management platform. It brings together do-it-yourself trading in stocks, ETFs, crypto, and options with Sarwa Trade, hands-off investing with Sarwa Invest, and high-yield estimated returns with Sarwa Save.

👉 Register using this link to be eligible for a $200 bonus when you fund $5,000 across your Sarwa accounts within three months of signing up:
https://www.sarwa.co/register?promoCode=FWDSTART

Promo code: FWDSTART

Sarwa is regulated by the ADGM Financial Services Regulatory Authority. All investing involves risk. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

-----------------------------------------------

Transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/95eb50ee/transcript.txt

-----------------------------------------------

Follow Jamie Lane on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamienlane/

Follow Jamie Lane on X:
https://x.com/jamienlane

Follow Djamel Mohand on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/djam/

Follow FWDstart on Instagram:
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Visit our Website:
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