Bootstrapping to Exit from Saudi Arabia: Emad Daghreri, Co-Founder CEO of Autobia (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. This particular project that really gave you this breakthrough situation, was it paid or was it just a complimentary thing that you were doing for Mr. Ahmed?

Emad Daghreri: It was a complimentary thing.

Sramana Mitra: So, once this worked, you took it to other people to replicate this kind of situation.

Emad Daghreri: In Saudi Aramco, there is a culture center called Ithra Center. It’s their public-facing center where people come to read books or watch a short movie. At that time, it was just a building that was not yet complete, but they wanted to activate the programs.

Dr. Khalid Al-Yahya is our first paid customer who saw what we did in the first project. He met us at TEDx KFBM that we’d organized ourselves in the university. He was interested to know more about its ecosystem and how we did it. His first project was to make readers shine in the Arab world. Reading is generally done when you’re alone and isolated – in a restaurant or cafe, drinking black coffee and wearing glasses. This is the stereotyping of readers.

He wanted to make readers go out and shine. We proved that readers are actually making an impact and they can be engaging in a community. We used the same website but did a new challenge where readers will come and post about their reading passion and the books they loved. To add to this, we created a small camp where readers can gather and we facilitate for them to talk on the stage. We associate that talk with an artwork in the background so that it will not be boring. At the end of the day, we have a final event where we invite a lot of people from the community to come and watch those readers shine on the stage and talk about a book they loved and read a few minutes. It’s like a TEDx Talk, but it’s about a book they’d read before.

These projects made it more than just a platform. This is the first project where it contained a platform, a boot camp, and a final event. That was the first framework TAM used to adapt more projects from different interested parties. I need to engage with the public to have a particular set of people to find the best out of them, to improve their skills in a certain subject, and to put them on the stage in a final event. This is the first framework of TAM. It was the first beta project.

Sramana Mitra: Okay. How much did you get paid for this?

Emad Daghreri: I think it was less than $50,000 for the entire project.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a lot of money though.

Emad Daghreri: No, but it was nice technology. We actually had to hire a lot of part-timers from the university because we cannot afford to pay anyone full time for two months. We had to pay some of the artists who did the artwork. We had to organize some of the judging events because they need to be in front of a judging panel. Honestly, even today, the CEO Abdullah has no idea how I did it, how I pulled it off with this small budget because it was really small on a two-month project with a lot of engagement. It started during my final exams in the university. I took my final exam in the summer, then came back to manage the project.

It was really a great time. In that project, I mastered the balance between operation excellence and technology. I’m always solving operation challenges with technology. That’s where we built our internal system. For receiving thousands of applications, you need a strong system that’s flexible enough for different criteria and a filtration system where every project has different scenarios, different touch points, and different judge panels. We need software to do voting. That’s where TAM ecosystem as technology and product started to develop to help us to accelerate or scale and do more of those projects with less amount of people. We started with this idea that we cannot hire a lot of people. We need the technology to help us to automate and help us be agile.

Sramana Mitra: So, does that mean that you turned these competitions mainly to online competitions then, yes?

Emad Daghreri: Yes, almost all of our project has an online component where I need to engage with certain people around the kingdom. This is the perfect medium to do that. Whatever is happening after that will depend on the case.

We had cases where we used to help filmmakers to do films and manage their budget because they get grants from the government, or to help a foundation like Misk Foundation to do a fellowship program for students to work abroad with international companies. Or we’d help the Ministry of Culture to help students to get international degrees in art, which we don’t have in Saudi.

We also help new entities to understand the historical landscape in a certain city. We did a competition specifically for those people in that city to help identify the historical location without actually paying more money to a market research company who will do random things in that area.

We utilized that ecosystem to do a lot of things, not necessarily as a competition, but competition was the first framework. We did a lot of things that work – online applications, sorting, and filtration, then delivering the value for the end user – the one who actually applied or the governmental sector or the private sector who has a certain problem that can be solved with public engagement and the network effect of people.

Sramana Mitra: How did the pricing evolve?

Emad Daghreri: In the early stage, we decided that we want to go with the government only because at that time government had this 2020 and 2030 vision. It’s what made sense because they mostly want to engage with the public. Government works on bidding and contracts. We had to understand how this ecosystem works and how we can create a proper business proposal that will be aligned with their goals. Almost 90% of our income comes from governmental contracts.

Sramana Mitra: What was the scale of these projects? You said your first project was for $50,000. So, were you able to significantly improve on the pricing then?

Emad Daghreri: We started with $50,000. Now we are taking projects that are worth $30-$40 million. The scale of projects was going up like crazy, especially in the last three years before our IPO. Due to the 2030 vision, the government is giving out projects, and there are not many companies around. Usually, they’d award you with two years or three years worth of projects as a big project with a small milestone. Since TAM developed all of that ecosystem and we have the smartest people in that ecosystem, we now know how to do consultation, project management, technology, and the team is growing in that regard. We were able to really have big contracts from the government at the latest stage of TAM.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping to Exit from Saudi Arabia: Emad Daghreri, Co-Founder CEO of Autobia
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