Habib Hadad, the Lebanese entrepreneur behind
Yamli and general darling of the Arab startup community, has just told me about
YallaStartup, a new project he is working on.
More details will come soon, but in short, Habib has put together a team of mentors and advisors who will support new tech ventures coming out of the Arab world. If you got to the site right now, you can register to find out more. Working together on the project are
Elie Khoury, the founder of Woopra, and
Sami Shalabi, who founded a mobile applications company called Zingku
which was acquired by Google in 2007. One thing that we all know is
seriously lacking in the Arab startup scene is the support structures. The most obvious ones are venture capitalists and incubators, but equally important are the less institutional things, entrepreneur networks, democamps, programs like Y Combinator and Seedcamp, angel networks etc. Its cool to see things like YallaStartup emerging not from government policy or corporate PR, but from some of the success stories of the community.
That's awesome, so is it a new VC/Angel-Investor or what?
It is more like a support / networking platform for everyone in the startup ecosystem. Am writing an article with more details for tomorrow's newspaper, will post up a link when it goes online.
That's of course interesting I'd like to see more projects like this in the future :) good step