OUR FOUNDER OF THE WEEK- Yasmine Abdel Karim, co-founder and CEO of Yalla Fel Sekka (LinkedIn).

My name is Yasmine Abdel Karim, and I’m the CEO and co-founder of Yalla Fel Sekka. I studied political science and economics at Cairo University. After graduation, I began my professional career in Schlumberger’s economics and marketing department, where I spent a little over a year. Afterward, I quit my job, moved to Scotland, and got a master’s degree in human resources management from Robert Gordon University. When Schlumberger hired a young CEO with an HR background in 2010, I rejoined the company’s HR global branch in Paris, ending my tenure there as the HR manager. I then took a sabbatical from work, moved to Boston, and started pursuing another master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University — and that’s where the idea for Yalla Fel Sekka popped into my head.

I co-founded Yalla Fel Sekka with my friend, Khashyar Mahdavi (LinkedIn). We both recognized the gaps in the MENA region when it comes to the availability of instant delivery and on-demand logistics companies that cater to needs of businesses in the Egyptian market. We both decided to travel to Egypt to study the market and figure out what to focus on to create an impactful startup that addresses the needs of players such as supermarkets, SMEs, and e-commerce outfits to enable them to sell to their customers through a network of dark stores, warehouses, and delivery drivers. When we became enamored with the idea of founding YFS, I decided to change my major at Harvard and to shift my focus of study to delve into business and entrepreneurship courses.

My studies at Harvard proved to be essential to the founding of Yalla Fel Sekka. I consulted my professors about the plans I had laid out for YFS, and I constructed the model, pitch, and business plan for my startup during my studies. I pitched my business idea and got the maximum amount of funding from Harvard’s Graduate Syndicate Fund to start my startup. The backing of the Graduate Syndicate Fund led us to attract more US investors like I Squared Capital and Flybridge Ventures. We raised more than USD 2.5 mn during this seed round. Our beta launch took place in 2019 and we fully launched YFS in 2020.

Our goal at Yalla Fel Sekka is to provide instant delivery services for businesses and to build the infrastructure required to enable them to satisfy their on-demand logistics needs. This year, our goal is to build and expand our dark store and quick commerce infrastructure for our clients. Our clients include Carrefour, Spinneys, Instashop, and Alfa Market, among others.

The most important KPIs I focus on include growth levels, and our performance indicators — the quality of our service, customer satisfaction, utilization rates, riders’ performance, and delivery time, among others. We also keep track of our internal KPIs, including the team’s performance and the level of their professional development, and focus on the training plans that would suit the needs of each team member.

To focus on my entrepreneurial journey, I had to give up on my freedom, personal and professional stability, and peace of mind [laughs]. The startup challenge is huge. With startups, risks are a part of the job. It’s an agile, ever-changing process; you improve as you progress in your founder journey, and oftentimes things don’t go as planned. Sometimes they go better than what you had envisioned, and sometimes they don’t, which can be personally taxing. Ultimately though the biggest gap I’m noticing is that I can no longer disconnect, entirely switch off from work, and take a two-week vacation, for instance.

The founder’s journey is very lonely. As a founder, you won’t be able to turn to your friends for advice. They will be unable to relate to the hardships you face. You can, however, overcome the lonely side of the job by reaching out to your peers. Other founders face the same challenges regularly and can relate to your woes, offer solutions, and provide useful insights. Whenever I’m in need of advice, I turn to my co-founder Khashyar Mahdavi, MaxAB CEO and co-founder Belal El Megharbel (LinkedIn), and Trella co-founder Omar Hagrass (LinkedIn). I think there should be a Tinder-like platform that would enable entrepreneurs to get together, talk about relevant problems, and bounce ideas off each other.

On the upside, it’s also a journey that’s filled with rewards that make the sacrifices worthwhile. The best part of the job for me is seeing progress and observing that we’re innovating, impacting, and inspiring our customers and our team. This gives me the grit and resilience to keep going and helps me forget the negative side effects of the job. I also love the fact that I’m empowering and helping with the personal development of my team: When the team evolves, so do you.

My advice for would-be founders is to maintain their determination, be flexible, and always listen to the advice of peers and experts from the market. Entrepreneurs need to pay attention to the advice of experts from the startup scene to better understand the hardships and the underlying complications that come with the founder's journey. Entrepreneurs need to be flexible to adapt to pivoting business models, and to shifting markets. I also believe that time is a critical asset for startups, so founders need to be very process-oriented and must have an understanding of how to focus on pressing problems to be able to ensure the survival of their business.

Aside from the USD 2.5 mn we raised during our seed financing round, Yalla Fel Sekka raised USD 7 mn in our series A funding round in 2022. We have attracted US investors including I Squared Capital and Flybridge Ventures, and regional investors including Kharafi Group, and DisruptAD, an Abu Dhabi-based VC set up by the emirate’s sovereign wealth fund ADQ in 2021. We have no further funding plans for 2022, but with our short-term goal to focus on our dark store management plan, we may raise more funds once we have a successful model.

If I had to do it all over again, I would still go down the investor route early on. I believe that bringing in the right investors accelerates the business on so many levels. Investors obviously bring capital to the table, but they also bring strategic advice, market insights, help connect you with future investors and otherwise useful people, and so much more.

Aside from our dark store management initiative, our other short-term goal at Yalla Fel Sekka is to expand into different Egyptian cities and become the market leader. We currently operate in five cities in Egypt — Cairo, Giza, Alexandria, Mansoura, and Tanta. Our long-term goal is to launch new verticals and to expand regionally, possibly into North Africa and/or GCC countries.

Startups that I think are killing it are MaxAb and Trella. I love their business models. They are doing incredible work and are both solving real problems in the market. Other startups that I think have a great impact are Paymob and zVendo. Yalla Fel Sekka is actually partnering with zVendo.

The last great things I read were The House Of Gucci by Sara Gay Forden, and Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt's Roaring '20s by Raphael Cormack. The former delves into the mesmerizing tale of the Gucci dynasty, and the latter brilliantly immerses you in the Cairo of the roaring twenties: It brilliantly transports you to a surreal world that is amazingly alien to modern readers.