Hossam Taher, co-founder, CEO and head of product, Orcas: Each week, My Morning Routine looks at how a successful member of the community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of random business questions just for fun.

Speaking to us this week is Hossam Taher (LinkedIn), co-founder, CEO and head of product at edtech platform Orcas, which offers online and in-person courses for K-12 students. The company recently raised USD 2.1 mn in a pre-series A round and last month started operating in Pakistan, its first market outside of Egypt. Edited excerpts from our conversation follow:

My name is Hossam Taher and I’m currently CEO and head of product at Orcas, the edtech company that I co-founded with Amira El Gharib. I’m 31 years old and I graduated from the German school and studied medicine at Cairo University. I love tech, I love products, I love solving problems and I love math.

I wake up at 6-6:30 am and I have my morning coffee while watching the NBA highlights from the day before. I’m a huge basketball fan and play 2-3 times a week, so in the morning I usually go to the club, run a bit, shoot some hoops before going home and taking a shower. Afterwards, I check out Enterprise or read something that I’ve saved from the day before. Sometimes I read a book instead or spend time chatting with my wife. By 9 am, I start doing my own work, answering emails and messages. At 11, I walk to the office and that’s when the insanity begins.

I do two main activities at Orcas, I’m the CEO and head of product. As CEO, I’m responsible for hiring and building teams, fundraising, making sure that there is a company runway and making sure that our plans make sense on the strategic level. I have to make sure that I align with team leaders, investors, team members, and the board. I do a lot of firefighting and problem-solving and decision-making everyday.

Everyday, I’m bombarded with questions and decisions. For me, feeling comfortable with being assertive and decisive are things that come with being a CEO. You have to perfect it and learn from the mistakes. And by perfecting it, I don’t mean being right all the time: I mean learning to live with the wrong decisions that you make and understanding that decision-making quality does not reflect the quality of the outcome and that worrying about the outcome distracts from the decision making process.

My work as head of product allows me to outsource decisions to the user. When I was in med school, we would document the personal and medical history of a patient using a set methodology. I love applying this methodology to products. Our users are students, moms, teachers and schools, and so I ask them questions about the product and try to validate their answers through investigations or data by comparing what they say to what they do. Then I can figure out what the actual problem is and turn that into product features. This is something that I really enjoy working on.

We recently raised USD 2.1 mn in a pre-series A round. That money will go towards two things. Expanding our reach by opening Pakistan and looking to Saudi Arabia. And the second thing that we’re focused on is making sure that our product is the best that we can offer. We want to invest in the quality of teachers, classrooms, assessments, etc. We want to provide more monitoring and more control for the parents. We want to be present and monetizing in three markets, so product investment is very important.

We started our Pakistan operations in early January. We’re applying all the lessons learned from Egypt to Pakistan. We don't cross borders, so we match Pakistani teachers with Pakistani students. It’s currently the best way to provide the best results for our students, but working across borders is definitely something that we want to explore in the future.

Online is becoming part of how we learn but it’s not the only way. We still have more demand for offline tutoring, but our data shows that online tutoring was less than 1% of our offerings in 2020, and 30% did it in 2021 and today, 70% do hybrid.

When work is done, I like to sit with my wife. We talk about life and things, we watch Netflix or documentaries, or go to the club and have lunch. I also love to play board games with my friends. Traveling is also very important to me, so I try to do weekend getaways to Sokhna and I go to Fayoum a lot.

One of my favorite books is called Thinking in [redacted] by Annie Duke. She’s a poker player and it’s built on the idea that life is like a poker game, not a game of chess. She talks a lot about decision-making and she basically concludes that you should never let the outcome of a decision determine if your decision was right. I also like How Not To Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg.

[Editor’s note: Annie Duke’s book is great. It also uses in its title a word we can’t use in Enterprise — not because it’s crude and we’re prudes, but because it enrages the algorithms that determine whether we make it into your inboxes or disappear into a bad folder.]

I don’t remember who told me this, but the best piece of advice that I’ve been given is the ability to unlearn. We live in an age that is full of updates and events that are changing everything that we know, and we have to unlearn and relearn things. It also frees up your brain capacity; it’s like upgrading your brain with new apps and removing cached material.