Mahmoud El Said, co-founder and CEO, Wasla: 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 Mahmoud El Said (LinkedIn), co-founder and CEO of Wasla. In February, internet browser turned e-commerce superapp Wasla bagged a USD 9 mn investment from Contact Financial Holding, which it will use to introduce secure checkout and expand into Nigeria. Edited excerpts from our conversation follow:

My name is Mahmoud El Said, and I’m cofounder & CEO at Wasla browser. I’m an investment banker and I’m married to a lawyer.

I always wanted to go into banking as an extended education. It’s quite demanding and you deal with a lot of seasoned and experienced people. I recommend it to anyone at the start of their career. I always had my eyes on moving away from that and starting my own thing, so when the idea of Wasla came up, me and my co-founders decided to jump ship and pursue it full-time.

As CEO, I’m responsible for the overall success of the business. On a day-to-day basis, I would say that my main responsibility is developing the strategy and making sure the team is aligned on it. I tend to think that I don’t manage people, I manage the process, which shows how I expect things to be completed. I tend to assess a lot of the risks facing the business, manage the board and shareholders, and develop strategic partnerships.

I actually like to think that my morning routine starts the day before. I check stuff at night to have a clear picture of my goals for the next day. I wake up at 6:30-7am, make coffee, and do the same thing that I did the night before with a higher level of engagement. After that, I spend some time on social media. I tend to read up on messages or emails from the day before, and typically scan Enterprise headlines. I spend some time on Wordle, which is quite fun. Then I wake up my wife, shower, and we both head to work at 7:30-8am.

I like to be the first one to the office, even though I would like to allocate some time to health in the morning. There is a whole other morning routine at the office — including a deeper dive in Enterprise. I believe that mornings set the tone for the day. I usually leave the office at 6:30-7pm.

My routine is extremely important for me. I really appreciate simplifying my life to make sure I’m not occupying my brain with small tasks, so I do things in the exact same sequence every single morning.

I stay focused through a lot of thinking and a lot of brain-dumping. If you open my notepad, you’ll get a glimpse of what I think about. I’m very organized with my time, calendars, and what I think about. I make a lot of to-do lists and schedule a lot of stuff on my calendar. I try to put a process in place for anything that is routine for me so I can handle the ad hoc. I’m the person who is always two minutes early.

We always had our eyes on fintech and an e-wallet, but we wanted a unique way to go to market that would resonate with emerging markets. When we first started Wasla in 2018, we wore hoodies that said “Do you want [no-charge] Internet” on them and stood in front of Cairo University until we got kicked out. From there, we built out the browser and created an app-sponsored model, and using that revenue, we subsidized the user’s internet cost. Fast forward to 2020, we were getting ready to go to market, when covid hit. That’s when we saw e-commerce traffic grow. Since there are two main use cases — content and e-commerce — we decided to shift the model from helping people save data to optimizing online shopping in general. Today, our mission is to enable e-payments for online shopping audiences in emerging markets, integrating price breaks, and buy-now-pay-later models.

We were lucky to be pushed toward this new direction because of covid. During covid, the number of e-commerce visits rose from two to 16 per month. We always wanted to pivot to a more transactional business and fintech, so we’re happy that this happened.

In the evenings, I like to sit with my wife. We tend to cook together every day when we get back home, watch TV, sit in a comforting environment — basically anything to decompress.

I recently read an interesting book called 6 Bn Shoppers: The Companies Winning the Global E-Commerce Boom that one of my co-founders bought for me. It’s very interesting and shows how ecommerce is adapted in different parts of the world and how each model was built and what allows each model to survive. I generally like nonfiction and shy away from fiction.

I’m the type of person that has Friends, Brooklyn 99 and Two and a Half Men on repeat, but I recently watched The Tinder Swindler.

The best piece of advice I’ve heard is: “You can’t rely on motivation because it won’t always be there. You need to rely on discipline because you can always control that.” It was an inspirational quote on Instagram but it really resonated with me.