OUR FOUNDER OF THE WEEK- Mostafa Ashour, co-founder and CEO of NowPay (LinkedIn).

My name is Mostafa Ashour, and I’m the CEO and co-founder of NowPay. I started my professional career as a software engineer at IBM in 2005, and went on to work for Microsoft as a program manager for six years. I led an incubation team that was responsible for de-risking ideas, incubating them and making the business case for them, and then pushing them all the way into products. After Microsoft, I joined the family business, Taco Industrial Group, and learned a lot about the ins and outs of managing a manufacturing company.

My experience in tech and manufacturing opened my eyes to the importance of utilizing tech to ease financial pressure. In 2018, I started focusing on the idea of financial wellness and observed how companies abroad were tackling this issue to make a material difference to employees’ financial wellbeing.

Some studies show that most employees rank financial pressure as their main stressor in life. In 2019, we launched NowPay to help solve that problem. We look at financial wellness through four different verticals: savings, spending, borrowing, and budgeting. We believe that if you can save well and spend less, set a budget for your financial wellbeing, and borrow seamlessly and effectively, then you can become financially healthy.

Our core offering at NowPay enables employees to receive their salaries at any time, instantly settle payments, shop online, and transfer money through our app. To make this happen, we have corporate agreements with over 200 clients, including government entities, manufacturers, schools, and top companies like McDonalds, KraftHeinz, General Motors, Edita, and Americana.

We currently have a financing round in the works that we expect to raise a USD 8-figure sum. NowPay raised USD 600k in our pre-seed funding round in 2019, and then USD 2.1 mn in 2020, as well as additional financing in undisclosed rounds.

The caliber of our investors illustrates that Egypt is becoming a regional startup and tech hub, and speaks to the importance of the work we’re doing. We have attracted US investors including Y Combinator, 500 startups, Plug and Play, and 4DX ventures, as well global investors including China’s MSA Capital, and the UK’s Sturgeon Capital, among others. Our regional investors are BECO Capital and Global Ventures, and we also have local VCs like EFG-EV, Beltone Private Equity, Endure Capital, and Foundation Ventures, as well as a number of angel investors.

The most important KPIs I focus on include how our sales portfolio is performing, the number of agreements in the pipeline and the number we close, and how many employees and companies are using NowPay. We also keep track of our retention levels — we are very proud of the fact that we’ve never lost a single client.

Our short term goal at NowPay is to keep growing our company’s portfolio. Our long term goal is to build new products across our verticals.

The likely exit strategy for NowPay would be a SPAC. I think the SPAC mechanism is the least complicated exit strategy for startups. We’re considering that for our startup, and plan to go the SPAC route by 2024.

My advice for any would-be founder is to find a more experienced mentor who has been through their own entrepreneurial journey. They will help you navigate problems and challenges, because they will have gone through the same struggles. Amr Shady (LinkedIn), CEO and founder of Tribal Credit, is that person for me. Whenever I’m in need of advice, I call Amr.

Every entrepreneur needs a proper support system. If you bring in the right executive team and partner with qualified investors, you will never feel lonely. Founding a startup is like running a marathon: It’s a long game and you should be able to execute well for a long time. That means you need to factor in your personal wellbeing and surround yourself with the right people.

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 partners accelerates the business on so many levels. Investors obviously bring capital to the table, but they also bring strategic advice, market insights, emotional and professional support, and so much more. I have a lot of respect for entrepreneurs who choose to bootstrap their business all the way, because it is an arduous path — and not one I would advise would-be entrepreneurs to choose.

The biggest strength in the local startup scene is Egypt’s talent density. A lot of our successful entrepreneurs are second-time founders. They came back to the scene with the scars and experiences of their past endeavors, and now know how to get things done. I also love the fact that Egypt’s startup scene has dramatically progressed in terms of investments in recent years.

If I had the power to improve one thing in the local startup scene, I would focus on attracting more investors and funding. Funds create companies. We are noticing that the availability of capital is enticing seasoned, high caliber executives from the corporate world to start businesses of their own. This is a very healthy trend. The availability of funding makes the jump to the startup side of the fence safer than it was before.

A startup that I think is killing it is Breadfast. The quality of their work is outstanding: Their app, content, packaging, and delivery systems are all testaments to the team’s hard work.

The last great thing I read was The Messy Middle by Scott Belsky. The book brilliantly zeroes in on the fact that people often glorify the beginnings and endings of startups, forgetting the crucial middle stretch of the journey. Take the movies that focus on Apple’s success story — they initially show you Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniack starting Apple in a garage, then fast forward to them becoming tech moguls [laughs]. They virtually skip the years of hard work and uncertainty that come in between.