In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Raju Narisetti chats with Noor Sweid, founder and managing partner of Global Ventures, about Coming of Age: How Technology and Entrepreneurship Are Changing the Face of MENA (Whitefox Publishing, March 2025). Sweid chronicles the entrepreneurial growth that the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has experienced in the past two decades, based on interviews with more than 30 local founders. She describes a MENA that the rest of the world doesn’t often see, where a seismic shift in the role of technology and the maturation of its resilient youth population have ultimately reshaped the future of the region. An edited version of the conversation follows. You can also watch the full video at the end of this page.
Why did you write this book now?
The book came about from the last 20 years that I’ve been working in the United Arab Emirates [UAE] and in the broader region. Dubai has been a home for 30 years for me. I’ve always felt this juxtaposition between my life in Dubai and abroad. I’m writing to explain the region and the way it differs from the outside perspective people have of it.
This book was really a compilation of stories—35 founders’ stories and their journeys. Some elements of my own journey are included. It’s really the stories of the coming of age of the region.
MENA has 450 million people; half are under the age of 30. Indeed, they are coming of age. The embracing of technology and entrepreneurship has given rise to new economies. The way technology is being used to overcome challenges, such as lack of financial inclusion and healthcare access, has really been key over the last ten years.
We have just arrived at a point in the region where it’s important to share these stories—to tell these stories not just to inspire founders around the region, but really to inspire the world. The book is an opportunity to share how MENA, how this part of the world, is really coming of age demographically, so literally speaking, as well as from an economic perspective and the opportunities that lie therein.
How did you choose the 35 founders featured in the book?
Selecting the founders that appear in the book was probably the hardest part of the journey. There are so many incredible stories that I’m privileged enough to hear. As a venture capitalist, my daily job is to meet amazing, inspiring founders, hear their journeys and stories, and work with some of them as they build these incredible companies.
When I took a step back and said, “Well, I wish I could tell all the stories I’m honored to hear, but we have to pick a few.” I considered the “originals,” or the stories of the founders from 20 years ago.
The stories include Ronaldo [Mouchawar], who founded Souq, which became Amazon, Mudassir [Sheikha] and Magnus [Olsson], who founded Careem, which was acquired by Uber, and more. What was the journey like here 20 years, 15 years, and ten years ago, as they were starting to build the beginnings of the ecosystem?
Then we take a look at what transpired over the last ten or 12 years. I chose those founders based on sectors. As we think of sectors that have been properly disrupted or innovated—or in this part of the world, created by technology—we think about financial inclusion and how seven years ago, we were 85 percent unbanked. Now we’re about 55 percent unbanked.
No one built banks; people built fintechs. Let’s take a look at fintech, and let’s work with four or five founders to tell their journeys across savings, credit, and access to basic finance. Then we looked at health tech. We have the same challenges. The region has one doctor per 1,000 people, as compared with Europe, which has four doctors per 1,000 people.
Realistically, we’ll never have enough doctors. How are we going to overcome that lack of access to care by building health tech? We can do so by creating the health tech industry, rather than trying to replace the healthcare industry. Again, there are four founders telling their incredible journeys around building augmented surgery solutions, all the way to building Arabic LLMs.
We approached education in the same way. Considering ed tech, the region has 43 percent of its live population today in school because it’s so young. We don’t have enough teachers or schools. How do you educate this new population that is such a large part of our demographic?
We covered founders who cater to that. We also thought about agriculture tech, where we still import 85 percent of our food in the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] and most of MENA. It’s not how do you improve agriculture, but it’s how do you create a new industry that enables you to feed the people over the coming decades?
We also looked at supply chain tech. Manufacturing is such a small percentage of the GDP in these economies—about 5 percent or 6 percent—as opposed to where it could be, as in other developed economies, at about 15 percent. As we move toward that figure, what does supply chain tech and manufacturing look like in the future for these industries? We considered founders who have created these industries or are at the beginnings of creating them.
Finally, the last section covers looking forward. What is AI? What is crypto? What is energy for this part of the world? Who are the founders that are building in those spaces? It wasn’t about choosing which founders; it was about choosing sectors where we saw the most opportunity.
Was the fluid definition of MENA itself challenging in choosing founders?
The fluidity of MENA as a definition of borders and geographies created by others, not the Arabs to start with, was something I really wanted to step away from. There are so many common denominators between Morocco, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, which don’t exist between these countries and, for example, Germany or Sweden.
I examine the common denominators that create this block, because it’s not an economic block, it’s a language block. Everybody speaks Arabic. It’s a demographic block. All of these countries consistently have very young demographics. And it’s a cultural block.
How can we define MENA by its true essence, which is culture, language, and history, rather than by borders that have been created in the last 100 years?
People understand the culture—the culture of hospitality, of generosity, of collaboration, all driven by the tribal and nomadic cultures. What do those mean? I delve into what it means to be in MENA and from MENA. What is the MENA culture? How can we define MENA by its true essence, which is culture, language, and history, rather than by borders that have been created in the last 100 years? We see commonalities in these founders as they strive to build companies in this part of the world.
What is unique to being a founder in MENA?
Being a founder in the MENA region has some advantages, such as these wide spaces. There aren’t many incumbents in some of these industries. Yet it also has its own challenges; the lack of capital being the first challenge that founders encounter.
In 2024, the venture capital industry across MENA had less than $3 billion in funding—the entire industry, all deals, all year, all countries. That’s a drop in the bucket of the global funding. Access to funding is challenging.
The MENA market is one cultural and language block, yet there are many economic blocks starting to come together. I think of it as the opposite of Europe. Whereas Europe is one economic block but many languages, MENA is one language, but many borders.
Considering how you enter new markets, you might have new regulators, and founders have to bear with that. In addition, entrepreneurship is still in its early days. That means you don’t have as many mentors, as many second- and third-time-exited founders. There have been more IPOs in the last two or three years. We’re now starting to see the evolution of the ecosystem, ie, more maturity.
Yet that causes a challenge for founders because it’s harder to have people who have been around the block many times. It’s harder to find the right mentors. Liquidity is harder, and investors are less sophisticated. As a result, there is a lot of adversity.
In 2024, the venture capital industry across MENA had less than $3 billion in funding—the entire industry, all deals, all year, all countries. That’s a drop in the bucket of global funding.
In the book, there’s a chapter I call “The Adversity Advantage,” which talks about how all of these things compiled lead to stronger companies. Capital efficiency is key here because of the lack of capital. When we think about talent, it’s not jack-of-all-trades or master of none; it’s both at the same time. People have to be very agile.
It’s somewhat like Silicon Valley 30 years ago, where people were expected to do everything and do it very well, and where capital was scarce. Companies had unit economics that made sense from the beginning, where they entered new markets because they had to, not because they wanted to.
When companies start to scale, they are much stronger with high revenues, having raised less capital, incredible talent, and unit economics that make sense from an earlier life stage. That leads to what we’ve called the “adversity advantage.”
What is different now from, say, 20 years ago for founders?
When the originals started, there were practically no venture capital investments in the ecosystem, or maybe there were one or two very small ones. But there really was very, very little venture capital. Again, there’s $3 billion now, but back then, there was roughly $100 million.
That led founders to think differently because they’re thinking of friends and family funding, which are small tickets—very “scrappy.” You can read about those stories, especially the Careem story and how its cofounders, Magnus and Mudassir, used to take the bus from Dubai to Abu Dhabi, and more.
Part of the challenge was the availability of capital and talent. Twenty years ago, trying to recruit talent to move to the MENA region or the UAE specifically, or to Saudi Arabia, was a near impossibility. Today, these countries are attracting the world’s top talent to move here to start their own companies or to join fast-growing companies.
Just as the ability to attract talent has changed drastically, the implementation of technology and the acceptance of regulators has also changed. Twenty years ago, neither fintech nor health tech nor supply chain tech were where they are today.
Twenty years ago, trying to recruit talent to move to the MENA region or the UAE specifically, or to Saudi Arabia, was a near impossibility. Today, these countries are attracting the world’s top talent.
Today’s founders are in a very different place. Consider the adoption of technology by the younger population and the dynamic regulating of technology by the regulators—with Dubai having VARA [the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority]—versus 20 years ago, when nobody knew what they should be regulating.
What was the biggest surprise as you researched the book?
As I researched the book, the founder stories that grabbed my attention were those who actually grew up in a place of war or interacted daily with refugees.
There were some from Syria, from Lebanon, from Jordan. They shared their personal journeys. They conveyed the moments that struck them as children and led them as adults to build companies that affect hundreds of millions of lives and that are incredibly financially rewarding for all their investors. It’s interesting to see the common threads of how many of these founders start their journeys with, “When I was six, we left because of the war,” or, “When I was ten and I experienced this because of the war.” Those circumstances have really enabled this population of people who are now in their 30s and 40s to say, “We’re going to change something. And we’re going to use technology to do something meaningful for so many others that may have struggles similar to ours, but now we’re able to do something about it.”
What gives you hope for the future of entrepreneurism in MENA?
We have high unemployment rates in the region, 30 percent and upward, sometimes 40 percent in the youth sectors across different countries. A large part of this can be considered second-generation unemployment, where even their parents—as these youth were growing up—didn’t really have formal economy jobs.
There is a long-standing entrepreneurial mindset and hustle mentality. The influx of technology over the last ten to 15 years has really enabled people to start building companies with much more access to a market that’s big, and to do so much more cheaply. Given the capabilities with tech, coupled with regulators’ ability to accept tech in different large solutions like fintech or health tech and so on, we see people who are eager to build, regulators who are happy to accommodate, along with a market that is happy to buy.
Youth are engaged, so entrepreneurs are able to build outside the box, or rather, there is no box. When we think about the region, it’s not that people are trying to improve financial services by building fintech.
The goal is simply to provide basic financial services to the mass population. It’s not that we’re trying to improve healthcare; the aim is to offer basic access to healthcare. That ability to build industry and the lack of incumbents there to stop you enables us and enables the entrepreneurs to take a step back and say, “What is the best-in-the-world technology today that can help me address this massive problem that affects hundreds of millions of people in a very successfully sustainable manner?”
Repeatedly, we’ve seen entrepreneurs coming in and saying, “Hey, we know this is how it’s done in the West. But, given that we don’t have to improve on something that already exists, we can just build from a blank slate. So we’re going to use this tech to build something that’s never been done before because it’s just much better this way. And we don’t have to contend with all these incumbents and all these old rules we’re trying to change.”
That’s the leapfrogging we’ve seen across different sectors that I talk about in the book. It takes place even in supply chain tech. Consider the way spare parts managed in oil and gas are now moving to 3D printing, rather than the traditional way, which is to make the spare parts, ship them halfway across the world, store them in a warehouse, and then ultimately use them only if you need to, or throw them away most of the time.
That whole concept—on a sustainability level, a logistics level, and a working-capital level—doesn’t work for most companies if you can shift mindsets. It’s hard to shift mindsets when you don’t have an acute problem. In the region, we have an acute supply chain problem.
That shift toward an entrepreneurial business-building culture and ability has been a massive shift. It is not perceived as much from the outside as it is experienced on the inside.
Yet when mindsets shift, leapfrogging happens. Now these companies scale globally. We’ve seen so many companies build in the region and then scale globally because their tech is really the best in the world, their business models are very creative, and others haven’t thought this way because it’s really stretching the mind.
Look five to ten years from now. What do you see?
I don’t think we’ve even started to crack energy. As we take a look at energy consumption around the world, it’s supposed to continue to increase. When you think of the 760 million people in the world without access to power, 700 million of them live in the Middle East and Africa, which is next door.
Considering how we give access to power, access to energy—just basic access—no one’s going to build power grids in Africa or in large parts of MENA the same way they did in Europe or the US. I think microgrids; I think a ground-up, grassroots solution, given where solar is, and given how much sun this part of the world has.
Considering not just solar power but other energy sources, if I were to look back five years from now and say, “What are founders not yet doing?” They’re not yet tackling this massive problem with a grassroots solution using best-in-the-world tech. I think we’ll get there.
What mindset about MENA do you hope the book will change?
The region has really changed over the last ten years. There has been a move, even in entrepreneurship, from emulation to innovation, from copycats, which there’s nothing wrong with, to localized solutions, to brand-new solutions as people try to tackle problems that are local, regional, or global, but with a local angle or edge.
When people take a look at the region from the outside, there is an attitude of, “These are consumers. They’re buyers of technology. And if they’re building their own, they’re simply copying.” Whereas the truth is that over the last five to ten years, we’ve seen a lot of innovation, new solutions, exporting of technology, creating, not just consuming.
That shift toward an entrepreneurial business-building culture and ability has been a massive shift. It is not perceived as much from the outside as it is experienced on the inside. So I’m hoping that, as people read the book, they take away that there’s a lot of magic happening here—a lot of business building, a lot of creation that’s globally competitive, best in class—and read some of these stories and journeys of the founders who are accomplishing that.
Watch the full interview
