Empowering global small business with crypto-powered payments

Thank you, Yassine. Great to be here.

Of course. I think you mentioned it, yes. We are here to help SMEs and startups in emerging markets grow and compete in a global economy. How do we do this? The main thing is we are driving so much efficiency into their financial operations by providing them with a very rich digital experience. Think of it as a one-stop shop for their treasury services, expense management. We give them access to payment rails, corporate cards in partnership with Visa, physical cards, virtual cards, and non-card payment rails so they can make a SWIFT payment to 80 plus countries, access to local payment networks. For example, I could be in the UAE and make a payment to someone in the US using the ACH network. We have 15 of these local country networks already integrated. We add another layer of financing on top of all of this, so we can extend credit to our customers anywhere between 30 to 120 days. The other thing we're very bullish on is crypto. We're really using crypto to drive even more efficiency to payments and financing, and really make that experience and cost advantage pass it on to our customers, and incentivize the system around us, around Tribal, in this community we're building with our customers and partners.

Great question. We are right now in 22 countries, more than 22 countries. What we found that's incredible is that founders, startups, and SMEs in UAE and in Egypt are facing the same problems as others in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and Peru. We have seen this problem exist. The problems they're facing with banks, trying to get access to corporate cards and trying to get approved for credit, it's incredible how it's pretty much the same everywhere. We are very big in the Middle East, very big in LatAm, and we're growing into other markets during 2022.

Since we started, we've always seen how crypto can really boost and accelerate what Tribal is trying to achieve and can really impact the experience of our customers. We're doing this through many things. We've announced two of those already: payments and financing. With payments, we see how that can make a big impact, imagine making instant cross-border payments from one country to the other. These are some of the experiences we're bringing to our customers, especially because many of them have problems with very urgent, critical payments that need to get from point A to point B, very hard to track, sometimes these payments get stuck or lost in the middle, and you have to pay almost $60 or $100 just to be able to track a payment in more detail. That's one of the use cases of crypto in what we're doing. On the financing side, there's a huge stablecoin economy. Looking at the market cap of stablecoins going from 20 billion to more than $120 billion in just a few months, it's pretty insane. This market cap is looking for yield, looking for returns, and there are a lot of problems in the current over-collateralized lending that's happening that's trying to generate yield, and it's just based on how good the market is, whether it's a bull market or bear market. Yield generation for stablecoins is just not consistent. We're solving a problem for crypto by bringing a very healthy, sustainable yield generation and putting crypto to real world use. We have Stellar Development Foundation as one of our investors, and we've been working very closely with Stellar to bring real world use cases to stablecoins. Stellar was also part not just of our equity but also on our latest debt round. We closed one of the first, if not the first, hybrid crypto and fiat debt rounds. We're taking Stellar USDC and bringing it to real world use cases, driving more force using crypto. That's really what we're using crypto for today, and we've got more things that we will be announcing hopefully very soon.

The way this all started really was, as you know Yassine, I've been very much involved with the startup ecosystem in multiple ways. We've both served on TechWadi's board together, we've crossed paths there. I've been very much engaged with Endeavor for a very long time as well. I've always been keen on working with startups and founders, being part of that journey one way or the other, whether it's investing, mentoring, or even learning from a lot of these founders. There are so many opportunities at Endeavor for this. What happened then was I was working on my Master of Science at NYU and I thought about how do we use machine learning. My thesis was about using machine learning to underwrite this whole new startup economy and really try to find these amazing founders that you can work with as early as possible. That was my passion. We did a really good job, we were very blessed, Alhamdulillah. The results of the machine learning algorithm were over the top, and the ability to generate amazing returns if you're going to be investing in these founders was very high. We got very encouraged to take it to the next level after we finished that project at NYU. We commercialized that machine learning algorithm, which is really the core of what Tribal does today. The way you can use this algorithm that we've built is you can invest in these companies. We have funds that are licensing our scores to detect and find these amazing companies as early as possible and put money in them. That's one use case. I've had friends who ask me about these startups, and you can work for one of these companies. We score these companies as early as possible, and you can use that same score to go and be part of a company that has a very high chance of success. The other thing we were doing was licensing this to financial institutions who want to provide financial services to these companies again as early as possible. We started with the data play, saw the different use cases, and then we realized that financial services is really one of the highest leverages that can really impact the countries and the economies we will be operating in. You only get to invest in a certain number of companies, but with financial services you can do a lot more. We have a thousand plus customers. It would be hard to say we've invested in a thousand plus customers. So it's really as close as I can get to working with amazing people on math.

It's a great story. I'd love to share with you in a little bit more detail what happened, because we did a big mistake that others do all the time. As founders, you've got your investors, your customers, and maybe even between the founders themselves. What we started to do, I think it was June 2018, we got all these scores and use cases and what we can do, and we started asking for advice, bouncing ideas off of people. I think that was the worst thing we could ever do. We talked to our investors and said we're thinking of doing this, we're thinking of doing that. We had some amazing advisors on board, and we gave them all these opportunities that we can pursue with what we have. The worst thing we could ever do was just ask for advice. The worst thing we could do is just sit as founders and discuss the different paths and try to get to consensus together. It was a very in-time thing. What happened then that was transformational in how we approached this problem, I think all founders will get to that point whether it's early pre-product-market fit or post-product-market fit as you grow and continue to search for these big bets that are going to be your next wave of growth, whether it's from Series B to C or C to D or whatever it is. The thing that really transformed how we're thinking about approaching this problem was just talking more and more to customers through design sprints, showing customers what looks like a finished product, not even just asking customers for their feedback or ideas. We found a lot of leverage in showing customers something that looks like it's ready to ship or is in beta mode. The best thing about design sprints is you can do this in four days. You can go from zero idea to user interviews and feedback in four days. We really adopted design sprints. I did my own master class coaching in design sprints. We started design sprinting all these different paths. We tested pretty much every path that we had in mind, and we started going down that path of designing, iterating, doing these design sprints two weeks on, one week off, and testing different propositions that way. When we did the Tribal proposition, you could not imagine what the feedback was like. We had people who were trying to sign up instantly on it. They wanted this. They were like, 'I need this.' This is how we raised our seed stage. We raised our seed stage with customers recording voice recordings of what the product was and how bad they wanted the product.

It's always been very demanding from day one. Before Tribal, I already had previous startups, so this startup life has always been very demanding. You know what you give up. I've been doing this for a long time. I almost forgot what we're giving up for it. It's always the same kind of ups and downs. The ups and downs are very extreme, and trying to moderate yourself is always the best thing in my view. You give up a lot of sleep, of course. You really need to balance the time you give to family, the time you give to the startup, and the time you have to give to yourself as well. As you scale, what's interesting is as you move from pre-seed to seed, seed to Series A, and A to B, it just changes what your priorities are, the kind of work that you do, and honestly the kind of stuff that you have to do for yourself to stay in focus. It's been a very interesting journey for me, and I've learned so much just being in great situations and even more in really bad situations.

I got a lot of help from a lot of different people. Building on a little bit of what you asked before, I felt more grounded again in the highs and lows by trying to connect more and more with God. That has given me that balance in really good and really bad times. For me, my father has been an entrepreneur since the very beginning, the 60s, 70s type of entrepreneur who's still running his own business. That was a huge help for me, having someone very close as family to be able to talk about these things. I had a very good support network, with investors that understood. One of the biggest problems I found especially in the region is how early stage investors can be very susceptible and uneasy with a pre-product-market fit company, especially if they need to pivot or think about something different. I had the blessing of a great cap table. We had great investors on board. I was working very closely with Yousef from BECO, and their openness and appetite for change and encouraging new ideas in the pre-seed was very pivotal because you feel like you'll be able to keep going without having to worry about an immediate raise. That was very supportive. For early stage founders, making sure you do reference checks and understand which VCs will be with you in the good times and how they react if there is a change in the model or the business is imperative, especially in the Middle East and emerging markets. That made a very big difference for me. I also had a lifelong mentor I've met since 2012, an amazing guy. Many of you will know him, Yousri Helmy. He's really the reason why I made this move to the US and encouraged me to think differently about the future, about what I can do, about my own potential. Yousri has been with us on this journey from the very beginning as a mentor, then as an investor, mentor, advisor, and now he's on our board. Above all, he's just a very good friend who is a CEO who has done pretty much what I did and more. That made a huge difference for me as we continued to build Tribal.

Top of mind for me is, as you start scaling the company, you might feel the company slowing down in different parts. A book that just came out that I'm very excited about and a lot of the leadership team is reading is called 'Amp It Up' by Frank Slootman. He's now the CEO of Snowflake and built ServiceNow before that. He's a great entrepreneur and founder who has scaled businesses before. It's about how do you get energy and drive in your organization as you continue to grow and scale, how do you keep that high-speed rhythm within the whole organization. That's been one I've been very excited about. The other one that I think you might not agree with absolutely everything in there, but the way it's organized in very short chapters is very helpful for founders. It's called 'The Great CEO Within'. That's another nice reference for myself and other folks on the team. These two have been pretty helpful for me in my journey. The other one I find very fascinating is 'How Brands Grow'. There's part one and part two. Part two is very relevant because it talks about emerging markets, fintech, and other stuff. I've been trying to read that a little bit more as well because these are top of mind ones.

Bad thing for me.

Thank you, that's so kind of you. Thank you so much.