Samer Karam: Lebanon is the best place for IT in Middle East

On February 9-10, Latvia capital Riga hosted TechChill event that gathered over 1000 investors, startup founders, entrepreneurs and other representatives of the ecosystem from 26 countries.

Samer Karam is a Lebanon-based ecosystem builder and angel investor. He founded Startup Megaphone, an organization tasked by Banque du Liban to manage the international image of Lebanon’s startup ecosystem. Seeqnce, founded by Karam, opened their accelerator programme in 2012 as Lebanon’s 1st startup accelerator. Samer Karam is also the organizer of BDL Accelerate, annual large-scale tech event in Lebanon that attracts over 25,000 attendees.

Itel.am attended TechChill and talked with Samer Karam.

- What is the development level of Lebanon’s startup ecosystem now?

- Lebanon is actually the only country in the entire Arab world that’s a democracy. It creates a very unique position of freedom of speech, the right to vote, the right for self-determination. As a result Lebanon has been leading the space in digital content and creative content, so everything from T.V., movies, music, etc. is produced in Lebanon and then brought to other countries, where it may be forbidden.

Three years ago we created a sovereign fund, that’s around USD 400m. The idea behind it was how we can turn Lebanon into a technology hub for the region. USD 400m is a lot for such a small country. The idea is anybody Lebanese or not Lebanese can come and incorporate a company in Lebanon and create a business that can cater to either the region or the world from Lebanon.

Lebanon is relatively successful compared to the rest of the region because we have very easy immigration, very easy access to resources, very little discrimination, relatively acceptable cost of living and so on. So anybody from around the world can literally fly in and start a business in Lebanon which is very different from most of the Arab world.

photo © Ruslan Zavacky

Lebanon now hosts BDL Accelerate, the largest conference across the entire Mediterranean and the Middle East market. 25 000 people attended it in 2016, 5000 out of them were from Europe.

- How big is the share of Armenian participants?

- It’s rather big, given that around 5-10% of the Lebanese population is Armenian. The Armenians are rather active in Lebanon’s social and political life.

- What are the obstacles for development of Lebanon’s tech ecosystem?

- We need to understand that the region is extremely difficult, with hard-to-control situations like the Arab Spring, Syrian Civil War, and the fall of oil prices. Hopefully, in 10 years these challenges will have transformed into opportunities - we are making sure that Lebanon will be at the center of it.

Lebanese are a nation that exports a lot of talent. We are very good outside of Lebanon because we do not have the limitations of the country. But I think the minute the country falls into a healthy environment of growth and prosperity a lot of these people are going to come back.

- Seeqnce, which you founded, organized Lebanon’s first accelerator program in 2012. What difficulties did you face during that project?

- The accelerator ran as a co-working space and then developed into an incubation environment. Finally, I was able to raise a small fund to run the accelerator for a cycle.

At that period Lebanon was going through the toughest time of the last ten years, because we had a massive car bombing in Beirut maybe every month … There was a lot of risk, a lot of concern and so on and yet we still were able to create the program. We created more than 20 companies, from which we selected 8 that we accelerated. 6 of them went to pitch to the Central bank of Lebanon and that was what helped to create the sovereign fund. Of these 6 startups 4 are still active and they have raised around USD 10 million collectively over the last four years.

Narine Daneghyan talked to Samer Karam

TechChill was organized by TechHub Riga, with ALTUM, TWINO and Printful performing as the main sponsors.