Starting a business, let alone an international business, from scratch is never an easy thing to accomplish, but with determination anything is possible. This is what you’ll walk away with after listening to Mai Medhat’s, an Egyptian entrepreneur, discussion with president Barack Obama at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit 2016 in the Silicon Valley.
The 27 year- old Tech Egyptian entrepreneur has always dreamt of running her own business, and it wasn’t until 2011 that she started Eventtus with her friend Nihal Fares. Being friends for a decade, the two bonded over an obsessive love of startups. After they attended the first Startup Weekend Cairo, they noticed a shared gap of interaction in most of the events they attended and therefore decided to take action. Their next step was developing an online platform and a mobile app for event planning, networking and ticketing- a one stop shop for event organizers and event attendees. The idea is to help event organizers build their customized, interactive mobile apps in a few minutes to create an interactive medium with their attendees.
So far Eventtus has been trusted by more than 7,500 event organizers- including RiseUp, Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority and ArabNet Summit Digital- to lead their successful events.
For her outstanding work as a CEO and a co-founder of Eventtus, Mai was invited, along with two other global entrepreneurs, to have a discussion with president Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit 2016. Unsurprisingly, in a discussion about the challenges faced by entrepreneurs, Mai was a good representative of the MENA region. And with her Egyptian sense of humor, she captured everyone’s attention as one of the MENA entrepreneurs role models! Describing the experience of starting her own business Mai said
“When I look back at the journey, it wasn’t easy at all. It was challenging, it was very exciting as well, but it was full of ups and downs… now we have a number of amazing startups, mentors and support organizations who are working together to build the ecosystem. I can see that the ecosystem has grown very well, but we still have a lot to do.”
For Mai, her participation in the summit was more about finding ways to create a rich entrepreneurship ecosystem in the MENA region than sharing her individual experience. She believes:
“The region has all the capabilities and skills, we just need to dream big, go there and achieve it.”
Mai followed her passion for events and shared it with the world becoming an example for young entrepreneurs, especially from the MENA region, to follow!
You can visit Eventtus Website or their Facebook Page for more Information.
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