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Mudassir Sheikha

lines on the record: 49
first: 2023-09-04
most recent: 2023-09-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Supreme should be a household name in the region all the way from Morocco to Pakistan. The service should be used by everyone in the region on a daily basis. Their quality of life is radically better as a result of Kareem. And as a result of all the friction that we've taken away from their daily life, people are doing more meaningful things than figuring out how to get water and transport to live their daily life.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Integrity is foundational, and then beyond that, shooting for the moon, which is ambitious, and then perseverance, don't give up.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like many people, remote working is a topic that we're still learning and evolving on. In 2020, we thought this is going to absolutely work and we don't need to come to the office anymore. We now believe that with the way that we collaborate and with the state of technology that is available to us, there is still a lot of value in bringing people to the office and working together. This topic will probably evolve again as technology gets better, people and old habits change. But at the moment, I'm starting to lean towards getting people to the office a little bit more than what we believed in 12 months ago.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, one thing that we have believed for some time is that if you can dream something, there's a good chance that you can get there. There is this power of manifestation that gets unleashed when you believe something big can be done. You start thinking differently, you start attracting other people who get inspired by that dream. And then magically it starts to come together”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a few months after the acquisition, we did some interiories in our house. So we changed some furniture, changed some lights. It wasn't a big deal, but it was probably the first thing that we did.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So for me, that would be Prophet Muhammad. I can definitely get stronger in my faith. And if you look at profits in general, it's just amazing to see the kind of impact they've had for hundreds of years. And if you just take a secular view on things, there's a lot that we can learn from it. And how do we build organizations successfully that will stand the test of time?”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Margins, those high margins, and end up creating vulnerabilities. They end up creating frustration from the marketplace stakeholders. So I actually feel that many of these businesses, including our business, have accepted things that should not have been okay. So one of the things that we are trying to do as we start chapter three is how do we build Kareem SuperApp differently and no longer accept these levels of engagement. Let's make sure that if we acquire a customer, that customer is going to stay with us for a long period of time. And that customer is going to do a lot of things on the Kreen Platform. They should live their life on the clean platform. And if you can do that successfully, then you can operate at margins that are sustainable for all the stakeholders that you're serving. We'll do it differently. And I would love to have another conversation in five years when you have done it. And we've shown that this can be done and this has been done.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different reasons, Harry, for different ones that have not done well, but I think the last few that have been attempted have been built in an environment of capital abundance. They have been built in a way that has made it difficult for them to be profitable and sustainable while they're growing. I'll give you a basic example. In many of the business that we operate, the monthly retention of customers tends to be in the 60 to 70 percent range. And that's actually been considered okay and even good in some cases. Now, if you have a monthly retention of 60 to 70 percent and if you want to keep growing, what does that mean? Next month, the first thing you got to do is you got to acquire enough customers to fill the first 30 of the customers that have left. And then any customer that you acquire on top of it, you need to then acquire them so that you can keep on growing. And that's incredibly expensive. And to keep doing that as you grow, it becomes more and more expensive with scale means that you need to have high margins to support that acquisition spend. And when you have high margins,”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can see a line of sight to that problem being solved, I think, in Dubai, in Abu Dhabi, in Saudi. There are local and regional exchanges that are open for business. So some IPOs have happened already and inshallah more will happen. So I feel that over time, that problem will no longer be a big issue.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To startups, but it's not universal across the region, like in a place like Egypt, Pakistan is starting to become difficult once again. Capital, again, is available in some places, not available in others. So that's a challenge for some. And one of the biggest challenges that I find still in the region is the fragmentation of the region. The region is not small. There are 500 million people that live between Morocco and Pakistan. But it's made up of a lot of small countries, a lot of small markets. And you can create an incredibly large platform for the region, but to cover the region is extremely complex. The region operates in a way that if you, let's say, take this to the US, you start a business in California, you can only serve customers in California. And if you want to take this business to New York, need to register a legal entity, you need to get licenses, you need to get payment systems, you need to get SMS systems. You have to redo the whole thing to go to New York. Then if you want to go to Florida, you have to redo the whole thing. Now just imagine how much entrepreneurship will happen in the U.S.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question. And I think one thing that you hopefully find in many of them and many others that didn't cross that number is a huge desire to do something for their countries or for the region. Because in the last eight, ten years of Kareem, the purpose of Kareem and the passion that the person wrote was so central to our daily existence. Once I was visiting Lahore, the team in Lahore did not let me enter the office until I read the manifesto that was outside the office. And that manifesto was all about I'm going to create jobs, I'm going to look after these captains, I'm going to make sure they earn a respectable living. I'm going to look after them. These kind of things manifested in different ways in different markets. So I feel and I hope that a lot of them are doing the next Kareems for the right reasons. And they will build them in the right way. Now, what is stopping them from being successful? Talent continues to be a challenge in the region. It's becoming a little bit easier to attract talent.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not wrong. I think in dollar terms there were 75 millionaires. In Dharm terms, there were, I think, 300 plus. So it was a good exit for many colleagues at Kareem.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or three things that come to mind. One, my lifestyle hasn't changed too much. I'm still living in the same house that we lived before, largely driving similar cars, travel similarly and so on and so forth. So we haven't done too many changes in our life. So we don't think that money should change our lifestyle too much because we want to make sure that our kids get the right upbringing, which gives them enough hardship that makes them resilient over time. So that's one. It's also a huge source of responsibility, Harriet. We live in a region where, of course, you can live in Dubai and it's very different. But as soon as you step in a country like Pakistan or Egypt or Lebanon, you do see a lot of suffering around you. And you feel like somehow, for some reason, you were chosen to be given wealth. It's not something that you deserved or you have it for yourself. You need to somehow step up to the responsibility that this brings. So that's something else that we feel quite responsible.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, marry well, 80% of the problem is just finding the right person to marry. And then as much as possible, become intentional about parenting. Okay, what is your responsibility? What is the other person going to do? So Sabah, my wife, she was very clear with me that there are two or three things that you would like me to focus on with respect to kids. Financial education was one of them, and there were a couple of other things that he delegated to me. So then over the weekends, I put some things in place for me to start coaching them on those topics. Yeah, having a discussion on what's important, what he will do, what you will do, and then try your best to do what you need to do. And that's not easy either.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's hard. You realize every minute is an opportunity for you to teach them something because they'll do so many different things and some they will do right and some they will do wrong. And if you're not there, you're missing an opportunity to show them the right way. So it feels like a lot of hard work. If you want to do it well.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've said a lot of stupid things to my wife for the last 11 years. This was probably one of them. He's been incredibly understanding and not just understanding. She's been very, very supportive. I've been working so hard at Kareem for the last 11 years and before that at McKinsey and before that at other places that the only friends I have are the people that I work with. Since I don't stay in touch or don't have the time to stay in touch with others, I lose that connection over time. So when we started Kareem and when we start any service at Kareem, she's actually been the cheerleader for those services. When we start the right healing business, she was part of some forum. She was spreading the word about those services to her friends. When we started payment service, she did the same. When we started food delivery, she was doing the same. So she's actually been an early marketeer of many of our services. And that's been incredible and great to see.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me and for us, it's not gotten easier, but the problems that you're solving are different. You're not on the street driving as a captain or speaking to captains and recruiting captains and supporting captains, but you're trying to figure out what are the structural things that we need to do to build a lasting institution? What kind of performance management system makes sense for Kareem and its ambition? What kind of capital allocation process makes sense? What markets should we go after? How should we go after those markets? What should we do organically and organically? And many of these things are not straightforward, at least for many of us in the region. We haven't had those kind of big successes that have happened in other parts of the world. So we're still learning and evolving in this new phase of Aryan.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wish we could have done more for our captains as a part of the exit process. Kareem was built by these captains, and we're close to many of them. And if I look at them today, they're still doing what they were doing 10 years ago. And that saddens me a little bit. So many people at Kareem have done quite well. They've grown and they've progressed in life as a result of these last 10 years. But the captains, which were the foundations of Kareem, which were the ones that taught us how to build this business, and many cases are still where they were 10 years ago. So I wish we had done something for captains that would have benefited them from the transaction as well.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not at all. Uber and Dara have been incredible. I think they have supported our vision. They have funded the vision. And as you probably heard, we have done a spin out thanks to their help with some regional investors on board now that is restarting the entrepreneur.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I remember talking to the night before the deal, of course I had to tell some of our leaders that this deal is happening. And one of the leaders I spoke to about the deal, his exact words to me was, this is the worst amount of money that I'm going to make. How can you do it? And there are many people at Kareem who are not happy that we did this thing, even though so many of them did really, really well financially, but they were just not happy that this could mean the end of something special that could have been and should have been the Google or Amazon type of institution from this region over time.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kareem is quite special, Harry, and I don't say it because I was one of the people who started Kareem, but I've been at startups before. I've been part of founding team before. And these things generally start for relatively material things, right? People want to become rich. People want to do something that people will look up to and inspire others. But Kareem got lucky in the sense that Kareem's start was a result of Madness's near death experience and the desire to build something big and more importantly build something meaningful. That's a gift that keeps giving. And as a result of which, the purpose of Kareem came about, the passion for that purpose came about. And we felt that it would be a shame to lose such a unique and special start to a competitor who's most likely going to merge it and the Kareem brand and the Kareem purpose and the Kareem culture will disappear. It felt like a huge loss.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The timing was pretty strange, Harry. I think a few months after we closed the deal, COVID happened. And as you expected, our business was down 90%. We had to do a massive headcount reduction, and there was a lot of focus all of a sudden on profitability and becoming efficient. The whole environment changed dramatically, which also now that you look back, accelerated the start of the delivery businesses and the buildout of the super app, which is what we launched in June 2020 at the height of the pandemic. And today, if you come to Dubai, we have 20 plus services all the way from ride hailing to food delivery to grocery delivery to home cleaning to laundry to payments. So a lot of the effort went into building things that were needed at that time versus the ride healing business that was less relevant in that environment.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Region gets an exit which it needs for the ecosystem to start running forward. At the same time, the purpose of Kareem, which has been so sort of special for us, stays, the culture stays, and we continue to build and hopefully build a much bigger and lasting institution from the region.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So at some point, they guess had decided that they were going to consolidate in markets where it made sense. That's where the China thing had happened. They'd done something in Russia and Middle East was in that list as well. So they reached out to us. We had some discussions with them, but nothing made sense. And then when we were about to start our second last funding round, we were in San Francisco meeting investors and then our CFO had this idea that maybe we should go and check on Uber as well, see what they're up to. And it was just a catch-up meeting that ended up restarting the process. And of course, there are many reasons to do the deal, but there were also very crucial reasons not to do it. The thing that really made it happen at the end was Dara saying that you guys can continue pushing your purpose, keep your culture, keep your org. I'm just going to replace your shareholders and become a better shareholder. And that's really what felt to us like this was the best of all worlds. Our shareholders get an exit. Our colleagues do well.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First meeting was surprisingly positive. It was a meeting that happened in Rayat on the first FII, and Dara had just joined or was going to join. And Dara just showed so much respect. He mentioned his links to the region. He asked questions, why are we doing it? What are we doing it? What is our vision? To a lot of respect, and was just a refreshingly positive interaction from someone that was heading a company whose name was a four-letter world at Kareem. There were people at Kareem that would not wear black because that color was black. So it was a very different relationship that we had with them before the deal happened.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that, of course, after the whole thing got done, I reflected on what we could have done differently. And board management was one where we could have done a much better job. We were just so busy running the business, Harry, that we didn't spend a lot of time with our board other than a few people here and there. So we could have been more proactive in building relationships, building trust that would have then created currency that could have helped us at those moments. But then one concrete learning for me was let's have a chairman of the board that can help manage the rest of the board because it takes time and if we can get someone that is well respected by everyone, that has got the time and the ability to help us manage the board, getting someone like that in place and then making sure that we spend a lot of time with that person and with that person manage the board could have been quite helpful. We tried doing that towards the very end after we reflected on it, but by then it was a bit too late and it wasn't necessary.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think after maybe series A, I didn't think that the company would die. There was just a belief that we're on to something and it's going to be around. Towards the end of the process with Uber, and it was a contentious process where there were some investors that wanted to sell and there were others that didn't want to sell. And it ended up creating a big divide in the board that made things quite challenging. And at that time, we felt that we were sort of left holding the bag. Everyone is sort of looking out for what they want. And there's a risk that we are going to destroy everything that we have built for the last eight years. So that was quite stressful because we were sort of at the finish line, but we were just not able to get everyone to cross it with us.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first two rounds were probably the toughest because we were too small to go to global investors and the region was very early in their sort of appetite for local startups. So there weren't a lot of people that were investing. So the first round came through sheer luck all the investors that we spoke to, there were a handful of VCs in the region. They turned us down and then somehow one of them had a change of heart, called us back, and we were negotiating on the valuation and they figured out a creative way to bridge the gap. So that happened. But the second round was probably the toughest because by now we have some people. We've put two, two and a half years into doing this, running out of money first Magnus and I put more of our own money into the business. But at some point we were not able to put any more money. We're still running out of money. We have a lead investor on the table, but that investor, the documents are just taking way longer to sign. And this is really where you see the beauty of the region come through.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our CFO back then encore, he had this frugality DNA as well. So we were going for an investor meeting for the $350 million round in San Francisco. And he had booked these two rooms on Airbnb with bunk beds, which frankly was actually quite difficult to sleep on. So I didn't get much sleep that night. And in the morning, I'm not a coffee person, but I had more than my fair share of coffee just to make sure that I was able to present in that meeting and stay awake. And I think there was also one small thing there where we got to the meeting a little bit before the time of the meeting. So we said, let's catch up on sleep. So we had a small little car where we were sleeping in the car. And one of our investors had come to meet us just to give us advice for that meeting, took some pictures and sent them around.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very early on, and we said, let's enable cash payments. And while Uber was spending a lot of money in that market, many people that were looking at their ads and looking at all the things that they were getting from competition, they were not able to use the service because just they didn't have the cards to pay for the service. That was one example. We had a call center that made it very easy for people in the region who prefer to make phone calls and get served to call us and get supported. There's a lot of things you can do in the product and service that can make you go a longer way than others who may not be as close to the market as you are. And the third is on people, it's all about quality versus quantity, right? Rock stars are price more productive than average performers. So let's just make sure that you get the right talent on board and focus on the quality of that talent versus the quantity.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope that the excesses of the last 15 years are behind us. So hopefully you're not going to have many situations where those kind of decisions will have to be made. But the two or three things that I generally tell founders are one, similar to on the marketing side, let's just figure out how can you get a lot more from your spending than you would do doing things traditionally or doing things without a lot of creative thinking or doing things which other people are doing. So I think that's one element that you can optimize. Second, make the product very, very local. And, you know, a lot of times you end up competing with companies that are coming from outside that have access to capital from a different market and they're just able to spend a lot of money, which is what happened with us. So make sure that your products are able to outcompete. So I'll give you a basic example. When we were early in Saudi Arabia, which is, of course, the largest market in the region, not many people at that time had credit cards. Or even if they had credit cards, they were not able to use credit cards. And people just preferred paying in cash. So this was something that we spotted.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was a publicity stunt. It ended up going viral, having Elon Musk tweeted that as well. And we ended up creating tens of millions of dollars of publicity through a very simple video. In Pakistan, when we were launching the motorbike category, we bought a small billboard that basically told women in the country that if you want to run away from your wedding, you should call a Kareem bike because we come quickly and we'll make you run away, which got us into trouble with a lot of people in the country, including the religious segment and our MD in Pakistan at that time, had to leave the country just to make sure that he was safe and so on and so forth. So we've done a lot of these crazy things that have just made our dollars a much longer way than competition dollars.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%. It's very difficult, especially when you are in a market where others are spending a lot of money. You know, we used to have this concept that every dollar that we spend has to match the five dollars that our competition is spending in our market. Because we were outfunded and outfunded by a mile for a long time. And if you need to compete with much less funding, your dollars just need to stretch a lot more. And marketing, which as a consumer platform, you need to spend and invest money in, is an area where we felt we would never be able to spend big dollars on marketing because it's just very expensive. So what we would try and do is we would come up with viral concepts that just spread on their own. And we did a lot of crazy things. You may have heard of this slingshot video in Dubai where we basically threw a man from one tower in Dubai to another tower and turned out that he misses and everyone thinks, including the intelligence in the city that someone has died.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we'll start charging for two of these three things. And we wanted people to vote which of these two things do we charge people for. So we got some pretty supportive responses. One colleague responded saying that this is completely ridiculous. Are you going to start charging for oxygen next? And then someone figured out that this is the 1st of April and most likely in April Fool's roke. So we all laughed and moved on. But it sent the message that frugality is important and every dollar is something that we have to watch out for.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the 1st of April 2014, we decided that we need to send a message of frugality. The point being that we are in a very low margin business. And since we're low margin, we don't want to tax our captains with very high margins. We just need to be super, super frugal as a platform so that we can be as efficient as possible. You have to keep repeating that message, especially when you've raised funding, when all of a sudden there's money in the bank and everything that was being done for a dollar now ends up costing $2 and needs for capital just multiplying. So on the 1st of April 2014, we decided that we're going to send a message to the entire org, to the small org. I don't know, we're probably 40, 50 people back then, that we raised a lot of money, but we're still losing money. We're still in a low margin business. So we need to save money. And we noticed that we're actually spending a lot of money on coffee, not great for people's health. We're wasting a lot of money on printouts. And we see a lot of lights turned on even when people are not in the office.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, it's good and it's bad at the same time, right? It's good in the sense that a lot of the learnings that you get in trying something, they end up taking turns that you don't expect and they end up becoming valuable somewhere else. Yes.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a great question. And to be honest, Harry, we're not great at that. We tend to get excited quickly and do more things that we can chew. But there is an attitude at Kareem that we don't give up. So we stay at the problem for way longer than we should. And in many cases, we figure it out.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where do I start? In some markets, we could not onboard individual drivers or individual captains. We were working with companies and they would bring all of their captains to work with us. So we figured they have their own business. They're working with us as well. What if we could give them our technology as a cloud offering, which would then allow them to do their business on our technology stack and also do our business? So this would be a way for us to get them to adopt our technology and would make the acquisition a lot, lot seamless. We spent a lot of time building it. We spent a lot of time trying to sell it. In fact, even had one large limo company in Dubai sign up, but that was a miserable flop because we were just not designed to be a SaaS company. They kept asking for this improvement there, that feature there, and we just had other priorities. And we were just solving for our customers. And those needs were very, very different than the needs of an enterprise that it's using us as a technology provider. So that was a big one. And like I said, there's a long, long list of such things.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The short answer is no, and you never do because you've launched many products now in the last 12 years, 11 years, and almost nothing has worked on day one. So I remember we had launched a service, we have many captives that are waiting, but there's no one booking a hive. So we end up calling our friends, hey, these guys are waiting just for free, try it out. But even then, people were not using it because they had existing arrangements that were taking them around. But what you end up realizing is you have to be very focused early on. You have to go after as narrow opportunities as possible. So we realized that there were some use cases. For example, where people were not able to use their own transport, going to the airport was one of them. So we launched an airport promise that if more than five minutes late, the trip would be free. So we went after that use case. We went after corporates that ended up becoming a huge source of revenue and profits in the early days before we were able to raise money. So it took us a few months to get this thing going.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Saying that your capital is on the way, and they would arrive, they would send another message, and then we'll tell the customer that the captain has arrived. And when they were starting a trip, we would have them send their car mileage, the currentometer reading. And then when they were ending the trip, the same ones, we've calculated the distance they've traveled. And on the back of that, we would price the trip. So it was very, very low tech, but it got us out there very quickly. And of course, capitalists were looking for work. So many of them started working with us. Service was available for customers. And it really gave us a flying start in the buy, which is where we started.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Captains are drivers. So we start the business in July of 2012. We mapped out what does it take to launch the service with an app on the captain side, with an app on the customer side. But we realized that it's going to take us four or five months to get this thing unknowned. And by the time we get this thing out, captains will not need work from us because they'll be quite busy with their existing work. And it's going to be difficult to get the captains on board. So Magnus came up with this brilliant idea that why don't we figure out a way to go live in the next six weeks while summer is still here so that captains will be more open to working with us and it'll be easier to acquire them. Now, of course, you're not going to be able to develop an app and figure all of these things out in such a short time frame. So what we ended up doing was we ended up creating an SMS app where captains, of course, they all had feature phones as used to call them back then. Every time they would get a booking from us when they were going to pick up the passenger, they would send a message. I'm coming to the customer. And as soon as our systems would get the message, we would trigger a message to the customer.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is summer 2012. And as you can expect, summer is a very slow time in the Middle East. It gets very, very hot. And this is the time when a lot of captains don't have enough work. They're not as utilized as they normally are in the winters and in good weather.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, look, as we discussed, every problem is an opportunity. So the fact that not many people are trying and not many people are met thing has created a bit of a void, right? Where there are 220 million people actually 250 now based on the recent count. And they still need to lead their lives. They still need to solve the same problems that people in other parts of the world need to solve. So since there are not many companies globally and many companies locally solving those problems, the companies that end up solving those problems, they just have a more open playing field to do well. So there is opportunity in this madness, which is why I personally am an investor in the right teams and the right startups.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Boils down to two things First thing is what I mentioned a little bit earlier No shortage of potential. Is a lot of friction in daily When you wake up in the mor Things that you have to worry about is to make sure that there is water in the tap, which you can use to take a shop. If you're lucky after getting water in the tank that can power your sh Or may not have power or electricity That you have to worry about how will you get to your College or school because transportation is not as easily available as it is in many parts of the Just a lot of daily friction of life A lot of talent”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Magnus scheme had said, let's build something big and meaningful Very easy for me to subscribe to We said, let's figure Begin mean meaningful. As diligent consult A list of all the problems that we had faced in the region. We made a list of ideas. of opportunity and how meaningful they could become. Some of our transportation came Faced day to day, week to week as consultants going around in the Immediate angle which made it look We got close to the captains or drivers understood that Very, very difficult in the way they serve customers. Many of them don't know where the Will come from their families that are typically in Pakistan, Bangladesh, India that depend on their earnings. And this could be quite meaningful. Really, where we started into”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bit embarrassing because of course I spent many years in Silicon Valley before that every 100 meters. There are companies that are way larger. I joke around with, grew up in Sweden for a nation of 9 million people, you guys have produced many large and lasting institutions where they're worldwide. The hell are we doing Country in this part of the world that we haven't been able to build those large and lasting institutions.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Desire to build Important thing happened in Magnus A year before we start green, he had a bleeding in his brain. Took Part of the reflection that he Life and what he had Himself that Something big and meaningful. My side, something much less dramatic as part of Mc In Pakistan, which is where As part of the process Of 220 million people”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Instinct these days is to figure out Can we do to overcome it? And the second thing is okay, what's the silver lining in it? Every challenge An opportunity You'll find that silver lining that can actually become a source of growth.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Question. Look, I grew up in Pakistan, in Karachi, in a very humble, middle-class background. And if you've been to Karachi, you know, that life is full of friction, a lot of daily challenges, basic things like water, power, safety, and So, I think one thing that I've learned over the last few years is to just be resilient, make sure that nothing can bring you down. So if I'm running for something, I'm probably running from a lot of daily friction in life that can take away from people's potential to achieve things that are aligned with what they're capable of achieving.”
2023-09-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The $3.1BN Meeting That Led to an Uber Acquisition, The Battle With Uber; How to Outcompete When You Have 10x Less Cash & The Marketing Campaigns That Led to Pakistan MDs Fleeing and Elon Musk Fanboying with Mudassir Sheikha, CEO @ Careem · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source