Entrepreneurial Ventures: Inherently Egyptian

Car horns blaring. Heated conversation on the streets. Lights flashing from street shops into the small hours of the night. Throngs of people going up and down in their buildings/ Llate dinners and early morning meetings. Does all this create an outer system that drives our internal systems to oscillate with greater amplitudes at the same frequency?

I observe the creative momentum of our citizens with amusement. Starting from the porter who is a real estate broker, to the other porter who runs his family within an entrepreneurial fabric that facilitates the lives of the tenants—his wife a housekeeper, his son a daily job of washing the tenants’ cars, his daughter a pickup and delivery service.

From the housewife who utilizes her home kitchen as a platform for a catering service to the car parking assistant that conquers the street as a pool from which he hires his friends and family to valet for cars. The young lad who refuses to work at a supermarket and opens his own kiosk selling anything that could possibly be sold from a four square meter territory.

Moving up a couple of notches to the segment of startups are those that Uberized the business model to act as your personal assistant and buy you anything from anywhere and deliver it up to your doorstep, those that save up your money in a circle of our traditional gam’iya, those that have a network that pays your bills, those that provide you with apps to highlight traffic routes, those that airbnb your kids’ tutoring.

The list is endless. Scale it up and consider our national assets of entrepreneurs that Forbes spotlighted with pride late last year.

How did it all originate? How does this momentum pass on from one life to the next? Do we watch each other create and engage accordingly? Or are we Egyptians born with a genetic instruction to break traditions with unique inventions that rebel against obsolete systems? Is it part of our DNA to creatively think how we can bend and manipulate the status quo to a better one? And what is it that powers this dynamic entrepreneurial gene? Is it the fabric of our cultural context or the economic one? Sometimes I ask myself, are we running on survival mode? And if we are, is our survival mode driven by our economics of happiness or by the economics of our incomes?

So many questions might run through the minds of viewers observing us from a distance. We are a cult that dons its gear and keeps on going in the face of hardships. We put it on to elevate our own personal sense of existence, and yes, it runs in our blood. We manage the micro level of our lives with excellent creativity, delegation, customer engagement, networking, and perseverance. We capture a niche assuming all its risks and rewards, we venture with confidence. Isn’t that what entrepreneurship is all about? Aren’t those the skills that build small businesses and startups and transform them into stories of success?

Genes do not alter with circumstance, and neither do we. We do not deviate when hit by events, revolutions, recessions, wars, terrorism. If anything, we persevere in becoming more creative; we excel in what can be accomplished with minimum input. We are genetically programmed to survive with passion.