Jeffery: Welcome to the Supporters Fund. Ask an investor. I’m your host, Jeffrey Potvin. And let’s please welcome Nicolas Rihanna, CEO of I am funding ISOC Iban Angels as our investor for today. Welcome, Nicholas. It’s a real pleasure having you join us.

Nicolas: Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.

Jeffery: Well, I’m pretty excited to have you here, Nicholas, because we’ve had the opportunity to, I guess we’ll say, travel the world somewhat. We met in Egypt, and then when I was traveling through Lebanon, I was able to to come check out and spend some time with yourself. And what I find the country to be absolutely a beautiful country. So I’m excited to kind of dive into all these great things that you’ve been doing over the last 20, 30 years inside of Lebanon and pretty excited to jump in. So the way we like to start our show off is we want to learn a little bit more about you so perhaps you can share a bit of your background, obviously from the days, your education on side from being in Paris all the way through to spending the last 20, 30 years working as an accelerator and really driving some amazing opportunities in the Lebanon ecosystem. And then one thing about you that nobody would know.

Nicolas: Nobody, nobody. I mean, I was born in Accra, Ghana, but I surprised you didn’t know that. I did. You want me to go all the way back? So I have been, you know, expats outside Lebanon. So my grandfather actually was born in in in Ghana. So my father and then me and my my sisters and we moved back to Lebanon. You know, primary school was in Accra, in Ghana. And then we came back in the early eighties to finish up, you know, the country school and university in back in Beirut. So and so, A, I’m getting by birth and obviously with Lebanese blood. And then by education, I mean, I did a computer and telecommunication engineer in Beirut and then I went to France and did the PhD. So my first life was, you know, I was associate professor at the St Joseph University Faculty of Engineering. In my then years after my graduation and then the university, uh, which is a French speaking of which, is the Saint Joseph University, and it belongs to the Jesuits and what they did when the the order to go into, you know, the, the third millennium, the 2000 and then they wanted to like make a dent in the economy in Lebanon, not just education but the. So they came up with the first technology board or business development center or technology incubator for tech. And it was it was within the campus. And I was lucky enough to be part of the the founding team of this technology incubator. And then, you know, so I had two offices, one at the Faculty of Engineering and one as the incubator manager across the street on campus. So I had to deal with, you know, the students and uni students. And on the other side, entrepreneurs, whether they came from the the campus or from outside campus, any, any walk of life. So I started, you know, helping entrepreneurs, you know, as they did with the students, obviously. But, you know, entrepreneurs are a different type of breed. But it’s the same you know, I used to tell students, you know, you come in at the university and you get all the support of 44 years and then you get your weight as a successful student. Same for the incubator, because at the time it was like something that people didn’t understand. You know, it was really the early days of these types of words, you know. So it was semantics that no one really understood. And so I told them, it’s like you come in as an entrepreneur and you sit 3 to 4 years as well in the incubator with all the support that we give you, and then you graduate as a typical, you know, a good startup. So I had two heads, I had two bosses at the time. So I had the dean of faculty, who was my boss at the faculty, and then I had the chairman and CEO very thick, my second boss, you know, So it was really very hard to deal with both because, you know, it was not easy to coexist. But this is another story behind us now. And so I said, well, I so I picked up the activity in benefits, you know, And then slowly I started to shift, you know, to to this side of, of of the life. So I left my previous life and started in the finance and the incubation and, you know, supporting entrepreneurs, mentoring, etc., you know, coming up with incubation awards, you know, startup weekends. And really, I mean, did it all it was like 20, 32 years ago. So can you imagine at the beginning of these types of ecosystems? And that was quite the time. And so we had to really construct everything, you know, with the mentorship, you know, and, and all the the awards, the grants, you know, the competitions that the the hackathons, etc.. So we really, really all of those we built them over the years. And then in 2008, we started the first technology fund that was nobody. See, there was no a venture capital fund at the time. There was access. I mean, there was banks obviously that do lending. But, you know, the funds of money about startups couldn’t get access to this type of money because it’s it’s typical. You know, you cannot get that capital from a startup, you know, because you’ll have collateral, no history, no cashflow, etc.. So so we came up with the first technology fund, which was at the time really a pretty tiny early stage fund, $6 million fund that we started in 2008 right after the 2006. You know what I mean? I don’t have to remind you that, you know, we’re in the region, which is not that easy, you know, So it is we often have, you know, instability within within Lebanon. So it’s really hard to to I mean, to to come up with innovative stuff. So we came up with the first Fund six money at the time, and we we started, you know, this this type of of a VC investing which again you know it meant for startups to open up a capital, you know, and get other foreign investors in. So this is something that was not in the in the mindset at the time. We also had to change the mindset of the people of the Lebanese mentality, which, you know, it’s just the businesses and we don’t have enough capital. And what’s this new investors and what’s this fund? What does it mean, valuation? You know, you give up. So it was really a learning curve for all the ecosystem. So this was in 2008. And then, you know, we grew from one center, by the way, to three other centers in an incubation each in different camp