Jordan’s Silicon Valley
J magazine
There’s a lot of success to celebrate. Amman is well on its way to becoming the region’s technology hub. Conservative estimates say the industry employs 80,000 people and accounts for almost 10%of Jordan’s GDP. “A few things came together to create a little [Jordanian] technology revolution in the Arab world,” Ahmad Humeid, the grandfather of the Arab internet tells me. It may seem like this success has come from nowhere, but for entrepreneurs like Humeid, it’s been a long and lonely slog. He set up ArabiaOnline, one of the region’s first net portals. “We must’ve been crazy to launch in the mid- 90s,” he says. A decade later, things weren’t much better. “When we started itoot.net [in ]2006to aggregate the best Arab blogs, the field was completely open. For a long time we were the only story in town,” he says.
Now, there are dozens, possibly hundreds of exciting tech startups in Amman. “I used to attend ICT meetings from the 1990s to 2009 and I’d see the usual suspects,” says Marwan Juma, former minister of Information and Communications Technology. “What I saw all of a sudden in 2010 was a whole new generation of entrepreneurs who think differently.”
The first Tech Tuesday was held little over a year ago. It was the first real attempt to build a local tech community. Until then, Amman’s IT companies rarely talked to each other, no one even knew how many people were working in the field. The organisers sent out invitations on Facebook and booked a room for 100people. Five times that number turned up. Now, they easily get more than 1,000people to their monthly meetings.
It was only when Yahoo bought the Jordanian portal Maktoob for a rumoured $100 million that people started to get excited about the country’s potential. “It was a huge, huge deal for Jordan,” says Juma. “[King Abdullah] felt vindicated –betting on the ICT sector had started to bear fruits. In meetings with His Majesty he said how can you create more Maktoobs in a much shorter period? He said I want to create a Silicon Valley in Jordan.”
There were some major hurdles to overcome first, though. Even after Maktoob, the money men were reluctant to get on board. “The average Arab investor was willing to invest in skyscrapers in Dubai but it’s really tough to get funding for an internet project,” says Humeid. “It’s a lack of trust in the emerging generation. Why should I give my money to a bunch of young kids doing something on the internet, they say.”
Boston-born Jordanian Fouad Jeryes was a promising computing and business graduate at Dartmouth, one of America’s leading technology colleges. One of his projects caught the attention of Google. Tech superstardom beckoned. “I never planned on coming back [to Jordan],” he tells me, “I thought it was a desert. But then I realised that was the opportunity in itself. I could be part of building an industry.” With the backing of King Abdullah, he helped set up Oasis ,500an angel investor scheme. The idea is to bring in young people with good ideas, mentor them, help them set up their business, and eventually help get them hold of that elusive funding. “We had six pitches in May, all six got angel funding almost immediately and our largest one was a $2million investment,” Jeryes says. “Some of the companies that have graduated from the programme have gone up in valuation six to eight times”.
Oasis 500 has set an ambitious goal: to create 500 technology startups by .2015 So far, they’re well ahead of target. “Oasis is funding twice the number of companies we expected. They’ve almost met the first two years’ targets in year one,” Juma says.
It has all happened very quickly, and at their office in a west Amman business park (right next door to the regional headquarters of Microsoft, LG and Sisco), there is barely room for all of the Oasis companies. The one- or two-person teams sit at large shared desks in the open-plan office. Beanbags are scattered around, and there’s space to play table- tennis. Outside, there’s a glass cube the size of a small house: that’s the gym. Their workspace is about to be refurbished to include a slide from the first floor down to the ground. All very Google.
As I walk around, the young businessmen and women give me their one- minute pitches. There’s Progressive Generation Studios, an animation company that made its name with the Captain Khaled character. They’re already winning awards, and selling their work to Al-Jazeera and MBC. “We plan to be the Arab Disney,” they tell me.
Fakker.me is a career- development site. Users sign up, go through a one-year process and can present their results to potential employers. Zaytouneh produces one- minute cooking videos for the iPad. Menwayn is a shopping comparison site. 3otla.com is developing mobile travel guides. Many of the ideas sound familiar, but for the Arab market, it’s all new. “That’s natural,” Jeryes says, “you copy at first, then once you’re at the same speed as the West, you move on.”
“The success of Oasis 500is that it’s changing the culture in our part of the world. Risk taking, entrepreneurship and acceptance of failure is the only way for the Arab world to go forward,” Juma says. “We’re hoping the impact of Oasis will go beyond the ICT sector, eventually beyond Jordan.”
Despite the successes of the past three years, there’s still a long way to go. “The problem is that [Jordan] started late, and when everyone got connected you had a highly evolved products already out there from the West like Facebook,” Humeid says. Palo Alto and Cupertino could do it cheaper and quicker than Amman.
“We need another eight years to get to that level of innovation. We have a couple of companies here that are doing things that are globally unique,” Jeryes says. “I really believe that Jordan is on the path to being the next tech hub of the world.”
