Acceleration Services Guest Speakers
The following speakers contributed to the success of the Acceleration program by sharing their experience and expertise in a variety of topics from areas of People Operation, Financial Management, and Investment Readiness.
We appreciate the time they dedicated to the program and its participants
Yadgar Mirani
Yadgar Merani, CEO and Co-founder of Lezzoo, was born in London and raised in Erbil, Iraq. At eighteen, Yadgar moved to London to complete his studies.
As a business-tech enthusiast, Yadgar returned to Iraq and Co-founded Fastwares, a Software Development startup that mainly developed mobile games and applications. Fastwares, later on, became Lezzoo, an on-demand delivery service. Lezzoo participated in Ycombinators’ Winter 2019 program and graduated as the first Iraqi/Kurdish startup to be backed by the world’s leading accelerator.
Yadgar joined as a speaker in the acceleration program to talk about his experience with an investment with entrepreneurs. Yadgar helped the entrepreneurs understand investors' requirements, enabled them to understand the due diligence process better, drew startups' attention to many business aspects, and explained the business life cycle.
Zahi Hilal
Zahi Hilal is a hustler, an initiator, and an engineer. He’s passionate about fostering entrepreneurship to develop societies and national knowledge economies. He focuses on researching, developing, and executing best practices in accelerating startups’ customer discovery and customer validation and helping them reach product-market fit in the shortest time frame with the least amount of money spent. With research in entrepreneurship pedagogy, health tech entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurs’ social networks, he is always exploring new ways to produce startups out of entrepreneurial ecosystems sustainably.
As a guest on our acceleration program, Zahi, a representative of Iraqi venture capital, assisted the entrepreneurs in determining whether their companies were startups or MSEs and provided information on funding startups, financial projections, and pitching.
Rawa Ali
We also invited Mr. Rawa Ali, the CEO of Mr. Erbil to talk about Financial Management and the significance of being familiar with its various aspects. Mr. Ali also tackled the importance of knowing about the financial terms in order to be able to read financial ratios. He also walked the participants through Mr. Erbil’s experience with COVID 19 and the economic situation during that period and how they were able to manage it during that period.
Mr. Erbil, a style collective and the first gentleman’s club in the Kurdistan Region. Mr. Erbil creates high-quality, handmade, locally-produced luxury clothes at affordable prices. They aim to create many local businesses and become more dependent on local products with the hopes of providing jobs as well as providing goods that were hard to come by before. In the future, they aim to have their own physical gentlemen's club, tailor, and barbershop combined where they can bring back Afandi fashion from the 20’s and 30’s, while giving the local gentleman a place to enjoy their time, have a haircut and have a custom suit tailored to fit their highest fashion needs.
Hussein Albayati
Hussein Albayati is a general manager at Careem, a global ridesharing company headquartered in Dubai. Hussien has a bachelor's degree in Engineering in electronics and communications from the university of Baghdad and an EMBA at Quantic school of business and technology; other than that, he has been general manager at Kalimat telecom for more than eight years as well as head of business development at Awal Telecom.
Hussein joined us in our acceleration program and shared his experience about the peoples operations with our participants. He was an excellent example for our entrepreneurs in the acceleration program to learn more about his experience in practice to build a winning team.
Mohammad Salam
Dr. Mohammed Salam, the founder of Meraki Ventures, also tackled the due diligence process and preparing to pitch in front of investors. Meraki Ventures is the organizer of the GEW (Global Entrepreneurship Event), and it holds various local and international clients. Meraki Ventures offers marketing services such as graphic design, motion graphics, business consulting, marketing lecturing, social media management, event management, and project management
Mohammed joined our acceleration program as a speaker and helped entrepreneurs to understand the needs of their businesses and understand if an investment is a wise decision for them or not. Mohammed also explained the expectations of investors, the evaluation of businesses, and pitching to investors.
The Acceleration Services program was generously sponsored by USAID