Rami Al-Karmi
Managing Partner at F03 Venture Partners & Mentor at 500 Startups
Discussion
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Rami Al-Karmi
@alkarmi · CEO F03 Venture Partners (http://f03.co)
Hi - I'm Rami Al Karmi, founder and managing partner of F03 Venture Partners (http://f03.co) and mentor at 500 Startups. I've invested / advised / cofounded hundreds of startups and scale ups in silicon valley and the arab world and my passion has driven me towards building and activating lean startup and entrepreneurship communities and ecosystems. I host a daily AMA in arabic on snapchat alkarmi, which is becoming rather famous. so I have a pretty wide variety of information on this topic . I'm delighted to be here-- ask me anything!
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Jacqueline von Tesmar
@jacqvon · Community, Product Hunt ✌️😻
What industries would you place your bets on in the next 10-20 years?
Rezki El Mokaddam
@rezkiem · Digital Marketing Professional
Rezki here, a young entrepreneur from Morocco.
In your opinion, how should entrepreneurs approach investors? Social Networks? Cold emailing?
IMHO, those are the only accessible ways to reach an investor and I can understand that they are not fans of receiving hundred cold emails from entrepreneurs pitching for their startup, nor do they like being spammed on Social Networks.
Shuran!
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Rami Al-Karmi
@alkarmi · CEO F03 Venture Partners (http://f03.co)
@rezkiem investors are human beings :) BIG IDEA ! the path to the attention of each investor is unique .. but its all about building a relationship .. which can be done on social media or face to face during events .. make sure you dont come down as the sleazy guy who is trying to pitch an investor even if you bump into him in the bathroom :) and it is always helpful if the 1st intro is done through a referral .. make sure its always fun and that you add at least a new piece of interesting information / or interesting progress to the investor every time you see him/her .. dont keep "bumping" into them and sharing them same info again and again again ... and remember investors are humans sometime they wake up on the wrong side of the bed .. while sometimes they decide to help no matter how bad the pitch was :)
Mikkel D. Bertelsen
@mikkel_db · CEO of Corro.io
What company has been the most exciting to work with (500 Startups)?
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Rami Al-Karmi
@alkarmi · CEO F03 Venture Partners (http://f03.co)
@mikkel_db i am a mentor @ 500 startups ... so the 500 team get exposed to more companies than i do .. but from the top of my head the real cool ones i have worked with are http://feesheh.com http://i3zif.com http://silkroadimages.com http://wuzzuf.net http://tamatem.co http://shopgo.me http://jamalon.com
Ben Tossell
@bentossell · Community Lead, Product Hunt
Hey what are your favourite questions to ask founders?
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Rami Al-Karmi
@alkarmi · CEO F03 Venture Partners (http://f03.co)
@bentossell what is the problem you are trying to solve and how painful is it to the person / group suffering from this problem ?
Emily Hodgins
@ems_hodge · Community and Marketing, Product Hunt
Hi Rami, thanks for joining us today. What 3 things should every new founder thing about every day?
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Rami Al-Karmi
@alkarmi · CEO F03 Venture Partners (http://f03.co)
@ems_hodge 1) how will what i do today help in discovering a repeatable and scalable business model 2) what should i do today to discover a repeatable and scalable business model 3) make sure all the founders are aligned on the business model version that we are all going to validate against today
Jordan Gonen
@jrdngonen
Thanks so much for being here!
What is the biggest mountain you have to climb this year?
How can a student get involved with 500 startups?
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Rami Al-Karmi
@alkarmi · CEO F03 Venture Partners (http://f03.co)
@jordan_gonen crazy mountains every day ;) my new baby "mountain" is http://f03.co where we are trying to disrupt ecosystems and grow the culture of angel investing in emerging markets
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Rami Al-Karmi
@alkarmi · CEO F03 Venture Partners (http://f03.co)
@jordan_gonen many ways to get involved in 500startups as a student i think the best way is to attend events produced by 500 and to intern with portfolio companies
Rajiv Mukherjee
@rajiv_mukherjee · CEO Incubatehub l Helping Organisations
Rami - i run an virtual accelerator in India fhsidealab.com... Will love to know if the venture money is drying up for early stage startups ?
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Rami Al-Karmi
@alkarmi · CEO F03 Venture Partners (http://f03.co)
@rajiv_mukherjee dying up might be too harsh but the whole world is going through some hard times ... my advice for startups is to always aim for a revenue funded company ,, where investment is need to grow the venture .. not for the venture to live
Harry Stebbings
@harrystebbings · Podcast Host @ The Twenty Minute VC
Thanks so much for joining us today, I would love to hear how you view your personal brand? What have been the best strategies for expanding your personal brand? Snapchat, what content is most popular? Do you use Insta, Vine, Periscope etc?
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Rami Al-Karmi
@alkarmi · CEO F03 Venture Partners (http://f03.co)
@harrystebbings can you please elaborate is your question about "Rami Al Karmi" as a personal brand .. cause it aint a brand :) but i have different personas on each platform .. on facebook it more about me as a person .. on twitter its live coverage and advice .. short .. linkedin is more professional .. Perdiscope is live coverage of events in the innovation spaces / incubators / accelerators that i created or support .. and been doing daily AMA snaps on "alkarmi" for a month now in simple arabic where i answer ppls questions and address topics around #entrepreneurship #investment #innovation ... the growth in the engagement level in snap chat has been phenomenal !
Pritish Sanyal
@sanyalpritish · Director Business Development
Hi Rami, Thanks for taking the time! The one question I would like to ask is "One Business Mistake That You made, which has made you see things differently ever since"
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Rami Al-Karmi
@alkarmi · CEO F03 Venture Partners (http://f03.co)
@sanyalpritish yeah .. painful but i have the luxury now to talk about it as a lesson learnt :) We built a company for managing the life cycle of real estate .. and invested a fortune in premium office space and in building a mapping / GIS solution to capture and automate most of our activities .. hired the best facility management crew .. then after 2 years had to face the sad reality that the Major real estate developers ( the ones that build towers - our target segment) has all what we do as a built in function in their operations .. it wiped me flat broke and to add some more fun Google decided to roll our Google Maps for free and made the technology we invested ton to build worthless .. it was fun ;) but to recap : I only build companies after i validate the business model .. and hardly build companies that are not mainly revenue funded.
Pritish Sanyal
@sanyalpritish · Director Business Development
@alkarmi thanks for your response... Yes it may have been painful... We all learn a great deal from us situations...