with Loulou

We talk to Dr. Louise Lambert, a Registered Psychologist, Researcher and Professor about Positive Psychology. We cover strategies to use to improve our overall wellbeing as well as the endless pursuit of happiness and meaning in life and at the workplace. We wrap up with some insights from Dr. Lambert's research (a podcast scoop!) on the impact of school systems on our children's wellbeing, a must...

We talk to Rashid Al Ghurair, the Founder & CEO of Cafu, the first on-demand fuel delivery company in the Middle East that is expanding to become the one-stop-shop for all vehicle needs. Rashid recalls how growing up in one of the UAE's most successful business families has taught him that "business has no borders" and that he needed to branch out of the family business and leave his own legacy. W...

We talk to Omran Sharaf, Project Director of the Emirates Mars Mission about his experience in leading one of the most significant projects the UAE has undertaken. Omran and his team were in charge of developing, building and launching the "Hope Probe", an unmanned spacecraft sent to study the Martian atmosphere. Omran recalls the events of the night of November 20th 2013, as he juggled between th...

We talk to Jonathan Labin about his move from a high powered career at Viacom and Facebook to taking a 1 year sabbatical and then shifting gears to startups. In 2020, Jonathan joined Unifonic, a Saudi born startup co-founded by brothers Ahmed and Hassan Hamdan. In his role, Jonathan was responsible of taking the company to the next level, and in 2021, Unifonic raised a whopping US$125 Million to s...

Talal Tabbaa is the Co-Founder & Chairman of CoinMENA, a crypto business that was founded by Talal and his Co-Founders Dina Sam'an and Yazan Barghuthi - and regulated by the Central Bank of Bahrain - that aims to provide crypto based financial services such as borrowing, lending, investing and more. He joins us to discuss the business of crypto exchanges and why we need them particularly in the Mi...

Shant Oknayan is the Head of Global Business Solutions at ByteDance (TikTok) across Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa. He joins us to discuss his role in building the regional footprint of one of the fastest growing startups globally. In this episode we zoom in on challenges of leading in a pandemic and we focus on culture. We discuss the evolution of our digital lives and we close with a dee...

Mohamad Ballout, a serial entrepreneur and the Co-Founder and CEO of  Kitopi , a cloud kitchen startup, has recently joined the exclusive and extremely coveted "unicorn club", with Kitopi's valuation topping US$ 1 Billion. He joins Loulou to discuss building a global business out of the UAE, the challenges he faces as he scales Kitopi beyond the UAE, the complexity of running a "food platform" and...

Nadine Mezher, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Sarwa, and her 2 partners Mark Chahwan and Jad Sayegh want to bring smart investing, trading and saving to the Middle East. In 2017 they launched Sarwa.co, a venture backed fintech startup with US$25M in funding to date. Sarwa is democratizing investing for the young professionals and as a result has witnessed tremendous growth. We talk to N...

Our guest is Dr. Saliha Afridi, Clinical Psychologist and Founder of The LightHouse Arabia, a premier mental health and wellness center in the UAE. We check in on mental health in our "new normal" and we discuss unlocking our potential as individuals and business leaders, listening to our spirit, taking back our power, unleashing creativity and healing both our body and mind. If you're looking for...

Emaan Abbas is an American Egyptian entrepreneur who has recently moved to the UAE to follow her dream of working with her idol Huda Kattan, the famous Co-Founder of the Billion Dollar Huda Beauty brand. Working under the stewardship of the Kattan sisters, Emaan quickly learned everything about product development and gave herself the permission to dream about creating her own, one day. We talk to...

We talk to Cedric Betis, an athlete and wellness expert who works with Ministers from the Dubai government and CEOs from the private sector to help them achieve their health and wellness vision for themselves, their companies and their city. We discuss how COVID has changed the dynamics in terms of wellness on a corporate level and why it is no longer a "nice to have" a wellness program and why th...

We talk to Noor Sweid, the General Partner at Global Ventures about building a top tier Venture Capital firm in the Middle East & North Africa region. We cover her recent startup exits with e-commerce startup Mumzworld that has undergone an M&A transaction and Kitopi, a cloud kitchen startup that has recently raised $415M via Softbank’s Vision Fund. We discuss fund return expectations in MENA and...

Ramez Shehadi is the Managing Director of Facebook for the MENA region. In 2020, Ramez was ranked among the top 20 of the 'Top 50 Regional Executives Heading International Companies' by Forbes. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Aramex, the Board of Trustees of BeMA (Beirut Museum of Art), the Board of Directors of MMA (Mobile Marketing Association) and is a Fellow of the Aspen Insti...

As the topic "cryptocurrency" reaches its highest level on google trends globally, we decide to dig into this world in order to understand what it all means to us as individuals and potential investors. We've all seen the news and watched Elon Musk drive cryptocurrencies and particularly Bitcoin to its highest peak and then sent it back crashing. But is it all Elon? What else is at play? Are crypt...

This inaugural episode for season 2 delves into the world of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and gives you a high-level overview of their use cases. We talk to Kristel Bechara, the award-winning Lebanese artist residing in Dubai about her experience being the first artist from the MENA region to mint and sell NFTs. Why do you need to know about NFTs? Because the underlying technology of NFTs could beco...

Brahms Chouity known by his Instagram handle @DaddyFoody is the winner of the Best Comfort Food Blogger at the World Bloggers Award for 2019. In this episode we discuss Brahm's passion for conceptualising and identifying business opportunities with the goal to exit in a few years and how he managed to launch close to 30 startups in 2 decades. Whilst he was hard at work churning one business after...

Tara Rogers-Ellis, co-founded Mojo along with Louise Mezzina. Over the course of a decade, the duo have built Mojo into a successful PR and Communications agency, with top clients like Johnson & Johnson, the European Union, RAKBank, Montblanc and more. Tara grew up in South Africa during apartheid and an opportunity to move to the UAE meant that she could have a fresh start, it was at that point w...

I’m excited to have Mishaal Al Gergawi on the show this week, one of the UAE’s top thinkers and intellectuals. Mishaal’s journey is quite fascinating as he started his career in finance yet quickly became renowned for his writing, a passion that fueled the launch of The Delma Institute, a think tank that he ran between 2012 and 2018. His work was centered around providing analysis and insights on...

Ali Matar, LinkedIn's Head of EMEA Emerging Markets, Middle East & Africa talks about the disruption that COVID has had on the MENA region and how people are coping with the new work dynamics, job losses and the need to re-think their careers, particularly women. We build on Ali’s experience as the first employee tasked to build the LinkedIn presence in MENA and how a misconception he had ended up...

I’m joined by my friend Khaled Kteily, the Founder and CEO of [Legacy](http://givelegacy.com), - a startup he founded at the Harvard Innovation Lab - that provides from-home fertility services for men with the aim to change the outdated view that fertility is a women's issue. The UAE is part of Legacy’s first phase of international expansion and Khaled is hoping to kick off at the earliest given t...

Nadine Hachach-Haram is Lebanese reconstructive plastic surgeon based in London and the founder of Proximie, an augmented reality platform allowing surgeons to remotely guide local clinicians through complex procedures in real-time. She joins me on the show this week to talk about growing up in post-war Beirut in the early 90s, her first exposure to the world of surgery to her mission with Proximi...

In an increasingly digital world, you have to appreciate people who work with their hands—artists, tailors, buildings, designers, cooks. I’m joined on this episode by Sky Kurtz, co-founder & CEO of Pure Harvest, a new breed of tech startups that has raised $50 million to build high-tech greenhouses. We talk about how he got started with entrepreneurship after graduating from Stanford, moving to th...

Jalil Allabadi started working on Altibbi.com, a health-tech startup out of Jordan in 2011. It was the first attempt to digitize an Arabic-Arabic medical dictionary published by his father, a prominent Jordanian surgeon. What started off as 15,000 terms is now 100,000 medical terms across 2 million pages. In 2016 he saw an opportunity to change his business model and decided that the real opportun...

Dina El-Mofty is the founder of Injaz, a pioneering NGO in Egypt and on a mission to empower one million Egyptian youths by 2020 by teaching them entrepreneurship, financial and work readiness skills. Injaz's work with schools and universities led Dina to launch "My Company" in 2011, an accelerator offering grants and mentorship to entrepreneurs at a time of crisis (during and post revolution). We...

Binod Shankar is many things--from a former entrepreneur & now a mentor to a podcaster & speaker to a cyclist & mountaineer, and a dear friend. He was also my CFA Level I coach. After leaving the corporate life, he went on to co-found the Genesis Training Institude in 2009 which eventually got acquired by Kaplan Inc. in 2017. Today he mentors young finance enthusiasts via his podcast, The Real Fin...