Interview with Hassan Ikram – entrepreneur, investor, mentor and advisor

Our first interview is with Hassan Ikram - the entrepreneur, angel investor, VC, mentor, and advisor. Most recently, he founded Cotyledon, a premier consultancy firm offering companies the opportunity to work with a multi-faceted group of professionals who have once stood in their shoes. Here's what he had to say

How did you arrive at this point?

I'm a serial founder, having worked on my first startup back in 2011, which was a logistics startup. Since then, I've gotten into a lot of different ventures.

I co-founded Falak Investment Hub, where we were running incubation and acceleration programs. During that time at Falak, I concluded that many investors weren't necessarily providing value-added services such as the advisory function. Hence, once Cotyledon was set up, we built an advisory arm to offer additional services to our portfolio companies.

I also saw that most acceleration programs heavily focused on education and go-to-market strategies, but nobody supported startups' operations. These include things like doing the right business model, doing the right product, finding the right product-market fit, how to build your team, and so on.

And so, we decided to include the venture builder in our next business to support startups on an operational front, in addition to capital. Today, that is an integral part of Cotyledon.

Can you explain what Cotyledon is all about? What was the founding idea behind it?

We consider ourselves as enablers of great startup founders. We have three main divisions: the consultancy arm, the investment arm, and the venture builder arm.

The consultancy arm supports startups with services related to how to do pre-IPO readiness, how to get ready for investors, how to create your virtual data room, your financial modeling, how to do your research, how to create your pitch deck, and how to look at funding options for yourself.

The investment arm invests in early- and growth-stage companies.

And finally, there's the mentioned venture builder arm. We have ideas that we curate and create from scratch, and then we develop the product ourselves. We bring in a management team supported with funding and then push them out and help them get the external funding.

The venture builder arm is also meant to serve family groups or corporates who will come to us looking for digital solutions they have yet to find. In this scenario, they will fund such a solution, and we'll help them create it and push it onto the market.

And finally, the venture builder arm also supports other incubators, accelerators, and venture builders by perfecting their models and structures.

What are you looking for in companies you want to invest in? Are there some common characteristics?

Generally speaking, we look at MENA plus Pakistan. As a deployment geography, we look at serious startups looking to expand into KSA as one of their main markets.

For early-stage investments, we are sector-agnostic, but we do like founders with passion, domain knowledge, and dedication. We also love the fact that they have worked in a startup before.

When it comes to growth-stage investments, it's more thematic in that we prefer specific sectors and verticals that we want to go in. We are still looking for good founders.

What's your perspective on the digital health sector in the MENA region?

Very under-tapped. What made the digital health sector challenging in the past was a lot of regulations that were now changing. It's still a work in progress, though.

Regulations in Egypt will be different from those in the UAE or the KSA, making scalability a lot harder.

If you're looking at telehealth, in Egypt, you can open a telehealth service without having a physical clinic or contract with existing businesses. On the other hand, in the KSA, you need to get a license for that and a physical clinic that meets specific requirements.

Luckily, things are moving forward, enabling startups to expand throughout the region steadily.

What would be your one piece of advice to entrepreneurs creating digital health solutions?

Research regulations and find the business model that works for that respective country. It will not necessarily be a unified methodology to launch in all countries, so localizations are extremely important in every single market.

Any words for the end?

As a founder, you know there will always be roadblocks on your way - you just need to keep going. And you need to stay dedicated to your business. Be ready to pivot whenever needed.