For years, Hussam Ali Kaj, ran a web design studio in his native city of Aleppo. When the textile and pharmaceutical companies that made up his customer base started leaving Syria to escape the ongoing civil war, he got a call from a friend suggesting that he apply to Oasis500, a startup accelerator in Amman, Jordan. After spending January in a month-long boot camp to learn basic startup skills, he convinced Oasis to invest $30,000 in his new company, Websity, a website builder and content management system designed for Arabic speakers.
The soft-spoken designer, whose wavy black hair and hazel eyes give him the appearance of a Syrian Al Pacino, left two children behind in Syria. Now he spends most of his time seated at one of the long white tables that fill Oasis500′s open-plan offices. “I’ve been working the last twenty years to achieve something, and suddenly you lose everything, and you have to start somewhere else in a new country,” he says.”It’s difficult, it’s not a pleasant experience.”
Ali Kaj, 45, is part of the exodus of Syrians who have left the country amid two years of conflict between rebels and forces loyal to President Bashar Assad. More than 1.4 million Syrians have registered as refugees with the United Nations. The better off have departed for Europe, while a greater number of displaced business owners have landed in countries like Turkey or Lebanon, where they often work menial jobs to get by.
To tap into the pool of talented entrepreneurs set adrift by the war, Oasis500 has been actively recruiting Syrian entrepreneurs—through personal networks, placed articles in publications owned by Abdulsalam Haykal, a Syrian media entrepreneur, and by running ads on Facebook (FB), Twitter, LinkedIn, and Jordanian radio stations. To help pave the road from Aleppo to Amman, the accelerator is also paying travel and some housing expenses for Syrian entrepreneurs.
The efforts are paying off. In the accelerator’s first boot camp class after beginning the outreach, which is funded in part by the governments of the U.S. and Jordan, 13 out of 60 participants were Syrians. Oasis500 invested in two of those entrepreneurs: Ali Kaj and Judy Samakie, who’s building an e-commerce site to help Jordanians find and order healthy food—a problem in a region where it can be hard to find health-conscious or even vegetarian meals. The current bootcamp session has attracted nine Syrians.
The Arab world is well-suited to diaspora entrepreneurs, says Steven Koltai, who created the U.S. State Department’s Global Entrepreneurship Program in 2010. An Oasis500 company can quickly expand from Jordan’s domestic market of about 6 million people to reach the larger Arab world, which includes more than 400 million Arabic speakers, according to Unesco. “For anything where language is a central tool, there’s a lot of opportunity,” says Koltai. The biggest startup success story in the Middle East/North Africa region is still Maktoob, widely hailed as the first Arabic email provider, which was acquired by Yahoo (YHOO) in 2009 for $164 million.
E-commerce and content companies in particular have attracted investments. Mohanad Ghashim, a Syrian who has become a darling of the Amman tech ecosystem, arrived at Oasis500 last March. A little more than a year later, his company ShopGo—an e-commerce platform tailored to the Arab world—raised $500,000 in follow-on funding from Wamda Capital Fund, which invests in early-stage startups in the region, and U.S. venture firm 500 Startups. ShpgGo also has inked partnerships with Google (GOOG), PayPal (PYPL), and American Express (AXP). “We’re hoping to launch in the second half of the year,”says Ghashim.
Investing in Syrian entrepreneurs like Ghashim and Ali Kaj serves many ends, says Usama Fayyad, former chief technology officer at Yahoo and founder of Oasis500. The accelerator gets entrepreneurs who often already have experience running a business. And because of the chaos in Syria, the transplants often have a greater imperative to succeed than the Jordanians who make up the bulk of the accelerator’s participants. If the companies succeed, they’ll boost Jordan’s economy, and be in a better position to aid reconstruction in their home country when the war ends. “There’ll be this cadre of entrepreneurs who are engaged in business and ready to help rebuild the country,” Fayyad says.
As the war drags on, Ali Kaj is adapting. Amman’s white stone buildings are reminiscent of Aleppo, he says, and when he walks down the street he sometimes forgets he’s not back home. He registered his company in Jordan, and figures that means sticking around for at least a year. If Websity succeeds, he’d like to move the company to a country with lower overhead costs, but at the moment, it’s difficult to think long-term. “I have to commit to my new project and make it happen to be able to support and help my family.”
