Visit to Ramallah

Arabreneur is a business accelerator and seed fund with offices in Amman, Ramallah, Bahrein and, oddly, Toronto. I promised their Ramallah manager, Hanan, that I would stop by and run a 90 minute workshop on sales and marketing, with a focus on user acquisition. Parenthetically, it is with mild surprise that I find myself giving talks on this subject. I'm a techie guy! People used to want me to talk about designing distributed systems or managing a multi-threaded application! What do I know about sales and marketing? My old VP of Sales, Mike Foreman, would be laughing.

Yet, it makes sense. These days, there is lots of technical information on the web, but to get advice on how to scale a company means spending a lot of time with a mentor until he/she "gets it" and offers something useful. You can't get that through the static pages of the World Wide Web.

Workshop attendees in Ramallah.

Before the talk I spent about 3 hours with some young entrepreneurs learning about their businesses and the very unique challenges they face starting a company on the West Bank, currently occupied by the Israelis. It's tough to get goods in and out, so most startups focus on software products. But not all of them. I heard from a company wanting to make a wearable sporting goods electronics. Another a consumer goods product. Both wanted to manufacturer in West Bank, but recognizing how tough that would be, have reluctantly recognized that they will have to go to Eastern Europe or China to build the thing.

The talk went well. Or, at least I think it did. Nobody walked out, which I was told is a good sign.

Afterwards, Hanan, visiting mentor Elizabeth, and I went for a ride to visit the planned community Rawabi, on the northern outskirts of Ramallah. This is an incredibly ambitious project to build a planned community for 20,000+ residents, with schools, hospitals, commercial areas, and even an outdoor theater, from scratch, out of the hard scrabble rock of the desert. Seven hundred million dollars later, they are nearly done, and the first residents are moving in.

View of the planned city of Rawabi.

It's pretty dead now because the residents are just beginning to move in.

On the eastern side of the city is a remarkable outdoor amphitheater, where they plan to put on concerts and plays.

Outdoor amphitheater. All that stone makes for some great acoustics!

Hollywood movie stars line the inside box seats.

We were shown around by their director of sales, who rightly took great pride in what the Palestinians have been able to build out of nothing. He took special delight in the project as an in-your-face statement to all the surrounding settlements that the Israelis have built in the West Bank. This hilltop was originally slated to be yet another one, but Rawabi got there first. They too can change the facts on the ground!

Said the director of sales, "I take great pleasure in waking up each morning, knowing that the settlers have to look across at the Palestinian flag flying on the hilltop."

After an enjoyable and informative day, it was time to head back to my hotel in Jerusalem. Unfortunately, nothing is simple in the West Bank. Although the hotel is only about 8 miles as the crow flies from where I gave the talk, you have to go through an Israeli "checkpoint" to get back into the city. The obvious checkpoint, Qalandia, has been a site of recent unrest and a knifing or two, not to mention an hour or more wait. So, Hanan let me out at a diplomatic checkpoint, where I was able to make a lonely crossing by foot in the dark and meet up with a taxi on the other side.

The checkpoint at night. Intimidating, but an easy crossing.