Lean Startup Nights Are Coming to Cairo for their First-Ever Event in the Middle East

Lean Startup Night, a brainchild of the best-selling book by Eric Ries The Lean Startup and his most recent book, The Startup Way, is landing in the Middle East for the first time at Cairo’s AUC on July 10th. 

“We look forward to hosting Lean Startup Night Cairo as our first event in the Middle East and Africa region,” says Thijs Sprangers, Director of Lean Startup Summit EMEA. “Along with bringing expert speakers and the latest innovation case studies to the local stage, our goal with Lean Startup Nights and Lean Startup Summits is to be where entrepreneurs are. We’re always looking to move into new regions and engage with local communities, learn about the challenges they have and the lessons they’ve learned from putting innovation methodologies into practice.” 

Lean Startup is a methodology for developing businesses and products established by Eric Ries. His book, The Lean Startup, has become a must-read for entrepreneurs and has been translated into 30 languages around the world, becoming a New York Times best seller in 2011.

"When local communities come together to talk about these ideas —to meet each other, to push each other, to help each other — that really is where innovation comes from,” says Eric Ries, commenting on the importance of Lean Startup Nights. “That’s how we advance the state of the art and discover new things about entrepreneurship, which hopefully we can then share with the rest of the world.” 

This event, also recently held in Berlin, Milan and Amsterdam, is organised by Egyptian innovation firm Novus, whose CEO & founder, Hani W. Naguib, is the region’s first Lean Startup Summit EMEA ambassador.

The event will feature Robbert Van Geldrop, a tech entrepreneur and Chief Venture Officer at Firmhouse, founder of the Dutch Lean Startup Circle, and author of The Startup Experiment Design Guide. Robbert is an entrepreneur and software developer who wrote his first lines of code when he was eight years old and founded his first company at the age of 19. Robbert also founded the first Lean Startup Circle meetup group in continental Europe, in an effort to create closer ties with other entrepreneurs facing the tough challenges of building a business.

The event will kick off with a keynote speech by Hani Naguib, CEO of Novus, followed by a digital keynote speech by Van Geldrop, and a fireside chat between Ayman Ismail - Director of the AUC Venture Lab Director and Abdul Latif Jameel Endowed Chair of Entrepreneurship - and Startup Scene ME's Editor-in-Chief Valentina Primo.

“We’re excited to be the first city in the Middle East to host this event; it’s a unique opportunity to create an intercontinental mix of tools that are grounded on practice rather than just theory. As a Lean Startup ambassador, I am dedicated to bringing the latest practical knowledge to enrich the local ecosystem with well-informed and updated startups, SMEs and corporates with the aim to help them innovate," says Naguib, whose firm Novus is the first knowledge and business design studio focusing on evidence based innovation and entrepreneurship in the MENA region." As a practitioner of the methodology, I have witnessed firsthand its capabilities in bringing successful innovations to the market. There is a lot of hype around entrepreneurship in the region, and we would like to cement that with concrete, practical know-how from real practitioners,” he continues. 

“What Hani is doing is introducing more rigour in thinking about designing and launching a business. That comes about by thinking about the validation of hypotheses, by being data-driven, and analytical in our approach. That’s what’s we are trying to introduce. I like the word “designing” a business before building it," Ayman Ismail tells Startup Scene ME.

"In Egypt, entrepreneurs are working in a challenging environment and with very few resources, so the concept of doing it in a lean way is very important. We are also in an environment that is light on data, so it’s very important to introduce that, regardless o the industry,” he adds.