Cairo's 'startup revolution'
One warm day in early July, Omar Gabr and Moataz Soliman, the 22-year-old founders of Egyptian startup Instabug, sat in a cool, dark flat in Giza - windows and shutters firmly locked - contemplating their next move.
The duo were scheduled to appear on stage at San Francisco's MobileBeat 2013, publicly unveiling the launch of their product - an innovative bug-reporting tool for mobile application developers, activated by users simply "shaking" their iPhone - in front of dozens of investors, CEOs, and Silicon Valley big-shots.
Instead, they followed the event via a live Twitter feed, as armoured personnel carriers patrolled the streets in front of their office. Widespread protests and violent clashes across Cairo ground the city to a halt. The US embassy had been closed for days, and at the last minute, they couldn't get visas.
"It was frustrating," remarked Soliman, Instabug's chief technology officer. "It's the event that we'd been looking forward to for four to five months."
Yet despite the political instability and violence on the streets, they, like most other young startup entrepreneurs in Cairo, simply had to push on.
Gabr and Soliman graduated from Cairo University in 2012, and immediately turned down jobs at large multinationals - Microsoft in Seattle, and Vodafone in Egypt - to start Instabug. Their decision to give up steady, well-paying jobs for an uncertain startup caused their family and friends in Egypt to consider them crazy.
But their gamble paid off. In April, they beat 4,000 other startups to win $50,000 from MIT's Arab Business Plan Competition. This month, they received an additional $150,000 from investors.
"If you want to make huge money, you have to start your own business," says Gabr, Instabug's CEO. "And now is the time to take a risk - we don't have any responsibilities."
Their story is becoming more common in Egypt today. A wave of young entrepreneurs, fresh out of university and inspired by the recent revolutions are taking risks, launching businesses, and hoping to build a better future - for themselves and for Egypt. Many hope to turn Egypt into the world's next technology hub.
"There were always entrepreneurs," says Cornelius O'Donnell, a Region Entrepreneurship Adviser for MC Egypt, who has spent the last 20 years founding startups in Egypt. "But there wasn't an entrepreneurship ecosystem."
O'Donnell said that the main barrier to startups was that Egypt was "socially repressive for entrepreneurs - and the entrepreneurship landscape was challenging, filled with bureaucracy."
Another hurdle for young entrepreneurs, according to Muhammed Radwan of icecairo, a new co-working space for green-tech startups in Cairo, was a lack of hope. "People had no hope that things could change," said Radwan. Now, however, "they are taking matters into their own hands, not waiting around".