FWDstart

Jamie Lane

The FWDstart Podcast is a weekly show at the intersection of venture capital, startups, and strategic industries shaping the MENA region. Each episode features candid conversations with founders, investors, and operators behind the region’s most ambitious companies, from frontier AI and fintech infrastructure to climate tech, construction, energy, and space.

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FWDstart

Episodes (20)

Monday Bayt’s Rabea Ataya on 26 Years of Building and Why the Old MENA Startup Playbook No Longer Works
Jul 13th Algebra AI’s Anis Harb on Raising $7M, Leaving Deliveroo After a Decade, and Why Managed AI Services Are Booming
Jul 6th Lean Technologies’ Tewfik Cassis on Launching Pay by Bank, Building the AWS for Fintech, and Why Stablecoins Could Transform Payments

FWDstart

Aug 10, 2026
1 hours
58 MB

One of the luckiest things about doing this podcast is getting to sit down with people I’ve admired for years and ask them all the questions I’ve been storing up. Rabea Ataya is very much one of those people. As the founder of Bayt, he has spent more than 26 years building through multiple technology cycles, financial crises, geopolitical shocks and the rise of an entirely new startup ecosystem around him. Bayt itself survived an era in which many of its peers disappeared, became profitable and cashflow positive, and ultimately grew into somet...

FWDstart

Bayt’s Rabea Ataya on 26 Years of Building and Why the Old MENA Startup Playbook No Longer Works

Jamie Lane

00:00 -01:03:43