Idea: Can you tell us more about Oscar and what inspired you to create the business?

Oscar’s Smart Business Hub is an end -to-end ERP platform built from the ground up to help medium and small businesses automate processes, drive incremental revenues, and grow their business.The Smart Business Hub provides a unifiied business in a box solution, with Point of Sale, Inventory Management, Purchasing & Supply Chain Management, CRM, Digital Marketing, and Analytics. A lot of small business owners are tied to the wooden cash drawer. Some store owners take home less than $31 a day. We built Oscar to empower SMEs, and help them make money and save money.

Cloud 10: Why did you choose Cloud 10 as the place to get your business off the ground?

Bahrain is known to be an interesting sandbox to test market relevance. When we started working in UAE, we came across Cloud 10 and thought it might be interesting to check what Bahrain had to offer with C5 as a partner. We have loved our stay in Bahrain with C5. It is a relatively mature market. We have been able to get some great meetings and see a lot of opportunities to help digitize Bahrain with Market IQ. We feel we are at the right place at the right time & connecting to the right people with Cloud 10.

Challenges: What are the challenges that Women in Tech face and how can they overcome these challenges?

One of the coolest things I read once, for women in tech was ‘Get comfortable with being uncomfortable’. I think this is so true. There is a clear minority of Women in Tech, though this is decreasing and we see more women as engineers, developers, designers, writers, data scientists, entrepreneurs; there is still a visible gap. More women need to be encouraged from a young age to feel empowered that they can work hard and excel at anything that they want to do.

Women feel they need to work extra hard to prove their worth and skills set. This is commonly called the unconscious -bias. We as women perceive the need to be specialists in the subject matter, to voice our opinion in a meeting or a discussion. This is often caused by people reacting to the same statements from women differently than men. As women, we should make some noise, be confiident and be heard. Being a few in the herd, women in Tech often feel inferior that they are not-fiitting-in. There’s a constantly changing fast-paced environment that requires keeping up with the latest trends, learning & upgrading skills which leads to this inferior feeling. Fortunately, the IT world is a reward-based function of consistent performance and results. Women can let their hard work and performance speak for themselves; and they can support other women to incorporate this invaluable network of support to each other.

Vision: Where do you see the Tech industry in the future? What kind of products would we be enjoying and creating?
Robotics, machine learning & artifiicial intelligence are all being experimented and coming to life with improved versions on an exponential pace. We will soon be witnessing the ‘Jetsons’ era transporting in flying cars, reading peoples minds with machines, shuttling to Mars for a weekend getaway, nano-medicine, organ replacement from heart to kidneys for a prolonged life and living in 3D printed houses built in a week, to name a few. As we experiment on these new domains, the future of technology still revolves around the debate of being in control vs. being controlled – and the power of AI, will be an interesting one to watch unravel.

Tips: What advice can you give to aspiring tech entrepreneurs?

A. Execution is what makes you different. Think small, and fiind the one thing that you are really passionate about solving and the customer you want to solve it for.

B. Failing to plan is planning to fail. It is important to have a solid understanding and build out of the product/business you wish to create before spending invaluable time and resources. An initial MVP to validate your product- market fiit and how scalable your idea can be is a must, rather than just measuring a business proposition based on what you think or feel is the market perception. Test it!

C. Work-life balance is key to achieve a harmonious mindset. An entrepreneur’s life has to be fluid enough to strike a fair combination of work, family, friends, networking, workout and “me time”. Plan your days and schedule your work to increase productivity and better handle unforeseen hurdles.

SAFAA NORREDINE MD & Co-founder

1 Tech & Well-being: Can you tell us more about Break and how it has fused technology and wellness together to create a groundbreaking concept?

People working in large corporations tend to have a small group of co-workers with whom they would interact on a regular basis – which tends to build some invisible wall between teams and departments. Our purpose is to break the silos and foster collective intelligence. We want to make a difference in the daily corporate life by bringing freshness to people’s professional relationships. Break is a user friendly mobile application designed for internal use in big corporations that help employees leverage their breaks to connect with each other. We match co-workers based on their interests, current goals within the company and the branch or subsidiary they belong to.

2 Inspiration: What inspired you to create the business?

I have always had the chance to work in companies that had a true company’s culture. Human interactions and connections were always a priority. This made me truly enjoy going to work every single day. But this was not the case of many of my friends who worked in large corporates -where that type of engagement is hard to achieve. At Break, we therefore made it a mission to make people happier at work on a daily basis.

3 Vision: Moving forward, how do you see technology enhancing people’s quality of life?

The use of technology enables any process to become more efficient, especially with the rise of Big Data and AI, wherein we are now able to provide automated high-level quality services to any industry: health, education, finance and HR.

4 Cloud 10: Why did you choose Cloud 10 as the place to get your business off the ground?

Bahrain is a foreign market for us, therefore an unknown one. By being part of the cohorts at Cloud 10, everything has been facilitated for us significantly: understanding the market, creating and developing a network, reaching out to large corporates, connecting with decision makers, getting more exposure… Cloud 10 was our most impactful ally in our quest for a new market.

5 Tips: What advice can you give to aspiring tech entrepreneurs?

The technology is designed to help a certain kind of people – your target. These people should therefore be your most important source of inspiration. Get to know them very well to better answer their needs and pain points. Also brace yourself with patience, entrepreneurship is a marathon not a sprint.

C5 Accelerate is a London, Washington D.C., and Bahrain based technology investment firm. Its mission is to accelerate best-of-breed start-ups to meet the growth opportunity being created by the geographic expansion of AWS, the world’s leading cloud computing platform.