Yasin Aboudaoud is a Hong Kong born entrepreneur who has been in the global trading business for over 12 years through Ecico Group, which he founded and through which he built a massive distribution network spanning the Middle East, Europe and South America. This is also where he implemented major projects including premium hotels, residential compounds and amusement parks.

A graduate of international development at the University of Toronto, Yasin’s ten years of experience in China served as the springboard from which he nurtured his global vision of an A-Z solutions in market development and product distribution which connects people with a wide spectrum of products from all corners of the globe.

Yasin is currently the Chief Development Officer of Brinc, an IOT accelerator headquartered in Hong Kong with massive operations in the GCC, Hong Kong and China, and which recently opened a branch in Bahrain, initiating an innovative trend of startup ecosystem in the Kingdom.

First of all, congratulations on being the only IOT Hub in the region. What does it mean to be an IOT hub and what kind of projects do you support?

As an IOT hub, our aim is to enable entrepreneurs, get them to start working, build their connective hardware in the region– and see how we can solve local problems. Our model is very simple: we want to invest in startups from the region, who are working in hardware and then take their business models from a very raw, maybe untested idea into a proper business. We take them through a very long process, which starts from identifying their market foundation, financial models and technical feasibility.

Seems like a lot of work, how are you able to handle of all these things?

We’re very fortunate because we’re part of Brain Global, which has its main offices in Hongkong,  Guangdong and Shenzhen. We’re able to utilize our engineers in Poland and Barcelona, and we have a lot of financial folks who are able to help right here in Bahrain. So through all these we are able to get a lot of work done. We actually operate as a group of companies, so we utilize our resources from several different places.

Aside from being an IOT accelerator, you are also a co-working and events space. Can you tell us more about what Brinc does and how is it accessible to people in Bahrain .

When we built this place, we didn’t do it primarily from a monetary point of view. The objective was to create a space where people want to come work, collaborate and really share ideas together. You’ll find that in a lot of cities there’s a lot of registered offices and business offices, and people are really maybe renting a room, or sharing a room, but they’re not really collaborating or working together. Our aim was to make ours workable, we wanted to make it a fun place to be in, it’s obviously decorated in a different way, it’s not conventional, but our aim is to create a pillar of the ecosystem, where everyone can come to one place, and work together. Bahrain is a very small island. It’s not that big. However, there’s amazing talent here who needs a place like this to get things started.

What would you say is the role of innovation in the 21^st century?

We hear a lot of buzzwords about innovation, incubators, acceleration and all these things. I think what’s important is that we need to look at the new generation and how they are moving forward. I always say that if I’m looking at my iPhone today, my 6 year old son in 10 years will laugh at me. He’ll say how come he’s running around with that brick? I don’t how we’re going to be communicating. But the point is though, we have to look at innovation and say how do we help the world to move towards a few major things: how we eat, (which is a focus for us as well; especially agri-technology); how we move, which is about autonomous driving, transportation; how we live, or ‘smart cities’, we have to take innovation not just as a pile of gadgets or social media, let’s take innovation as how do we prolong human life, how do we make the environment sustainable? These are the key things that we are looking at. And that’s more important than the buzzwords.

What’s next for Brinc?

Over the last 4 years, we’ve focused on connectivity and hardware, and that’s because of our strategic location in China, which as you know is a bustling hub of connectivity and technology. Now we’re moving forward with a new program that we just launched called “Brinc Fod”. The program is based on food sustainability. How do we take meat, dairy and eggs off the menu? How do we create proteins, as in steak, or fish from plant-based products? Because the way that we are eating today as humans it’s not sustainable. The amount of beef that we eat and what it takes to produce it is a disaster. We have just partnered with __________ of Silicon Valley to be able to produce products that answer these problems. One of these is a synthetic egg product that looks like eggs, tastes like eggs, fries like eggs… but they’re not eggs. And this is the technology that we are accelerating now, and which we are investing on in the future.

What advice can you give to aspiring tech entrepreneurs? Especially the ones in Bahrain.

People sometimes get sensitive when I say these things. But I think it’s about the hustle. It’s about the grind. The GCC and the MENA region are places that have been have been very fortunate to have a lot of supporters but I think entrepreneurs in the region need to get on the grind, to move fast because a lot of folks have good ideas, but the ideas don’t materialize until someone actually puts in the time and the effort. Many people do turn it into a business, but for the ones who don’t it’s because they don’t put in that time to “hustle” and really get into the grind.