When Saeed Talaat left his internship in Dubai with Emirates NBD Bank, he planned to return to Egypt to start a ticket-purchasing platform. The startup idea was one he and his friends had entered in a digital banking competition in 2016 during their last year at the American University of Cairo.
Things didn’t turn out exactly as he planned. Back in Egypt, they were told the ticket platform was risky and too dependent on its linkage with Facebook to be viable.