Letting Go To Move Ahead: Bosta's Ahmed Gaber On How Failure Fuels Growth
"Why do we need to talk about failure? Because it is the thing that sets you up to succeed."
Failure is a subject most entrepreneurs shy away from discussing openly, which is why it came as a surprise when Egyptian entrepreneur Ahmed Gaber—perhaps best known for co-founding Bosta, the tech-enabled logistics firm that helps e-commerce companies in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE with fast transfers and next-day delivery—announced that he was shutting down his latest venture, TradeHub.
Launched in late 2023 with US$1.4 million in backing from Concept Ventures, Tlcom Capital, Armyn Capital, and a group of angel investors, TradeHub set out to “connect manufacturers with local and global buyers for seamless B2B trade.”
But after 18 months of experimentation, two pivots, and no clear product-market fit, Gaber and his co-founder, Ahmed Atef, made what he described in a post on the social media platform LinkedIn as the “very difficult but responsible decision” to wind down the company down and return the remaining capital to their investors.
When Inc. Arabia spoke to Gaber just days after he broke the news, Gaber said that TradeHub had initially felt like the right move to make after the momentum he’d built with Bosta. “When we started TradeHub, I thought it would be a fast-growth company,” he said. “I had the experience; I had the investment. All of this gave me the energy that this is going to be big. And then you realize that it’s a startup, and you need to go through the ups and downs—nobody is too big to fail.”
However, after spending as long as Gaber did in trying to make TradeHub work, he came to the realization that he had to call it quits. “I’ve always thought of myself as a startup guy who builds things,” Gaber says. “So, how do we make sure that we’re on the right track? We try, and if it doesn’t work, we let go and move on. [TradeHub] started as an idea. We wanted to validate it; the first idea took around a full year, and the second idea took a little less than six months. A year and a half later, we had a very big chunk of the investment money, but we didn’t have any conviction.”
This moment made it clear to Gaber that it was time to move on from TradeHub. Ironically, one of the factors that led to his decision to close down TradeHub was the success that he saw early on at Bosta. “They always say that the customer has their hair on fire, [which is an expression that] means that the customer has a huge problem, and once you give them your product, their hair is no longer on fire,” Gaber shares. “Bosta did three pivots—and when we did the third pivot, [our customers] started to get angry if the service wasn’t prompt. With TradeHub, we never reached that. The customers didn’t want our product, and they treated us as something on the side. So, because I saw what worked, and the dynamics of how it works, and when to know that it’s actually working, I saw when it wasn’t working with TradeHub.”
Gaber was also very keen to publicly share the story of why he shut down TradeHub. “Why do we need to talk about failure? Because it is the thing that sets you up to succeed,” he said. “I totally believe that it is a part of the process. I believe that it is trial and error, and it’s a cliché, but it’s true that if you never try, you never know, and you lose 100 percent of the chances you don’t take. And we need to be strong enough to try and try and try, and to eventually succeed.”
Beyond accountability, though, Gaber also wanted to talk about the company’s failure given that we operate in an ecosystem where such setbacks are rarely discussed openly. “When we started this company, I wrote a post about me leaving Bosta and starting TradeHub,” he noted. “And now that I’m not doing this anymore, I wanted to communicate that personally to people, and to communicate why.”
And this, Gaber shares, goes back to the very origins of his own entrepreneurial journey. “I started to love startups when I was around 20 years old, and what made me fall in love with them is that I read lots of articles from the likes of Open AI’s Sam Altman and Y Combinator’s Paul Graham,” he shares. “I remember that one of the first posts that I read was about why startups fail. Companies live or die, and when companies die, it always has to be dramatic. But I wanted to make it clear that we can still close a business without drama, and we can also close a business and return money to investors when we don’t have enough conviction.”
Pictured in the lead image is Ahmed Gaber, co-founder of Bosta and TradeHub. Courtesy of Ahmed Gaber.
This article first appeared in the September 2025 issue of Inc. Arabia. To read the full issue online, click here.
