MoneyHash's Mustafa Eid On Being A Self-Taught Entrepreneur

While the MENA region has seen social viewpoints on entrepreneurship change significantly over the past 10-15 years, perceptions on the need for formal schooling haven’t budged much. And though the college dropout status of prominent entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates are often celebrated, leaving one’s education to set up a startup (or for any reason, for that matter) is rarely, if ever, seen as a badge of honor in the Arab world.

That’s what makes the entrepreneurial journey of Mustafa Eid, co-founder and CTO of MoneyHash (the Egypt-born, New York-based payment orchestration platform serving the Middle East and Africa), particularly noteworthy. Eid, who dropped out of university to set up his own startup, tells Inc. Arabia that not having completed his education in a region known to be obsessed with degrees has made him very aware of the role that formal credentials play in receiving startup funding. But given that, earlier this year, his startup raised US$5.2 million in a pre- Series A round led by the global venture capital firm Flourish Ventures (which has backed over 100 fintech startups, including industry leaders like Chime, Flutterwave, FairMoney, and Neon), Eid’s take on what it means to be a self-educated self-starter carries a lesson or two for aspiring entrepreneurs in similar circumstances.

“I’ve had a pretty unconventional journey when it comes to education,” Eid tells Inc. Arabia. “In high school, I had to repeat a year, and I ended up graduating with a 50 percent score, and I was basically considered a failure. That one number on my transcript felt like it had already decided my future, but I still knew I wanted to pursue computer science.” But it wasn’t just Eid’s grades that were a hurdle for him to follow through on his ambition – his non-privileged background meant that he was unable to access top-tier schools, and he also had to support himself during his years at university. “My background is modest, so I couldn’t afford the more prestigious private universities like the German University in Cairo or the American University in Cairo,” Eid shares. “I had to also work full-time in call centers to pay for a lower-cost school. But I really wasn’t satisfied with the quality of education I was getting; so, I decided I’d be better off learning on my own. Around that time, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare and the early Udacity courses became available, so I dove into self-study, and I did freelance software engineering work on the side.”

It was also around this time that Eid began dipping his toes into entrepreneurship, and in 2014, he teamed up with two friends to bootstrap Egyncy, a digital marketing services company. The trio used the revenue generated by Egyncy to fund product ideas that addressed challenges that they cared about, and the first such enterprise they built was a platform called Bteekh, which launched in 2016. “Bteekh was a content creation and discovery platform, initially focused on graphics interchange formats (GIFs),” Eid explains. “At that time, chat and social media tools had peaked, making popular media snippets embedded in interactions the norm. However, Arabic-speaking users were underrepresented, because most content tools didn’t support Arabic, or cater to Arabic users. As a result, the GIFs available on these platforms, even today, primarily feature Western popular media, even though there is over a century of beloved popular film, television, and theater content [from the region] that users would love to share daily. When we launched the tool, users loved it, and the content quickly went viral; in fact, some of it still appears on Google today with our watermark. Unfortunately, we couldn’t secure funding beyond a small check from a friend. We tried to support it for as long as we could, but keeping that content alive was costly, and we eventually had to shut it down. That product and that company are very dear to me, because I learned many valuable lessons about startups as well as the startup ecosystem from them.”

Eid recalls that it was during his time fundraising for Bteekh that he started to see that funding was often directed to entrepreneurs who came from more privileged socio-economic backgrounds. “Generally, these are entrepreneurs who are either ex-Uber, ex-Careem, or [ex-Big Tech], or they come from foreign or prestigious local universities (mostly private),” he says. “The whole network (founders, investors, judges) feels very interconnected, so if you haven’t studied or worked in those circles, it’s tough to break in.” But that didn’t put Eid off entrepreneurship. If anything, his experience with Bteekh instilled in him a love of startups that made him resolute that, rather than be discouraged by the relative exclusivity of entrepreneurship networks, he would carve out his own path. Indeed, it is after working for startups for many years that he co-founded MoneyHash with Nader Abdelrazik in 2020. And while he is proud of being a self-made and self-taught entrepreneur, he admits that his lack of formal schooling has caused him to question himself more than once. “During that journey, one big thing I’ve faced is imposter syndrome – wondering whether my lack of formal credentials would overshadow my abilities,” he says.

Today, as a mostly self-educated, self-made entrepreneur, Eid makes it a point to be particularly tuned to the non-traditional talent out there in the region. “In every company I’ve worked in, I’ve hired and worked alongside college dropouts, and they’ve been some of the most talented people on the team,” Eid reveals. “At MoneyHash (and in other companies before it), we don’t put much weight on credentials, and we certainly don’t have any strict college or degree requirements for our roles. If you can do the job, you’re in.” This isn’t to say Eid has a bias against those who come with formal education – but he does believe the industry at large needs an outlook where one’s skills matter more than one’s qualifications. “I think we need more communities that are genuinely agnostic about formal credentials — places where merit and skills count more than the name on your diploma,” he says. In addition, Eid says that the stories of MENA founders who have had non-typical routes to success need to be amplified. “That visibility helps normalize the idea that a nontraditional path can still lead to meaningful innovation and success,” he says. “We need to elevate diverse backgrounds and judge people by the value they create, rather than by the logos on their resumes.” 

Pictured in the lead image is Mustafa Eid, co-founder and CTO of MoneyHash. 

This article first appeared in the March issue of Inc. Arabia magazine. To read the full issue online, click here.