Today’s episode is with Amr Shady, who has two decades’ experience in building and scaling startups globally. He co-founded Tribal, a Silicon Valley-based crypto-powered payments and financing platform that helps emerging-market SMBs grow and compete in a global economy. The company started as a spin-off from his NYU research on using AI to predict startup success. Tribal raised $163 million in total funding from SoftBank Latin America Fund, QED Investors, BECO Capital, Stellar Development Foundation, Digital Currency Group, and Coinbase Ventures. Amr started his first company at 22, bootstrapping it to a multimillion dollar business. TA Telecom is a payments company that processes 15 billion transactions yearly. Named “local hero” by the Financial Times, the company also ranked on Deloitte’s fastest growing tech companies in EMEA. Amr’s mentors and especially his mom, were an instrumental force in allowing him to stay the course on the road towards building Tribal. We talk about the following and so much more: ✅ Why Amr started Tribal Credit and why it’s so important to small businesses ✅ How his product changed from version 1 to the latest version ✅ Which people and mentors in his life helped him develop his company ✅ Some of the books that he recommends for anyone starting a business Stay tuned for upcoming episodes with startup founders in the Middle East and North Africa! Please tag us and tell us what you learned. We’d greatly appreciate a review if you are enjoying these conversations.