I interviewed Nour Khrais, Founder/CEO Maysalward, an entrepreneur from Jordan @Gamesbeat 2013. He spoke about the organization which he works with the King & Queen of Jordan which is free to learn about developing video games. Queen Rania has supported women developers in gaming so they can work from home with the training program. Nour is an experienced gaming entrepreneur in Jordan from 2003. He spoke about his startup Maysalward & the challenges about being in an ecosystem that is not developed, in the Middle East. He has a team of 20 people & he has been living from the business for the past 10 years. He spoke about raising funding with a women investor from Turkey. He spoke about the added value of having a woman as an investor. He is setting up an office in the valley for his forthcoming projects. He spoke about what it is like to be a startup in Jordan. There are many more startups now than when he first started. They are trying to educate people in Jordan to not look at failure negatively. “We live in a flat world today”.
Middle East
Jalak Jobanputra, FuturePerfect Ventures: European Startups and Venture
Jalak Jobanputra has over 16 years experience in venture capital, media and technology, most recently with the NYC Investment Fund. She spearheaded the formation of NYCSeed in 2008, a seed fund dedicated to funding early stage tech entrepreneurs in NYC. She was previously a principal at New Venture Partners, a $300 million early stage venture fund that incubated technology at corporate labs. Prior to that, she was at Intel Capital in Silicon Valley and was on the launch team of online financial information startup Horsesmouth in 1997, during which time she first discovered the NYC sample sale scene in Nolita. You can find her @jalak and her blog Nothing Ventured