Interview
Nucleus Ventures (NV) partner with global businesses, funds and governments to create new ventures and investments. NV’s aim is to drive growth and disrupt markets through innovation.
For that, Nucleus Ventures works with its clients to understand the shifts required to unlock the core assets, capabilities, and competencies of their industry, through innovation by identifying the potential and transforming it into growth.
Paying their dues as stakeholders of the Lebanese startup ecosystem, Nucleus Ventures is pushing to strengthen their network of mentors and investors through their counterparts in the US, France and the GCC, as well as the Lebanese diaspora around the world.
Since 2019, Lebanon’s ecosystem has scaled back from being a factor-driven ecosystem to a subsistence-driven ecosystem. To Nucleus Ventures, this means prioritizing resources and efforts to ensure the survival of existing businesses in addition to supporting new ones. It also means helping traditional sectors leverage technology and innovation to survive and thrive.
For that reason and to multiply its impact, NV has invested time and resources in developing a teachable, repeatable, scalable methodology, processes, and more, to build client innovation capabilities — driving growth without dependency.
Fouad Assaf is famed for his innovation ventures advisory, venture building & capacity building operations. His experience spans from the entrepreneurship ecosystem design to digital transformation. He lives in Paris, Île-de-France, France, and juggles between the Middle East and European ecosystems.
Assaf is an entrepreneurial and result-oriented executive with over 20 years of leading expertise in founding and leading numerous ventures domestically and internationally. He has extensive experience in entrepreneurship. His focus is on strategy and operation optimization involving both start-ups, ESMEs and growth-stage entities.
He is a distinguished Managing Partner of Nucleus Ventures, a leading entity in corporate innovation, Venture building, and advisory.
With a track record of several ventures built, managed and delivered to his clients, more than 7 incubators and accelerators successfully created, 140+ start-ups graduated, $280+ Million USD raised, 2000+ jobs created, Fouad can proudly state that Nucleus Ventures’ executives and team are today leaders in innovation Venturing.
Nucleus Ventures’ HQ is in Cyprus, with a presence in France, the US and Lebanon, servicing the EMENA region.
Nucleus Ventures’ 2023 plan is to have an office in Saudi Arabia to start facilitating soft-landing for start-ups looking to expand from the GCC to Europe and/or the US and vice versa.
On a personal level, Fouad Assaf coaches and mentors several start-ups at regional accelerators, is a speaker and competitions judge.
He holds Ph.D. in management and continuously conducts trainings with leading institutions like Motorola University, Lloyd’s London, and Babson College US, among others. A Member of several social and Business organizations like the Red Cross and the RDCL (Lebanese Business leaders association) for whom he is leading the efforts to launch the Paris chapter.
Fouad Assaf, Managing Partner at Nucleus Ventures talks to BUSINESS LIFE about the current financial situation in Europe, the globe and Lebanon and what it means for the country’s startup ecosystem.
BL: Can you tell me more about the companies that have been produced by your program?
Fouad Assaf: We worked to help accelerate more than 150 start-ups in the modern technologies sector. We provide options for generating sales and accelerating business. We help grow businesses by using our resources, connections and insights. Many of them have grown and became well established businesses regionally and globally, one of which is Proximie, a telesurgery company. It enables any surgeon to conduct a surgery remotely by using augmented reality and high precision platforms. We are proud that Proximie is a Lebanese team that ran the first surgery in Gazza from EUMBC. We are proud of being an early partner with other companies like Kamkalima platform which is a platform that teaches Arabic language online by making the process joyful through gaming. It also helps school children to learn Arabic by using this platform. It is an Arabic e-Learning platform that provides high-tech and interactive educational content in line with the modern academic systems. We have numerous other companies that have been parts of our program and which have been using modern technologies in the Middle East.
BL: How do you plan to make your business more sustainable and grow beyond the geography of Lebanon?
Fouad Assaf: Fostering entrepreneurship has become a core component of economic development in cities and countries around the world and we are expanding our operations to the Middle East to accompany this development.
Our work is two fold, Venture building with expansion service, and Capacity building.
In the first stance, we work with our clients in the Middle East to bring growth to their business by being super connectors and enablers, what we like to call an ecosystem of support and development for anybody who is an innovator entrepreneur and who wants to build or generate value from their business. We also started an expansion program for their activities to Europe and the USA to complement our Venture building services.
Our second activity is Capacity building mainly in the Tech field. To be able to accomplish this, we have partnered with the best in class, Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple USA to launch in the Middle East WozU Tech coding bootcamps. Talents that graduate from WozU bootcamps are day 1 Job ready with high level tech and soft skills which makes them stand out of the crowd.
BL: You have previously said “One of our core activities is to be interlinked, bringing together knowledge, market expansion and funding needed to generate high potential international ventures.” So, would you elaborate more on that?
Fouad Assaf: The digital transformation is in full swing. The technological progress is rapid and is changing the way we obtain information, communicate, consume – basically, the way we live. Look at AI, and how it is changing the very foundation of everything we do and how we do it.
We want to understand this transformation, these innovations, as an opportunity to create growth and prosperity for businesses and a better quality of life for the citizens, whilst shaping it in a socially acceptable way and in harmony with our fundamental values. Our objective is to bring together what it takes for a group of companies or an individual who has a dream or a potential to succeed, whether it is an investor, a mentor, a subject matter expert, access to the global market. That’s what we do. We help people who have the will to succeed and want to achieve that by bringing together those ingredients of success and being their partners. This is what we do virtually and in-person.
Put in simpler terms, we build and bring growth to your venture in an accessible, easy to navigate and lean way by bringing innovation and providing you with global market soft landing support.
BL: How do you raise the funding? What is the formula between you and the person who has a new idea?
Fouad Assaf: We bring together a network of investors and we offer what we call proof-of-concept model. If they reach a point where they get interest from a potential client we get them a small funding to invest and help them improve the concept. If they have proved that they have products that have clients willing to buy already, we get them a bigger amount to help them complete the product, and to take it to the client and to the market. If they proved good with this client and showed that they are able to grow that business and to generate more revenue, we expose them to our network of institutional investors and angel investors. If the later are interested in the entrepreneur business model, they would invest in seed funding. Seed funding is anything between 50,000 to 250,000 USD.
BL: How do you provide tailored support to entrepreneurs to help validate and build up their ventures?
Fouad Assaf: One of the best ways to validate a startup idea is to talk to potential customers and get their feedback. We focus on coaching entrepreneurs to run what is called ‘customers’ feedback loops’ to help them validate their ideas with real-life clients and we coach them through the process. This process usually entails being able to address the business aspects, the value proposition, the problems they are solving for the client and they are solving in the right way. Also, what does it mean in terms of the product and technology. As a result, do they have their teams in place? Are they developing the right strategy to build a product that the client wants? This is simply what we do and each business has its own story, its challenges and its learning journey. So, we build and customize a gross learning journey for every company. We assign them a lead mentor, somebody who would click with the founders to understand the line of business they are doing. We assign them from our own team a dedicated account manager and we invite experts to come in sporadically to help them tackle all the different challenges whether they are in business, technology, commercial, legal or financial. We help them to solve all these problems depending on their needs. So, we help them through this journey from having an idea or a product to actually having a real product in the market and selling it to real-life clients.
BL: How do you help business universities and government organizations create a culture of innovation? Will solutions to industry challenges generate and spring out?
Fouad Assaf: Our expertise is running these programs. We are able to create innovation ecosystem and entrepreneurship mindset programs for universities, corporations or governments who want to support entrepreneurs for development purposes. Our program and our platform are a kind of ecosystem which we offer to such clients to help them develop their ventures hubs and their innovation ecosystem. We did that for the Lebanese-American University (LAU). We helped them by establishing and running these programs and platforms that go across the university community. These programs benefit students, faculty and the staff. As a result of our work with them, LAU is now supporting students and faculty launch startups. We closely worked with the LAU team in developing an IP policy and supporting the applied search projects of its own faculty. It is set up to engage with the global and regional industry that can collaborate with LAU to develop their tech.
BL: Why is Nucleus Ventures pushing to strengthen the network of mentors and investors through counterparts around the world mainly the USA and France?
Fouad Assaf: The most important thing about building a successful technology and innovation ecosystem is being able to connect with the right people at the right time. The more you have access to expertise, the more you have competent people, the more you are able to work with them productively and the bigger your chances to succeed. This is an investment that every economy needs to have. It is to attract and encourage the right talent in order to be able to thrive and build successful scalable businesses around the world. All the world economies are competing over those talents and trying to attract and create all sorts of conditions to be able to invest in them. Our objective is to make that available to our entrepreneurs wherever they are.
So, if you are in the GCC, you are able to connect with top-of-the-world industries anywhere around the world using our platform or Soft-land in France or the USA. Same goes if you are in the USA or France and looking to soft-land in Saudi Arabia for example, Nucleus Venture is the go-to partner.
BL: Can you tell me more about UK Hub?
Fouad Assaf: We were called the UK Lebanon Tech Hub because we used to run a program for the UK Embassy, but we are no longer named as such. We are now called Nucleus Ventures and we run other programs for Donors & Governments. The UK Tech Hub is added to our track record of 8+ Incubators done in the Middle East and Europe where 150+ start-ups graduated.
BL: When was Nucleus Ventures established?
Fouad Assaf: Nucleus Ventures was formerly known as the UK Lebanon Tech Hub. It was established in 2014 and funded by the Lebanese Central Bank and the UK government. However, in 2019, we turned private. So, the UK Lebanon Tech Hub was acquired through a management buyout and some additional investors, with Nagi Boutros becoming Chairman.
The Nucleus Venture is composed, above all, of an amazing team and invested partners and that is what makes us successful.
Since then, Nucleus Ventures runs a private business and it is also running hubs for clients like the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the World Bank in Jordan, and LAU in Beirut.
Our services are available for companies, family offices, universities and governments, as well as international organizations. Some of our clients are interested in creating an economic impact, while others are looking to have the ability to develop their innovations and to consider building startups or matching with other technology startups in order to improve their business growth. Universities want to develop the intellectual property that their staff generates from research and to commercialize it. And if they are governments then they look to enhance the economic impact to create jobs and to grow their technology sectors and their knowledge economy. They can do this by working with us via cost-effective platforms instead of having to invest a big amount of money for setups, accelerators, and innovation hubs.
BL: What are your present challenges?
Fouad Assaf: I believe that our major challenges are scaling quickly to regional markets, especially in the light of Covid-19 impact and what this impact has done to the economy. However, innovation and technology are thriving because of Covid-19, so now is the right time to invest in digital transformation, innovation and the knowledge economy to meet the challenges of the 21st century. So, being able to nurture this culture, we are looking at transformative technologies and partner with what is called, patient capital. Patient capital is another name for long term capital. With patient capital, the investor is willing to make a financial investment in a business with no expectation of turning a quick profit. Instead, the investor is willing to forgo an immediate return in anticipation of more substantial returns down the road. Prominent examples of patient capital include pensions, sovereign wealth funds, and university endowments. Governments with access to patient capital may have greater maneuverability in formulating domestic economic policies. These are the primary challenges to nurture this culture and encourage more and more a patient investment in the human capital in the Arab world.
We run startup programs and we run technology transformation programs which are programs that help innovative researchers to commercialize their innovations and their technology in cooperation with the industry. Plus, we are in digital bootcamps, technology bootcamps which we run in partnership with the Woz U University, the coding school of the Apple co-founders.
So there is a lot to be done, and a big geography to cover.
BL: Ok, in the past you joined hands with the Lebanese Central Bank, so do you regret it now?
Fouad Assaf: No, we don’t regret it because we learnt a lot from that experience, at least as a team, we tried to do our best, we had a lot to learn and we did; we couldn’t have done this without the central bank. Notwithstanding, back then the central bank did a good thing for this particular space for the Lebanese knowledge economy. Was it flawed? Definitely! There were mistakes? Certainly! Were there lessons to be learnt? Definitely!
BL: What are your comments on the current Lebanon and what is the future of Lebanon?
Fouad Assaf: We have a very tough time ahead of us, maybe a cycle of 5 to 10 years. However, I believe that what is happening to Lebanon is something that is sort of a reckoning; it was always something bound to happen. I do believe that we have to re-invent ourselves, change is very difficult and maybe at certain times, it would be hurtful; it will hurt a lot but it is necessary for us to learn to be a productive nation that relies only on itself and have the support of foreign parties. In the 21st century, it is impossible to be productive without investing in our human capital, we have to reverse the model where we export our best people and our most talented people to the rest of the world, and instead we have to invest in them and we have to give them the freedom and get their buy-in, let them feel this country is theirs in order for them to be able to build the values and therefore the economy of the 21st century, especially a knowledge economy and that is not just broad slogans; it is in fact very practical. We need to retain our best professors and retain our graduates, and then provide them with the best sort of conditions whether it is the laws that govern the big businesses in the country or whether it is the effective environment that people are going to work in. Plus, we also have to nurture a management culture and productivity culture among people to encourage them to shift from a rentier economy to a productive economy. We have what it takes and we have some real success stories that show the potential that we can build on.
BL: What I understand is that you are abroad and specifically in Paris, France, are you trying to integrate in France society for good?
Fouad Assaf: I’m as ever committed to Lebanon and we still operate in Lebanon, despite the hard conditions and even though we operate around the world, we never thought of halting our Lebanon operation. I want to succeed with Nucleus Ventures from Lebanon and elsewhere because I don’t believe that today’s economies are only about geography. It doesn’t matter where you are, what matter is where you create the value. You have to be a global company, anywhere you go. If somebody asks me where I live, I say that I actually live on the airplane. I live wherever my business needs me to be and I’m going to grow that business globally if I can, but this doesn’t mean I forgot my roots.
BL: Ok, what are the new plans and strategies for the rest of 2023 and what is your vision for the year 2023?
Fouad Assaf: I would like to talk about work first, so we recently launched our Capacity building unit, with the Steve Wozniak coding Bootcamp as its cornerstone, a coding school where hybrid programs for students online and offline, with specialized tracks in Cyber Security, Data Science and Full Stack development. So, the students get certified by WozU. WozU as I said is the coding school of Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple. We graduated 200 students to date, founded by the US through their community support program and another cohort that was funded by Al Ghurair in partnership with Dot.
For 2023, the plan is to expand our offering to the GCC countries.
In 2022, it was the year we went digital, today we are able to service clients anywhere and anytime using our online platform where they get everything we offer, including mentoring communities, access to investors, and support for their project, making it easier to expand and bringing a support ecosystem to our clients anywhere they are in the world.
I’m very optimistic about technology and economic knowledge worldwide; all sectors are striving now to re-invent themselves and our services are at the core of all this action. Now, it is the time to think about how you are going to transform your business taking into consideration Covid-19.
If we want to look at the micro level, Lebanon has an opportunity because, besides having the know-how, quality, and expertise, it is cheaper now, and therefore it is more cost-effective when it comes to global competition. So now, we have the opportunity to reinvent ourselves when it comes to technology services, creative sectors, and customer services. Those are the kind of services and businesses that Lebanon can now offer for global clients because we are trailing with nations, our salaries and cost of operations are lower. I strongly believe that we can harness this situation and turn it into an opportunity, especially if we manage to secure basic infrastructure like internet, power, and security. Infrastructure is needed so that we can attract global clients to work with us and use our services. Mind you, a lot of private initiatives secured their own infrastructure to make sure they are more reliable when servicing global clients.
