“A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars,” Justin Timberlake famously quipped in his role as real-life tech entrepreneur Sean Parker in the critically-lauded biographical drama The Social Network (2010), which dramatizes the inception and rise of Facebook. The film cemented Mark Zuckerberg as a cultural icon, launching him into the global consciousness as the quirky techie with a head for business. A few months after the movie’s initial release, protests erupted across the Middle East and North Africa, people in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen were taking to the streets to topple autocrats and demand political change. And although most Arab Spring countries have slipped back into their old chains, a new revolution sprung from the historic protests: the MENA region’s startup movement. It was in these little business nodes scattered across Cairo that many were proselytized into Zuckerberg’s irreverent and disruptive brand of entrepreneurship, despite the film’s unfavorable portrayal of the billionaire and of Silicon Valley’s tech startup scene. And just like that, The Social Network, inadvertently mainstreamed ruthless pragmatism in Egypt’s budding startup ecosystem, which is slowly drifting away from its…
The Egyptian Silicon Valley Veteran Behind World’s 1st Conscious Tech Summit
October 30, 2019
