MENAbytes Live: AMA with Arzan VC’s Laith Zraikat – Full Video

We kicked off MENAbytes Live, a series of our online sessions with startups, founders, investors and different other stakeholders of ecosystems across the Middle East, North Africa, Turkey & Pakistan, earlier this week with an Ask Me Anything with Laith Zraikat, a partner with Arzan Venture Capital.

Here’s the full video of the session in which he shared his insights about how Covid-19 will impact the startups in MENA and what can they do to survive it. He also answered different questions of the attendee who participated through Zoom – ranging from raising venture capital to how Arzan selects the company it invests in.

More about Laith

As a partner at Arzan VC, Laith has led many investments in startups across MENA, North America, and UK. He covers different verticals but is specifically passionate about SaaS, marketplaces, logistics, and transportation. Laith’s investment thesis is honest hardworking founders backed by data.

He started his entrepreneurial journey in 1997 by co-founding Jeeran, the Yelp of the Middle East. As co-founder of Jeeran, he served the startup in different roles while shaping and executing the company’s product vision, and growing its user base from a handful of friends to 7M.

In 2012 as Jeeran matured, he decided to take a step back and left the company, taking on advisory and consulting roles with startups including names like OpenSooq, Akhtaboot, LunchOn, and HelloWorldKids.

The founder-turned-investor is a self-taught developer and geek at heart. He enjoys working closely with developers and designers on solving product challenges. Laith still codes, and speaks fluent Arabic, English, Objective-C, Swift, PHP, C#, JavaScript, SQL, CSS, HTML, and a little bit of Python. He holds a Bachelor of Dental Surgery from the University of Jordan.