Welcome to the fourth, and final, edition of the MENA VC Playbook!
In the first edition, we tackled how the region's top investors build deal flow pipelines. In the second, we flipped the lens and looked at how those same investors raise the capital they deploy. In the third, we got into the mechanics of how they decide what to actually invest in.
And now, finally, we arrive at the part of the job that is at once the most romanticised, the hardest to evaluate, and arguably the most consequential, what happens after the wire transfer clears.
There’s an old line, frequently attributed to Vinod Khosla, that has been quoted in industry discourse so many times that it’s almost lost its sting. 90% of VCs add zero value, and somewhere between 60% and 70% are actually value-destructive.
We're not particularly interested in litigating the precise percentages, which are obviously somewhat tongue-in-cheek to begin with, but the underlying observation is one that most founders and investors acknowledge with varying degrees of discomfort.
The pattern, broadly speaking, is that the value-add a VC actually delivers tends to be a function of two things:
Who they actually are (their experience, their network, their pattern recognition), and how well-calibrated they are to what the founder actually needs (which, frequently, is something quite different from what the VC thinks they should need).
The first variable is hard to fake but mostly invisible at the point of investment. The second is easy to fake at the point of investment, and exceedingly difficult to recover from once the gap becomes apparent down the line.
What emerges from our conversations for this edition, and what we'd suggest is the single most important and counterintuitive insight, is that in MENA the most valuable thing a VC can do for a founder is very often to do less. To be available rather than involved. To listen rather than fix. To defer rather than direct. To open a door without insisting on walking through it together.
This cuts against every instinct in the VC business, where the temptation to demonstrate value, to founders, to LPs, and (probably most significantly of all) to oneself, makes restraint feel professionally negligent.
But restraint, properly understood, shouldn't be thought of as passivity, rather a kind of calibrated form of attention, and it's ultimately the harder, slower, and more valuable thing.
In a region where the venture community is small enough that founders genuinely do compare notes on a weekly basis, where pattern recognition is one of the few genuinely scarce assets a VC can offer (a point we explored at some length in Edition Three), and where the founder pool is small enough that reputational damage compounds across deals blisteringly quickly, the stakes of being one of the 70% are uniquely high.
Conversely, the upside of being one of the 10%, the genuinely useful, genuinely additive investor, is uniquely valuable, because in this market there is no anonymous capital. Every cheque tells a story, and every founder remembers.
This edition is about how to be one of the 10%. Or, at the very least, how to avoid being one of the 70%.
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Table of contents
Earning the right to invest: Why pre-investment value-add is the real credibility-builder, and how it works in a market where founders have heard every promise before.
Setting the relationship up to last: Onboarding, governance, cadence, expectations, and the unglamorous business of looking after the founder behind the founder.
The dialectic of disagreement: Why productive conflict is the foundation of useful board work, and how the best investors in the region navigate the hard conversations.
The long arc: How the founder-investor relationship evolves as the company scales, what a healthy handoff looks like, and why the best of these relationships outlast the investment itself.
Thank you once again to Hasan Haider (Plus VC), Ambar Amleh (Ibtikar Fund), Zach Finkelstein (Class 5 Global), Ivo Detelinov (Oryx Fund), Laila Hassan (Algebra Ventures), Khaled Talhouni (Nuwa Capital), Michael Lints (Golden Gate Ventures), and Hussein Attar (Tech Invest Com) for opening up their fundraising strategies.
Now, let’s dig into it.
Step 1: Earning the right to invest
A founder takes a meeting with a VC.
The VC, charming and well-prepared, makes a series of confident assertions about what they bring to the table. Buzzwords abound. Network, strategic guidance, customer intros, and the intangible-yet-immensely-valuable benefit of having someone in their corner.
The founder, pressed for capital and inclined to believe the best, signs the term sheet.
Somewhere between three and six months later, the WhatsApp response times start getting slower.
Sometimes it's good to show you can add value before you invest. Many founders have been through experiences where VCs promise everything, "I'll bring you this, I'll do that for you," and then once the investment closes, the calls just stop. Really showing "I believe in you, I want to support you," even before you're in, is the right approach to genuinely earning that trust with the founder.
By the time a founder in this region sits across from you at a pitch meeting, they've likely heard every iteration of the value-add monologue before, from VCs whose follow-through, when the time came, was conspicuously absent.
Which means, in practical terms, that the work of being a useful investor has to start long before the term sheet does, with whatever intro, advice, or genuine help you can offer in the months (or, very often, the years) when there's still no economic reason to.
Trust outside the investment
The first thing is really building a relationship outside of the investment, where you can. Being helpful without being transactional, which is particularly key in Saudi, though I think people appreciate it everywhere. Adding some value before you do anything. Naturally connecting people, helping them, seeing if you can be useful, being approachable, stuff like that. I think it's key.
In ecosystems where venture has been institutionalised for several decades, transactional first-meetings are normal and expected, both parties show up, run through the deck, and either follow up or move on.
In markets like MENA where business culture remains heavily relational, walking into a founder's life with a transactional mindset is a way of signalling, before you've opened your laptop, that you don't quite understand the room you've walked into.
There's also, in our view, a structural benefit to the non-transactional approach that goes beyond the cultural one, which is that the relationship gets to form on a footing where the power dynamic isn't yet skewed by capital.
Both parties show up because they want to, not because one of them needs the other's money, and that equality of motive tends to produce a much more honest read of whether the thing should eventually become a financial relationship at all.
I distinctly remember a founder I was working with. Our fund hadn't closed yet, the funding had gotten delayed for a bit, and they needed a bridge. I introduced them to another VC who ended up stepping in and putting in a ticket. It was a goodwill thing. So when the founder was later raising another round, which turned out to be an extension, they were keen to give us the proper allocation because we had done it with no return.
This is the reciprocity dynamic that defines pre-investment value-add in a small ecosystem. It isn't generosity for its own sake (though there are certainly worse things to be accused of, in venture or otherwise).
It's the recognition that founders remember who showed up when there was nothing in it for them, and in a market where the best deals are routinely oversubscribed and allocations are negotiated rather than offered, that institutional memory translates more or less directly into deal flow that money cannot buy.
Demonstrable value, day one
Class 5 Global’s Zach Finkelstein has codified the pre-investment value-add philosophy into something close to an actual framework, which is rare enough in an industry where most positioning of this kind defaults to vibes.
We see our value-add as three pillars. First, we use our international networks to grant our founders access to insights on how their business model has worked in other ecosystems, whether that's Silicon Valley or the global south. We aim to deliver to them not just data and information, but deep networks of founders who have been successful employing their business model elsewhere, and VCs who have successfully backed their business model elsewhere. It's important to deliver that value aggressively and early. There's no reason that founders should rely on "trust me." They should see your demonstrable value from day one.
"Demonstrable value from day one" is a load-bearing phrase of sorts here, that carries with it an implicit critique of how most VCs actually operate. Which is to say, on a "trust me" basis, asking founders to extend credit on a value prop that conveniently won't be tested until well after the investment is locked in.
The international-networks angle, meanwhile, is calibrated to a very specific gap in the MENA founder experience, which is the difficulty of accessing the same calibre of founder-to-founder learning and VC pattern recognition that Bay Area counterparts more or less take for granted.
It's a benefit that we have funds across two regions. Founders here ask, there's a similar company in Singapore, how have they done it, or could I speak with the founder for a few minutes, or how did you guys do this specific deal there, how did they grow from one country to two? That asset has been very valuable in helping our founders here.
The implicit asymmetry is one of the most underrated advantages a multi-region investor has in MENA. A regional founder considering, say, a single-country to two-country expansion has the choice of either reasoning from first principles, which is slow and error-prone, or learning from someone who has already navigated the equivalent expansion in a structurally similar market, which is fast but requires access.
The MENA-to-Bay-Area version of this access is theoretically available but, in practice, frequently mediated by referral chains long enough that the conversation never quite happens.
The MENA-to-SEA version, on the other hand, can usually be set up in a single phone call by an investor who is genuinely embedded in both ecosystems, and the resulting conversation, in our experience, tends to be more useful to the MENA founder than its US-equivalent would have been, partly because the structural similarities are more honest, and partly because the ecosystem timeline gap is small enough that the lessons are still operationally fresh.
A VC who can credibly bridge a MENA fintech founder to a LatAm payments founder who's already navigated the same regulatory question is offering something that's genuinely difficult to replicate locally, and that, deployed properly, can shave a year or more off the founder's learning curve.
What we try to do is really cross-share benefits across the startup network you have. You do these introductions, "hey, you're working on this, they're working on that, why don't you work together, they need a solution I think you're providing," which adds value for startups on all sides. They say, "okay, he's bringing us clients," and then you do the same with new founders, whether for business or for partnerships.
Done thoughtfully, cross-portfolio matchmaking is another one of the very few areas in venture where being a busier VC can actually make you a more useful one rather than a less useful one, provided you've put in the underlying work of understanding what each portfolio company actually does.
The discipline of being honest about what you can and can't reach is also a non-trivial form of value-add in its own right.
When founders ask for an introduction to a fund in the US, I either say, I know the partner, I can give them a call and see if they're keen to meet, or I say, I have no idea who these people are, but let me try to find an entry point for you through my network. What I don't like to do is say I know someone for the sake of saying it and then not follow up. I'd rather follow through right away, or just say, sorry, I can't help you here.
The default behaviour in this situation, especially when a founder has just asked for help and the investor is anxious to demonstrate utility, is to gesture vaguely at a possible intro that, in the moment of asking, sounded more concrete than it actually was.
The follow-through, two weeks later, is invariably more uncomfortable than the original ask, and the gap between what was promised and what materialises is precisely the territory in which the slow-burn value-destruction we've been describing actually occurs.
The investor who is willing to say, in real time, "I have no idea how to reach this person, but let me try", is the investor whose subsequent "I know exactly who you should talk to" actually means something.
The pull, not push, model
The best way it works is as a pull rather than a push model. When the founders pull, they say, "Look, this is my wish list of things I need, which of these can you help me with, if anything?" That's very, very effective.
Our thesis is, we're there when you need us. We're there to help and support as you need it. We don't get super involved in matters unless you really ask us for it.
Hasan and Khaled's perspectives in particular are informed by an unusually high volume of portfolio touches, both being regional venture veterans, and when it comes to what founders actually want from their investors, the answer they've converged on is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the one most VCs find the very hardest to internalise.
I'm finding great people who have the capacity to build something amazing. So the way I see it, I don't think I'm better than those people. I'm in fact not as good as them, because they're the ones building it. My role is to be there for them whenever they need me. That's it.
Zach Finkelstein arrives at the same place via a slightly different route, and adds an operational corollary that is, in our view, worth taping somewhere visible in the office, or on an analyst’s forehead.
It's important to understand when you are not adding value. Founders are extremely busy, and what I have found that can make them resentful is if a VC pushes their value to the founder in a way that the founder doesn't welcome. Our philosophy is that as a pre-seed VC we will become less involved as the company scales and develops capabilities in-house, unless the founder pulls us in.
The skill isn't being available less, it's being well-calibrated enough to know when "available" is the help and when "available" is the burden. That distinction is the difference between a VC the founder is grateful for and a VC the founder is quietly engineering ways to avoid at industry get togethers.
We know what we can offer, and we know what we're very good at. What we offer, broadly speaking, is business development opportunities, introductions to businesses in our network. Some of them could be LPs in the fund, others could be a call or two away, but we can get to them. We can also offer help around future funding rounds. Why? Because we've done so many. Entering remote markets, tweaking the product to find better product-market targeting, finding niche clients, these are not things we can promise. We can definitely try, but we cannot promise. I think that is the expectation-setting point.
Most VCs, given the choice, claim everything. The ones who claim only what they can deliver, and are explicit upfront about what they cannot, tend to be the ones who actually deliver on what they claim. Probably a wider lesson in there.
The differentiation question
If pre-investment value-add gets you the right to invest, and post-investment restraint earns you the right to stay useful, the question that remains is the one Zach raises, and which any GP in this region should be able to answer in a single, specific sentence.
Make sure that what you bring to the table is differentiated. There are outstanding VC firms operating in MENA today. Why should a founder be interested in what you have to bring to the table?
The default answers, network, strategic guidance, capital efficiency, operational support, are the answers every VC gives, which is to say, they are not differentiating answers.
The investor whose pitch to founders includes "we make intros and offer strategic guidance" is, in functional terms, a parity offering.
The investor whose pitch is "we have specific Series A relationships at three named funds in San Francisco who have backed payments companies in your stage and geography, and we'll make those intros in the first ninety days," is pretty unique, and any half-decent founder can tell the difference inside two minutes.
The same logic we explored in Edition Two as applying to LP pitching applies just as directly here. If your post-investment prop sounds identical to every other one in the market, your portfolio is unlikely to look meaningfully different from every other portfolio, and the founders you'd most want to invest in will, given the choice, take the cheque from the firm with the more specific story.
The reputation flywheel
In the Valley, a VC can be quietly mediocre to twenty founders in succession before the reputational signal accumulates to the point of meaningfully affecting their deal flow. The market is large enough, the founder turnover high enough, and the social graph fragmented enough that bad behaviour gets diluted faster than it accumulates.
In MENA, we cannot overstate the extent to which the inverse is true. The founder pool is small enough that one badly-handled post-investment experience can become known to a meaningful portion of the next year's pipeline within weeks, sometimes days.
The downside, obviously, is that being unhelpful is uniquely costly.
The upside, less obviously but more consequentially, is that being genuinely useful is uniquely valuable, because the reputation it generates compounds in a way that is virtually impossible to replicate in larger markets.
In Step 2, we get into how that ethos translates into the operational rhythms of the founder relationship, onboarding, cadence, governance, expectations, and the unglamorous-but-critical question of what it means to look after the founder behind the founder.
