Today's guest is Djamel Mohand, a Rocket Internet alumnus who landed in Saudi Arabia over a decade ago, back when relocating to the Kingdom for tech was rather less fashionable than it is today. What was supposed to be a six-month stint turned into ten years of building businesses across the region, most notably as COO at Foodics, where he helped scale the restaurant management platform to over 30,000 restaurants across 25 countries.

Earlier this year he stepped away to start something new: Governata, a Saudi-based data governance platform that just raised a $4 million seed round from investors including Joa Capital, Sanabil Accelerator by 500 Global, and Plug and Play. Data governance is not exactly the sexiest pitch in the world, and Djamel will be the first to admit it. But his thesis is essentially this: everyone is talking about AI adoption, but very few organisations have their data house in order to actually make it work. Governata is positioning itself as that foundational layer, the Arabic-first, Saudi-built platform designed to get enterprises AI-ready rather than just AI-curious. 

We get into the Rocket Internet origin story, what he learned scaling Foodics, and why the gap between having a data policy and actually implementing one is where the real opportunity lies.

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Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction

03:00 - From France to Saudi: Djamel's Origin Story

05:30 - Rocket Internet Baptism of Fire

08:00 - The Culture of Extreme Fairness

10:30 - The First Ride Hailing Wars

15:00 - Pricing Agility as a Competitive Weapon

17:30 - Kitopi: 400 Employees in Nine Months

21:00 - How Saudi's Regulatory Approach Actually Works

25:00 - Discovering the Data Governance Problem

32:00 - Leaving Foodics to Start Governata

43:30 - The Enterprise Sales Playbook

53:00 - Arabic-First and Global Ambitions

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Transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/95eb50ee/transcript.txt

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