Mehdi Benbrahim (#006)
I am personally convinced that if there is one thing I could have done better at university, it would have been to start a venture back then. I cannot think of a better time to get started.
Company: SquadPal
Headcount: 5
Stage: Pre-Seed
Tell us your story
I was born and raised in Casablanca, Morocco where I grew up for the first 18 years of my life before coming to the UK to study. I was part of this French cocoon in Morocco, attending a French high school and speaking French to my parents and friends. I was curious, and ultimately developed a deep interest for sustainable energy and its role in electrifying rural Africa. I applied to study Environmental Engineering at UCL with the hope of specialising in sustainable energy later but ended up majoring in Civil Engineering in the end.
In my 2nd year at UCL, I took a programming minor and started attending entrepreneurship events. This was what introduced me to tech and the startup community. What I loved about tech was how fast your ideas can come to life: you can literally build an MVP in hours! Civil engineering and energy projects are the complete opposite, everything takes time. And I am not really the patient kind.
I started my career at Amazon in transportation analytics, a team focused on how we could improve the speed of the network at the European level. I was interning in Luxembourg, which funnily enough had fewer inhabitants than Amazon had employees worldwide! I learned a huge amount, and at that point started to fully recognise my ambition to start a company. I knew that I wouldn’t be happy at work doing anything else, no matter how great the company I was working for was.
But I felt like I needed a bit more experience and didn’t I also have an idea back then. Luckily a great opportunity to work for Babylon Health came up; the company was at Series B at the time. I was definitely seduced by their purpose of putting healthcare at the fingertips of everyone on Earth: what better purpose is there? I worked as a Product Analyst and had quite a nice exposure to different Babylon products, and was involved at different stages of product growth.
At that time I was living in London with one of my closest friends Robinson. During the first lockdown, we started having a lot of free time in our hands and decided to start a venture together. This is when we met our third co-founder Harshit.
We realised that we all had the experience of working remotely, both during the lockdown but also on and off for a number of years. We shared the common problem of feeling disconnected from our teams when working remotely. It was really difficult staying truly engaged. Speaking to people around us, it turned out that basically everyone was struggling with the lack of social interaction and personal connection with their colleagues.
Some teams out there were trying initiatives over Zoom, but these were typically one-offs happening on different platforms (e.g. creating a poll, playing online Pictionary). Also, most people found it extremely time-consuming and difficult to find the right team activity to organise for the team. This was the beginning of SquadPal, the one-stop-shop for the life of the team.
Tell us a story that has really resonated with you
I recently watched a movie called ‘Clouds’. It’s a real story about Zach Sobiech, a kid in his senior year of high school, who was diagnosed with terminal stage cancer and had only a year left to live.
He was passionate about music and wrote a song on the verge of death, called ‘Clouds’. The song became viral and had millions of downloads worldwide.
This resonated with me as I often ask myself what I would do if I had a limited time left to live. Would I do anything differently?
At 24, you tend to live like you have all the time in the world and there is always this weird trade-off between doing things that make you happy in the moment versus accomplishing things that would benefit you in the long run.
What can’t you stop thinking about?
Hmm at the moment? I am actually thinking of buying my first saxophone, but I wonder if I will ever have the time to properly learn the instrument.
More seriously, just like any other entrepreneur, I probably think a bit too much about my venture, SquadPal. I would doubt any other founder that would tell you otherwise!
In a world where people are physically isolated, how do we bring humans back together virtually? Work takes so much of our time, especially now when people tend to overwork, and the barrier between your home and workplace is blurrier than ever.
Relationships at work are becoming transactional. Now that office banter and the casual coffee chats are gone. Now that you have so much accumulated Zoom Fatigue because you spend so much of your time behind a screen. How do we recreate human relationships in a virtual world? And how do we continue to help employees feel like they are part of a team in this increasingly hybrid world?
We used to frame our mission around mental health, but if there is one thing that I learned from my Babylon days, is that I don’t want to get anywhere near medical device certifications. Our newly evolved mission is to become the Chief Happiness Officer-as-a-Service (CHOaaS), improving employee satisfaction and well-being. But how do we get there?
These are the questions that keep me up at night.
If I could tell you just one thing…
People often wait to get that “one amazing idea” to start a project. The first jump to get involved in a project is obviously the most difficult. Chances are, you are most probably not going to get it right the first time. So why not try faster to fail forward and be better prepared to get it right when that “billion-dollar idea” actually comes to mind.
I am personally convinced that if there is one thing I could have done better at university, it would have been to start a venture back then. I cannot think of a better time to get started. The network effect you can get in university is unparalleled and professionals are much more eager to help university students. The risk at that point is at an all-time low: There is no family to look after, no extravagant lifestyle one might get used to because their salary is already too high.
Another barrier is the typical “I don’t feel like I know enough to start”. Any founder would argue that they learn more on a daily basis that they have in any previous job.
If you could get a warm intro to anyone in the world, who would it be and why?
I have been staring at this question for quite a while. It’s a pretty tough one.
I would say Seb Barker or Alex Stephany at Beam, as I really love what they do. Beam.org is a crowdfunding platform, funding job training for homeless people, enabling them to be independent.
One of my main issues with charity is that you don’t typically see where your money goes. At Beam, you get to see the faces of the people you are helping, how much they each need and how you are actually helping them. I love the concept of being able to visualise how you are actually contributing to change people’s lives for the better, one life at a time.