Execution Over Invention: How to Evaluate Founders in Egypt and Africa

Mohamed Okasha, founder and managing partner of DisrupTech Ventures, argues that in Egypt and across Africa the decisive variable for venture success is execution, not invention. Okasha — who co‑founded Fawry, the payments company that became Egypt’s first billion‑dollar technology listing on the Egyptian Exchange (EGX) before stepping away in 2020 to build a venture fund — says the biggest threat to an African startup is rarely a bad idea but an operator untested by the region’s economic and regulatory shocks.

"The biggest threat to an African startup usually isn't a bad idea. It's an operator who has never had to navigate currency shocks, credit bureaus, or a regulator that changes its mind halfway through the year," Okasha told SRI 360. "There is no great idea. You can do a Google search and you will come up with ten great ideas in financial services."

Context: why operational experience matters

Okasha’s stance is reinforced by regional failure data and recent regulatory change. BROOT Consulting estimated the average startup failure rate across Africa at 54% in 2020, with country variation from Kenya’s 24% to highs of 75% in Ethiopia and Rwanda. Globally, startup failure remains high — design analyses often cite roughly 90% as an overall benchmark — and a common global reason for collapse is lack of real market demand, with product‑market‑fit showing up in about a third of postmortems in analyses such as Stripe and DesignRush.

In Egypt, regulatory shifts have materially altered the fintech landscape. The Non‑Cash Payment Law passed in April 2019 mandated electronic settlement for government bodies and large employers and created a licensing framework for payment service providers. The Central Bank of Egypt’s Financial Inclusion Strategy (2022–2025) is credited with pushing financial inclusion from roughly 14% in 2014 to 77.6% by the end of 2025, figures the CBE has published and local outlets have reported.

Those fast‑moving rules change the sort of operational competence investors must underwrite. Okasha says the relevant skill is timing and compliance instincts — "closer to a compliance officer’s instinct than a product founder’s" — rather than merely having regulator relationships. That view shapes DisrupTech’s investment approach: the fund tends to back founders with proven operating chops and leans into "backseat leadership," coaching rather than dictating, a model Okasha describes as slower and costlier but aligned with frontier market realities.

Evidence in deals and portfolio strategy

Practical examples from DisrupTech’s portfolio underscore the thesis. Bokra, an Egyptian fintech offering Sharia‑compliant, asset‑backed investment products, closed a $4.6 million pre‑seed round led by DisrupTech in 2024, targeting a market where roughly two‑thirds of Egyptians remain unbanked. The product is not novel in structure (sukuk‑based instruments exist for decades); its value lies in packaging those instruments for retail and small businesses previously shut out of digital access.

Similarly, i’SUPPLY — a B2B pharmaceutical supply platform — raised a pre‑Series A in 2024 with DisrupTech returning as a repeat investor. DisrupTech pushes portfolio companies to build on each other’s licensing and compliance groundwork instead of solving the same regulatory puzzles from scratch, a practice more typical of later‑stage private equity than early‑stage venture.

• Operator premium: founders with prior exits tend to outperform first‑time founders in these markets.
• Regulatory timing: knowing when and how to engage regulators is a core capability.
• Portfolio leverage: shared compliance groundwork lowers incremental risk across investments.

Outlook

For investors allocating capital into Egypt and wider Africa, Okasha’s prescription is clear: underwrite operators, not ideas. That raises practical implications — higher due diligence on founders’ prior operational experience, more active post‑investment coaching, and portfolio strategies that deliberately reuse compliance and licensing work. Whether that model scales broadly remains unsettled, but early evidence from DisrupTech’s bets like Bokra and i’SUPPLY suggests execution‑focused capital can unlock opportunities that novel ideas alone cannot.