Founders must keep building through crisis, says Doha-based investor

Founders navigating economic uncertainty should resist the instinct to pause and keep building, Muhannad Taslaq, Director of Investments at Alchemist Doha, told a regional webinar hosted by Startup Grind Doha Chapter. Taslaq, who spoke at the session titled ‘Building Through Fire: A Playbook for Mena Founders Navigating Challenging Times’, urged entrepreneurs to adopt short planning cycles, sharpen financial discipline and use tools such as artificial intelligence to preserve runway and protect core revenue-generating activities. Alchemist Doha is a venture capital and investment platform formed in partnership between Alchemist Accelerator and the Qatar Research, Development, and Innovation (QRDI) Council.

“People who are smart and capable say the same thing: ‘Let me just wait and see how this develops before I make my move’ — and this is one of the biggest mistakes a founder or anybody could make,” Taslaq said.

Practical playbook shared

Taslaq, who spent nearly 18 years in Silicon Valley, described the webinar’s content as a practical playbook rather than a motivational framework and said six rules underpin that approach. He warned that a wait-and-see stance often erases market opportunity: “The market did not send a calendar invite saying, ‘Okay things are stable now and you can start again’.”

• Short sprints and continuous shipping: He advised shrinking the planning horizon to 30-day sprints, identifying a single metric that matters and shipping continuously, even if progress is incremental. “You have to keep shipping — a product update, a customer call, a proposal sent — any movement. It’s what keeps the company and the team psychologically alive during the crisis,” he said.
• Financial discipline: Founders must know their exact “burn rate” and calculate their “date of death” — the specific day funds run out if nothing changes — and communicate that openly with the team. Taslaq recommended cutting any expense that does not “directly generate revenue or protect our core product.”
• Use AI before headcount cuts: Immediate candidates for automation include customer support responses, social media scheduling, invoice processing, lead qualification and meeting summaries, Taslaq said, urging founders to automate repetitive tasks before reducing staff.
• Investor relations and dilution: Taslaq cautioned against raising at distressed valuations unless survival demands it, recounting how panic-driven dilution during his own Covid experience left him a minority shareholder. “Dilution taken in panic is a cost you would pay for years,” he said, and urged regular, transparent investor updates even when the news is bad.
• Customer focus: Founders should call their top 10 customers immediately to surface new pain points and feed findings into the product roadmap. “The relationship you protect during a crisis is worth 10 relationships built after,” he said.
• Team leadership: Employees watch the founder, not metrics, during a crisis. Taslaq urged leaders to over-communicate, be honest about the situation, and if layoffs are unavoidable, to make them “once, surgically, and immediately” rather than stretching cuts across rounds.

Outlook

Taslaq concluded that clarity and consistent action can attract the right capital rather than chase it away. “Clarity is a competitive advantage. Smart capital doesn’t disappear in conflicts — it recalibrates. They are watching, they are waiting, and they are looking for exactly the kind of founders who keep building,” he said, framing resilience and disciplined execution as the attributes investors will reward through turbulent periods.