Ahmed: Hello, and welcome to the startup agenda, where we feature Egyptian tech companies with an eye on the African market. And I'm delighted to be joined today by Ayman Bazaraa the CEO and founder of sprints, an Ed-tech company that hopes to bridge the talent gap among youth. Hello, Ayman, and thank you for your time.

Ayman: Hello, how are you?

Ahmed: All's good. I appreciate you joining us. Tell us about the solution you're offering. What is your background? How did you begin the company and what made you stumble on the idea for Sprints?

Ayman: Okay. my background mainly is technology. I graduated from Cairo University from electronics and communication department. When I graduated, I started my first startup with my colleagues from the university and, actually, it was a complete failure. We were just freshmen trying to do something new. There was no startup ecosystem at this time. No investors. Nothing there. So in six months we decided that we are still so naive and so inexperienced to do this.

Ayman: So, I switched to corporates, and I had a great experience that three main software companies who [sic] were opening in Egypt. First was France telecom. So I worked for France telecom for almost a year as a software developer. And then I switched to IBM. Also it was creating a new business unit, which was focused on IOT. And IOT at this point of time, was something completely new. I worked for IBM for several years. Then I worked for Valeo. It's the biggest R and D software center in Egypt focused on, mainly software for cars, mainly autonomous driving cars, electric vehicles and so on. I worked there for several years also. So I had that great experience, a kind of a startup experience in a corporate, which is combining from both areas; you are learning a lot in terms of quality and procedures at the same time, agility and fast growth. Then, I left Valeo, and I started my entrepreneurship journey again.

Ayman: So I founded the three startups successively. First one, it's called Microdose and it's focused on augmented reality applications. It's based in Dubai. Then I co-founded the second startup; it's called AV Labs and this startup is focused on software mainly for autonomous driving cars and electric vehicles, with customers [from] all the main brands. Almost all cars running around the world that has a kind of software, a piece of software that was developed by an Egyptian, young youth. And finally is Sprints. I founded Sprints three years ago and the reason for founding sprints was that I was almost reaching 40 years old. And 40 years is associated [with] reflecting on your life and what you're doing. And I thought that I would like to do something that has impact on millions of people, especially youth. I have seen youth struggling a lot to find a decent job.

At the same time, coming from the business side, I was always struggling to find good calibers. It was extremely hard to find someone who is good, that you can rely on. So, I thought that it's the right time that we can try to help bridge this gap. There are some initiatives that is there, but I cannot say that it is a completely scalable. Again, the supply and the demand side, there is a huge gap between what companies are looking for and the skills sets [needed], and the amount or the number of youth that can work in the tech domain.

So, I started sprints, and the main goal of sprints is mainly to bridge this tech-talent gap. We are focused on delivering guaranteed-hiring learning programs, for freshmen or people who graduate from universities or from whatever background. Some people may be not ready from university and they want to join the tech field to work in mainly programming specializations, whether it's AI, data science, mobile development, web development, cloud, and so on.

So this is the main goal. It’s to have people who are struggling to find jobs and help them within a concentrated and intensive learning journey. Mainly it varies from three to four months, completely dedicated. Those boot camps, guarantee the hiring where you start paying after landing the job. So you can, you can just join without any upfront payment and you can pay after landing the job over three years, with even zero interest, we succeeded to have financial plans with zero interest.

So this is a Sprints in a nutshell. Currently, we are operating mainly from Egypt. However, we are serving multiple countries because we are completely online. So our programs have different nationalities joining.

Ahmed: I love the idea of you guaranteeing a job, but not being paid for your service until the trainee lands a job. How do you go about doing that? do you partner with private sector companies or do you partner with financial lenders. Who are some of the people you've partnered with?

Ayman: Okay. that's a great question. Again, we are coming from the market, so we are market-driven. So we start by assessing the market needs. So we talk to employers: what are your needs? What are the exact specializations that you want? What are the qualities and skills of the people that you are looking for? And we move backwards by sourcing those talents through assessments. So we start all our journeys. We believe in assessments, full assessment.

I can give you an example. For example, we have a bootcamp and this bootcamp is with a graduate. For instance, a data scientist or a mobile developer. We start by assessing them to see their gaps, whether it's technical or non-technical. Because the barrier for employment, it's not just tech, it's also how to utilize tech. When you utilize tech you have to communicate with people; you have to present and pitch your ideas; you have to talk with customers. So it's not only about some technology, but it's also how to deploy this technology in the right context. So we assess the applicants and we pick the people who will benefit from our journey.

Some applicants, they are ready to be hired immediately. So we hire them immediately. Some may lack some skills that we don't cover. For instance, they lack English skills, so we partner with some English training institutes that can help them. And if the gap is not huge in terms of English skills, they can work in parallel with our boot camps.

Then we start putting the learners in a completely different journey than any educational Institute. We have a product-based learning trip, where the learners start developing products within the bootcamp. Every week we call it a sprint. They have a deliverable and this deliverable is to a customer that receives this product from them and they have to pitch the product they have.

Ayman: They will be challenged; the code will be inspected in terms of performance, in terms of quality, even there’s a 360 degree peer feedback where learners give feedback to each other, assessing communication skills and the quality of the deliverables. And of course there is an automated system that assesses even the code.

So we test code that’s delivered through another software that can check the performance, the functionality and the quality. And this is how we ensure scalability. When we started sprint three years ago, we had in our course only 20 learners. Now we have 500 learners per core per one specialization. This is how we ensure scaling. And also we partner with employers. So employers. Partnering in terms of curricula in terms of experts. So we have, people from ten countries from all over the world, from Google, Facebook, and all the big names that are supporting the execution of the learning journey, and also to inspire people: how they went there, how they joined this company, what do we expect. So this is regarding the journey.

After graduation, our learners are hunted within the bootcamp. Because all employers know that if they wait until then, they may not find the learners. However, we are trying to push this and to share the data of the learners at the end of the bootcamp to ensure equal opportunity for all employees. But we are seeing a huge demand from the employer side.

From the financial part, yes, we are partnering with different organizations. Either governmental organizations to finance learners. This is why we've secured zero-interest payment. This is how learners are paid the same cost of learning program over three years after being hired. So this is a mode of operation. Also we have for the underserved and underprivileged people, even, they cannot pay at all. We have a hundred percent scholarships thanks to our partners that can even sponsor people with disabilities, refugees and so on. And this is also a kind of an encouragement to join our Programs.

Ahmed: One of the things that caught my attention when reading about Sprints is that you offer what you call “a customized learning journey”. And I was going to ask you how you do that, how you develop a customized journey for every individual. But you answered that by describing this pre-assessment boot camp that you hold for applicants, which I think is a brilliant idea that really makes you stand apart from, other, large platforms like Coursera or Udacity. You really dig deep into the individual's needs, whether they be technical, language or communication skills, and you try to develop those, through, a complete and wholesome package.

Ayman: I would like to add on this point, because the customized part, when we start the Sprints three years ago, it was all applicants would have the same journey. So three to four months. After multiple iterations and the pre-assessment we were able to, for instance, give a learner only a one month learning journey and another one [maybe] requires a four months learning. This is how we would like to be the shortest path for employment. We don't want one size fits all. And we would like only to focus on your own gaps. So if you have a challenge when it comes to communication skills and storytelling and so on, you will have, you will find in your journey, the storytelling and the pitching and the presentation module helping you within the journey. If there is a programming language this is a prerequisite to the program and you don't have it, you will see it as part of the journey. So this is how we customize the journey, because we know your gaps and then you really will be different from other people that are targeting the same specialization and to work even at the same employer.

Ahmed: One of the important metrics you mentioned is the number of trainees currently on the platform. You said there is a cohort of about 500 individuals per specialization. And I wanted to ask you about the specializations that you are offering. You mentioned them before quickly, but I'd like to highlight them.

Ayman: Okay. Sure. we have, mainly, AI specialization. We have Data Science specialization. We have mobile with all its specialization, whether it's Android, iOS, or flutter. Also for the web development, we have the front end part and the back end part. We have also specialization like IOT and embedded systems and, even, more specialization, which has led to automotive software development. Also we have the cloud specialization, and we have partnerships with Amazon and very big names when it comes to employment and technology being used at the boot camps. Also, we have specialization, which is related to the cybersecurity part, also the testing and the automation part. So we have in total twelve specializations that are available on our platform. Everybody can check them. And those are the most demanded when it comes to high payment, whether you want to work with an employer at your country or, as a remote worker or even as a freelancer.

Ahmed: And the courses vary according, not only to depth, but according to lengths. so you have the crash course, the booster and some others. Would you like to talk a little more about that?

Ayman: Exactly. Yeah. So the crash courses, this is our “awareness level”. You just want to know what is AI, how you can join this career, and what are the different kinds of jobs there and so on. So it's an awareness level. So even any non-techy can take those crash courses to know about this domain. Second layer, it’s the booster And the booster. is a beginner level. It doesn't require any prerequisites and you just join there and you will be upskilled. And the target of the boosters mainly is to land an internship or an entry-level job. So it's very useful for universities. Some universities actually have our courses integrated in their programs and it is accredited by those universities. We land [you] a kind of an internship by the end of the program and our internships, actually, it's a little bit long, it's one year internship.

So if you are a third year university student or a fourth year, you will have a one year [internship]. So you can graduate from the university with one year of experience with even two years, if you joined earlier. And we see that actually you should work as early as possible. We don't believe that after graduating from the university you [should] start searching and losing one or two years in finding the right job for you. You have to explore and work while you are at the university.

Then the third level is the bootcamp, and this is actually the employment, they're the guaranteed-hiring programs. And the bootcamp, as I mentioned, it's between three to four months of a full journey. And finally the master classes, it is for employers. And this is advanced topics that is required by all employers. and this is why we have a lot of employers actually sponsoring their own employees to upskill them. So those are the different four types and all the different levels of length and depth of the learning trips.

Ahmed: Speaking about employers, your platform, as I understand it, also serves employers in the sense that they don't only help them find potential employees, but they also can integrate into their, human resources systems, as you were telling me before the call. Can you tell us a little more about that?

Ayman: Yeah, of course. The trigger of having the employers as our partners and our customers, came from when they started hiring from our graduates, from our boot camps, and when they [saw] a very high skill level. So they started asking for learning programs for their own employees. And we started from there. There were three types of programs deployed with most of the big names whether corporates or startups. And the first request was that “we have a risk to lay off thousands of employees because they are working on the call center site and there are automations to be deployed right away. So we had a massive program with different companies where we transformed call center agents to be techies working in the programming sector inside the same companies. So this was the first type of program. The second type of program is “tech for techies”, so programmers who need to learn a new programming language, to have more advanced skills, to know for example things to do with design, architecture, high-level programming and so on. So this is the second: it's up-skilling their own techies, their IT departments or their development team.

The third program, it's called “tech for non-techies”, and this is a wide-spectrum program. So, for instance, you have HR resources, human resources. You have accountants or financial officers. You have operations, you have people working on the customer service side and you still want them to be there working at the same part, but you want to boost their efficiency because most of their daily tasks could be automated. So you teach them how we can automate the tasks. So to give you an example here, an accountant can generate reports, can copy data from an Excel file to Excel file or automatically. As an HR recruiter for instance she can scan the thousands of CVS from applicants automatically and sort them out just by deploying a tech tool that can do this and search for some keywords. Also, it can match the interviewee with the interviewer side without calls, just through an automated system that can make the matchmaking. So we are trying to eliminate all the manual work there so that they can boost the efficiency by multiples so that we can create a defensible career. We believe that everybody has to learn how to automate and to be tech savvy. Otherwise you will be replaced on a very short term.

Just to mention one of the companies, a very big companies that employs thousands of engineers. They talk to us that they want to up-skill their own engineers. So we asked them why they want to do this because they started with non-techies and you are switching them to techies.

They told us even engineers, they will be [furloughed]. For example, network engineers, telco engineers, they are doing some manual work to configure routers and switches. And this are being automated right away by AI-powered routers and AI-powered switches. So even this manual task will be replaced and they will be laid off. So they want them to be taught programming. We are providing all what is related to tech skills, whether it's for techies or non-tech,

Ahmed: A superficial look at sprints and what it does, would lead me to the conclusion that you and universities are competitors. You're vying for the same field [of applicants], but yet you are partnering with universities in very useful and collaborative ways. Can you tell us more about that?

Ayman: Yeah. We believe in partnerships. We would like to plug and to support all the ecosystem. This is why we started partnering with universities. As I mentioned, two years ago, our programs are deployed in different universities as part of their learning journey, and not only deploying the program, but also employing that the university students. So our partnership with universities is providing our learning programs as part of that curriculum and also employing [students] through long-term internships with different employees throughout the world or all over the world. We see universities as our partners, and we plan always to integrate our work and to partner together. Because again, we are trying to search for impact and scalability and being alone will not, we'll never be able to do this.

Ahmed: Civil society organizations, and also donor organizations are probably a big part of your ecosystem. And we're talking about partnerships. So what sort of partnerships does Sprints have with these entities.

Ayman: Actually we worked with the governments. We have for example worked with the US government. We have worked with the German government, the Swiss government, the Netherlands government, the German. We are, we have, programs that is the developmental programs where it is focused on job creation. Yes, we have a lot of sponsors that are sponsoring our learners, either to improve their jobs or to create jobs. Also, we have a two massive programs with the Egyptian government where we target 200,000 learners over 18 months.

Ayman: All of them are techies. And also we have the same program with the Saudi government, also to up-skill thousands of Saudi youth, to upskill and to land jobs for them. Yeah, the governments and the donors are our partners and without them we'll not be able to scale and serve tens of thousands of hundred thousands of learners.

Ahmed: The initiative, you're doing with the government is this related in any way to the Digital Egypt Builders Initiative [DEBI]?

Ayman: Actually it's called “Egypt forward” program. And the one with the Saudi government is “future skills” [maharaat al-mostaqbal] and so these are two of the biggest platform tech platforms for up-skilling.

Ahmed: Excellent. You recently landed a $1.2 million seed funding round. Congratulations. and the purpose of that fund, as was advertised was to scale your tech skills program across the Middle East and Africa. which African markets are you currently eyeing and where do you see opportunities for growth?

Ayman: Okay. Maybe why Africa first? Mainly we believe that Africa has the highest population when it comes to youth and not only youth who are striving to find the right opportunity to create an impact. Africa has a huge potential. We believe Africa should be the biggest tech hub in the world. If you compare ourselves for instance with Europe, you can see a median age over 40 years versus a median age under 24 years. So the potential is huge there. And we focused on the parts of the world that really require our support. So we are impact driven. So we don't want to go to the US market where actually there are lots of people who are upskilling, but we want to go to Africa and serve the communities that really require a chance. So again, we are looking for partners who can support us, mainly to deploy our programs all over Africa. And we are currently looking. We had some discussions with the Nigerian companies to support us. Kenyan companies as well. Some universities there. Also the Arabic countries as well. We have a lot of discussions, currently running. So because it will be very hard for Sprints to open offices at all over the continent. We are looking for partnerships to grow, and we are, since day one, we are partnering with different partners to be able to serve the learners with a unique learning experience.

And we would like to expand this, all over the continent. So again, we are looking for countries that have high population, because it will be much easier to deploy there. There will be thousands of youths or hundreds of thousands of youth that would benefit from our programs.

So priority comes for mainly countries that have a high population. We are called Sprints from being agile and being opportunistic where we find the real demand and the real opportunity where we go there. And actually we're discussing with multiple partners in different cultures, as of today.

Ahmed: Excellent. What else is new for Sprints? Other than the expansion to other markets, what is new, moving forward on the technological level or on the products that you're about to offer?

Ayman: Okay. mainly, we are [an] all-tech center. Whatever related to tech we offer. We have programs that is [sic] focused on tech-enabled employees. So this is the tech for non-techies program. We have programs for freelancers, how they can be tech-enabled and how they can sell what they are doing. We have also a tech-preneur [program]. This is focused for entrepreneurs, how they can scale their small enterprises or startups. For instance, any entrepreneur [if] he or she wants to build a product, there are products ready-made that you can just utilize, as a white-label product.

Ayman: Also, we have assessment-as-a-service. Right now, we are deploying for a lot of employers, where we provide our assessments that we use to onboard and select people for our boot camps, but this time for employers.

Also, we are hiring massively, in terms of people with different backgrounds. Even we are hiring interns, actually even university students. So to have a tech experience in tech startup, this is also a great opportunity. We are hiring even people from outside Egypt, if you'd like to join, we have a lot of people [who] are working remotely. So we encourage them to come and apply and we'll be happy to serve them.

Ahmed: That's wonderful. And I'll spread the news. did you ever have a student where, after they go through the bootcamp, they decide “no, I'm not going to go for a nine to five job, I'm going to start my own startup, to compete with Sprints”. I think that would be the ultimate measure of your success.

Ayman: Yeah, actually, there are three pathways [through our programs]. First is to get employed. Second is to work as a freelancer or to start your own startup. And actually we have the three outcomes coming from our boot camps. We measure our progress by three things, either “job creation” and job creation is actually by having your own company, whether it's an SME or a startup. The second is a “job matching” where you land the job. After the bootcamp. A “job improvement”, because as I mentioned some of our learners either are trying to switch the job for a better job, or even to improve their own job by learning new skills. We measured the three indicators, the top is “job matching”, then it comes “job improvement”, and then “job creation”. And this is what we expect; not everybody will launch, his or her startup once graduated, I think, also some experience will help, in, in increasing the chance of survival for startups.

Ahmed: I hear the startup system in Egypt is very collaborative and collegial. who in the field, do you feel has been helpful on your journey? Is there anyone you would like to thank in particular?

Ayman: Actually a lot, as you mentioned the Egyptian startup system is great. Everybody is extremely helpful. I can I mention some startups. We have, for example “WAZZAF”, it’s the biggest recruitment platform in Egypt. So we are using the platform to recruit our learners. We have a partner company called “Knowledge Officer” that focused on product management and some areas that we don't focus on. So we have them working with us in multiple learning programs, as partners to deploy a holistic learning journey that covers multiple tracks. We have companies like “MARSOOL” where we are supporting, and they are hiring our grads and sponsoring learners. We have also “SWIVEL” who hire as well our grads and sponsor learners. We have with us “Vodafone Egypt”, they have been main supporters since the beginning, whether upskilling their own employees or sponsoring learners as well.

Actually we have a lot of corporates calling us as well and trying to support us. So we have, Amazon is a great sponsor for us, for instance, they sponsored complete cohorts from end to end, and with employment. We have “BOSTA”. So I don't want to forget names. There have been a lot of supporters throughout the journey, and also even individuals. The ecosystem also consists of angel investors and they were extremely supportive throughout the journey. So we have Alex Angels, for example, AUC Angels and also our investors are backing us up a lot. Again, working in Egypt is a privilege. And also the government itself. As I mentioned, the government is one of our biggest partner from day one, whether supporting with the financial aid program. “Egypt Forward” as well, selecting us as the main partner to cover the different tech-tracks. So again, I'm privileged to be in Egypt and to start Sprints in Egypt. And this is how we will scale and support other countries as well.

Ahmed: The number of names you mentioned is not only a testament to how helpful the ecosystem is, but to how much all of these entities believe in what you're doing, want to support you and see the potential of Sprints. Ayman, it was a real pleasure talking to you today and thank you very much for your time.

Ayman: Thank you. Thank you, Ahmed. It was my pleasure and I hope I can see you soon.