Ep028 - Tarek Kabrit, Seez

Streams of Progress

Tarek Kabrit is the CEO and co-founder of Seez, an intuitive car selling, buying and lending app in Dubai and Kuwait, which has been cited by leading publications as a ‘tech game-changer.’

By using artificial intelligence to gather and cleanse the jungle of car data online, Seez reduces the process of finding a car from 17 hours to 6 seconds. Tarek and his team also invented the world’s first A.I. car negotiation chat bot called Cesar, who finds you the best deals, estimates the fair value of the car, and even negotiates the price on your behalf.

As a testament to Seez’ success, they celebrated 250k downloads. They are also number 3 on Apple Store with over 3,000 ratings and number 5 on the Android Store.

With over 17 years of regional and international experience in strategy consulting, investment banking, private equity and VC, with industry leaders such as Deutsche Bank, Abraaj Group, Mubadala, Wamda, and Booz & Co, Tarek understands both sides of the start-up journey.

Enjoy the show!

Show Notes:

• 01:30 - Tarek’s background in Private Equity & Venture Capital in the region prior to becoming an entrepreneur
• 3:45 - From Pre-Med to Economics
• 4:30 - Consulting to Banking
• 5:45 - The reason he became an entrepreneur after being a VC
• 8:15 - Dealership partnership for leasing plans
• 9:00 - How Cesar works?
• 10:45 - Why Tarek chose to pursue this startup?
• 13:30 - How Seez started as a side hustle
• 14:45 - Reaching out to his nephew to be his co-founder
• 15:30 - Sourcing the AI/ML tech talent from Denmark for Seez
• 16:45 - Coders, penthouse and cardboard boxes
• 17:15 - Bootstrapping note: Tinder for second-hand office equipment
• 18:15 - The uncle / nephew co-founder dynamics at play
• 19:00 - Regional expansion
• 20:00 - One of the key criteria when deciding a country to expand into
• 20:15 - The challenges Seez faced when expanding into Saudi Arabia
• 23:15 - Difficulties Tarek overcame when learning to manage a technology team
• 24:45 - Transitioning from VC to a founder role and the learnings
• 25:45 - The ability to step back and look at the bigger picture of your startup
• 26:15 - Seez’s funding journey and the pivots
• 26:45 - Scrapping all they had and starting fresh
• 28:00 - Knowing how to pitch VCs from his past experience as a VC
• 30:00 - Looking to Steve Jobs’s drive, Airbnb’s attention to design detail and Netflix’s culture for inspiration
• 32:45 - Tarek’s closeness with all his employees
• 33:30 - The importance of Dreaming Big
• 35:00 - Love for movies at the cinema
• 36:30 - Tarek’s dream of a humanity scale dream initiative
• 36:15 - “Start a startup in your 20’s”, his advice to his 20 year old self

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