Hi AMAZING Alumni,
Submitting my application in the coming days and appreciate your feedback.
ABOUT ME: I am Egyptian American jack of all trades as one reference called it, I am a startup executive who has led in both Marketing and Operations. My expertise outside of building teams and organizations expansion of products and markets. Most recently, I’ve worked as Chief of Staff and VP of Operations.
Personal Statement: Still finalizing details here, but I’m really focusing on my non-traditional story and how I’ve become an operator jumping from NGO/politics who enables digital business to scale globally in the physical world. And walking through how I want to bring all these experiences to tap into the startup impact ecosystem (which is one of the fastest growing) to build my own accelerator focused on underrepresented leaders and founders while also supporting companies looking to expand in the UK or from the UK out into the world.
- QUESTION: Should I acknowledge the failures in my story, including the startups that I advised and companies I worked for that failed? I think there are a lot of lessons here, but wanted to see if they see it as positive as well? Learning from misses.
Reference Letters
- VP of Global Product (Startup & AMEX): Worked closely in a Series B company and speaks to the impact I had on the business particularly from scaling product perspective.
QUESTION: This company went from Series B to C (I supported fundraising) and ultimately failed due to sadly various things but not publicly known fraud by the founder. With that said we did good work, if I include this in my personal statement any concerns with the merit of this Reference letter?
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VP of US and Canada Uber Eats: Was my first manager at Uber (worked there for 5 years), we worked closely for a few years and then he mentored me over the past 8 years. He speaks to the many successes I had at Uber and how I had a global impact on the business, helping increase revenue and users.
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COO of AstroLabs (Accelerator in Dubai): I was tapped when she was at another accelerator as a Mentor for various accelerator cohorts and was part of structured mentorship program then continued similar efforts for AstroLabs including building out GTM templates etc.
Mandatory Criteria:
- Handy Employment Letter - Public tech company, High salary
- Medly Health Employment Letter + Promotion Salary - High startup salary
- Business impact at Handy: Shared two slides from a H2 review deck showing how we 2X the business and a screenshot of a newsletter I used to send out as the Head of Operations. It was my team responsible for absorbing demand by building out supply–technicians and professions (marketplace for home services.)
- Business impact at Medly: Slides from deck showing expansion of pharmacy (3x number of national pharmacies) which is the role I lead as VP of Market Expansion, AND a news clipping announcing pharmacy launches
QUESTION: My work has largely been behind the scenes so I am not mentioned in the article, is that an issue?
- Business impact at Uber: I’m still digging in the deep end for this to pull out decks and news clipping of markets going life that I expanded and email to an executive.
QUESTION: Similar to #4 Can I leverage news clipping referencing my impact essentially?
- Business impact at Mozilla: Letter from CMO, I’m currently her Chief of Staff and she speaks to the impact I’ve had on the organizational structure and enabling the team. This can ALSO be OC3
QUESTION: Given it is a private company there is limited evidence I can show? Does an email referencing the work I submitted to the CFO suffice as an additional item to add to reference letter (will remain under 3 pages)?
QUESTION: Should I change this to OC3?
Optional Criteria
OC2
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Three publications I was part of. NOTE: They are smaller and more focused for 1) Female in Tech AND 2) Generalist in Tech)
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Podcast with “Need to Know” operators - screenshot and link to it
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Interview on HealthTech sector in BuiltIn publication - they have 38K followers on Linkedin AND 268 employees
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Interview with MissFits (much smaller publication that supports women leaders) - don’t know the numbers
QUESTION: Does this match the criteria?
OC3
- Contract as a Board Member for a Startup in Egypt that I was mentoring while supporting accelerators in the Middle East (RL #3) and after a year of mentoring they asked me to be on their board.
QUESTION: This startup ultimately failed, is there any issue still showing this? I still believe I had a big impact on how far they were able to go.
- Accelerator Mentorship
- Email invitation to be part of the next cohort of accelerator with reference to my past participation AND another email to another accelerator whereby I break down the GTM plan ahead of speaking with them
- Screenshot from Deck referencing how I supported accelerator in Saudi new tech hub/city
QUESTION: They are 3 different accelerators should I group them together or separately as evidence on their own?
LASTLY I’m still missing two more pieces of evidence and figuring out what is the gap in my application and what I can show. Some other content I have but not sure of:
- I’m mentoring 3 startup founders: one in New York, one in Egypt and one in South Africa BUT we do it through a more informal structure of monthly calls where we review investor decks, ops etc.
- I can’t share their content and struggling to find what I can share. Any ideas?
- The CEO of Uber has tweeted out my story but not sure if this would count
- I built a deck pitching how Uber can leverage tech to support refugee camps in Bangladesh, but not sure
- Screenshots of the Arab Professional Network I’m building out and looking to launch in London, but this is still under construction (though I have a lot of content)
Does any of these options work or support my application in a way that matches the criteria?