This weekend, AUI President Bensaid and Chief Entrepreneurship Officer Bartlett hosted 22 mentors and investors in AUI’s second Entrepreneurship Weekend. The weekend included our unique “Speed Mentoring” event that invited 93 students from 33 teams to receive one-on-one mentoring from these 22 experts, plus Workshops on selling, business plans, marketing and financing led by experts. The weekend began with Inspiration Talks from 7 Alumni entrepreneurs to inspire AUI students seeking to launch and scale businesses.
During the Award Ceremony, these mentors and investors awarded over 100 KHDS to 14 startup businesses created by 25 AUI students. The ideas ranged from creating a unique, healthy beef jerky to an online aggregator of douane-seized products to scaling existing businesses such as online discount products, custom cake sales, and gas distribution. The mentors were successful entrepreneurs in Morocco who provided advice, mentoring, and awards of expense payments for continuing the projects to prototyping, MVP (minimum viable product), and scaling to new markets/customers.
The largest Award for expense payments of 18,500 dhs for “Most Impressive Investment” went to Annarabic, a translation software company that was first mentored in AUI’s Spring Speed Mentoring sessions and has continued growth. The student owners are Inass Benjala, Ali Jaafari, Ahmed Jaafari, and Youssef Lambarki El Allioui.
The Mentors said “The Annarabic business is an innovation that has outstanding potential because the team listens to the advice given last Spring, has grown, and now just needs more customers to expand. We are impressed with their sales so far and want to help them continue to grow.”
The cash awards for expense reimbursement will provide winning student teams the funds to continue growing their ideas and businesses. The cash awards were generously donated this year by Dachser Logistics, Devoteam, HoplaTours, StudyLix, Oulmes, and four anonymous angel investors.
Other mentors donated valuable in-kind gifts: the marketing firm, DaBuzz! owned by Dana Al Mubaidin Adnani a Communications and Public Relations Consultant, awarded two teams pro bono consulting to help with public relations and marketing to expand their sales. The unique athletic club, CasaCross Fit, owned by AUI Alumni Amine Berrada, donated his sites to be POS (point of sale) outlets.
Here are all the Entrepreneurship Awards were given during Entrepreneurship Weekend:
The Entrepreneurship Weekend was created by the Office of Employability and Entrepreneurship alongside the Student-Led Incubator StartUp Olympus to provide Inspiration, Mentorship, and Funding/Award projects to encourage and equip students to continue with entrepreneurial ventures while at AUI and beyond.
The 22 expert mentors including 12 alumni that mentored at AUI for the weekend were: