Revolution 2.0

The experience of the MBA program at AUC was crucial. Learning the science behind marketing was key to my career progress, and later on was vital to my online activism. The combination of marketing and a concentration in finance enabled me to understand how to study market needs, design products that address those needs, and promote them to target audiences. The finance classes introduced me to the world of business; since I came from an engineering background, this taught me a lot about how to run businesses financially. Little did I know that only a few years later, all this piled-up experience would come in quite handy in promoting a product I had never seen myself marketing: democracy and freedom!

In 2005, during the first year of my MBA, I had the startup bug. It was then that I met a major Arab investor in the field of technology — a chance meeting that I attribute solely to divine assistance. Mohamed Rasheed al-Ballaa was an engineer and a major stakeholder in the National Technology Group. Headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, NTG is a multinational conglomerate with more than twenty specialized information and communication technology (ICT) businesses in the Middle East and North Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the United States. To my delight, al-Ballaa was impressed with my web experience and listened to me pitch a cars portal for the Arab world similar to AutoTrader.com. He invited me to visit his company’s branch in the United Arab Emirates to discuss the project further.

Instead of offering to finance a startup, however, al-Ballaa offered to hire me. He wanted to expand aggressively into the Internet business in multiple ways, and effectively gave me the opportunity to be part of a larger team with a mission to help what he believed would change the face of the Arab web. The offer was quite enticing, since my entrepreneurial dream would be partially fulfilled with very little financial risk and my efforts would ultimately have more impact given al-Ballaa’s ambitious vision.

After I started working at NTG, I found al-Ballaa to be a model Arab investor. He treated me like a son, to the extent that my colleagues started to refer to me jokingly as Wael al-Ballaa.

One of the companies established by NTG was Mubasher, a Middle Eastern version of Reuters and Bloomberg financial solutions, which provided Arab stock market investors with web-based screens displaying real-time prices to facilitate buying and selling decisions. Al-Ballaa knew the importance of research and economic news for investors. He asked me to take the helm in starting a Cairo-based company to support Mubasher with data and analysis. I was not yet twenty-five.

At the time I knew nothing about the media, or publishing, or even the stock market. I was so ignorant that I did not even know the difference between a stock and a bond. I began avidly reading everything I could get my hands on about stock markets, and decided to take finance-related courses in my MBA. The company was established, and I quickly assembled a team. Needless to say, I was committed to the Internet generation. Most team members were fresh graduates in business and mass communications; I much preferred them to the experienced researchers, who were nowhere near as digitally engaged.

Mohamed al-Ballaa was extremely supportive of the project’s launch, both financially and morally. When Mubasher.info was launched, it quickly became one of the main destinations for many small Arab investors seeking information and news on listed companies.

This experience had a profound effect on me. I was heading a large team of more than 120 people. We were always seeking ways to develop and innovate. I tried every possible means to motivate the team to give the company their absolute best. I constantly urged all the employees to improve their own skills and the work environment. The site had more than one million visitors per month, and its reputation spread around the globe. We launched an English version. Several international stock market websites and companies began using our portal as one of their reliable sources for news and information. As a result, the company became interested in expanding and increasing its investments in Egypt.

Mohamed al-Ballaa was in his fifties, but he had the energy of a man in his twenties. He enjoyed taking calculated risks and venturing into areas where others would seldom go. He often told me that the rapidly evolving world around us makes it difficult to formulate five-year and ten-year plans, especially in a tech-related industry. As an investor, al-Ballaa committed his capital to dozens of ventures at once, a spray-and-pray strategy, hoping that just one would strike gold and make up for losses in the other investments. This made a profound impression on me.

The Internet has been instrumental in shaping my experiences as well as my character. It was through the Internet that I was able to enter the world of communications (when I was barely eighteen) and network with hundreds of young people from my generation everywhere around the world. Like everyone else, I enjoyed spending long hours in front of a screen on chat programs. I built a network of virtual relations with people, most of whom I never met in person, not even once.

I find virtual life in cyberspace quite appealing. I prefer it to being visible in public life. It is quite convenient to conceal your identity and write whatever you please in whatever way you choose. You can even choose whom to speak to and to end the conversation at any moment you like. I am not a “people person” in the typical sense, meaning that I’d rather communicate with people online than spend a lot of time visiting them or going out to places in a group. I much prefer using e-mail to using the telephone. In short, I am a real-life introvert yet an Internet extrovert.

My addiction to the Internet made joining Google a dream that I fervently aspired to make a reality. I had heard a lot about how cool it was to work there. The company’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, became among the most influential people in the world after they developed the web’s best search engine. Employees at Google are among the happiest in the world. Their intellectual skills are respected and their innovation is appreciated. For years I persistently applied online every time there was a vacancy that matched my experience. I used to joke with my wife and friends by saying, “I want to work at Google even if I have to take a job as a tea boy.”

One of those attempts was in 2005, only a few weeks after I joined NTG. Google announced a vacancy for a consultant in the Middle East and North Africa. Without hesitation, at barely twenty-five years old, I applied. My résumé was designed to demonstrate immediately that I was crazy about the Internet.

I had doubts about getting this position, because of my age and lack of experience. The job was to develop the company’s strategy for the entire Middle East. Yet to my surprise, I received a call from Human Resources inviting me to start the interview process.

Google is unique in everything it does. Human Resources sent me some documents to read before the interviews. The entire process took a few short months. The last, and ninth, interview was with a vice president, who spoke to me from his office in London. He asked about my experience in mergers and acquisitions along with my web experience, and about my understanding of regional web issues. Although I knew that I certainly was underexperienced, I was still hopeful, because I felt that my character and Google were “plug ’n’ play.” This is why I was devastated when, two weeks later, I found out that I had not been selected. My wife was dumbfounded and could not understand why I didn’t get the job.

My desire to join Google only intensified. It was no longer a matter of employment; it was a challenge, and I was stubborn. I particularly did not want to fail at joining a company that I thought embodied who I was as a person.

In 2008 the company announced an opening for a regional head of marketing, to be based at its one-year-old branch in Cairo. It was the perfect chance, now that I had my MBA in marketing and the Mubasher experience. Of course I applied. I volunteered a study, on my own initiative, in which I explained my vision of what the company’s strategy in the region should be. My observations included technical notes on the search engine’s performance in Arabic. Then a series of interviews began: I met with seven interviewers from different countries and functions. I thought I did very well in most of the conversations. My last interview was with the VP of marketing. I still remember my answer to her question “Why do you want to join Google?”: “I want to be actively engaged in changing our region. I believe that the Internet is going to help make that happen, and working for Google is the best way for me to have a role.”

After eight months of interviews, I received an offer — I had made it to Google! I was later told by my manager that one of the senior Googlers who interviewed me described me in his evaluation sheet as “persistent and stubborn, just the type a company needs when entering a new market.”

My skills and experience were enriched by Google. And I marveled at its culture, which was all about listening to others. Data and statistics ruled over opinions. Most of the time, authority belongs to the owners of information, or as W. Edwards Deming once said, “In God we trust; all others must bring data.”

Similarly impressive is the trust Google bestowed on employees, who were empowered to access a lot of internal information that other companies would normally restrict to smaller numbers of employees. Communication and sharing knowledge among employees was key to the company’s success.

Google did not rise to the peak of the tech industry by luck. Its success is all based on strategy and philosophy. Attention goes not only to employees but also to users. The company listens to its users, asks their opinions, analyzes their usage behavior, and uses this input to develop its products. Teams within the company are constantly changing and developing products using unique and innovative product development methods.

The culture of experimentation was another thing I loved about the company. An experiment is always welcome, so long as the results come quickly. In a case where there is a difference of opinion about features of a product undergoing development, the product managers and engineers will put a beta version out to a group of users. The decision will then be based on the results and feedback. Google is not afraid of failure. Failure is accepted. If a product fails, it is terminated. Simple.

What attracted me most was Google’s 20 percent rule. The company allows employees to work on whatever they please for 20 percent of their time (one day a week). This means that they are free to work on projects other than their official assignments if they want. The idea is based on the notion that people work best when they work on things they are passionate about. A host of Google’s most outstanding products were born out of the 20 percent rule, including the e-mail service, Gmail, and the largest online advertising management network, Adsense. For me, Google helped reinforce the idea that employee engagement is the most important strategy of all. The more you can get everyone involved in trying to solve your problems, the more successful you will be. I found it natural, a few years later, to apply this philosophy to political and social activism.

A year before I finally joined Google, when I sat across the desk from Captain Rafaat of State Security, he asked me many questions about my religious faith and practice but none about my Internet experience. After a few hours of interrogation, during which he found nothing to hold against me, the State Security officer seemingly decided that I was not a threat in any way to security or to the political status quo. He said that he would try to remove my name from the airport arrivals watch list after presenting a report to his superiors. I thanked him and departed, grateful that this strange day had come to a peaceful end.

If Captain Rafaat and his colleagues had spent more time thinking about the Internet than classifying Egyptians by type of religious belief, they might have been better prepared for the digital tsunami under way.

2

Searching for a Savior

I’M NOT INTO POLITICS.” I used to say this all the time, reflexively, whenever the subject came up. It was a popular stance, shared by most Egyptians. It was the result of a deeply rooted culture of fear. Anyone who dared meddle in politics, in opposition to the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), took a risk, with little hope of reaping any return. Most of us shied away, believing that we could not do anything to change the status quo.

The truth is, however, Egyptians have always expressed political opinions, but only passively. We complain about education, health care, the economy, unemployment, police brutality, bribery, and corruption, but that is as far as we once dared to go. Few would point fingers at the officials responsible, while most kept such thoughts to themselves.

Egyptians who grew up in the fifties and sixties endured the worst repression in our modern history, including arrests, torture, military trials, and other forms of oppression. Most of them chose safety over activism. Informers were so deeply planted that many Egyptians were afraid to discuss politics in public. This generation raised their children first and foremost to fear politics and State Security. Sometimes it seemed to me that we feared the wrath of the secret police more than we feared death itself.

Egyptians practically never chose a president. The dynasty of Mohamed Ali, who is regarded as the founder of modern Egypt, ruled for almost 150 years until the revolution of July 23, 1952 (in a sense, Mohamed Ali himself was installed by popular demand, when a group of prominent Egyptians insisted in 1805 that the former governor, Ahmad Khurshid Pasha, step down). From 1952 on, the military made all key decisions. The army officers who led a military coup against the ruling monarchy chose Mohamed Naguib as Egypt’s first president, transforming the nation into a republic. Two years later the Revolutionary Command Council forced him to step down, and they kept him under house arrest for the short remainder of his life. According to Naguib, this happened because he had planned to hand over control of the country to civilian leadership.

Naguib was succeeded by the extremely charismatic Gamal Abdel Nasser, best known for his pan-Arab nationalism. He was highly esteemed by Egyptians, although a lot of his actions actually planted the seeds of repression and autocracy. Under Nasser, democracy meant referendums on his popularity in which people voted either yes or no, and he somehow always garnered 99.9 percent of the vote. Egyptians joked about tracking down the 0.1 percent that opposed his rule.

Nasser’s vice president, Mohamed Anwar al-Sadat, became president when Nasser passed away in 1970, with no help from any electoral process. A referendum confirmed him as president soon after; he received 90 percent of the votes. The same scenario occurred when Sadat appointed Mohamed Hosni Mubarak as vice president. When Sadat was assassinated in 1981, Mubarak took over. Potemkin referendums continued to provide a façade of legitimacy. The percentage of “yes” votes changed slightly over time but always remained in the 90 range:

Gamal Abdel Nasser195699.990%Anwar al-Sadat197090.040%Anwar al-Sadat197699.939%Hosni Mubarak198198.460%Hosni Mubarak198797.120%Hosni Mubarak199394.910%Hosni Mubarak199993.790%

Mubarak ruled for five terms, each of which lasted six years. His best terms were the first and second, when he released political prisoners arrested by Sadat and promised widespread reforms. He vowed to fight corruption. He also pledged not to rule for more than two terms, as the constitution required. Many political analysts believe that Mubarak did not start out as a corrupt man. But Lord Acton’s rule prevailed: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Mubarak, like the presidents before him, held almost all the reins of power in the nation. There was a parliament to issue laws and in theory to divide power with the executive, but in practice the members were kept closely dependent on the regime. Their loyalty was maintained through what came to be called the “chain of interests”: privileges and benefits were showered on any parliament member from the ruling NDP. From land to loans to immunity from arrest to (most important) influence — these members were among the country’s movers and shakers — a chain of corruption bound them tightly to the regime.

Councils in each governorate of Egypt were selected in the same manner. Known as the Local Popular Councils, they were responsible for services and policies in their respective governorates. The fortunate members who were loyal to the NDP were akin to Communist Party members in the Soviet Union: they received special privileges unavailable to others.

Little by little these privileges eroded the rule of law. The higher up in the chain you were, the less restricted you were by the law. We suffered chronic inefficiencies because of widespread bribery and corruption. The system eroded the Egyptian character. We lost our self-confidence. The phrase “There’s no hope” became customary, especially among young Egyptians. For too many of us, dreams of an apartment, a marriage, and a decent life faded. Out of hopelessness came anger. We were ripe for revolution, even when we were terrified by the idea.

When Mubarak broke his promise of a two-term presidency in 1993, state media — the only media at the time with any effective reach — portrayed him as the epitome of wisdom, the only hope for the nation. The pharaoh’s favorite cloak, “stability,” was the primary argument advanced by the official press. The president was presented as the only viable alternative to chaos. As the ancient proverb put it, “The people you know are better than the ones you don’t.”

At the turn of the millennium, and after Mubarak had had four presidential terms, the first son, Gamal Mubarak, began — cautiously — to dip his toes into political waters. Rumors were floated to test reactions to the possibility that Mubarak Junior would become president. In nearby Syria, Bashar al-Assad had succeeded his father. Why not the same for the Mubarak dynasty?

Throughout Mubarak’s reign, the most enduring and influential opposition came from the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), formed in 1928. The Brotherhood’s popularity was regularly presented to the West as a scarecrow whenever Mubarak was under pressure to reform and democratize the regime. Members of the Brotherhood were widely arrested, subjected to military tribunals, and vilified in the press.

The regime played a typical tyrant’s game. It needed a bogeyman, so it both repressed and enabled the Brotherhood. Yet after years of obsession with its chosen enemy, the Mubarak regime may have become complacent about other threats. In 2004 a group of opposition activists founded the Egyptian Movement for Change, otherwise known as Kefaya, which means “enough” in Arabic. Kefaya opposed the renewal of Mubarak’s presidency for a fifth term and also rejected the attempt to transfer power to his son. The movement’s motto became “No to renewal, no to the inherited presidency.” Members of Kefaya were diverse, including dissidents, intellectuals, journalists, Internet bloggers, university students, and artists. It was the first group to openly and explicitly express opposition to Mubarak’s presidency as well as to his son’s potential candidacy. Its first major protest against the regime was on December 12, 2004 (though many of the protesters knew one another from earlier gatherings to protest Israeli strikes on the Gaza strip and the U.S. invasion of Iraq).

The regime did not crack down on Kefaya as hard as it had on the Muslim Brotherhood. The security masterminds could not imagine such a movement mobilizing significant popular support, since many of its members were intellectuals, whose discourse is not usually appealing to the masses. And the regime was right — Kefaya never achieved a broad following. Yet just by exhibiting the courage to protest, Kefaya helped tear down a psychological barrier. And by criticizing Mubarak openly — the group’s famous chant became “Down, down, Hosni Mubarak” — Kefaya members were certainly brave pioneers.

Kefaya’s courage, however, meant very little to Mubarak Junior. Gamal Mubarak was born in 1963 and graduated from high school in 1980, the year I was born. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business at the American University in Cairo. A few years later he left Egypt to work for the Bank of America in London. With a few colleagues, Mubarak then left Bank of America to set up a London-based private equity fund. Upon his return to Egypt in 1998, his political ambitions started to become more obvious, and he joined his father’s party in 2000. As the son of the pharaoh, he rapidly became a key person in the party, which he wanted to restructure and reposition. He was promoted to lead the party’s Policies Committee, the most important division of the NDP. In addition, he became the deputy secretary-general. He was the youngest man of any consequence in an aging party.

In 2004, a new cabinet composed of Mubarak Junior’s close allies was sworn in. It came to be called the businessmen’s government, because most of the ministers were rich businessmen. Mubarak nevertheless left the regime’s main pillars intact. The ministers of defense and interior affairs and the head of intelligence remained in their positions. Many Egyptians hoping for real change, including myself, were still pleased to see younger faces in government positions. The new prime minister, Ahmed Nazif, had a solid background in technology. Yet it was clear that the regime intended to groom Gamal Mubarak as the nation’s next president.

When Gamal Mubarak appeared on the Egyptian scene, I thought it was an opportunity to empower the younger generation and get rid of the old mentality that had been dragging us into the dark for ages. He seemed like a progressive person who appreciated experience and understood the youth culture better than the dinosaurs around his aging dad. The new campaigns for the party seemed to indicate a real desire for change, but later it became obvious that this was purely cosmetic — a change in the campaign but not in the product itself. Corruption was deeply rooted within the NDP, and it seems that Gamal Mubarak agreed to play by the same rules as everyone else.

The following year, 2005, owing to pressure from the international community, parliamentary elections were held under the supervision of the judiciary for the first time. Gamal Mubarak’s influence was growing. He had announced reforms within the ruling party (as head of the Policies Committee). The new cabinet was made up of his own men, not his father’s, and the party was coming under his control.

Yet the election’s first and second phases (out of three, in different locations) dealt a strong blow to the NDP. The Muslim Brotherhood gained seventy-seven seats, bringing them and other opposition groups close to having a third of Parliament’s members. If that proportion continued in the third phase, the opposition would have an effective veto over legislation. The message was clear, and alarming: many Egyptians hated the NDP and would vote for anyone who stood up to its political monopoly. In those first two phases, the state police were nowhere near as aggressive as they had been in previous elections.

In phase three, however, the regime showed its true face, blatantly rigging the results. Hundreds of polling stations were shut, and when voters protested, they were handled aggressively. The international community hardly protested, after witnessing the result of fair elections, since the West was wary of the Muslim Brotherhood, whom many regarded as extremists. More than nine people died during phase three, and the Brotherhood won only eleven seats. The result left the MB as the only strong opposition force in Parliament, with 20 percent of the seats. Despite the fact that official NDP candidates won fewer than 40 percent of the seats, the party ended up with 72 percent representation, since many independent candidates joined the party after winning, either because they desired the personal riches associated with each loyal seat or because they were too afraid to decline, or both. It was very clear that the party needed a monopolizing majority to pass any legislation without having to negotiate with any opposition groups in the country. When the emergency state was up for its biennial renewal, the party wanted at all costs to avoid a vote against it. The regime’s chief tool of oppression could not be placed at risk.