Adding A New Mentor To My Life

Adding A New Mentor To My Life

It’s very easy to identify great people to learn from. However, it’s not easy to get them as mentors! Such people are really busy, and you’re lucky if you get to meet them once a year. I thought that I am a busy person, but compared to these people, I really have plenty of free time to do more!!!

I am honored to officially add Hala Fadel (@halafrangie) as a new mentor along with Rashid AlBallaa (@RBallaa) to my Kauffman Fellows Program Mentors. It seems that I am lucky enough to meet Hala and Rashid regularly and learn from their own experience.

Hala graduated from HEC in France with a Masters in Financial Economics and Berkeley Haas School of Business, and holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

A mother of three wonderful kids, a true believer in entrepreneurship, and an active and passionate angel investor in the MENA region, who always takes a leap of faith in talents, no matter how uncertain their success is because she gets in very early, Hala comes from an amazing entrepreneurial background.

Hala stated a company (Booleo, a telecom software business), in the right place at the right time while pursuing her MBA degree at MIT in Boston 1999, and then sold it at the right time. She didn’t stop there, she used the money she made to get into another company (Comgest), and help grow it to become one of the biggest investment companies in France with more than 14 Billion Euros under management.

I couldn’t find better words to tell her story than her own in her TEDx Beirut Speech.

That’s it!!! Of course not! Not with a person like Hala.

She is a true superwoman with more hats than I can remember! While at MIT, Hala won the 50K Business Plan Competition. Building on this experience, she initiated the MIT Arab Startup Competition. She chairs the MIT Enterprise Forum of the Pan-Arab Region and is on the Global Advisory Board of the MIT Enterprise Forum and Board of the MIT Enterprise Forum of Turkey.

Hala also developed a similar association in northern Lebanon, The Maurice Fadel Prize, which recognizes the year’s best business startup idea. Twenty-two universities and many business partners have joined Hala to support this initiative.

In parallel, Hala runs several charitable organizations for underprivileged children in Tripoli. Amongst other things, she organizes a number of extracurricular activities, such as outings to the circus, Christmas events, and organizing educational games during Ramadan.

She is also an active member of Ruwwad Lebanon, an initiative that aims to empower developing communities and enhance the capabilities of young people to positively impact the process of sustainable development.

I hope this will only be the beginning of a fruitful relationship, I am so excited to learn from her.