Startup Rising
The revolution nobody sees
Description
In 2010, Christopher Schroeder was a successful American internet entrepreneur and angel investor, the kind of person who had backed companies in Silicon Valley and watched emerging markets from a comfortable distance. He had built and sold a digital health company, sat on boards, knew the venture playbook cold. When friends suggested he take a look at the startup scene in the Middle East, his reaction was the reaction most people in his position would have had. The Middle East meant oil, conflict, autocrats, and headlines about instability — not founders, not product launches, not the patient work of building a business. He went anyway, mostly out of curiosity, expecting to confirm what he already believed.
What he found surprised him enough to spend the next several years traveling through Cairo, Amman, Dubai, Beirut and beyond, meeting young entrepreneurs who were doing something the global narrative had no room for. While the world watched the Arab Spring erupt in 2011 and then watched, dismayed, as the political openings closed again — Egypt sliding back toward repression, Tunisia struggling, Syria collapsing into civil war — a different kind of activity was quietly accelerating. People in their twenties and thirties were starting companies, raising money, copying and adapting business models, and solving problems that their governments had failed to solve for decades.
Schroeder turned what he saw into a book, Startup Rising, published in 2013. It is part travelogue, part investment thesis, and part argument with the reader's assumptions. The premise is that the most consequential change in the region might not be the one on the news at all. The political revolution stalled almost everywhere. But underneath it, something less visible and possibly more durable had taken root, and the people driving it were not waiting for permission from anyone.
The question we’re asking : Why did a skeptical investor come away convinced that entrepreneurship, not politics, might do the most to reshape the Arab world?What we’ll see : How a quiet wave of founders took hold across a region the world had written off, and why it kept escaping the headlines.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The investor who flew in skeptical
Schroeder is careful, in Startup Rising, not to pretend he arrived as a believer. He came as someone who had spent a career evaluating companies and who knew exactly how easy it is to mistake enthusiasm for a market. His mental model of the Middle East was the one most Western investors carried around: a place where business meant connections to the ruling family, where the rule of law was thin, where talented people left for London or the Gulf, and where the words "tech startup" sounded faintly absurd. He expected to find a handful of vanity projects propped up by government money.
Instead, the first thing that struck him was the density of the talent. He kept meeting engineers and designers who were as fluent in the global internet as anyone in California — they used the same tools, read the same blogs, admired the same companies — but who had grown up solving harder problems with fewer resources. They were not asking to be taught how the internet worked. They were asking sharper questions about how to make a business survive in an environment where almost nothing could be taken for granted.
02Chapter 2 — A generation that stopped waiting
The founders Schroeder profiles share a temperament more than a sector. They had grown up under governments that promised stability in exchange for passivity, and they had concluded, well before 2011, that waiting for the state to fix things was a losing bet. Entrepreneurship was partly an economic decision and partly something closer to a stance — a way of taking control of a small piece of their own future when the larger institutions around them were stuck. The Arab Spring did not create this attitude. It revealed how widely it was already held.
One of the recurring figures in the book is the woman entrepreneur, and Schroeder pushes hard against the assumption that the region's women were absent from this story. In several markets, the proportion of women founding and running technology companies was strikingly high — higher, by some measures, than in parts of Silicon Valley. He recounts meeting founders who built e-commerce platforms, content businesses, and recruitment services, and who navigated social constraints with the same pragmatism they brought to product decisions. The point is not that the region had solved its inequalities. The point is that a startup is one of the few places where what you build can matter more than where you come from.
03Chapter 3 — Building on top of broken infrastructure
The hardest part of Startup Rising to romanticize is the chapter that the founders lived every day: the infrastructure simply did not work the way it does in the markets the global playbook was written for. Payments were a chronic problem, because credit-card penetration was low and trust in online transactions lower still. Logistics were unreliable, with addressing systems that made delivery a guessing game in many cities. Capital was scarce and often came attached to expectations that had nothing to do with growing a company. Legal frameworks for incorporating, protecting intellectual property, or winding down a failed venture ranged from cumbersome to nonexistent.
What Schroeder finds remarkable is that the founders treated these gaps not only as obstacles but as opportunities. If nobody trusted online payment, you built cash-on-delivery into your business model, the way the early e-commerce players did, and you absorbed the friction as a cost of reaching customers no one else was serving. If logistics were broken, the company that figured out delivery had a defensible advantage that a Western competitor, used to functioning systems, would never think to build. The very dysfunction that scared off outside investors was also a moat for anyone willing to solve it locally.
04Chapter 4 — Where the real change might come from
Step back from the individual founders and Schroeder's larger argument comes into focus. The world had learned to read the Middle East almost entirely through the language of politics — regimes, elections, protests, wars — and so it measured change by whether the regimes fell or held. By that measure, the years after 2011 looked like a story of disappointment, even disaster. But this is a narrow instrument for detecting change, and it tends to miss the kind that does not announce itself with a headline.
What entrepreneurship redistributes, quietly, is agency. A young person who builds a company that employs forty people, serves customers in three countries, and answers to investors rather than ministries has a different relationship to power than one who waits for the state to provide. Multiply that by enough founders and you get a slow shift in who decides what gets built, who gets hired, and what is possible — a shift that does not depend on any particular government surviving or falling. Schroeder's wager is that this kind of change, precisely because it is decentralized and unglamorous, may prove harder to reverse than a political opening that a strongman can simply shut.
05Conclusion
The skeptic who boarded the plane expecting to confirm his doubts ended up writing a book to argue the opposite. What changed Schroeder's mind was not a theory but an accumulation of rooms full of founders who had already decided the future was theirs to build, regardless of what the headlines said about their countries. He came back convinced that the most underreported story in the region was not the one about regimes at all.
Related books
