OUR FOUNDER OF THE WEEK- Every Tuesday, Founder of the Week looks at how a successful member of Egypt’s startup community got their big break, asks about their experiences running a business, and gets their advice for budding entrepreneurs. Speaking to us this week is Youssef Rizk (LinkedIn), co-founder of Moonshot.

My name is Youssef Rizk and I’m the cofounder of Y Combinator-backed Moonshot, a company that helps aspiring tennis players fund their careers through a number of backers in exchange for a portion of their future earnings. Sports like tennis are very expensive, so we wanted to create a platform for athletes to achieve their potential, irrespective of their means. This idea is not just limited to tennis and sports, but in the future could involve other sectors like music, education, film, and content creation.

I’ve lived in London for nine years. I came here to study electrical and electronic engineering and went on to work for a company called Palantir Technologies as a forward deployed engineer, which is basically an engineer who talks to customers. This is also where I met my cofounder, Dimitris Nikolaou. We started working at Palantir on the same day and left on the same day, as well, because we both got that entrepreneurial itch.

If you want to give building your own company any justice, you give up anything in your life that is noise. You don’t have room for any unnecessary stress in your life, so you instinctively become very methodical about the things you allow yourself to spend time on. The lows are really low and the highs are very high, which comes with a certain rigidity of having to eat, sleep, and exercise well. This leaves very little time for other things.

You also give up your peace of mind. The worst part is the existential dread of not knowing what happens tomorrow — you may or may not be around tomorrow as a company. You have to be very comfortable with simmering in uncertainty.

It can also get very lonely. You know that no one is coming to your rescue. You are the single proprietor of this company and if you stop pushing, nothing is going to move. So, it takes a lot of mental resilience. However, you can set yourself up in a way where you have a good support system of the people you trust.

The best part of my job is that I’m building something from scratch that I believe in and solves a problem first-hand. This is worth every bit of foregone salary. The ability to just put the thoughts you have into action and work towards the way you’d like to see the world work.

If I could give entrepreneurs one piece of advice, it would be making sure you have a safety net. This could entail working somewhere for a while to save some money or raising some money. The stress and the angst that comes with building your company is enough; you don’t need to compound that with worrying about the money. You need to optimize the risk return for your gamble, which is essentially what starting a company is. Bootstrapping is noble, but raising money could actually give entrepreneurs a bit of that peace of mind and help them go further. Additionally, before you start a company, be very deliberate about the experiences you want to get before you do that.

The most important KPI I look at every day is revenue. This should be the main KPI across 99% of cases because other KPIs, like number of users, may give you a false sense of accomplishment. Your company is fundamentally underpinned by whether you can get people to pay you money for your product or service. Secondary KPIs for us include the number of athletes on the platform, for instance, but it all boils down to revenue.

In the current funding climate, you need to make the money last as long as possible. It is pretty unclear right now what the landscape will look like, which is why you should aim for three years of runway in your bank account.

Our short-term goal is to prove this concept scalably in the tennis space, and after that expand to other sports, like golf and motorsports. After that, we want to go into team sports and maybe even beyond sports altogether.

Although parents tend to be more risk-averse, mine were very supportive about me starting my own company. But that also goes back to the fact that we had raised the funding from Y Combinator, which derisked the situation.

The last great thing I read was Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey as an audio-book. It’s an autobiography that focuses on all the red lights in his life, which basically means all the bad things that happened to him, and how they eventually turned into green lights. He says that if you stop at a red light, you’ll never make it to the green light, so it is an overall very positive outlook on life.

In my down time, I do a lot of calisthenics and play tennis, as well as the occasional chance to travel and hang out with people.

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