Medhat Karam, CEO of ArpuPlus: Each week, My Morning Routine looks at how a successful member of the community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of random business questions just for fun. Speaking to us this week is ArpuPlus CEO Medhat Karam (LinkedIn). Edited excerpts from our conversation:

My name is Medhat Karam, and I’m the current CEO of ArpuPlus. I’m an engineer by background — I like things to be structured, and that’s how I approach both thinking and managing. Throughout my career, I’ve led several tech and engineering companies, mainly in the software space. I’ve built three or four companies so far. I was born in England, so I hold dual nationality, but I was raised in Egypt. I’m passionate about sports — mostly swimming and padel — and I’m married with three children. My eldest son has just graduated as a software engineer, my daughter is studying data science at AUC, and my youngest son is 17 and about to start university. I’m not trying to influence them — but somehow I think I am.

I manage ArpuPlus, a 21-year-old company that started out offering mobile value-added services and has since evolved into a venture builder. Around ten years ago, we spun off TPay, a mobile payment company. We built it, scaled it up, and exited. That experience showed us the potential of building ventures that leverage our telecom infrastructure — so that’s what we focus on now. Today, ArpuPlus manages and supports five active ventures in entertainment, telehealth, and enterprise messaging. We provide two main services. The first is full operational support, covering legal, HR, finance, and IT, among others. The second is access to our infrastructure, which includes 12 regional offices connected to 40-50 telecom operators. This allows us to scale up these startups across the region very quickly.

There are several examples of these success stories. Take TPay for instance, we started it out with one operator, Mobinil (now Orange Egypt), and helped it grow to connect with over 50 telecom operators across the region. That’s how it became a major player in mobile payments. Another example is Shofha, our Arabic video-on-demand platform. It started as a local content aggregator in Egypt, and now it operates across 35 telecom operators. All subscriptions and payments happen via telco billing.

We help successful local startups expand regionally. Most startups in Egypt, the UAE, or Saudi Arabia build great products but struggle to expand beyond their borders. We’re not an incubator or accelerator. We’re hands-on. We offer full operational support and a ready-made infrastructure to help founders grow their ventures across multiple countries and telecom networks. If you have the product and the team, we give you the rails to expand. Each of our ventures has its own CEO or managing director. I don’t run their day-to-day operations, but I support them closely — strategically and through our regional infrastructure. Think of ArpuPlus as a horizontal layer that enables vertical startups to grow fast.

The most interesting trend right now is AI, and it’s transforming everything. It’s become very dominant, and it is changing everything we do. But I want to highlight another important trend in the telecom space, which is unlocking and utilizing telecom data. Telecom companies sit on a goldmine of data — location, demographics, usage behavior — but most of it remains untapped. Platforms like Facebook and Google have been capitalizing on this kind of data, not the telecom companies themselves. Organizations like the GSMA are now pushing telecom operators to monetize this data in a secure, privacy-compliant way — opening it up for developers, banks, advertisers, and enterprises. One of our ventures, Cloudcom, is working on solutions to help operators expose and distribute these data sets through APIs.

I usually wake up around 7:30am. Sometimes I go for a quick swim before heading to the office. I spend the first 15-20 minutes catching up on the news — mainly tech and political updates. Recently, I’ve started asking ChatGPT to give me a quick daily summary, which saves me time as opposed to visiting different websites.

I spend the first hour reviewing the daily dashboards from our five ventures, analyzing performance metrics and understanding what is happening with each of them. Then, I usually have strategic meetings with the CEOs or managing directors of our ventures to discuss growth plans, partnerships, or any challenges. We all operate in the same building, except one company, so I also make it a point to connect with employees directly — walk around, chat, get a sense of everyone. My day breaks down into three core parts — numbers, strategy, and people.

The one constant in my day is looking at the numbers. Every single day without fail, I review the metrics. That comes from my engineering background. It helps me stay updated with everything that is happening inside each venture.

Professionally, I’d love to see one or two more successful exits from our current ventures. Personally, I’m working with a friend who runs a nonprofit microfinance platform called Naslink. It provides interest-free loans to underserved families using a community-based model. I’ve been working with him on tech and scalability. I’d love to help them reach 10k families. That would be a dream come true.

This is a very distracting job — five ventures multiplied by 12 offices means a lot of moving pieces. The only thing that works for me is the old-school daily to-do list written on paper. Every morning, I update it and cross off items as I go. I’ve tried every digital productivity tool, but I always come back to pen and paper.

I believe that discipline and efficiency are key. When you’re younger, managing your own time is crucial. As you advance in your career, the ability to hire good people becomes paramount, as they dramatically reduce stress. If you hire the right people, you can trust them to run the business. If not, you’ll end up firefighting all the time. One great hire can make all the difference.

Swimming in the morning really helps me relax. At night, I enjoy watching Arabic TV series with my family. I also watch some stuff on Netflix occasionally, but Arabic content resonates more with me.

I’m drawn to shows with a strong social message. I really like Hala Khasa, Lam Shamseya, and Family Matter. I believe these shows have very powerful messages and a huge social impact. In terms of books, one that really changed my mindset is How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie. It’s an old book from the 1940s, but the lessons are timeless, especially with the amount of mental pressure we experience today. I’ve read it three times, and I keep going back to it whenever I feel my anxiety levels creeping up.

“If you ask, you might get a no. But if you don’t ask, it’s a no already.” My father told me that, and I’ve passed it on to my kids and colleagues. Every time I’ve taken a chance and asked for something — even from someone senior — I’ve been surprised by how often the answer is yes.

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