Riz Ahmed, CEO of SmartCrowd: 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 Riz Ahmed (LinkedIn), CEO of SmartCrowd. Edited excerpts from our conversation:

I’m Riz Ahmed, the CEO of SmartCrowd, the Middle East's first regulated real estate crowdfunding platform. SmartCrowd started by addressing a fundamental issue that's in every major capital in the world, but especially here in Dubai. There’s high barriers to entry for real estate investing, and a lot of retail investors want to invest, but they don't have the capital.

SmartCrowd was the first to receive a regulatory license allowing fractional ownership in 2018, and letting people buy a portion of a property and benefit from its rental income or capital appreciation. You’re also relying on the expertise of someone who’s able to identify good investment prospects and manage the entire thing on your behalf.

I actually started as a customer of SmartCrowd. I had the capital, but wasn’t sure what to buy. Someone told me about it, and I thought it was great. Instead of buying one property, I ended up investing in 10 different ones. I loved it so much that I became an angel investor, then a year later, they asked me to join the board. I became an advisor to the CEO of the company, and then I took over the company as CEO about two years ago. That allows me to design products for customers that I myself had actually been looking for.

Before SmartCrowd, I was at Gems Education for nearly seven years, double hatting as both CFO and chief operating officer at the same time towards the end of the last two years. I took a bit of a break and went back to university to do my MBA and I started investing in companies, and SmartCrowd was one of them. I saw a huge opportunity there, because we had the best returns in the market — 50% better than our competitors — and the lowest fees. The co-founders felt like I had a good mix of vision and execution, given my experience at Gems and PwC before that, spanning finance, operations, and fundraising.

We’re in the process of getting our tokenization license, and we plan to launch a tokenized property by the end of this year or early next year. Tokenization is a bit of a buzzword, but all it is is just fractional ownership on chain. There’s increased efficiency and transparency, but it’s just an evolution of what we've already been doing.

The first step is making sure your compliance is fully up to scratch, and after that, you have to assess risks that come with being on chain. We have to invest in cybersecurity and establish partnerships for custody and distribution. Then we'll be moving to accept crypto payments as well, so there’s a whole bundle of new risks that we then have to assess and mitigate, and it’s really important to do that because you see a lot of compliance gaps in the crypto world.

We don’t chase volume, and that will be our approach with tokenization. Sometimes we’re funding one or two properties a month, because we’re chasing strong returns and fundamentals instead.

We’re at a different stage now where we’re moving from startup to a scale-up. We attracted a huge investor — Africa’s largest proptech Nawy — and the goal is to help them become the biggest proptech in Africa and the Middle East, ideally in the next three years, and build a global brand. We might even rebrand under Nawy in the future.

I’ve always had an interest in mergers and acquisitions, and specifically why acquisitions fail. I believe it all boils down to culture. When we were looking for a partner, we had several people approach us with offers, but with Nawy, there was a really good mesh of cultures. We understood each other, and understood that we can’t import their culture — with them being Egypt-born — into ours or vice versa.

I get up in the morning for Fajr prayer, and go boxing for 45 minutes. I’m an amateur boxer — you can see the marks on my nose — but getting punched in the face definitely wakes me up in the morning. I go home and spend a bit of time with my kids, and then I drop my daughter off at school and go to work.

As a CEO you're balancing between internal stakeholders, which is your team, and external shareholders. What I try to do as best as I can is to spend the whole day in the office working with the team and do other things like video conference, and when I have a bunch of meetings with external shareholders, I try to do them all on the same day.

In a corporate world, the day is very structured, but at a startup, it’s completely different. Anyone could come into your office and you have to firefight most of the time. You're constantly trying to solve problems and these problems can have a massive material impact on the actual business.

For me, nothing's more important than hiring. We went from roughly 10 employees when I first started two years ago to about 50 employees and we're probably going to go to about 100 in the next six months. A lot of time is spent finding the right candidates to grow, because if you make the wrong choice, it disrupts the team flow and culture.

One non-negotiable is spending time with the family. I will always make sure that I leave the office and get home in time to give my daughter a bath and put her to bed, and then I can log back on in the evening. That flexibility is really crucial for me, and it applies to the whole team. Family comes first, and everyone’s got a bit of leeway, but in turn, they’re also expected to cut the company some slack when times are more busy.

I’ve recently gotten into padel, which I think is a great networking opportunity in Dubai. I was playing padel with some investors last weekend, and we didn’t talk business, but there’s business to come off the back of that. It’s also a great sport to unwind a bit.

I love The Office — the American version. My team says I’m basically Michael Scott. I also follow this professor, Roy Casagranda, who’s an American political scientist and historian. He's very big in the Arab world because he talks a lot about Islamic history and current political situations in the Middle East.

My dad once told me something which I won't forget, which is “real wisdom is learning from others' mistakes, not your own.” Another piece of advice I think is important is that when some people dream of success, other people wake up and work harder. I think it’s really important, especially now as Gen Z gets on the career ladder and put a lot of emphasis on starting up businesses and making a lot of money from the get-go. There’s something to say about the importance of just doing the work. My three or four years at PwC led to the success I've had later in life, even though it wasn't glamorous and I worked really hard.

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