Idriss Al Rifai, co-founder and CEO of Flow48: 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 Idriss Al Rifai (LinkedIn), co-founder and CEO of Flow48. Edited excerpts from our conversation:

I’m Idriss — I’m half French, half Iraqi, born and raised in France. I have a bit of a non-traditional background. I used to be a professional basketball player; I played pro for a few years. I played for the French under 21 national team, and that was like the golden generation of France — 10 out of the 12 players made it to the NBA. I tried and I failed, but I played professionally for three years in Paris.

I later joined the French special forces for three years. I was sent to 13 countries, and was involved in 16 missions and nine black ops. I got about 40 or 50 medals. Since it was a lot of fact-finding missions, I became the personal advisor to the French Minister of Defense, and did that for two years, which was quite fun. I traveled to over 40 countries. After that, I got my MBA at the University of Chicago, built my first company and sold it, then moved to the Middle East and worked for two years with BCG to try to prove to everyone I was normal and I could do a normal job [laughs].

I later left to build my second company, which grew quite big — it became the second unicorn in the Middle East, with around 5k employees. That was Fetchr — it was in the e-commerce logistics space, and we saw a lot of ups and downs. I then moved to Glovo in Barcelona, where I took over technology, data, and strategy. We expanded the company from eight countries to 25. We ended up selling the company for USD 2.2 bn to Delivery Hero three years ago. That’s when I started building my fourth company — and my first fintech — Flow48.

There’s a trade finance gap in all emerging markets. Typically, SMEs represent 80% of job creation and 60% of GDP across many markets, but only 5-10% of bank lending, so there is a fundamental discrepancy. We know from Dubai Vision 2030 and Saudi 2030 that SMEs are critical for economic growth, and that SMEs are at the core of the economy, but despite that, banks don’t know how to assess them, and therefore don’t give them loans.

That’s what we’re trying to solve. We’re doing two things. One is a pure data play — we’re aggregating data from up to 50 different data sources, allowing us to have a 360 degree view on the SME market. The second thing is we’re putting money where our mouth is, and we’re acting like a small SME bank and giving loans to the best performing companies.

That’s the logical side of why I built the company, but there’s also the passionate side — anything that tries to address unfairness drives me. You have two companies that are exactly the same; they have the same P&L, but one is based in New York and one is owned by a minority in Dubai. One of them will be financed at a 6% interest rate and in three days. The other one has a 98% chance of not being financed, and if financed, it will be at 28% interest. That’s fundamentally unfair, and so we’re trying to bridge that gap.

One of the things that creates the problem is information asymmetry. You fear what you don’t know, and since a lot of banks don’t know how to assess SME risks, their assessment is erroneous and overestimates the risk. We ultimately want to reduce that information asymmetry, and by doing that, not only attract more capital, but allow SMEs to create more jobs.

We’re not here to compete with others. This is a space that is extremely big; we’re talking about hundreds of bns of USDs. There will be multiple unicorns in this space — I hope we’ll be one of them — and I think maybe even a decacorn.

I travel a lot — about two thirds of my time — so trying to stick to a daily routine is not easy. I believe in work-life balance, and not working 14-hour days, seven days a week. It’s not good to postpone happiness and assume you’ll be happier when you raise funds or when you expand your company — you have to manage your time and achieve a balance. The other side of it is you have to be doing something you love, while still being able to carve out some time to be a human being rather than just a business owner.

What I do is I try to manage my energy. One of the things that drove me crazy when I was in consulting is that I could not go to the gym at 3pm — because that, for me, is the time when I need that energy boost, not 7am.

I wake up typically fairly early at 7am, and start work around 8am. I then try to carve out some time in the afternoon to replenish energy. I also try to manage my meeting schedule so that meetings where I need to be active and energetic are scheduled at hours where my energy is at its peak. I also do not accept meetings that run longer than 30 minutes. I try to push to have 15-minute meetings as well, especially because we’re all very remote due to the nature of the job, so 15-minute alignments can do wonders. I’d always choose that over an hour-long meeting once a week.

In terms of long-term goals, I believe that overnight success happens after 10 years of work. You have to always work to be ready so that when something presents itself, you’re able to jump into the spotlight. Long-term plans don’t work; I’ve been wrong about a lot of things in the past, like thinking my company would IPO and then ending up selling the company sooner. So for me, in five years, I just want to have built something that I’m proud of.

I really enjoy The Diary of a CEO. I enjoy podcasts that are long and dive deep into certain topics. And it’s not really about the CEO, it’s more about health and longevity. I’ve also recently gotten into random history topics, and could watch 45-minute videos on things like the Hundred Years’ War.

There are two pieces of advice that I cherish — one is from experience and one that somebody told me. From my experience, I learned how important it is to really enjoy the journey and not postpone your happiness. The early days of building a company and the energy of that 5- or 10-person team is amazing.

The other one I got from my mom, and it was after I built a company that was worth nearly USD 1 bn and then everything crumbled in three weeks. I lost USD 700 mn of value, and all my personal net worth, so it really brought me down. My mom found the best words to put things in perspective for me. She said: It’s like you won the Olympics twice, and you’re pissed off you didn’t win it three times. That really resonated, because it’s true — you ride so much and then you fall, but you still achieved something that so many people would have loved to do.

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