After the revolution here in Egypt, no one was buying anything, it really hurt retailed. I saw a great opportunity in terms of all of the products that were just sitting on the shelves in the stores and exporting them giving these boutiques the opportunity to sell globally. Ever since I was pretty young and I was interested in technology, I had to learn almost everything in English and my community wasn't Spanish. I started realizing that there was a lot of developers out there that also needed good content in their own language, so we created Platzi to solve this problem. Here in Turkey, recent developments hurt the tourism industry especially the small mom and pop shops. In HotelRunner, our typical customers are family-run properties so we really help them get online, market their property and actually start selling. Online banking here in Egypt is almost non-existent. It's incredibly frustrating to think that we work on Coterique day-in day-out, but at the end of the day there are clients that are coming onto the site, they're loving the items that they see, they want to process the payment but we're not able to accept it. It's impacting the business, it's limiting us. Growing as a global company there are obvious problems. One of the biggest ones that we face right now is payment. When we first launched Platzi we needed to charge people from all over the world who speak Spanish so you try to think where should I incorporate. We had to do everything here in the US, I had to claim my tax ID number here in the US and this means flying to open a bank account. We had to go to several lawyers, several accountants. That's hard, it's complicated You know if you can't get paid for the services we can't really survive. When we heard about Atlas all three founders went just yes, this is it, we are going to solve this problem finally. Atlas is gonna make it so much easier to accept payments in dollars and different currencies and not have to relocate elsewhere. In order to do that, we're always going to have our Egyptian roots that it's gonna put us on the global stage. It will allow us to access a world-class banking and financial system, which really wasn't possible in Turkey. We're gonna see a revolution of startups coming to the global market and Atlas could help them from the beginning. Now I don't need to leave Egypt, I can stay in Cairo with my family and I can just focus on growing Coterique. We have more than 17,000 hotels in 127 countries. We are hoping that it's going to be a billion dollar business in the next three years, but for me it really is not about money. You shouldn't have to be a Silicon Valley insider to start a global company. It's not just Silicon Valley, it's the Silicon Valley of the world.
