Khaled Senawy: Founder of Squadio on Building Scalable Engineering Teams

Khaled Senawy, Co-Founder and CEO of Squadio, shares his entrepreneurial journey of building a platform that helps businesses hire, build, and maintain their tech teams. From pivoting a previous venture to overcoming fundraising challenges, Khaled offers invaluable insights into scaling a business and building great products.

Can you share a brief note about yourself?

I’m an entrepreneur with a passion for building great products. I come from a technical background, started my professional career in late 20s, with previous freelancing history in design and development as web developer, then iOS, and I’ve always been intrigued by the power of innovation to create quality apps.my first app got rewarded by Mobily the Saudi Telco company as best designed app in their competition (2011). After working in Ibtikar (software house) as CTO, COO, I realized there was a gap in the market for building products that scale, lasts long, and the main challenge was to build and maintain a great engineering team, so I decided to launch my venture, Squadio, that helps businesses to hire, build, and keep their tech teams with subscription model. My goal is to build a platform where any founder, business owner or decision maker think of it as first option when it comes to building their engineering teams.

Why did you choose to start a business?

During my work in Ibtikar, I witnessed the beginning of great startups that grew later and became a key players in the market, and I was passionate about building a product-based business rather than a service based (software house), I got inspired by few success stories and I co-launched a sport fans social media app in 2017, although it failed in less than one year but I learned many lessons on the business side, finance and fundraising dynamics, when I returned back to Ibtikar as CEO, I wanted to turn it to a startup with one model, one product, and one focus, so we shut down Ibtikar and started Squadio, looking at the gap of building sustainable tech teams.

How did you start your business?

Squadio was a pivot from Ibtikar, in 3 months we converted the existing contracts to a team based contract instead of scope based projects, it worked! But after 10 months the model was not generating much profit so we started fundraising to scale the model and build a solid product to digitize the experience of hiring and managing teams.

After the first year we succeeded to onboard big names in the Saudi market, and built a foundation of great talent pool who are vetted and ready for hiring.

Then we partnered with Seedra ventures, as the first investor and believer in our plan, they helped us to grow, to scale and even to tune our model to be a managed marketplace model than just hiring people manually. Also to get bigger market share in the Kingdom, before we go to other markets in GCC and Globally.

What do you wish you’d known before you started your business?

Many things, but experience comes only by the hard way, by failing and correcting, I can mention here:

• To focus on one segment in the beginning rather than all-segment style

• Build healthy data pipeline to help us make the right actions for the business and for our clients

• To learn more about finance and fundraising process

• To invest more in the customer experience and Talent experience journey

Did you have any support in your journey?

I can say am so lucky that I was surrounded by great people who helped me to tune and improve the model along the way, I can mention few of them here who I would not forget their generosity in support and guidance:

• Mohammed T. Ibrahim, Sabbar founder, our relationship started as a vendor-client, then we became friends, he is a great mentor and dear friend till today.

• Mostafa Abolnasr, Founder of Omniful, and Ex-Seedra Ventures, one of the best who mastered the VC / Startup ecosystem.

• SEEDRA Team, Haitham Alforaih, Abdullah Almunif, Musaab Almuhaideb and Waleed Albarrak.

• Majed Althagafi who was my ex- manager in Ibtikar and mentor after that, with his busy life he always had a time to guide and support me during my journey.

• Eisa Atawi, my first leader and mentor, who believed in me the most, and the one who taught me what is entrepreneurship 14 years ago, Squadio was an idea in the middle of one of our conversations.

And my team, I always got inspired and learned by their passion, their innovation and their ideas, I always learn from them how to do things the right way, and keep learning from them till today.

And few more but the place here is not enough to mention all.

What is your greatest challenge as a business owner?

• Growth and scaling the business, we’re in a tough industry that requires a lot of effort to streamline a growth mechanism.

• Fundraising was always a challenge, but with a great team we drove our company to be profitable.

What advice would you give to your past self before opening your own business?

Maybe to read more about successful startup stories around the world, more books on how to build a scalable startup. And to study more about finance.

Reflecting on your path to entrepreneurship, what key piece of advice would you offer to aspiring founders?

It’s not an easy choice to become a founder, and will never be, Get ready for a tough journey, and don’t be rushed for a quick success. The suffer will take other parts of your life, but eventually you will build great story if you were humble enough to learn, from the others and from your mistakes, and change yourself and business based on this.

Build a great CX and enjoy the ride.