Meet the Chief Yahoo! of the Arab World

Meet the Chief Yahoo! of the Arab World

By Rima Abdelkader, Exclusive to DinarStandard October 5, 2010

Samih Toukan’s life motto, “It’s better to try and fail than to fail to try,” has made him the globe’s largest Arab entrepreneur success story. When the world’s major Internet portal, Yahoo! signed a multi-million dollar deal with the biggest Arab online community in the world called Maktoob.com on August 25, CEO Samih Toukan was proud, not only for the company, his country of Jordan but for the entire Arab world. This is the first time an international media giant has acquired an Arab Internet portal in the Middle East. It’s a more than decade’s long journey from creating the first Arabic email to the world’s largest Arab online community for Toukan and his partner Ahmed Nassef.

Samih Toukan, Founder, Maktoob.com

Arab entrepreneurship is vital for job creation in the Arab world, a goal Arab entrepreneur Toukan has persistently pushed for in his work. Toukan hopes that this deal will send a strong message to the Arab world: to invest “in the brain power and talent of the Arab people and not in real estate projects.”

MAKTOOB KEY FACTS

Headquarters: Amman, Jordan Key Services: Maktoob.com the leading Arab portal with over 15 million unique Visitors, cashU; the electronic payment card, Souq.com; auctions and marketplace, Araby.com; the first Arabic search engine, Maktoob Research Offices: Amman, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Kuwait Employees 288 Source: Maktoob Website

Yahoo transaction: Aug 25th 2009 official announcement: Maktoob.com, including Maktoob Research, will be a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yahoo! once the acquisition is completed later this year. (Unofficial estimates of size of deal: $75-$100 million.) Group’s other entities - Souq.com, CashU.com, Araby.com and Tahady.com - will be part of a new company called Jabbar Internet Group that will have a focus on e-commerce and be managed by Maktoob founder Samih Toukan.

We interviewed Maktoob.com’s CEO Samih Toukan about his career and accomplishments, and what this deal means for America, the Arab world and Arabic-language online users around the world.

1. How did you get involved in the Internet sector? Is this what you envisioned yourself doing at an early age?

The first business I started along with Hussam Khoury was a management and technology consulting business. That evolved into web and Internet development and then the idea of Maktoob came along; to create the first Arabic email which then became the largest Arab online community. I really wanted to create an Arab success story and I found the Internet a great medium to be able to reach Arabs all over the world.

2. Who has been your biggest inspiration?

One special mentor that I remember and that shares this success story is Fadi Ghandour, CEO of Aramex (see our 2006 article on Mr. Fadi Ghandour). Aramex was our first client as management consultants and then Fadi became a founder of Maktoob. Aramex is a true story of success and entrepreneurship in the Arab World. It was the first Arabic and only company to be listed on NASDAQ.

3. How did you come up with the idea for Maktoob.com? What does it stand for? Tell us more about it.

Maktoob has several meanings. It means ‘letter’ or ‘written’ or ‘destiny’ if you like. The idea was to build the first Arabic email and spread the usage of Arabic language on the net. This core then became the largest Arab Online Community with over 16.5 Million users and with full fledged services ranging from news to sports to blogs to entertainment etc...

4. What does Yahoo!’s recent acquisition of Maktoob.com mean to Arabic-language speakers, and to online users around the world? What was your initial reaction when the deal went through?

When the deal went through, I was proud. Proud for Maktoob, proud for Jordan and proud for the Arab world. It’s the first time a global media company is interested to partner is such a way with an Arab homegrown technology and media company. This is a turning point for the industry and its going to mean more investment and growth for Arabic content and services in the region. It’s a message to all entrepreneurs that it’s possible to make it in the Arab world with hard work and innovation and a message to investors that the Arab world is a promising investment environment.

5. What percentage of online content on the Web is in Arabic? How many online users are there in the Middle East? in the Arab world? Which countries carry Maktoob.com? How many users does Maktoob.com serve?

We serve 16.5 million users out of a total of maybe 45 million users. It’s still the beginning for Internet in the Arab world but the future is very promising. Although Maktoob was a pioneer in developing Arabic content but that still represents only 1% of content in the world while the Arab population is 320 million people. This deal is going to be a turning point for Arabic content in the region and with no doubt will spur innovation and growth. For the users, it will only mean more and better content and services.

As for Maktoob, it serves users from all the Arab World and Arabs from around the world in addition to expats living in the Arab World or anybody interested in the region.

6. What are some of your favorite websites, and why?

The Huffington Post is certainly among the top of the list. I am also a heavy user of Facebook and Twitter as they are at the core of the social media revolution. I also use many local and regional sites.

7. When conducting business in the Middle East, what local laws do you have to comply with, and for which countries?

The Arab World is made of 22 countries. There are similarities between the laws and culture in each country, but there are also a lot of differences and sensitivities. The Maktoob team has learnt to deal with these situations and understand the local environments very well and that is one of our major differentiators. The Yahoo Maktoob deal brings the best of both worlds, global presence and reach combined with our local understanding and knowledge.

8. Can you give a specific example of where in the Middle East it has been difficult to carry Maktoob.com, and how you were able to work with that country to have Maktoob.com up and running there?

Countries of the region differ in terms of conservatism and liberalism. For example Saudi society could be considered more conservative than others and we have to be careful for example when we show banner advertising to make sure the banners don’t contain any graphics that could be considered not acceptable in Saudi. These same banners could be acceptable in Dubai for example so we have to sometime localize the site in terms of content and presentation depending on the country.

Maktoob is available in all Arab countries as Internet is already available everywhere.

8. What role will you and your colleague Ahmed Nassef play in the company now?

Ahmed will now become VP and head of Yahoo! Middle East and Africa.

9. What is the Jabbar Internet Group? What services do you provide to Arabic-language users?

Maktoob Group was made of several other companies other than maktoob.com. Yahoo chose to buy maktoob.com so we formed a new group called Jabbar Internet Group (jabbar.com) that has several interesting businesses. Souq.com is the Arab World’s Ebay if you like, cashu.com the Arab World’s Paypal, Araby.com the first Arabic search engine, ikoo.com the Arab World’s advertising network and Tahadi.com the Arab Worlds online games provider.

10. What’s next for the Jabbar Internet Group? What’s next for you?

I will be joining Jabbar Internet Group as chairman and CEO. We are very excited and think this business can create new success stories for the Arab World in ecommerce and other areas.

11. What’s your best advice for someone looking to make a career move to the Internet sector? What life advice do you live by?

Just do it. This is my advice to entrepreneurs in the region. You have an idea, go for it and risk. Don’t worry about failing because without failure you will not succeed. Its better to try and fail than to fail to try. The Arab world needs entrepreneurs because they are job creators and we have a long way to create jobs for our population and this will only work by investing in the brain power and talent of the Arab people and not in real estate projects.

12. Who is one person you would like to meet that you haven’t already met?

Difficult question. In technology, probably Steve Jobs and in politics, probably Mandela.

13. What are some of your hobbies? Do you like to play sports? If so, who’s your favorite player, and your favorite team?

I enjoy soccer and tennis. I used to play much more but the Internet has taken me away. I guess that’s one downside of the Internet.

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Author can be reached at rima.abdelkader@gmail.com and via Twitter @rimakader.

Source: http://www.dinarstandard.com/management/MaktoobCEO100509.html

Yahoo's taskmaster

Carol Bartz is shrewd, strong-minded, blunt, and disciplined. But can this no-nonsense tech veteran come up with a plan to save Yahoo? More

Yahoo's taskmaster

Carol Bartz is shrewd, strong-minded, blunt, and disciplined. (Don't even think about leaking company information!) But can this no-nonsense tech veteran come up with a plan to save Yahoo?

By Jon Fortt, senior writer

April 16, 2009: 4:40 AM ET

Bartz transformed Autodesk. Investors hope she can do the same at Yahoo.

Founder Yang spurned Microsofts $45 billion offer to buy Yahoo. The company's market value today is about $18 billion.

(Fortune Magazine) -- Carol Bartz wasn't interested when Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang first approached her about rescuing the company he'd created at Stanford University 15 years ago. As she drove to his home in Los Altos Hills one day last December, she was prepared to be polite and maybe offer some advice. Bartz, who had retired in 2006 from design-software maker Autodesk, didn't need a new gig, and she certainly wasn't looking to play savior to a company she figured needed a CEO with media-industry chops - not her specialty.

Out of respect for Yang, though, she found herself in his living room, asking him to draw her an organizational chart. "It was like a Catholic school kid diagramming a sentence," she later told business partners. Lines crisscrossed everywhere, with no clear system of accountability. By the time he finished, the hooks were in. "I got it," she told Yang. "What you need is a manager."

That's exactly what Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) got when it hired Bartz, 60, as CEO in January. She is likable yet hard-charging, given to salty language, and always brutally candid. (In March she told a questioner at a Morgan Stanley conference that she uses Google's online maps because they're better than Yahoo's.) Bartz is also a known quantity in Silicon Valley circles: a seasoned executive who understands technology, is skeptical of the kinds of juvenile-sounding job titles that proliferate at Yahoo (Yang remains Chief Yahoo, for example), and thrives under pressure.

Perhaps most important to the Yahoo board, she has shown she can jump-start ailing companies. During her 14-year watch at Autodesk (ADSK), she delivered compounded annual sales growth of 13%, and the stock price climbed more than eightfold.

Bartz's celebrated management skills are going to be put to the test: Once the wunderkind of the web, Yahoo has floundered as the likes of Google, Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500), Facebook, and Twitter have redefined online communication and commerce - and have grabbed much of the buzz along the way. Marketers have stopped pouring money into Yahoo in favor of Google's more pointed, search-driven ad platform as well as a passel of specialty sites such as Glam.com and Break.com. Last year Yahoo's revenue rose an anemic 3% to $7.2 billion; by contrast the company increased annual sales 47% in 2005. Many investors and analysts believe that Yahoo, despite spurning a $45 billion buyout bid from Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) in 2008, ultimately will be acquired or stripped of its most valuable parts.

Bad as things are, though, Yahoo remains one of the most popular online destinations, and users spend more time on Yahoo sites than on any other major web property, including Google (GOOG, Fortune 500). Bartz has the opportunity to harness that popularity to get the business growing again. But first she'll have to come up with a strong vision for Yahoo, a mission that seems at odds with her reputation as a taskmaster and disciplinarian. Is Yahoo a media company, selling advertisers access to its 562 million worldwide unique visitors? Is it a technology conglomerate that builds and delivers applications and services over the web? Or is it perhaps something else altogether?

There's little question that Bartz can make tough, unsentimental choices about which assets and people Yahoo should jettison. (She's already well on her way to fixing that messy org chart and reining in its unstructured culture.) But now she must do something much harder: She needs to figure out and explain what she wants Yahoo to be.

***

None of this would be Bartz's problem if she had simply stayed retired. After stepping down from the Autodesk CEO job in 2006, she busied herself volunteering with charities, vacationing in Hawaii, tending her garden in Atherton, Calif., polishing her golf game, and serving on the boards of Autodesk, Cisco, Intel, and NetApp. (She's since left the Autodesk and Intel boards.) The first year, she told friends, was great. The second, good. By late 2008 - well, the retirement thing was getting old. Bartz missed the thrill, and even the stress, of daily business life.

Though she comes off casual, even folksy, in conversation, she has admitted to associates that she's a bit of a crisis junkie. Bill Coleman, a Silicon Valley executive who worked with Bartz two decades ago, recalls taking a trip to Shanghai in November with Bartz and her husband, Bill Marr. (Bartz and Marr have three children, all adults.) "When my wife asked her how she was doing with the transition, she was like, 'You know, this is much harder than I thought. I like golf - I don't love golf. I like Hawaii - I don't love Hawaii.' You could just tell she was ready for something."

Carol Ann Bartz was born in the summer of 1948 in Winona, Minn., a river town on the Wisconsin border. Bartz's mother died when she was 8, and her father, a mill worker, disciplined his kids with a belt. When she was 12, she and her younger brother moved to Wisconsin to live with their maternal grandmother. In high school Bartz was a drum majorette and a science and math geek, and went on to earn a computer science degree at the University of Wisconsin. She worked her way through college as a cocktail waitress at the Hoffman House supper club, donning a uniform that, she has recalled several times since, included a red miniskirt with black fishnet stockings.

The determination that sprang from those humble beginnings stayed with Bartz as she began her career in the early 1970s, a time when corporate America often treated women with outright hostility. Undeterred, she did programming, sales, and marketing at 3M and Digital Equipment Corp., and eventually moved into upper management at Sun Microsystems, a scrappy young company she joined when it had about 100 employees and $9 million in revenue. Her co-workers quickly recognized her as someone with exacting standards - and a sharp tongue.

Venture capitalist Ray Rothrock recalls being on the receiving end of one such lashing when he was a 28-year-old business development manager at Sun. It was the mid-'80s, long before Silicon Valley's casual culture had solidified, and Rothrock had come to work without a tie. Bartz spotted Rothrock's attire and lit into him. "Ray Rothrock!" she snapped, loud enough for the entire department to hear over their cubicles. "You go home, and you put on your coat and your tie. I don't ever want to see you back here again not prepared to meet any customer who walks in that door." It was embarrassing, and effective - from that day forward, he says, everyone came prepared to do business at a moment's notice.

As CEO of Autodesk, she managed to succeed despite odds that were farcically stacked against her. When she arrived in 1992, sales growth had slowed and profits had fallen. She had to deal with a founder, John Walker, who had a penchant for sniping at the company's management, and with a band of programmers who bristled at her top-down style. As if that weren't enough, on her second day on the job she discovered she had breast cancer. Bartz had a radical mastectomy, made business calls from her hospital bed, and returned to work just four weeks later instead of the recommended six, a decision she has since said other women shouldn't emulate. "I didn't want people saying, 'There - women finally get to be CEOs and look what happens,'" she told the New York Times.

Eventually she silenced any doubters. Bartz transformed Autodesk through a series of smart acquisitions and by encouraging new product development. Autodesk's software and applications became must-have tools for designers and manufacturers alike, thanks to Bartz's insistence that the company methodically roll out new features based on customer feedback. Peers noticed. "Sometimes you get tech industry leaders who are either really great on making money or really great on technology but can't turn it into a great business," says Ann Livermore, a longtime Silicon Valley executive who leads enterprise technology at Hewlett-Packard. "Carol is very balanced between the two."

***

There's plenty for Bartz to tackle at Yahoo, starting with sprawl. David Filo and Jerry Yang's directory of websites weathered the dotcom bust, only to create bigger problems for itself. During a breakneck period of growth between 2003 and 2005, Yahoo expanded into areas such as online dating and job listings, while gobbling up Internet companies, including one called Overture that was the first to figure out a way for advertisers to pay for placement adjacent to online searches. But while Yahoo management was distracted by dealmaking and executive infighting, a crosstown rival, Google, emerged with an entire business essentially built around a technology similar to Overture's.

Google perfected paid search and eventually moved into new areas, such as online applications and maps. Yahoo, meanwhile, lurched from one strategy to the next: Under former CEO Terry Semel, a Hollywood veteran, the company tried to reinvent itself as a digital-media company, complete with original web content and an office in Santa Monica. Semel resigned in June 2007, and Yang stepped in as CEO. His big idea: to seize the lead from Google in search advertising. But Yang's reign, too, had an ignominious end. He was slow to consolidate redundant businesses (two photo sharing properties, multiple social-media sites) and failed to explain the strategy behind his Get Google objective. Sensing chaos at Yahoo, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made the $45 billion bid for his rival, which Yang turned down, much to the dismay of investors. (Yahoo's market cap is about $18 billion today.)

Bartz has brought some much-needed decisiveness and order. She blew up Yang's confusing management structure and tried to impose rules. (She told employees she would "drop-kick to fucking Mars" anyone who disclosed unauthorized company information, a comment that was immediately leaked to the press and blogs.) And she is doing away with "abandoned products floating like debris in space" - Bartz's term of art for ideas that launched in good times, failed to impress, then limped along for years. Properties that fit the description end up on her imaginary Wall of Shame, a list of misfits that a strategy team will save, sell, or scrap. (Online data storage site Yahoo Briefcase and travel tool FareChase, among others, have already landed on the scrapheap.)

She also wants to prevent more space debris from launching in the future. "Yahoo was amateur hour in the past when it comes to product management," she bluntly told business partners last month; groups haphazardly released things without a clear sense of whether customers wanted them. From now on, she has promised, products will arrive on a schedule so that customers can offer feedback, with the best ideas appearing in the next version - a formula that worked well for her at Autodesk.

She's personally soliciting customer comments. Since February, Bartz has been on a listening tour with Yahoo's sales executives, huddling with chief marketing officers, newspaper CEOs, digital ad agency executives - even NBA commissioner David Stern - to find out how Yahoo can get more of their business in a down economy. At a recent series of meetings in New York, she eschewed PowerPoint slides, handed out her business card, took her own notes, and pressed for suggestions on how Yahoo can do better. "When you meet with her, she's very frank. She really doesn't blow smoke," says Nick Beil, CEO of search engine marketing firm Performics, a unit of Publicis Groupe. "I think if she's focused, she can make some pretty big improvements in a short period of time."

One short-term move she likely won't make: selling Yahoo. Bartz has told associates she isn't interested in hawking Yahoo or its search business to Microsoft or anyone else. It isn't that she dreams of overtaking Google, a coup she has privately said is unrealistic. Instead Bartz believes she can use Yahoo's second-place search position to revolutionize online advertising, and in the process restore Yahoo's status as a digital superstar.

If that seems equally unattainable, consider the state of online ads. The rectangular display ads that flash, dance, and wobble everywhere on the web aren't nearly as effective as they should be. The first challenge is targeting. Sites like Yahoo know how to put ads in obvious places - say, a Nissan Altima ad on Yahoo Autos, or an E*Trade ad on Yahoo Finance.

Ideally, though, car shoppers and investors would see those ads everywhere on Yahoo based on who they are, not just what they're doing. If Yahoo could find a way to deliver a luxury car ad to a high-income person in the market for a new vehicle while she's checking her e-mail, formerly low-rent ad space on Yahoo Mail could suddenly become valuable real estate. Similarly, advertisers might be willing to spend more on sites that can deliver a payoff: a store visit, a test drive, or a sale - outcomes that Yahoo today tracks poorly, if at all. Bartz is "going to be pushing her staff to think up ways that can be done," says Rob Norman, CEO of WPP's ad-buying giant, GroupM. "It's a matter of finding the measurable thing against which they can sell."

Not surprisingly, every other Internet site is deploying its best and brightest to come up with better ways to serve Madison Avenue. Facebook, for example, hopes to sell ads that target consumers based on user-generated content. Microsoft is getting set to unveil a new-and-improved search engine. It falls to Bartz to explain to advertisers (and employees and investors) what ultimately will distinguish the company from these competitors and others.

She's fallen short thus far, telling people in meetings that Yahoo is a "starting point on the web" that strives to "deliver 'wow' experiences." The rap sounds quite a bit like the script recited by executives of companies such as AOL (a unit of Fortune's parent, Time Warner), InfoSpace, and other web disappointments. Bartz needs to come up with a compelling plan - and a better way of explaining it - if she doesn't want Yahoo relegated to also-ran status.

http://money.cnn.com/2009/04/15/technology/fortt_yahoo.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2009041604