Jihad Kawas

Wamda writes that in 2012 he won his first competition at the MITMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It received its charter from Massachusetts in 1861, admitted its first students in 1865 and moved from Boston to its present campus in 1916. As of October 2025 it had 11,816 students, and it counts 106 Nobel laureates among members of its community.Open the full entry social innovation camp, where he met Dani Arnaout, with whom he has worked ever since.⁠[1]

Two accounts differ on how old he was at his first TEDx talk: Entrepreneur Middle East writes that he gave his first TEDx talk in 2012, at the age of 15, about how he built his skills without fully committing to school, while Wamda writes that he was already a speaker at TEDxBeirut at 14.⁠[2][1]

Arabian Business writes that in late 2013 he co-founded Saily in Beirut with Dany Arnaout, a fellow Lebanese, describing it as the first location-based online marketplace for secondhand goods and as initially aimed at customers in the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry; he called Arnaout the best coder he had ever met. Entrepreneur Middle East spells the co-founder’s name Dani Arnaout and describes him as Kawas’s friend and programming mentor, with whom he launched Saily. The Lebanese Examiner writes that he founded Saily in 2013, at 16, as a social marketplace for buying and selling items on mobile devices.⁠[3][2][4]

In his LebNet interview he said that the idea of Saily began growing in his mind at 16; the name comes from “garage sale-ing,” and the aim was to bring an Instagram-like experience to buying and selling secondhand goods online. Entrepreneur Middle East writes that he calls himself “a second-hand freak,” and that his big break came one year after his first TEDx talk, when he was inspired by the sharing economy and by AirbnbAirbnbAirbnb is a travel platform for booking stays, experiences, and services, co-founded by Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk and headquartered in San Francisco, United States; its Class A common stock trades on Nasdaq under the symbol ABNB. The business began with hosting guests in the founders’ home in 2007, then joined YC’s Winter 2009 batch, and gradually expanded into local experiences, services, and boutique hotels.Open the full entry founder Brian CheskyBrian CheskyBrian Chesky is an American entrepreneur who is the co-founder, chief executive officer, and chairman of the board of the travel and lodging platform Airbnb. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, in 2007 he and Joe Gebbia rented out airbeds in their San Francisco apartment to their first guests, and in 2008 he co-founded Airbnb with Nathan Blecharczyk, leading the company through Y Combinator, the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, and its December 2020 initial public offering.Open the full entry.⁠[5][2]

The Thiel Foundation’s 2015 announcement and Wamda both describe Saily as a local marketplace where neighbors buy, sell and swap secondhand products quickly and seamlessly from their mobile phones, with the mission of helping to build neighborhoods that do not let anything go to waste.⁠[6][1]

Wamda writes that in 2014 his team took second place and $10,000 at the MIT entrepreneurship forum and placed first at StartUp Weekend in Saida, South Lebanon, where he had launched Saily; he also won tickets to TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry New York, a trip that widened his view of the startup world and made him more confident in the direction he had chosen.⁠[1]

A Mother’s Day article published by Wamda on March 19, 2015 carries remarks he sent from Silicon Valley while he was closing Saily’s seed round; he said that when he wanted to skip a month of high school to go to Silicon Valley and learn from established figures there, his mother funded him.⁠[7]

Accounts differ on how long he left school for San Francisco. Entrepreneur Middle East quotes him as saying that he started skipping high school every month to travel to San Francisco and learn from great people, and writes that there he met Will Bunker, founder and partner of the San Francisco-based accelerators GrowthX, who later became an investor. Arabian Business writes that his parents let him skip school for three weeks to travel to San Francisco, where he raised money for Saily and met important people.⁠[2][3]

On June 5, 2015, the Thiel Foundation announced its 2015 class of Thiel Fellows, and he was among them. The announcement gives him as 17, from Beirut, Lebanon, working in the sharing economy as founder and CEO of Saily, a local secondhand marketplace app.⁠[6]

Wamda wrote on June 15, 2015 that the 18-year-old was wrapping up his final year of high school and was one of 20 fellows chosen from a pool of 2,800 applicants; fellows receive $100,000 and mentorship from the Thiel Foundation’s network of founders, investors and scientists, on condition that they skip or stop college during the two-year program to work on their startups. Wamda called him Lebanon’s youngest CEO. Blog Baladi gave his age as 17 on June 8, 2015, and wrote that after the two years he might start his own company, sell his idea or return to college. The Lebanese Examiner wrote on June 12 that the 18-year-old had chosen to skip college to focus on his businesses.⁠[1][8][4]

Several accounts call him a “first” in the program, in different terms: Entrepreneur Middle East writes that he was the first Thiel Fellow from the MENA region and one of 20 fellows chosen from a record 2,800 applicants; Arabian Business writes that he was selected from 2,800 applicants as one of 19 Thiel Fellows and was the first Arab and the first non-European, non-American Thiel Fellow; he himself said in his LebNet interview that he was the first non-European and non-American to get the funding, chosen from 3,000 applicants together with 19 other entrepreneurs under 22. Arabian Business’s “100 under 40” list entry says he was one of 20 selected from over 3,000 applicants.⁠[2][3][5][9]

Wamda writes that he first heard of the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry in New York while watching the television series Silicon Valley, in which a tech billionaire offers students $100,000 to drop out, and that he and his co-founder laughed, thinking it was a joke; a few months later, at AppleAppleApple is a public technology company founded in 1976 and headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Its business includes the iPhone, Mac, iPad, wearables, and services such as digital content, payments, and cloud storage. The company builds its product system through in-house hardware, operating systems, and services.Open the full entry’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), he met an actual Thiel Fellow and realized that the program was real, and he said he applied because he wanted to surround himself with smarter people and get better at what he does. In his LebNet interview he also said that he learned of the program from Silicon Valley, found out it was real when he mentioned it at WWDC and someone confirmed it, and then applied quickly. Blog Baladi writes that while attending WWDC at the Moscone Center in San Francisco he took a selfie with Apple CEO Tim Cook, who gave him a thumbs-up and advised him to keep working on it.⁠[1][5][8]

He said in the Wamda article that the first thing he would do with the $100,000 was fly back to San Francisco for a couple of months to keep learning and improving Saily. He named Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, whom he had never met, as the most influential “godfather” of his decisions; he also said that he learns more from failure than from success, and that “I’ve always wanted to build the world I live in, instead of just living in it.”⁠[1]

Arabian Business writes that Saily was made available to American users in 2015, and that the company nearly closed after failing to attract customers until a man in TexasTexasTexas is a U.S. state in the south-central United States, with its capital at Austin and its largest city Houston. It was admitted to the Union on December 29, 1845, as the 28th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 29,145,505 residents.Open the full entry downloaded the app and shared it within his community. Entrepreneur Middle East recounted the story on October 5, 2015: during the private beta, a user in Austin, Texas, suddenly listed 12 items and shared all of them on social media; within a week about 50 people from Austin had joined Saily, and the team thanked him by sending him a US$50 iTunes gift card. He said that over the following six months Saily grew from zero to 800 new users every day.⁠[3][2]

Entrepreneur Middle East described him at the time as 18 years old, someone who should have been on his way to college with his classmates but had opted for the Thiel Fellowship, and who was about to move to San Francisco to keep running Saily.⁠[2]

On June 12, 2016, LebNet published an interview with him conducted by Michelle Tager. Its introduction states that he had recently raised his seed round in the United States, after having already secured Wamda, MEVP and angel funds, and that he was looking to add senior talent in Lebanon and San Francisco.⁠[5]

In the interview he said that Saily had 300,000 registered users in the United States without any marketing costs and with a team of five; growth was organic, the company focused on the United States, and plans were to expand to the MENA region “one day”; he also said that signing up on Saily was 17 times faster than on eBayeBayeBay Inc. is an online marketplace company headquartered in San Jose, California, United States, founded in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar; it started out with person-to-person online auctions and listed on Nasdaq in 1998. As of the end of 2025, it had 135 million active buyers, and its platform’s gross merchandise volume in 2025 was nearly $80 billion.Open the full entry. At one of LebNet’s Tech Mixers he met a person from GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry, who later helped him develop the Android version of his app. He said he was based in San Francisco and travelled very often to Beirut.⁠[5]

In the same interview he said that after being featured on national television and on the “YahooYahooYahoo is an internet brand founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in 1994, with email, search, news, finance, sports, and advertising businesses. It developed from a web directory into a portal, underwent major acquisitions and security incidents, and sold its operating business in 2017, when the original listed company became Altaba. Apollo-managed funds acquired the brand’s operating business in 2021. Yahoo launched the AI answer service Scout in 2026.Open the full entry Financial” cover he received more than 300 racist comments about his name.⁠[5]

On August 7, 2016, Arabian Business named him, at 19, its “Entrepreneur of the Week,” writing that he had won several startup competitions and been awarded for his entrepreneurial talent across the MENA region; Saily was then available on iOS and Android, had about 300,000 registered users in the United States and was adding about 2,000 new users a day.⁠[3]

Arabian Business’s “100 under 40” list entry describes him as the son of small business owners. In his LebNet interview he said that he grew up in Lebanon and went to a small private but highly progressive school in Saida. The Lebanese Examiner wrote in June 2015 that he attended Houssam Eddine Hariri High School in Saida, from which he had recently graduated, while Arabian Business’s list entry says that he graduated from high school in Beirut in the spring of 2015.⁠[9][5][4]

Wamda writes that as a child he wanted to be a painter; his mother said that he “never did things the same way others did,” and a childhood friend, Ali S., said: “If all the doors are shut, Jihad will enter from the window.” In his LebNet interview he said that if he were not an entrepreneur he would be an artist.⁠[1][5]

Accounts differ on when he started programming. Arabian Business writes that he learned to code at 13 and built websites and apps for friends and occasional clients throughout high school, and its list entry says that he founded his first company at 13; the Lebanese Examiner writes that he began exploring the mobile app industry and launching mobile startups at 13. Wamda writes that by 14 he had taught himself to code and built his first mobile application, and Entrepreneur Middle East quotes him as saying that he started programming at 14, building apps and websites “for fun and money, but mostly fun.” In his LebNet interview he said that he got his first iPhone at 14 and built his first mobile app that year, and that at 15 he set up a small agency with five older colleagues that programmed apps for sale.⁠[3][9][4][1][2][5]

In Wamda’s Mother’s Day article of March 2015 he called his mother “the best investor,” who “goes all-in every time, and never asks for a return on investments”; she always believed in his decisions and taught him how to convince her that what he was doing was worth it, and she was ready to fund him again; he said: “Whatever I am, whatever I become, is what she made.” Arabian Business quotes him as saying that his best investors, to whom he will never be able to give a return on investment, are his parents, and that his dad always used to tell him: “Make a decision.” In his LebNet interview he named his role models as Steve JobsSteve JobsSteve Jobs (1955–2011) was a technology entrepreneur, Apple co-founder, NeXT founder, and investor and former CEO of Pixar. His career spanned personal computing, digital music, smartphones and animated films, with an emphasis on product design, user experience and multidisciplinary teams.Open the full entry, which he called “the cheesy answer,” and his mother, “the real answer.”⁠[7][3][5]

Wamda writes that two years after his first TEDx talk he was on stage at TEDx again, this time to discuss why schools are not ready for young talent like him, and that he said entrepreneurship had reshaped his life, created opportunities for him and made him better at what he is good at. The Lebanese Examiner wrote on June 12, 2015 that in a TEDx talk in Beirut in February he said: “We should spend less time learning about how things work, and spend more time making things work,” and gave the title of his talk at TEDx Beirut as “Why School is Not Ready for Us.”⁠[1][4]

Looking back on his TEDx talk in his 2016 LebNet interview, he said that it was about how the school system is failing kids; he noted that it takes a year and a half for UK universities to update a college-level course, and said: “Knowledge is there, we only need to have the passion to light up the spark, and ask for it.”⁠[5]

In the 2015 Entrepreneur Middle East article he said that the MENA region lacks visionaries willing to disrupt education or other sectors, and pointed to a reluctance to change, a focus on regional rather than global markets, and a habit of building only after ideas have succeeded elsewhere; he was optimistic about Beirut’s ecosystem, pointing to more startups, more accelerators and more money, but said that most venture capitalists in Lebanon still operate with a real estate mentality. His advice to entrepreneurs was not to compromise on their dreams and to take advice only from people who have done something significant, believe in them and share their vision.⁠[2]

His advice to young entrepreneurs in Wamda in 2015 was to build something meaningful before dropping out, to try to improve the systems they encounter and to question everything; he also said: “Being young is a blessing.”⁠[1]

In his 2016 LebNet interview he said that venture capitalists were missing many opportunities because of legal issues and that Lebanon needed more accelerators for early-stage startups and students; he encouraged developers in Lebanon and the MENA region to apply for the Thiel Fellowship, and advised young Lebanese entrepreneurs to “jump on a plane and come live in Silicon Valley for a bit,” putting the cost at $1,500. He said he hoped LebNet would “break the stereotype that we Lebanese can succeed as individuals,” and said he would love to take part in a LebNet group on Facebook, since LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry groups were not popular with his generation; his dream was that every Lebanese in Silicon Valley would hang a Lebanese flag in their window, and he wished that all Lebanese, mostly the rich, would help change Lebanon by investing in its youth. Asked for the best app, he answered “Saily Inc. of course. SnapchatSnapchatA visual messaging and social app developed by Snap Inc., launched in 2011, with photo and video messaging, Stories, augmented-reality Lenses, Snap Map and Spotlight.Open the full entry”; asked for the best social media, he named Facebook; asked for the best wearable, he answered “I hate wearables.”⁠[5]

Arabian Business included him in its list “100 under 40: The world’s most influential young Arabs.” The list entry calls him a coder and digital entrepreneur, says that he lives in San Francisco, has won global entrepreneurship competitions and has given two TEDx talks, and describes Saily as “Instagram for classified listings,” a photo-focused app that lets nearby buyers and sellers negotiate prices; it says that Saily reached 150,000 users in its first seven months, was then signing up about 1,000 users a day and had generated more than $5 million in sales.⁠[9]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[10]