Rising with Refugees: A Conversation with Patricia Letayf, Cofounder of Five One Labs
Patricia Letayf is the co-founder and Director of Operations of Five One Labs, a startup incubator in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq that has incubated five cohorts of startups since its inception in 2017.
Patricia's main interest is Middle East politics and she has traveled extensively throughout the region for both work and academic research. Prior to Five One Labs, Patricia worked as a Middle East political risk analyst with a focus on Iraq and North Africa for the Dubai office of consultancy Control Risks.
She obtained her Master of Public Administration degree in Economic Development from Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, where she concentrated in economic and political development, and her BA in International Relations and Economics from Tufts University.
Charlotte Ehlers (BT): I noticed you did a lot of private consulting work in MENA (Middle East/North Africa). What inspired you to turn to nonprofit work, and specifically working with the Kurdish refugee population?
Patricia Letayf (PL): Sure! Just to give you some background about where I started off, I was interested in Middle Eastern politics, so I studied International Relations at Tufts. I really liked the idea of using politics to integrate with business.
I actually first traveled to the Kurdistan region in 2011 when I was a student to do research on various political issues and then write about them for publication. But I did want to try my hand at the corporate world. The political risk [in MENA] was something that struck me because it was a way to mix the two things: a way to work with companies who were operating in the Middle East and advise them on how politics impacted their businesses.
In late 2013, there were a number of protests happening in Fallujah in Northern Iraq. By the time 2014 came, Mosul and Fallujah had fallen to ISIS. Basically, I spent most of my time after that focusing on issues relating to ISIS because that's what the clients were most concerned about. When you're operating in such a volatile environment, you want to keep your staff and clients safe.
After a while, I wanted to do something more productive. I decided to go to grad school and study Economic Development, where I received my Master of Public Affairs from Columbia University. I never really envisioned myself working for a non-profit, but I ended up meeting my co-founder Alice there. She came into grad school with the idea of launching a refugee incubator, and the rest is history.
BT: What initial challenges did Five One Labs face when you were just starting?
PL: From a business perspective, the initial challenge was raising funds. We went through a public policy competition at Columbia, and we came in first, so we had the initial seed funding from Colombia which was $15,000, just about enough to register in the US and Iraq.
Most of the challenges we've had relate to the operating environment. Alice pulled me in because she was looking for a Kurdistan expert. The main expertise I had was how to understand local dynamics. We planned to have our first incubator in October of 2017, but the Kurdistan Region held an independence referendum. The federal government retaliated by closing the borders and restricting travel on certain roads, among other things. Alice and Pat, another team member, were in Kurdistan, but I couldn’t get in. A lot of roads were closed so the entrepreneurs couldn't get to our coworking space. People were afraid about the economy, and were hesitant to join a full-time program. We then had an earthquake a few months later. These things cause hiccups in the road, but we've been very fortunate because we've had support from donors and our really amazing team. It's just how you persist in light of all these challenges.
BT: I bet! So could you expand more on the training approach for these young entrepreneurs, especially more on The Lab: Suli?
PL: At our core, we are a startup incubator, so it's a very similar model in that we are providing an intensive, all-around support to our entrepreneurs. Our program is full-time and three months long. What we're looking to do is to take entrepreneurs with an idea and help them turn it into a business, so that by the end, they have their first customers, their first prototypes, they’ve completed a business plan.
The model has several components: training, mentorship, community, and financing. Our training is quite intensive. The curriculum has been written in-house, and we've adapted it to the local context. In regards to mentorship, all of the entrepreneurs are matched with mentors - some local but mostly international so they have access to outside markets. The Lab, which is our coworking space in Sulaimani, is great because we want the entrepreneurs to have a space to work full-time where they can meet other people and have good internet and electricity connections.
The last component is financing. We are a non-profit, so we don't take equity in our startups, but we are really aware of the fact that, once you reach a certain point in your business, you need funding to succeed. We usually give out at least $30,000 in grants at the end of our program in three prizes - $15,000, $10,000, and $5,000. To give you some perspective, $1,000 a month is a good salary in Kurdistan. However, we're looking to increase that amount.
BL: That’s awesome! So, I want to shift over to more cultural things. Since refugees are kind of a marginalized community, not only in the US but pretty much anywhere I looked into, how do the Kurdish refugees overcome the hostility directed towards them in Iraq?
I would say in Kurdistan, it's a very interesting situation. Kurdistan is a safe haven, an autonomous region of Iraq. So what happened during the conflicts is about a quarter of a million Syrians came over the border directly into Kurdistan. Some of those refugees are actually Syrian Kurds, so the local community viewed them with far less suspicion because they’re Kurdish like the locals. So from that perspective, they are able to assimilate.
You also have 1.2 million Iraqi IDPs (internally displaced persons). These are people coming from Mosul, Fallujah, Baghdad, up into the North, mostly Arabs. So because of historical tensions between the Kurdish and Arab community, Kurdish refugees [from Syria] have more rights than Iraqi IDPs. Refugees often have an easier time finding jobs than Iraqi IDPs, even though they're technically from the same country.
Entrepreneurship is color-blind in that sense, for lack of a better term. We haven't seen any problems at all in our programs between all the different communities, and we always have a diversity of people in each cohort. It's not to say that tensions don’t exist on the street. We've just been fortunate enough not to really have that be a problem for us. I think people in our program are more open-minded and willing to collaborate, as otherwise, you would not be a very successful entrepreneur.
BT: So I was really surprised to read that this is so international because you're serving such a niche community. Why does the international community really care about serving these Kurdish entrepreneurs?
PL: One quick thing--the entrepreneurs are not all Kurdish. The program is in Kurdistan, but the community we serve is extraordinarily diverse. We have entrepreneurs from Syria, Kurdistan, from Damascus, or Baghdad, and some are displaced. It's our mission to have a mix of people, not only by gender but also by background.
Our mission is to use entrepreneurship to enable these young people to rebuild their community. When we first started, the conflicts were in full swing, so the response was critical. We had all these displaced individuals looking for support. People have certain perceptions of what a refugee is - you think of a refugee, and you think of poor children in camps, but that's not at all an accurate image of what they are. There are a lot of extraordinary, really smart young people like me and you, college educated but torn from their homes, and they want to be able to rebuild their home countries once these conflicts are over.
“Someone always makes a difference in your life when you’re an entrepreneur. Someone is always there to support you, and this is the role that Five One Labs plays for our entrepreneurs.”
A second point is that - I always say being an entrepreneur is hard. Imagine being an entrepreneur if you are in Iraq. I think that really resonates with a lot of successful entrepreneurs in the US or in the UK or wherever they are. Someone always makes a difference in your life when you're an entrepreneur. Someone is always there to support you, and this is the role that Five One Labs plays for our entrepreneurs.
BT: I wanted to move on to a more personal question. I don't want to speak too much in generalities, but it seems like Iraq holds a lot of negative views, not only towards foreigners, but towards females as well. How do you and the female founders navigate that space?
PL: So Alice and I are obviously two female founders, but we haven't had issues. If anything, Alice and I face more challenges as female founders in the US than Iraq. There was a lot of doubt from certain types of people looking at us. We would go to pitch conferences and some people would say to us, “What are two girls like you doing in a place like that?”
In the Middle East, and more broadly, entrepreneurship is not a traditional path that people take. Normally, people are expected to go into employment, especially government employment in Iraq. Public sector jobs are considered very reliable.
With regards to women, it's a range, like in the US. You have some people who are quite conservative and some who are quite liberal, which is why it's hard to generalize. I think it depends on the family, but there are obstacles they might face. But like I said, we have not had an issue of getting at least 50% women into the program, and we make a concerted effort to recruit women.
Not only do we tailor our advertising towards women, but we also have a program called the Female Founders Fellowship, which is geared towards growth-stage female entrepreneurs. Once you hit that phase where you’re one year into the business, you need a little added support. This program is four months long, and it usually has ten women in it whose businesses have been running for at least six months. We have training work on certain topics that are relevant to them. We change them year by year if women want different topics like financial management, how to be a manager, marketing and sales - it just depends on what their interests are in that given year.
BT: So, as our final question, and taking a step back, what advice would you give to entrepreneurs starting their own nonprofits?
PL: I'd say, number one, you should be passionate and committed. Starting a business can be challenging. The second thing is, make sure you are solving a problem. Nonprofits exist to fill gaps left by the government. A nonprofit’s goal should be that it no longer exists after a number of years because, if that's the case, that means they solved the problem they set out to solve.
Do the research that you need and talk to your user. Nothing is more important than talking to that person you're providing that service to. Try to come up with an innovative solution. There are a lot of organizations that reinvent the wheel. For us, even when we thought about expansion from Iraq to other places, we didn't want to go somewhere where there was another organization that was similar to Five One Labs. If someone is doing it well, we didn't want to come and stick our nose in it.
I would say to build up a really diverse team as well. It's good to have someone on your team who has business expertise. I think a lot of nonprofits are founded by people who study International Affairs or public policy but maybe taking the time to learn a little bit about Excel or Finance, or sales - that's also important. Never underestimate the need to have those skills.