Yesterday I had my sixty minutes in front of the Darden MBA students, University of Virginia.
No blackboard, no tick-boxes: just me, my imaginary “Marrakech-Safi” hoodie and the urge to tell them,
“Hi, entrepreneurship here doesn’t wear a tie, it wears babouches.”
I told them about Amine from Tidar. 10 k USD in funding, one laptop, two co-founders, zero screwdrivers.
Result: the kernel of a state-wide start-up “Pass Jeunes”, then a ticketing platform now posting revenues in the millions of dollars. I watched their eyes widen: less than the price of an iPhone 17 to hatch a business that outruns the GDP of an entire village. Frugality level 100; forget the folklore of “you need to raise 5 M to take off”.
Next I dropped the figure that still makes me go “wow” even though I lived it:
7 000 beneficiaries since EBF was born, with one third financed—yes, more than one third delivered.
2 400 times someone said “I have an idea” and we answered “go on, test it, don’t over-think it, we’re here”.
2 400 times a dream in beta mode, not in PowerPoint mode.
And the humility lesson I freely handed to the Dardenites: the 2019 visit to EBF by the Medtronic guys.
They arrived, cardiac implants in their luggage, Six-Sigma processes, and found themselves inside an old Sidi Ghanem textile mill breathing creativity dust. I explained our KPIs, they nodded, then one engineer said: “At our place a project needs five years to see daylight; here you do it in five months—how?” I had the perfectly off-beat answer:
“We don’t have time to wait, we only have time to try.” Frugality at its tightest.
Their slap, my slap, everyone stayed humble.
Of course I mentioned the CCI—Creative & Cultural Industries—our regional joker.
With Marrakech light we wouldn’t just produce art, we’d export creative energy.
Digital, cinema, design, video-games, fashion, Craft 3.0: the future is written here between two calligraphy tags and a Tik-Tok shoot.
And women? A question asked with barely disguised awkwardness. I answered that they are a key pillar of our support programmes. Not by quota, by design. We decreed that “impact” is feminine. KPIs in feminine mode: less testosterone, more resilience. Laughter in the room, but it’s fact-checked.
Then the question that makes my black Japanese shoes tremble: “What’s the dream?”. I felt Zhuangzi’s butterfly wake up in my throat. I replied: “I no longer know whether I’m the incubator dreaming of being a butterfly, or the butterfly dreaming of being an incubator. Ask me that question every morning, let’s keep the transformation rolling.” Silence, then a big smile. I think we shared the same dream for sixty minutes.
So thank you.
Thank you to my philosophy teachers who taught me to doubt, therefore to pivot.
Thank you to my partners who taught me to count, therefore to survive.
Thank you to friend-partners, tutors of my project-tree: you prune, I grow, sometimes the reverse.
Thank you even to those who taught me to un-learn: false good ideas, oversized egos, over-filled slides.
Thank you to the 7 000 dreams that allow me to dream bigger, faster, more babouches.
And thank you, Darden MBAs, for taking notes from a university survivor and humble entrepreneur from Marigha.
Between Zhuangzi and me there must be a difference;
yesterday, for one hour, it was simply called “sharing”.
> “Once I dreamt I was a butterfly, and now I no longer know whether I am Zhuangzi who dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming it is Zhuangzi.”
