Postcards from Elsewhere: Amman, Jordan

Many people do not know that the first Endeavor office in the Middle East was in Jordan.

And we were the first for good reason: we produced some of the region’s most relevant exits. Maktoob started as a webmail service and grew to become the main destination for 16 million Arabic speakers on the internet. When it was acquired by Yahoo in 2009 for more than $100M, all eyes were on Jordan. The exit was a landmark deal for the Middle East, proving that technology companies from the region could attract global attention. Suddenly, being “ex-Maktoob” on LinkedIn meant being part of a highly regarded club, maybe even stronger than what ex-Google or ex-Apple mean today.

Then, Souq — a spin-off of Maktoob that Yahoo left behind — was acquired by Amazon for approximately $680M in 2017. Later came one of the biggest wins in gaming for the MENA region, when Jawaker, founded by two Endeavor Entrepreneurs who also founded ZenHR, sold to Stillfront for $200M+. Jordanians, to this day, are well respected as innovators and entrepreneurs because of this head start.

The thing is, we got outpaced by Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries with deeper pockets. Now with AI, Jordanian founders are rising to the top again, except where they’re building has changed. That is a rational answer to a small home market of 11 million with geopolitical instability and no oil wealth. Our entrepreneurs go wherever the clients and capital actually are, often headquartered in Saudi Arabia, the UAE or, increasingly, North America and Europe.

Some read this as brain drain, and it certainly comes with a cost. When a company leaves, the jobs and the tax base often leave with it. But I trust the logic these founders are applying, and I’d rather back a Jordanian building something global from New York than talk one into staying small here. They need that kind of ecosystem to thrive as companies and they cannot do it here. 

Our clearest example is Replit, by Endeavor Entrepreneurs (and husband-and-wife co-founders) Amjad Masad and Haya Odeh, a global “vibe-coding” powerhouse valued at $9B and based in Silicon Valley. They went to university in Amman and started their careers here. Having them talk to kids that went through the same path does more good than if they had stayed here and grown less. 

Replit has a lot of Jordanians in their team and just hired a couple of employees in Amman as well. We know that this will grow, and it will grow more if they are part of Endeavor — we’ve already helped form partnerships for their hackathons and open doors to corporate clients locally, in addition to global support through our offices in Japan, the UK, and beyond. Besides, Amjad has invested in at least 10 companies founded by Jordanians that I know of. We see more and more Jordanians getting into Y Combinator and I am positive that his example has motivated institutions like YC to look at Jordanian companies with different eyes. 

Currently, we have six companies in the selection process to become Endeavor Entrepreneurs. Four of them are building in AI. Five of them are diaspora, including a former employee of Endeavor company OpenSooq who, despite opening his company in the US, spends part of his time in Jordan, building a team of 35+ in Amman. To keep these entrepreneurs closer is to keep our ecosystem growing. In the short term, that translates into job creation and tax revenue. In the long term, into a Multiplier Effect of inspiration, mentorship, and investment.

So our position is simple: Support Jordanians wherever they are. There’s just no playbook to find these entrepreneurs, no list to go through. We reach out to communities in New York, San Francisco, London, Riyadh, Dubai, and Toronto. We see a Jordanian-sounding name announced somewhere, we stalk them on LinkedIn. Are they really Jordanian? Lebanese?

We call our network and ask for intros, we organize events abroad when we can. It is harder work on our side with the different time zones and the relationships built over calls instead of coffee, but it’s worth it.

The ambition is to make “ex-Maktoob” the beginning of a much longer future list of ex-Replit, ex-Abwaab, ex-Maqsam, ex-Tarjama, and so on. Wherever these Jordanian companies are built, they give the next generation something to point to with pride.