Ibrahim Ouassari: MolenGeek, the School of His Dreams to Change the World

For this third interview, we cast anchor in the Mediterranean to discover the story of Ibrahim Ouassari, the creator of MolenGeek, a “space of ideation, training and business creation” financed by Samsung and Google, among other prominent investors. On his return from Seoul, where he traveled with the Belgian royal couple on a state visit, I had the opportunity to meet and exchange with Ibrahim. This is the story of the journey of this extraordinary North African entrepreneur.

The least we can way about Ibrahim Ouassari is that this entrepreneur did not follow the path of the average employee. Ouassari, well into his thirties now, was born and raised in a Moroccan family in Molenbeek, one of the poorest districts of the Belgian capital, just 50 meters away from the place where, in 2015, he would launch MolenGeek, his tech incubator. While a brilliant student during primary school, the transition into secondary school was a real game-changer: he proved unable to complete his second year, failing to motivate himself to study subjects which, for him, did not make much sense. Given his socio-cultural background, some might assume that the teenager lacked support from his family or that his parents, lost in a new linguistic landscape, had some difficulty equipping him with the tools necessary to his integration. However these clichés are miles away from the reality in which Ibrahim was evolving at the time: “I am the penultimate child in a family of eight,” he says. “I have a big brother who is a judge, two other brothers who are engineers, my sister is a graduate of the University of Cologne. So I had role models at home. We are a family of brains. I, however, followed my own path. The school system was not for me. “

Ibrahim cannot explain this sudden change in behavior. Yet, while listening to him talk about his experience in school, one thing is clear: from an early age, he was determined not to remain there. “I was wondering about the why and how. Why do I have to learn this? Where am I going to go with that? Even if I have a degree, is it worth so many sacrifices? (…) When I look back on those days, I can really say that I was suffering from being there. I saw no sense in what we were doing. The teachers did not inspire me. I did not want to be like them. “

Weary of the successive failures of his son, Ibrahim’s father came to accept the obvious: the boy would not follow the footsteps of his elders. He therefore encouraged him to try out several disciplines to find his way: “I tried out everything. I did horticulture, hairdressing, electricity, mechanics, welding, painting. Really ! I did painting. There is a painting school. (…) That’s ridiculous, isn’t it ? How can students be taught 8 hours a day to paint a wall? Let’s be serious for a second ! At one point, I did so many sections that I ended up in nurseries for adults. It was rubbish! “

At the same time, Ouassari was training as a street educator. At the age of 18, he dropped out of school and found a job as an educator in a youth club in Molenbeek. He served there for two years, entertaining a group of teenagers in difficulty during days out at the bowling club, the cinema or the seaside. At age 20, however, he resigned: “This job did not make any sense, “he said. “I would take these kids and spend some time with them in the Ardennes and all, but the thing is that when we came back from these activities, we were back in the same quagmire. I had occupied them for a weekend at the seaside or a night at the movies but nothing was changing in their lives. So it was a bit like Don Quixote fighting the mills: it was useless.”

He subsequently started working as a temporary worker in a computer cables company. There he befriended a colleague who introduced him to the wonderful world of free music downloads on the internet. His friend would download his favorite US rap songs. Quickly, however, Ibrahim’s requests were no longer manageable: “He was more into techno music. So I was using all his bandwidth and then he told me he would explain me how to do it myself. So I went to buy a computer and got an internet connection. I had a problem installing the software and did not dare to call him because it was late. On Yahoo (there was no Google at the time), I started looking for a solution and I realized that the internet was an incredible source of information with people on the other side of the planet, with the same problems as you, who were ready to help you. I discovered an infinite library, with an infinite number of teachers all over the world who would help each other for nothing. “

Three months later, Ouassari resigned again. But at long last he had found what he was going to do with his life: he would start a career in IT. He began as a freelancer, selling logos, graphic charts, menus for snack bars. With time, his interest in computers, coding and web development grew stronger and later on he became an IT consultant: ” I first joined companies as a help desk. I was helping people with their PC. Little by little, I started to rise in rank (…). Then, I became responsible for the servers of large companies, I knew which application was running on which server, I was managing the exchange of corporate emails. I learned everything on my own, I learned to code and develop.“

When I asked him why he went down this road while he had abandoned all the others, Ibrahim seemed to know his priorities: “They paid me more for IT (laughs)”. However, he quickly resumed his seriousness: ” Working as a street educator has left a huge imprint on me. It was an important part of my life because I felt hurt and helpless. I was 20 years old and nobody listened to me. I did not know how to do anything. If I had kept going, I would have gone crazy. It was like asking me to take 20 50-kg sandbags and move them to the other side of the room and once I’m finished, asking me to put them back to the original spot. With IT, it was different. I was learning, I could meet my clients’ requests and I had a lot of value. (…) I knew that if I left, they would do everything to make me stay because I had important skills for them, I was indispensable. (…) When you drop out of school, you are not used to being treated this way, (…) you often have the impression that you’re not worth anything, that nobody wants you. In IT, they would fight to have me.“

Time passed and in the span of a few years Ouassari found himself at the head of four companies with more than twenty employees. For him, the revenge on life is complete: “These employees, they had the same degrees as my brothers. They were engineers. And I would always tell them: ‘They have the same degrees as you, but they call me boss!’ “

TECHNOLOGIES AS THE BEST WEAPON TO FIGHT AGAINST DISCRIMINATION

Despite the obstacles encountered, Ibrahim has no regrets. On the contrary, his disgruntlement with the education system only strengthened with time. Yet, beyond his personal experience and quest for meaning, Ouassari is also aware of the cul-de-sac that the traditional path represents in a world entirely devoted to new technologies: “I believe that the school system, in the technology sector, does not meet the needs of the job market. I get IT interns here at MolenGeek and I see their level. (…) These graduates leaving the computer schools are not ready to work and be productive. (…) The only advantage is that for a company, the fact that they have a degree, it reassures them about the stability of the person, the fact that they can continue with them over time, that the person is reliable (…).” And Ouasari is not the only one to have come down to this alarming conclusion: ” I also have a lot of young people who come [to MolenGeek] and who dropped out of uni and their computer science degrees after coming here. Because they understand that everything they have learned and used, they have learned it by themselves. Why go to school then? Especially since these guys have the end goal to be independent in the long run, to have their own company. What is this degree worth then? So instead of wasting 8 hours a day at school, they focus on what they want to learn and what is needed on the market. “

For Ouassari, technologies, besides being essential to our current way of life, are also a world in which each one of us, whatever their race, their ethnic group, their socio-cultural background or the color of their passport, can hope to start on an equal footing with their competitors: “The technology market goes so fast that what you learned two years ago is not used anymore. You’re already on something else. In that game, we’re all the same because you don’t know anything about what’s happening now, like the guy who has no degree. “

IBRAHIM AND THE SCHOOL OF HIS DREAMS

By creating MolenGeek, Ouassari’s mission lies in making IT and digital skills royal paths paved for all, from the engineer to the kid who dropped out of school without a degree. To define the very idea of MolenGeek, Ouassari refers to his sister. Having come to visit the incubator with their father two months earlier, she instantly understood what her brother had managed to create through this ecosystem: “Actually what you have done here is the school of yours dreams. The school you dreamed of having when you were young,” she told him. A gigantic smile on his lips, Ouassari nodded vividly: “That’s right. This is the school I would have dreamed of having as a kid. A school where you come whenever you want, during the night or the day, where you go to to work but without pressure. There is no constraint, you don’t get up when the principal comes and everybody’s there for the same purpose: to evolve together, in a collaborative spirit. So, unconsciously, yes, I have created the school of my dreams. “

Asked about the inaction of politicians in neighborhoods with large populations of immigrants, Ouassari’s reply is equally astounding: “It’s because they’re not in a wheelchair“. Silence. “You can be the Equalities Minister but you won’t be affected like a real disabled person. You for instance, you have come here and I can ask you about the height of the sidewalks, you will be unable to give me an answer. It’s not important to you because you’re walking on both your legs. So you cannot blame them because they are not in a wheelchair. It’s human. I on the other hand was in a wheelchair. I was a kid born and raised in Molenbeek, who dropped out of school, who faced discrimination, racism, injustice, the system and identity problems. I was confronted with this all and I know that there is only one person who has lived through this that can create a project that makes so much sense in a neighborhood like this one.“

Ibrahim also acknowledges that politicians have tried to find solutions that, if not pragmatic, were at least … political: “When your boat is sinking, you don’t need a bucket to empty the water, you need to plug the holes first. We were given lots of buckets but it was useless“. Ouassari, entrepreneur during the day and historian of his neighborhood at night, then started telling the genesis of the manufacture of these political buckets: ” In the 1990s, there were serious riots following the death of a man under police beatings. Since then, the only answer the state has found is to pour millions in Molenbeek. How? By creating youth clubs, parks, football fields and many other [occupational] activities. (…) I honestly think that youth clubs are necessary up until 15 or 16 years of age. After, the youth have other expectations. (…) [At that age], you need to start having prospects, to have opportunities. You need to have money to buy your cigarettes for example, to have money to go for a drink in the city center. These are expectations that the youth club can no longer meet. (…) If I became an educator at 16, it’s not for nothing. (…) I needed money (…) I thought, if it’s about spending time with my friends, better yet to be paid to do it! It was almost an entrepreneurial spirit. But you cannot at the same time make politicians 100% accountable without partially holding accountable the community that suffer without raising their voice. (…) Now that I know this world of politics a little better, [I can say] they do not have a lot of projects that make sense for the youth who have dropped out of school to support. “

Numerous associations have been established in Molenbeek over the last thirty years. However, most of them are often related to leisure activities or serve as tutoring schools. And, although these services are indispensable to the youth, they remain in the field of occupational or school activities. But when the youth do not want to continue their studies and are looking for opportunities and practical opportunities to make a living, what is left?

WHEN THE YOUTH DO NOT WANT TO GO TO SCHOOL, WHAT IS LEFT?

It is by attempting to answer this question that the genesis of the MolenGeek project began. The phenomenal success of the Belgian-Moroccan entrepreneur quickly made him a model to follow in the neighborhood: “I found myself in schools explaining to teens that they had to continue to go to school … Me! I found myself having to answer kids who asked me questions about how I made a living. They asked me what university studies you had to do to be like me. I told them they had to do IT but also learn by themselves to stay up to date. There were also a lot of kids in poorer schools that I could see willing to quit altogether, I could see something was wrong. They would tell me that they were screwed. That’s what they said. They were screwed. And MolenGeek comes from this need to prove to them, those who thought they were screwed or to others, that technology is sheer bluff, it is super accessible. It has been marketed with the big names in tech, with big universities. In reality, it’s bullshit. If you’re interested, we have a 6-month training. In 6 months, you become a full stack developer. We have a 93% success rate.“

The idea made its way and, as usual, Ibrahim left the big speeches aside and took action. Ouassari had made up his mind: he would create a tech incubator, an ecosystem bringing together individuals with different profiles, from the computer science graduate to the school drop-out, around common interests: technology, innovation and entrepreneurship. In May 2015, Ibrahim launched MolenGeek as a “start-up weekend”. Several events were organized and tech projects developed. Ibrahim and his team followed up on the relevant digital projects that had come out of it for three hours a week. However he knew that this was not enough. The very man a Belgian minister once dubbed “the anomaly” always wants more. He sees bigger, further, more relevant. In partnership with another entrepreneur, Julie Foulon, Ibrahim decided to launch a second event in November of the same year. Then the Paris attacks, to which his project would irremediably be associated in the international press, happened. The initiative was postponed until the end of January 2016. The US ambassador and Alexander De Croo (then Minister of the Digital Agenda) attended the event. The Minister was particularly enthusiastic and encouraged Ibrahim and his team to pursue the initiative. With the media fallout, Ibrahim grew more confident in the importance of the project. He bought a 60 m2 premises and started doing it up out of his own money. MolenGeek finally opened in March 2016 and rapidly attracted government funding as well as major sponsors’, including Samsung and Google.

The success was such that soon the 60 m2 proved too small. Ouassari began major works in the summer of 2016. The new enlarged premises were inaugurated in January 2017. Two months later the first coding school, an intensive 6-month training, was launched. A second edition was offered in June. Six more would follow in 2018. In 2019, Ouassari is expecting a dozen trainings. The machine has clearly run riot. So much so that Molenbeek has become too small to accommodate the ambition of the project. Ouassari is planning to open new incubators in Schaerbeek, Laeken but also Borgerhout in Antwerp and another one in Amsterdam. This ecosystem that brings together students, entrepreneurs, consultants has even become a brand that exports itself: in December 2018, Ibrahim went to Italy to inaugurate a first ecosystem in the city of Padua.

Today, MolenGeek has become synonymous with technological excellence. The vision of the entrepreneur, however, is not to propose a new Silicon Valley in the hope of finding the new Google. The business model of the incubator is quite different: “Our start-ups focus on monetization. You have to make money fast. The profiles we have here do not have the 3 F’s: “family, friends and fools”, those people who invest first in your company. So they have to make money with their start-up. Once they make money, the resulting balance sheet will make sure they will have investors if needed. We have start-ups that have taken off as Molenbike, a cargo delivery company (…) We want our teams to earn money to pay wages, buy their house. Create meaning. If we have a unicorn, it’s great, we’re happy but if we don’t, it doesn’t matter. We want the majority to make a living with their activity. That’s what matters to me.“

Meaning, Ibrahim Ouassari has created a lot of it, for him but also for others, without restriction of class or origin. Yet he does not seem to be willing to stop there. Asked about his ambitions and projects for the future, the entrepreneur, despite his many successes, appears insatiable: “Change the world. I know it’s a little more megalomaniac but that’s the idea. Impact this world, know that my being here has served a purpose. I’m still breathing so I can do more. When I see something that does not work well, I do everything to make it work better. The future of the world looks gloomy. There are fewer and fewer jobs, there are more and more unemployed people with no prospects, without any opportunity, the prices are going crazy, we bring in a qualified immigration instead of training our own people. There are plenty of inconsistencies like these. I am afraid for my children. What are we going to leave them? A polluted planet where it is easier to fly than using the train, where the ultimate purpose of working will soon be to survive and not live.”

This version of the world 3.0, Ibrahim does not want. Through MolenGeek and the ever increasing derivatives that the project seems to be counting, this innovator of a new kind appears determined to change the world and the way individuals create their place in the virtual and real worlds. And, given what he has already accomplished, it’s a safe bet he will not fail to make it happen.