Habib Haddad (born 1980) is a serial entrepreneur and early stage investor. He is currently the president and managing director of the E14 Fund that invests in spin-offs from MIT. Prior to that Habib has spent his career in startups as a founder and early employee. He has been named by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader in 2009 and as a top innovator under 35 (TR35) by the MIT Technology Review. He has also been an activist on various social issues in the Middle East. Haddad's work in the MENA region is credited with playing a key role in strengthening its entrepreneurship ecosystem.

Education

Haddad holds a Bachelor of Computer and Communication Engineering from the American University in Beirut and a master's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California.

Career

Haddad is currently the president and managing director of the E14 Fund that invests in spin-offs from MIT. In 2004, Haddad was a founding engineer at an image based modeling software company Mok3 (now Everyscape) as a venture backed spinoff from MIT CSAIL, where he served until 2005 and joined ATI as a senior software engineer. In 2007, Haddad founded Yamli, that was acquired by Yahoo! in 2012. From 2012 to 2016, he was the founding CEO of Wamda, a platform of programs and networks that aims to accelerate entrepreneurship ecosystems across the MENA region. He also served as a venture partner of Wamda Capital, a growth capital VC fund, with investments in startups like taxi-hailing app Careem and LittleBits.

Activism

In 2006, he founded Relief Lebanon to support relief efforts during the 2006 war in Lebanon. The grass root effort was featured by the "101 Stories to Tell" initiative by the UNDP in February 2009. In 2009, Haddad along with two other Middle East technology entrepreneurs, founded, YallaStartup, a non-governmental organization that aims to foster early stage entrepreneurship and startup creation. It was one of the first support organizations for MENA Entrepreneurs. In 2011 he co-created Alive.in, a website that brought 1000 volunteers to transcribe and translate voicemails from the Egyptian protesters after the government shutdown of the internet. He started the company when Google and Twitter launched a project to allow people to leave a voice mail that will be then put on Twitter, Haddad came up with an idea to crowd source translation of those voices in real time from Arabic to other languages.

Awards

Leadership