Mehdi Alaoui and the business of opening doors

A weekend is a generous amount of time to build a prototype and a rather stingy amount of time to build a company. Mehdi Alaoui’s career has increasingly concerned itself with the difference. He began running hackathons through his mobile-software venture ScreenDy. The events brought out people with ideas, technical ability and the willingness to spend hours making something work. Then came the less photogenic questions. Who would buy it? Who would finance the next step? What happened when everybody went home?

In Casablanca, the organisation he founded in 2017, now called LaStartupStation, grew around those questions. It brings young companies into contact with corporations, investors and people who can help them develop. An early result explains the appeal better than an elaborate mission statement: in 2018, LaFactory helped 29 startups obtain purchase orders. Somewhere beyond the presentation, a customer had agreed to pay.

Alaoui’s route to that work passes through mobile applications, competitions, a mentor, business associations and Moroccan television. It is a career with a recurring practical concern: giving people access to something they cannot easily reach alone. At first, that meant tools for building apps. Later, it meant buyers, capital and an audience large enough to include people who had never set foot in an accelerator.

The weekend that needed a Monday

The hackathons began with Microsoft in 2015. They also served a useful purpose for ScreenDy: the team could test its own platform. By late 2017, Alaoui described having organised roughly 50 events over two years, across Morocco, France, Côte d’Ivoire and Jordan. A tool for making software had helped create occasions for people to meet and build it together.

The events brought him into contact with aspiring entrepreneurs. Through Hack & Pitch, the association he founded, he worked on developing that format further. But the time required to become an entrepreneur was much longer than a competition schedule allowed. He put the transition from student to entrepreneur at between two and five years. The accelerator followed from that need for continuity.

“Transformer un étudiant en entrepreneur prend en moyenne entre 2 et 5 ans.”

Mehdi Alaoui, 2019

His estimate was a useful corrective to the stopwatch. A compressed event can make progress visible; the company needs support after the deadline. LaFactory’s work included helping startups find their first orders, an especially consequential task for a business with little history to show a prospective buyer. Twenty-nine purchase orders would be the wrong description of the 2018 result: the reported figure was 29 startups obtaining orders. Keeping the unit straight preserves what the number actually tells us.

Before the smartphone became ordinary

Alaoui had been interested in mobile applications long before the accelerator. While studying in Paris, he met Khalid Tabyaoui in 2001. Tabyaoui became a mentor and later his ScreenDy co-founder. The relationship belongs near the beginning of the story because the introductions and experience available to a founder were already consequential in Alaoui’s own career.

He competed in mobile-development contests, reaching the finals of Siemens Java Mobile Masters in 2002. In 2005, he won a Special Jury Prize on Challengers, the Moroccan television competition. He joined Réseau Entreprendre Maroc as a laureate the following year. His education included a computer-science qualification in Paris and further study at ESIAG and ESSEC. Alongside those credentials came repeated practice in putting an idea before other people.

Media Mobility was among his earlier businesses. ScreenDy followed in 2012, with a platform intended to simplify mobile-app creation. The problem was concrete: developers who could build for the web faced additional complexity when moving into mobile. ScreenDy sought to make that move easier. In 2015, it won the startup track of the MIT Arab Startup Competition. The tools, the competitions and the subsequent hackathons all gave Alaoui experience with the gap between making a product and getting others to adopt it.

What Silicon Valley sent home

In 2018, LaFactory organised a Silicon Valley learning expedition for Attijariwafa bank. Winning startups from the bank’s Smart Up programme travelled with executives. The itinerary brought them into the workplaces of companies including Facebook, Google, Airbnb and Apple. Alaoui noticed the differences in the settings, from the exuberance at Facebook to Apple’s restraint.

What interested him went beyond the furniture. He described managers helping employees resolve problems and giving them room to work independently. He paid attention to the trust extended to engineers and to the resources around them. In his account, the working environment helped talented people attempt ambitious projects. It was a lesson about the conditions in which people could do useful work.

That observation fits the organisation he was building back in Casablanca. LaStartupStation works with founders and with the institutions that might become their partners. Its corporate work includes helping teams develop an innovation roadmap and collaborate with startups. The relationship needs effort on both sides: a young company has to prepare its offer, while a larger organisation has to make room to try it.

The pitch enters the living room

Television returned to Alaoui’s career in 2020. This time, the former Challengers contestant was helping produce Qui veut investir dans mon projet? for 2M. LaStartupFactory and Smart Studio co-produced the programme, in partnership with inwi. The first broadcasts began in November. Startup fundraising now had a place in the national evening schedule.

Preparing the programme meant assembling much more than a set. Alaoui described mobilising founders, investors and institutional partners, training companies and putting them through selection. An independent jury considered 43 startups before 24 were retained for the broadcasts. The resulting pitch occupied a small, visible part of a process that had already required considerable organisation.

By the end of the first season, 11 Moroccan business angels had invested nearly five million dirhams in participating startups. Alaoui said LaStartupFactory would continue helping entrepreneurs complete their fundraising and develop their businesses. That continuing work mattered: an agreement reached under studio lighting still required attention afterwards.

The programme also widened the audience for entrepreneurship. People could watch founders explain their companies and investors ask questions. Television gave those exchanges a reach that an event at a technology hub could scarcely offer. For Alaoui, it added another way to connect entrepreneurs with people outside their immediate circle.

A station with more than one destination

In October 2022, LaStartupFactory became LaStartupStation. At the five-year review, the organisation reported 50 innovation programmes, more than 5,000 beneficiaries across Morocco and ten African countries, and over ten million dirhams in grants and interest-free loans. The beneficiaries included startups, very small businesses and SMEs. Those categories describe a wider group than venture-backed technology companies alone.

At the same gathering, Alaoui presented Startup Square, an application for launching and managing startup-support programmes. It was an engineering answer to an organisational problem. Companies and public institutions could use software to run programmes of their own. The developer who had worked on simplifying app creation was applying a similar instinct to the machinery of founder support.

There are quieter clues to his interests, too. On the Kass Atay podcast, his recommendations included Blue Ocean Strategy and The Lean Startup. His viewing list ranged from The Billion Dollar Code to La Casa de Papel and Vikings. The conversation itself made room for programming, entrepreneurship, trust and football. Even a discussion of startup infrastructure can eventually find its way to the pitch.

Thirty-six companies, a longer test

The 2026 chapter brings education into focus. LaStartupStation launched the Mastercard Foundation EdTech Fellowship in Morocco, with plans to support 36 startups across three cohorts. Each cohort is designed around nine months of assistance, including mentoring, market access and connections to partners. The five-year partnership carries an ambition to reach up to one million learners. Those are programme targets, with the work of delivering them still consequential.

The first cohort’s onboarding brought together 12 startups, mentors and experts. Its three stated pillars were learning science, inclusion and accessibility, and business development and investment readiness. For Alaoui, the initiative extends a familiar chain of relationships. Helping an education business develop also requires attention to the people who will learn through its product.

His personal ambitions extend further: by 2035, he wants to help create 100,000 jobs across Africa and inspire 100 million young Africans toward entrepreneurship. He also wants to support an impact-driven Moroccan unicorn. The scale of those aspirations is easy to state. His earlier career supplies the more tangible measures: a tool used to build, a founder prepared to pitch, a company introduced to a customer.

LaStartupStation’s next results will be built from such encounters. An introduction has to lead somewhere. A programme has to help a company do something it could not do before. Alaoui began by making it easier to create mobile software; he has since spent years organising the people around the product. The purchase order remains a useful place to look. It is a small document with a wonderfully direct opinion about an idea.