AGENDA

8:00 - 9:00 am | Registration & Coffee

Pick up your badge, grab a coffee, and connect with fellow attendees before the day gets underway.

9:00 - 9:15 am | Welcome Note

Opening remarks from Viaka and Cooley; setting the stage for a day of insight, connection, and cross-border collaboration.

9:15 - 9:45 am | The Conviction Gap: How Founders and Investors See the Same Company Differently

This panel examines the gap between founder belief and investor conviction: what VCs are really underwriting in today’s market, where founders overestimate or under-explain the opportunity, and why strong companies still struggle to raise. The conversation brings both sides of the table together to ask what founders need to communicate better, what investors need to understand better, and how trust gets built before the evidence is complete.

  • Ayah Bdeir, CEO at Current AI

  • Karim Jouini, Founder & CEO at Thunders

  • Namek Zoubi, Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Silicon Badia

  • Haley Bryant, Partner at Hustle fund

  • Nicholas Rouhanna, Chairman & CEO at IM Fnding

9:45 - 10:15 am | From Wedge to Moat: How Startups Earn the Right to Last

Great startups do not begin with a moat — they earn one. In a market that is slower to believe and quicker to scrutinize, this session explores how founders move from an initial wedge to something more durable: winning early conviction, finding real customer pull, and building the product, positioning, and distribution that compound over time. We’ll look at how startups go from merely promising to genuinely defensible.

  • Anis Bennaceur, Co-Founder and CEO at Attention

  • Tressia Hobeika, Co-Founder & CPE at Stepful

  • Ben Wilde, Head of Innovation at Georgian

  • Katy Nelson, Magentar Capital

  • Allia Mohamed, Founder & CEO at Openigloo

10:15 - 11:00 am | Networking Break

Recharge with coffee, continue the conversations sparked by the morning panels, and connect with fellow attendees.

11:00 - 11:30 am | The Road to Replit: A Fireside with Co-Founder Haya Odeh

Behind Replit’s journey is a deeply personal story of persistence, reinvention, and conviction. In this fireside, co-founder Haya Odeh reflects on her own journey alongside the company, from the earliest days of building Replit to navigating its growth and evolution, and how those experiences shaped her as a founder, designer, woman, and leader.

  • Haya Odeh, Co-Founder & VP of Design at Replit

  • Reem Goussous, Co-Founder of Viaka (moderator)

11:30 - 12:00 pm | Capital Has Left the Building: Where Is Conviction Headed Next?

Capital is moving—across sectors, borders, and away from assumptions that shaped the last cycle. As venture becomes more concentrated and selective, fund managers are reassessing how they raise, allocate, and deploy capital. Bringing together investors across North America and MENA, this panel examines where conviction is forming, how LP expectations are influencing fund strategy, where managers are choosing to concentrate exposure, and what those decisions signal about where venture goes next.

  • Amjad Ahmad, Managing Partner at 500 Global

  • Mazin Al Zaidi, GP at STV

  • Rana Al-Hallaq, VP at Pfizer Ventures

  • Omar Darwazeh, MD & GP at AAF Mgmt.

  • Omar J. Sati, Managing Partner at DASH Ventures

12:00 - 1:00 pm | Lunch & Networking

Enjoy lunch while connecting with fellow attendees and continuing conversations from the morning.

1:00 - 1:30 pm | Scale It Till You Make It (even in a Completely Different Market)

Scaling is where the company you built gets tested by the company it needs to become. This panel brings together founders and operators who have scaled in one market and expanded into another to examine what changes once you cross that line: which assumptions stop holding, what has to be relearned, and what cross-border growth costs in ways that only become visible once it's already underway.

  • Nour Taher, Founder & CEO at Intella

  • Khaled Kteily, Founder & CEO at Legacy

  • Firas Raouf, Co-Founder & GP, Companyon VC

  • Tamim Bazzi, Partner at Cooley

  • Sara Rona, MD & Head of EMEA at SVB

1:30 - 2:00 pm | If Compute Is the New Oil, Who Owns the Rig?

Compute is the constraint everyone builds around and almost no one owns. Founders rent the chips, the infrastructure, the models and the distribution, and pay margin at every layer. This panel works down the stack with the people building at each level to ask where leverage actually sits, what breaks when AI has to move into physical systems, and whether a company can be durable when its foundation belongs to someone else.

  • Hamza Derbas, Co-Founder & CEO at Maven Robotics

  • Samy Bahra, Co-Founder & CEO Bitbison

  • Najeeb Jarrar, Regional Director, Marketing, Middle East & Africa, at Google Dubai

  • Zaid Farekh, Founder at Propeller

  • Waleed Atallah, Founder & CEO at Makora

2:00 - 2:30 pm | When Intelligence Gets Personal: A Fireside with Dinesh Maheshwari, Founding Partner of GROQ

Humans change constantly. Yet most systems still see us through static profiles and fragmented data. This fireside is about closing that gap: multidimensional intelligence that connects personal, financial, behavioral and external signals into a living picture of the individual, turning information into context and context into better decisions. From adaptive experiences to precision wealth — what changes when technology begins to understand people rather than process them?

  • Dinesh Maheshwari, Founding Partner of GROQ

  • Mike Lynds, CRO at Prospera AI

2:30 - 3:30 pm | Networking Break

Take a break, recharge, and connect with fellow attendees before the final sessions of the day.

3:30 - 4:00 pm | The Frenemy Economy: When Competition Buys In

The relationship between startups and incumbents used to be simple to describe. It no longer is. The incumbent is now the investor, the customer, the infrastructure and the competition, often all at once. As that dynamic has shifted, so has the strategy on both sides. This session unpacks what the relationship actually looks like today, why it came to be, and what it produces — for the companies inside it and for the market around them.

  • Dalia Tarabay, VP of Corporate Strategi at IBM

  • Basel Fakhoury, Co-Founder & CEO, User Interviews

  • Josef Najm, Principal Investor at TR Ventures

  • Samir Addamine, Co-Founder & CEO at Heron

  • Dima Ayyash, Co-Founder & CEO of Pebble

4:00 - 4:30 pm | Bulls, Bears, and Billion-Dollar Bets: Private Conviction vs. Public Judgment

Private markets form the conviction; secondaries test the price; public markets deliver the verdict. As companies stay private longer, reach extraordinary scale before an IPO, and trade along the way, The line between a private mark and a market price keeps getting harder to see. This panel examines what is driving that shift, how different pools of capital are weighing growth, risk, liquidity, and time, and what those changing standards mean when private conviction finally meets public judgment.

  • Zach Finkelstein, Managing Partner at Class 5 Global

  • Bradly Fishman, VP at Manhattan Ventures Partners

  • Abbas (Eddy) Zuaiter, Chairman & CIO at 33 Capital Management LLC

  • Partner at Cooley

  • Jessica Al-Hussaini, Principal at Globivest

4:30 - 4:50 pm | The Venture Reset: What the Data Is Telling Us - Presentation by Carta

The venture market is changing, and the data is revealing where it may be headed next. Drawing on Carta’s data, Hamza Shad, Insights Manager at Cara, will unpack 3–5 trends reshaping startups and venture capital, from the rise of solo founders enabled by AI, to longer paths to liquidity for investors, and the growing concentration of capital in mega rounds. A fast, data driven look at what’s changing, what it means for founders and investors, and what to watch next.

4:50 - 5:00 pm | Closing Remarks

5:00 - 7:00 pm | Can I Buy You A Drink? Hosted by Cooley

Wrap up the day over drinks and conversation. Connect with fellow founders, investors, speakers, and members of the Viaka community in a relaxed setting, continue the conversations from the day, and make a few new connections along the way.