Norhan Othman is an Engineer, passionate about building ventures and coaching startups to sustain themselves and grow into new markets. She is one of the Co-Founders and Head of Partnerships at Startup Migrants focusing on helping international students and professionals to successfully step into the startup scene in Europe. Learn more about Startup Migrants, check out her advice for startup founders, and read about her view of the Berlin startup ecosystem.

1. Hi Norhan, thank you very much for agreeing to do the interview. Could you tell us about your background and how you got connected to the startup world?

I’ve studied Architecture Engineering in my home country, Egypt. Then I came to Germany to do my Master’s studies in Urban Development.

I noticed that many young people my age are able to start their own businesses, which contradicted my previous point of view – that you need to have capital and a lot of years of experience to start a business. So I started joining startup events that I found on the MeetUp app and going to the startup hub at the Technical University of Berlin. That’s how I first got involved with the Berlin startup scene.

I did my Master’s thesis research at the Technical University of Berlin about the startup ecosystem in Berlin, and the challenges migrant founders face. 

2. You’re the Co-Founder and the Head of partnerships at Startup Migrants, which helps communities build more resilient startup ecosystems, by gathering data and best practices on how the private and public sectors foster more potential entrepreneurial immigrants. Could you tell us more about your mission?

Startup Migrants started as a book. My Co-Founders, Maria Amelie, and Nicolai Strøm-Olsen created the book and launched it in 2019. They interviewed over 500 international founders living in Europe and asked them about the challenges faced when starting a business in Europe. The company programs work on the mitigation of those challenges and others that we observe in the scene and experience while working with international talents.

Startup Migrants aims to empower international students and professionals to take their own ideas into the business world. Whether they’re in their Bachelor’s, Master’s, PhD, or even PostDoc, we’re helping them turn their ideas into startups. 

We’re running programs such as the Startup Preschool in Germany, Norway, Austria, and the UK, while the atTRACTION, our Horizon EU-funded project, is live in Lithuania, Spain, and Poland. We’re looking forward to expanding our programs to more European countries and supporting more international talents there.

As a Co-Founder and the Head of Partnerships at Startup Migrants, I collaborate with the local ecosystem players like universities, institutions, foundations, and companies that are interested in fostering migrant entrepreneurship in the city or the country we’re operating in. I’m also looking for the right ways of collaborating with these entities and implementing projects together.

3. What is it about entrepreneurship and the startup world that particularly attracts you?

It’s the sense of the adventure. You can never predict what will happen and it’s motivating for me to learn by trial and error. 

You’re doing new things every day so it’s not repetitive work. You’re talking to new people, finding new partners, and finding new schemes of collaboration all the time, and that gives me a continuous boost of energy.

4. After years of working with startups, which advice would you share with founders?

Founders should be open to speaking to people from different backgrounds because they don’t know when and where exactly the next opportunity will hit them.

They should be open to learning on the go. Every day in the life of a founder throws another learning curve.

They should find the right partners in crime. Meaning, the Co-Founder and the core team. They should find people who complement their skills and help them move forward with their ideas. 

5. What do you predict for the startup ecosystem in Berlin?​ What are the challenges and the opportunities the ecosystem is facing?

Everyone’s always saying that Berlin is an international city with people from various backgrounds sitting in the same place. However, there’s a challenge when it comes to boosting their potential. 

The different entities in Berlin working with startups have been trying hard in the past years to boost the existence of these various backgrounds. Still, work remains to be done to provide an inclusive environment for founders, whether they’re migrants, females, or people hoping to become founders. We need more collaboration between the startup support entities to have a clear strategy for supporting people from different backgrounds and starting their businesses in Germany.

On the upside, the government is trying to enable startups to work in a better way. However, we need more collaboration schemes between companies and the government to make the startup scene in Berlin flourish. When I started to access the startup scene in Berlin, it was the second most entrepreneurial city in Europe and now, unfortunately, the ranking is worse. As opposed to seeing different entities in the startup scene as competitors we should change our view so that all of these entities, whether they are publicly or privately funded, collaborate with the scope of better good.

Thank you very much for sharing your story, Norhan. We wish Startup Migrants the best of luck in their future endeavors!

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