We sometimes get a chance to meet people who live a very interesting life, people who made a lot and experienced a lot, and those are the ones we wish we had more space for to get through every aspect of their lives in detail. Fahad Al Qadi is one of those very interesting individuals, who has always been on the cutting-edge of technology and business alike, you will find this interview one of the most interesting ever.

What’s Up: As one of the most interesting entrepreneurs we have ever met, you do have a long business history that starts elsewhere, would you give us a glimpse at how things started?

Fahad Al Qadhi: Well first of all I come from a family that has a long business history, my ancestors had their own share of trading, and I guess I was raised that way. Since my father used to make me and all my brothers help him at work during our vacations. So you can call it a family business. My real start was when I went to the United States to get my bachelors degree in medical engineering, but what I got was a detour to my entire life.

WU: How is that?

FQ: Well since I had a large family, and since my elder brothers were hard on me with financing my trip to the U.S., I had to find a way to make money, I started working in the cafeteria, then I moved to the computer lab to work there, that’s where I learned a lot about computers and programming, I even became an instructor. After about a year and a half, I started working on my own software, that was how I really moved from point A to point B, and never looked back since.

WU: Now that sounds interesting, what did you do?

FQ: The whole thing happened during the internet boom, around 1995, back then everything was about memory and space to store information, every company was having problems with lack of storage space. That’s the crack I wanted to fill with my software – which I sold to Nokia.

WU: What did your program do?

FQ: Back then when a computer or a cellphone looked at voice pitch, it analyzed it as a graph, and that took a lot of space to store, and much time to process. My concept was really simple, take the voice and convert it to zeros and ones, binary code basically.

WU: So that way you managed to make voice pitches smaller in size to store?

FQ: Not only are they smaller now, by converting them to binary you break the whole language, accent and dialect barriers, so no matter how the user pronounces the word or name, the system will break it down to binary then checks for the match, pulls that out from its memory and feeds it back to the user.

WU: And Nokia bought this technology from you?

FQ: Well after I got the patent for that software, I got a booth in GITEX, and Nokia saw my application and decided to buy the whole concept of the software in 96, and developed it further from there on, and that is how I made my boom, since I got a substantial amount of money, plus stock options in Nokia. After that I kept on working with them for a year and a half in developing and creating documentation for my software, it was during that time that I learned how the corporate world works.

WU: That is so interesting, working with such a large company would definitely add a lot to anyone.

FQ: Around 98 I started my own company, I called it “Gareeb”, where instead of dealing with voice I wanted to start working with text, I created a software that can look at any text from any language and see it as one universal language.

WU: How would that work?

FQ: Let’s say you write Mazen in Chinese, it would be also Mazen in Arabic, or even English for that matter, so the system will break the language that the word has been written in to again binary zeros and ones, look it up against a database, then come back with the results. During my Gareeb project I dealt with Yahoo mail, and Google mail. Till I got a contract with Google to be a technology backbone to their “Do you mean this” service, our job was to fix some of the problems they might get.

WU: Did you sell the software to Google?

FQ: The reason I made “Gareeb” was to create a technology service provider, and I managed to sign a deal with Google, to get revenue per hit, whenever a user gets to use our backbone service under Google search.

WU: WOW! This really sounds like such an exciting life, were you living here during all that time?

FQ: I lived in California, had my business, had my company and everything was peachy, till 9/11 happened, and I lost almost everything. Luckily I managed to salvage most I could and brought, what money I could pull out, back to Saudi Arabia. I remember when I first came back, I was dramatized about what happened to me, it took me a while to readjust and get back to work, at first I kept on observing the market and how things worked around here, till I started moving with my first project.

WU: Was it software?

FQ: Not yet, I got into steel structure constructions. Since my minor degree was in architecture, I found that there was another gap that I could fill – people buy a piece of land to build a home on, then they use bricks, cement, and concrete to make those homes, these materials cost a lot of money plus they are so fixed that you would have to tear up the house if you wanted to make any changes in the future.

I decided to make buildings and homes from steel beams, they cost less, plus they are so flexible that you can change them at any time you want. In the U.S. they build skyscrapers out of them. The best part was the fact that you’re not losing much money if you decide to demolish the building since you can resell the steal depending on the market price. This building we are in is made of steel, if I decide to move out, I can simply unbolt it and move. I saw this as a great opportunity. I used this as a launching pad for my next project.

WU: So have you left the days of technology development for good?

FQ: I can’t, I love technology so much, now I am into what is called OCR (Optical Character Recognition), where I have developed a new integrated hardware and software system that can scan hardcopy documents, then tag all the words together in a database that enables the user access to.

Let’s say you work in an organization that has a lot of paper documents in their archives, we can use our system to digitally archive them. Later on, the user or operator can type in any word, and the system will pull out all the documents that contain that word, I found this very useful since what is the importance of data if you can’t find what you are looking for, and fast. Let me explain how my system works, let’s say you are looking for the word “Islam”, the system will break it down to its origins, which is the Arabic word “salim” then it will search the database for any word that has that same origins, pulls everything else like “islam” “muslim” “salam” and gets back to you showing all the words that are related, that way we use the word’s origin as a tag. Now keep in mind that the document was a hardcopy scanned into the system to begin with.

WU: Let me get this straight, the documents are scanned, then archived digitally?

FQ: Yes, then the system will break all the words to their source word and use that as search tags, so when you search for a word, it will call the origin word and get all the documents that had this word plus any similar word to the user, fast and simple, and with no high storage space overhead. The best thing is that this system doesn’t have a learning curve, and it works even if you misspelled the word. I believe that data is worthless, and useless if you can’t retrieve it.

WU: I totally agree with that. Let’s shift gears, and talk about your two new projects.

FQ: Back to looking for gaps (laughs), when I returned from the U.S., I wondered why people waste a lot of time, and effort waiting for their cars to get washed, and in most cases in the hot humid Jeddah weather. I never managed to wrap my head around that, I wanted to save time, and do a better job at it, so instead of going to the car wash, I wanted the car wash to come to you wherever you are.

I developed the concept of a mobile car wash I called “Wash Me”, it uses no more than a glass of water to wash the whole car, but I needed something that could be sufficient in terms of power and water consumption, and that’s why I traveled to both Germany and Korea, to create a machine that can deliver efficient amounts of power, without making it look and sound like a circus. This is what we have right now.

WU: The car wash uses only one glass of water to wash?

FQ: Yes, and we got a new system that doesn’t even need water at all. Now after I got everything working the way I wanted, I managed to add more services, till I thought of creating the call center.

WU: Okay, you’re losing me now… How, what?

FQ: Simple, you call a toll free 800 number, the operator checks what you need, so if you need a car wash, waxing, exterior or interior detailing, our mobile car wash will do any job, anywhere, while you enjoy a cappuccino with friends, or finish your business meeting. Our operators ask about your location, GPS coordinates, or ask you to accept an SMS message that will figure out where you’re located, then our mobile car wash will be dispatched to that location and gets the job done.

WU: You have this business running now?

FQ: Yes, you can call our center from anywhere, even from cellphones, our call center is in operation to provide a vast range of services, like private chauffeur to any place in Jeddah for a fixed price; or even if you need a plumber, or an electrician. The point is to make things simple, and within reach, we respect our clients’ time, and we want to make things convenient, so whatever they need or want we will deliver that to them. The whole concept behind the call center is to be the number one service provider in the Kingdom. We are now providing jobs for Saudis, and this is what our services are all about.

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