Episode: 148 — "You Don't Have to Fail to Succeed" · Full Episode #148
Season: 10
Language: Libyan Arabic
Ahmed Bin Moussa (أحمد بن موسى) is a Libyan businessman. He graduated as an electrical engineer from the University of Tripoli in 2005 — the son of one of the first generation of Libyan electrical engineers — and spent roughly ten years inside multinational oil services companies before being laid off in the 2014–15 crash, when roughly 32,000 of the sector's 70,000 global staff were cut. He subsequently completed an MBA in Madrid and now runs several Libyan-based companies. His business positions in the episode include an anti-emigration argument and a long view on the Mediterranean as a coherent economic region.
His decade inside multinational oil services ended with the 2014–15 collapse, when the sector compressed staffing on a scale most outsiders did not register. He framed the layoff not as a personal disaster but as the event that exposed how thin the security inside the multinational career actually was — and the moment he stopped treating the corporate path as a destination.
He moved to Madrid for the MBA, and the city reshaped his sense of where Libya sits geographically and culturally. His thesis: Libya, Spain and Italy belong together as a Mediterranean rhythm — a working day, a food culture, a relationship to time, a tolerance for chaos that the northern European corporate frame does not capture. The argument is partly economic, partly temperamental. It also frames his anti-emigration position. If the Mediterranean is one coherent region, the Libyan diaspora's reflex to go further north stops looking obvious.
The episode's most-detailed business story is the failure of POZA, a t-shirt brand he built with collaborators. The brand had two shops — one in Benghazi, one in Tripoli — and roughly 500 designs in rotation. It collapsed in nine months. The post-mortem in the episode is unusually clean. He named the structural problems by category: inventory mathematics, the gap between design output and commercial decision-making, the cost of two-city operations, and the assumption that volume of creativity is the same as commercial viability. POZA is the title episode's example of how failure operates — not as a romanticised teacher, but as a specific stack of decisions whose costs become legible only afterwards.
See: POZA T-Shirts
The episode title captures his counter-position to the Silicon Valley failure-romanticism that has filtered into Libyan business discourse. His argument: failure is not a prerequisite for success. It is sometimes a teacher, sometimes simply a loss. The recurring start-up narrative that treats every failure as a step on a ladder elides the failures that ended careers, drained savings, and produced no upside. The frame matters in Libya specifically because capital is scarce, second chances are rarer than in Western markets, and a failed venture often disqualifies a founder for years.
He is unusual among Damiri guests of his generation in arguing that the Libyan diaspora's instinct to leave is mostly a mistake. The argument is not nationalist. It is structural: the closer you live to the country you are operating in, the more accurately you can read it, and the lower the friction on every transaction. The diaspora's distance from Libya, in his framing, costs them more than it saves them.
"Failure is sometimes a teacher and sometimes just a loss. The story that always makes it a teacher is the story of the people who survived it." (EP 148, paraphrased)