Episode: 27 — "Make Money With No Money" · Full Episode #27
Date: 23 June 2020
Language: Mixed Arabic and English
Full name: Mahmoud Abogrean (محمود ابوقرين)
Mahmoud "Mackey" Abogrean is a Libyan entrepreneur. He was born in Tripoli and raised between the Netherlands, Cardiff, and Libya. He completed two master's degrees simultaneously — entrepreneurship at Cardiff University and psychology at the University of South Wales — both funded by Chevening scholarships. He is founder and co-founder of Sindibad, an educational board game designed to teach entrepreneurship.
Mackey's first business ran out of a Cardiff primary school in 2006. His father gave him one pound a day for snacks. He noticed that the corner shop near his house sold packets of shaker sour sweets for 5p. He started buying them in bulk and selling them to classmates at 20p — his advantage being that the other children could not leave class to restock. Over the year he made around £500 before his mother found the hoard. He later described the lessons: loyalty beats price, pre-orders reduce risk, and controlling supply matters more than setting the margin.
See: Shaker Sour Sweets
Back in Libya at twelve, Mackey and his brother each put in 100 Libyan dinars to trade Ramadan toy guns (moassaddasat) in the town of Rashid. The first trip turned each 100 into 150. By the end of the season they had scaled the model to the point where family members were running stalls for them at 1,500 LYD a piece.
The board game started as a university project and grew into a company. It won a 15,000 LYD prize at a competition in Tunis, then 5,000 LYD at the Libya Small Enterprises Expo, and finally €23,000 from META Malta — one of seven teams selected globally and the only entry from North Africa or the Middle East. The prize came with a three-month accelerator in Malta.
In July 2019, on the way to Misrata to take a cheaper flight to Malta for the accelerator, Mackey was ambushed. Plainclothes men in four cars boxed in his vehicle. They knew his name. They took the laptops, passports, cash and hard drives he had prepared for the Malta launch. He was hit from behind and told to turn the car around. He later traced the operation to a former insider with a personal grudge. He will not name the person publicly.
See: The Misrata Ambush
Mackey stated explicitly: "I don't want the headline of my life to be that I'm a victim." He discussed how he code-switches between Mahmoud, Mackey, Mak, Mkay and Bougran depending on the setting, and noticed his own temperament shifting with language — more aggressive in English, milder in Arabic.
"I don't want the headline of my life to be that I'm a victim." (EP 27)