Our alumnus of the month for the November issue is the Senior Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer at the Jordan Ahli Bank - a leading Jordanian financial institution, and the CEO of Ahli Fintech - an Ahli Bank fully owned subsidiary responsible for running the Ahli Financial Technologies Seed Acceleration and investment program, Mr. Rami Al-Karmi.
Rami Al Karmi graduated from the University of Jordan (UJ) with a BSc in Electrical Engineering in 1998. He also completed a number of executive programs including the Venture Capital Executive Program of the University of California, Berkeley, California (2010); Leadership, Organizing and Action: Leading Change, of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government (2011); and LEADING FOR THE FUTURE: Promoting Arab Economic and Social Development in a Changing World, at Harvard Kennedy School of Government (2014).
Al Karmi has over 22 years of experience in company mobilization and project management and in delivering high value tech/digital business model ventures.
He is one of the 13 Jordanians who attended the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship in Washington DC 2010 after starting his first venture at an age of 19. He is a prolific partner, board member and mentor for a number of institutions, organizations and individuals, providing valuable consultancy to profit-oriented organizations, as well as philanthropic entities.
Rami is an innovation x speaker at NASA’s cross industry innovation summit, and mentor at Unreasonable Future, and Startupbootcamp Fintech, a global accelerator running 25 programmes in 17 cities around the world.
Al Karmi started his career as a software engineer, and worked as advisor to the Jordanian Minister Health on Information Technology. He also served as Senior Advisor at the Qatar Business Incubation Center (QBIC.qa), Qatar Development Bank (QDB) (Dec 2013 – Jun 2014); And Venture Lab Accelerator Consultant at the Entrepreneurship Center of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST); Venture Partner – Arabia, at Start up Labs, San Francisco (May 2013 – Jun 2014) ;Lead Advisor at ZINC (ZAIN Innovation Campus), ZAIN Jordan (Jun 2014 – Jun 2015); and Senior Advisor at Jordan Hashemite Fund For Human Development (JOHUD) (Feb 2015 – Jul 2016).
With talent, hard work and perseverance, Al Karmi managed to achieve an impressive career path in a relatively short period. Rami was the CEO for Arabic Region of CDI Global (Sep 2009 – Nov 2010); Chief Executive Officer and Board Member of Shabakat Al Ordon (Jul 2005 – Feb 2011); Cofounder of @YourServiceInc (Jan 2004 – Jan 2008); General Manager of Alsadeem Holdings (Jun 2004 – Jan 2005).
He is a member of the advisory board of Think Barter Network – Amman, Jordan; Advisory Board of ROYBI Robotics, San Francisco, USA;, and WAKE International in San Francisco, USA; as well as Mentor & Investor at Unreasonable Future @ Unreasonable Group, USA; Mentor at StartupBootcamp Fintech, UAE; Mentor at Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship – Caribbean; Mentor & Investor at 500 Startups - San Francisco, USA; and Mentor at Oasis500. He also serves as Chairman of Arcoten.com in San Francisco, USA and Chairman of Octonius.com Inc in San Francisco, USA.
Rami is a passionate advocate of the Lean Startup and the 10X Exponential growth movements and is a regular judge, mentor & keynote speaker at the region's important innovation, entrepreneurship and technology events. He designed and produced a number of events, design thinking tools, and interventions in the innovation space including the THINKLEAN speaker series, Lean Startup Program, Back To Startup Basics, and his popular innovation talks series titled: The Future of....
Al Karmi lives by the principle: "keep moving because prosperity follows constant movement".
His advice to young aspiring students includes: "recruit as many mentors as you can to provide you with guidance across your personal and professional journey"..."move fast and make mistakes .. the only way to learn is to keep leap frogging forward, the max that would happen if you fail is that you will end up having to say oops :) while standing up again".