The world has seen a massive transformation and advancement in the past few decades. Talk of any industry and the advancement is evident there. Technology has played an amazing part in every sector, let that be communication, healthcare or transportation. Gone are the days when you used to wait for days to get connected to a cab driver. Today, dream of a place and the cab is waiting to drop you there. A lot of car rentals have come up and many of them have made a really good name in the international market. As far as Dubai is concerned, we too have a transportation giant here. Yes, I am talking about Careem.

 Careem has become one of the leading names in the transportation space in a short span of fewer than 5 years, being headquartered in Dubai, Careem is operational in 50 cities across 11 countries and has almost the number of 180,000 registered drivers referred to as “captains” and still growing. Careem has served 8 million satisfied customers even in such a short period of time. It has become a reliable name across the seas.

You must be wondering about how this company made it this huge? I mean a lot of people start their ventures and businesses but this success is huge. What made it go this big? The same question was once asked to the CEO and Co-Founder Mudassir Sheikha to which he replied in style. He said that it has been quite a journey for him, with his team they hustled their way to regional dominance, competing with the international transportation giant, Uber. The core idea of the company is identifying opportunities and acting passionately upon them in order to achieve the goals. Mr CEO made it clear that it is the vision and the efforts that collectively make it to success. He started thinking big is the key. The first thing you have to target is a big problem and a big opportunity.

Moreover, he explained it’s essential to instil the right values in your organization – to make sure culture seeps down from the top and everyone on the team is cognizant of the ideals they should aspire towards. The entrepreneur’s mindset should be committed to solving problems and reducing inefficiencies that may build lasting institutions, one that will outlive them as well as their future generations. Founders need to treat the early years with the utmost care. He further said that they can’t just expect to launch a product and expect that it’ll take off automatically, “It takes a lot of hard work, curation, measurement, and feedback and in the case of Careem, they are obsessed with data and growth. Each city – all 50 of them – is monitored every 15 minutes. as we cannot improve anything that you cannot measure.

Your team can be used as your sharpest weapon having said that you didn’t have much money to throw around in the early days grinding in the insane heat of Dubai.

That was a problem – they wanted to hire savvy, technical, and qualified employees to grow quickly but the lack of cash meant that they couldn’t even match existing market salaries.

Mudassir admitted to having sleepless nights in those days.

“We placed a lot of emphasis on getting the right people. You can have an amazing idea but if you don’t have the right talent to execute then your plans are utterly useless. We were so cash-strapped early on that we could only offer half of what people were used to,” he said.

But there was a surprising benefit to this quandary. Careem’s early hires ticked all the right boxes in terms of their job capabilities, and they also bought into the vision of what Mudassir was trying to build.   No matter how the company started, what matters the most is how they kept it going while sticking to its strategies and plans. Careem is an inspiration for any venture who wishes to grow big and do great in the field. It doesn’t really matter where you start from, what matters is where you end up. Nobody will ever consider your hard work unless the end product is great. All you need to do is give your best shot every time you can.