The name is Moroccan, the logo is Dutch Orange and the location is Silicon Valley. Saïd Ouissal (48) is one of the most successful Dutch tech entrepreneurs you have never heard of. He leads his own software company in San Jose: Zededa. He founded it in 2016. Seven years earlier, his then employer had offered him a job for three years in California, which had been ‘quite getting used to’ in the beginning.
“America was not a country that I had been working on from an early age. I had more with France, where I had also did an internship. But after my study computer technology I started working for various American -led companies in the Netherlands and I often came here. First in Los Angeles, the America I knew from television, and then here, I started to think here in Silicon Valley. opportunities Then wherever in the world, “he says in his office with a bottle of iced tea.
After the birth of his eldest son – now high schooler – it went pinch. “With a baby at home, all that travel became difficult. And my wife seemed a nice adventure to live here for a while.”
It was political, economically and socially a very interesting period in 2009. “Barack Obama was just president. The feeling was real”oh wowthis country is going into another phase ‘. We were very happy to come here at the time. I can imagine that people who now have such a opportunity and look at this country think: is that where I want to go? ”
Guest workers
The fact that he had to get used to at the time had nothing to do with political current affairs, but with cultural and practical differences between the Netherlands and the United States. “A good friend warned us: people in America are very friendly, but that doesn’t mean they are your friend. You have to learn to divorce that. Everywhere you go, people ask: ‘how are you? ‘ In the beginning you answer how things are going, but that does not show the intention, it is a greeting, not a question. ”
Ouissals relocation from Amsterdam to Silicon Valley is difficult to compare with that of his parents, in the early 1970s, from Sefrou, in Morocco, to Enschede. “My parents came as guest workers, the idea was that they would go back after about ten work. Many people also lived there, but my parents had the institution: we were also staying here. They were very busy with what we now call integration. We applied the same mentality here: we initially tried it for three years, but never with an idea of temporality.”
The US is a lot easier to command, he says. “It does not seem and feels with current politics, but this is and remains an immigration country that has been used to waves of newcomers for 250 years and that accepts.”
There is little animosity against strangers in this rich bubble in California. Even elsewhere in the US, he has not experienced unpleasant things. Not in the Netherlands either, he says. When Americans ask where he comes from, he says the Netherlands. “And then they sometimes proudly tell about their Dutch ancestors.”
Where he comes from is never ‘one thing’. “The more important question here, certainly in conversation with potential investors, is: where did you study. Then they expect Stanford University of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). If I say ‘Hogeschool Enschede’, I get a response like: ”Say What? Health! “” Not only do they don’t know the institute, the Dutch statement sounds like he is sick. “They can’t place me.”
Computer course
It was De Boei community center that indirectly brought Ouitsal to the US. There he got to know his first and eternal love when he was seven years old: the computer. His father had given himself and him for a free course. “That was my first experience with computer games and I was immediately sold.” A few years later he got his own computer, learned to program. The internet did not yet exist, so he read computer magazines and went to a computer club every Sunday. “Then all those geeks and nerds came together. We packed our computer in a cardboard box, cycled to such a club and put it on it again. Then software was exchanged and you could talk about trends. I didn’t play much outside.”
Europe, he says, was then stronger in the development of what the Home Computer was called. “America was not that leading at all.” He turns his finger in the air and points out, to the concrete and glass where giants such as Nvidia, Adobe, Cisco and many startups, financiers and lawyers are. “This was more agriculture than Tech.”
That he now has his own company with 120 employees on three continents and an estimated value of certain 400 million dollars (he wants to confirm or deny that), feels like something that is only possible in this place in the world. He didn’t have it immediately when he arrived, but after nine years at three different companies and “with a network of people who believe in you and want to help you, financially or by working for you”. And with a good idea about what technology will be important in the future, of course. Moreover, he says: “Starting a company is incredibly easy here, as everything in America is focused on convenience.”
What Zededa (Moroccan-Arabic does for ‘new’) is called Edge Computing. Ouissal has built an operating system that makes devices ‘smart’ and companies helps to immediately analyze data from their machines, factories and power stations. His major customers are energy groups that can control drilling platforms and car manufacturers who make the information that cars store in a local garage. And shipping companies, which can adjust the temperature in a container in a container bananas at sea with this software, so that the fruits have the correct ripeness when they land. To name just a few examples.
Said Ouissal in San Fransisco
Anastasiia Sapon
‘In the current polarization, telling what you voted soon means that you have to defend it’
Making a startup such a success is typical of the metamorphosis of this valley in recent decades – and the lagging of a European tech sector. Of the fifty largest technology companies, there are but a handful of European.
“The ecosystem that originated here is difficult to copy: the interaction between academic institutes such as Stanford, investors with really a lot of money and large tech companies that develop talent, such as Google and Facebook. There is a flywheel that keeps delivering: more jobs, more people who come to study here, more daring to take some good luck because they know.“
Certainly so important: “The government keeps some supervision, but does not interfere with it. It is organically arising because there is no policy.” That is a recipe that will be heavily on the stomach in Europe. “If governments start to mix in, it usually does not go in the right direction,” laughs Ouissal.
No comments
That aloofness of the local and national administration makes it, professionally, makes little difference who is in the White House. “We don’t do business with the government, so that is not important either.” Visa requests for foreign employees go very slowly under Trump. “More due to staff shortage and confusion than policy, but it is annoying. That Trump wants more domestic industry is positive for us again.”
Ouissal says he has “nothing with politics,” but that is not entirely true. Last year he was allowed to vote for the first time in the US presidential election and had studied all local races and referenda. When asked if he colored the Kamala D. Harris or Donald J. Trump box at the top of the ballot, he says: “No comment. ”
“In the current polarization, telling what you voted soon means that you have to defend it.” That you are seen by others as an complicit in what this or the previous government has done: deploying people without any process or opening the boundaries wide. “I am more in the middle. I voted for that long ballot for politicians from both parties, depending on the subject.”
He is still analyzing Trump’s profit – for himself and all friends and family in Europe and Morocco who ask him about it with bewilderment. “Whatever you think of him, if someone who is so much negative in the news is chosen again, that is a signal from voters. For many people what he did apparently was less bad than continuing with the Democrats. They seem to lose their anchor, they no longer know what they stand for. At least with Trump that is clear.”
Series The US & WE
This is the last episode of the series in which NRC The Dutch interviews who have a strong personal relationship with the US. Do their feelings and ideas about the country change, now that Trump is changing that way?
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It was precisely Ouissals’s own tech sector, originally very democratically, with Elon Musk at the forefront of his weight behind Trump. “I don’t know why. Maybe it’s demographic. Young people generally vote more left and older people.” And Big Tech is no longer led by young dogs.
“Voter behavior is very action. Every government, with a certain power until the next congress elections, takes entire drastic measures. We saw that at Obama, Trump, Biden and now Trump. Much of it is aspiration and is eventually postponed, reversed or held back by a judge. Works better than many people think now. ”
Political and social turbulence, he says, is here of all times. When he moved to the US under Obama in 2009 “were the protests of Occupy Wall Street, now they are demonstrating at the Tesla dealer. In the 60s and 70s, with the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, people also wondered” is the end of? ” As a company you don’t have to let yourself be guided too much, but you heads down Focus on what you have under control. “
And as a person, as an immigrant, as a father of three? “Up your children as resilient and resourceful as possible and hope that they can put it into perspective.”
Safety net
He looks with special interest at how the relationship between the US and Europe changes. The morning after the explosion between Trump and the Ukrainian President Volodyymyr Zensky in in February, he flew back from Frankfurt to San Francisco. The images from the White House could be seen everywhere at the airport and in the lounge Americans told each other that they were happy to leave. “Because nobody here is allowed to us.”
Trumps aversion to Ukraine and threats against NATO allies make Europeans nervous. “America has always been a safety net for Europe, not only in terms of defense, but also economically. That gave a sense of safety: if the shit hits the fan The cavalry will come from over the ocean. It has become too dependent. Now that the safety net is no longer self -evident, uncertainty dominates. ” But he is also optimistic about this.