MAW ENTREPRENEUR OF THE WEEK

Fahim Saleh, Founder, GOKADA

This week on our entrepreneur of the week, we shall be paying tribute to Fahim Saleh, founder, Gokada.

Born in Saudi Arabia to Bangladeshi parents, Fahim lived with his family in the Middle East for a while before they started moving around. They eventually settled in New York as immigrants. It was there, in New York, that he had his education. As a child, Fahim would spend hours in hiding playing video games which later became his motivation in his interest in technology.  

Fahim built his first website Salehfamily.com before he turned 15, and it was hosted on AOL Hometown. When his parents threw family parties, his father would encourage relatives to visit the website. This ‘marketing strategy’ helped the young boy to garner an average of five unique visitors to his website every month. 

Quite naughty as a youngster, young Fahim would often go out to play and end up using rocks to scratch people’s cars, this he said was his moment of awakening after his actions caused his parents to spend one-third of the family savings, to fix one of the damaged cars.

Even then, Fahim decided that he needed to start making some money for himself. As a teenager, Fahim self-schooled himself on coding and started developing apps. He was quite a boisterous and lively teenager, and apps soon became a means of expressing this. He built teen-hangout.com, at age 15, a social network which many have now described as “too-early-for-its-time”.  

He made some pennies from it, enough to encourage his efforts. He would ask his friends to publish articles on it, and it soon became a community-oriented blogging forum, allowing him to place ads and generate $2-$3 a month through his trial and error approach.  

His first company in high school generated over one million dollars in revenue. He created websites targeted at the young demographics such as AIMdude.com, iconfun.com, msndollz.com, icondude.com, and was generating $100k-$150k in profit from such websites. One of his websites was later sold on eBay for $2,000.  

After college, he taught himself how to program and started KickBack Apps, garnering over twenty-million downloads. By the time he graduated from Bentley University in Waltham, Massachussetts, where he studied Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), he created an app – PrankDial, for the purpose of making prank telephone calls.   

He realised early that for busy commercial cities in the world, where workers were always in a hurry to get to work, that a bike hailing service would bring some sort of ease into the system, and this fuelled his interest in starting a bike-hailing service or a motorcycle taxi.  

In 2015, he co-founded Pathao with Hussain M Elius and Shifat Adnan, now said to be the largest bike-hailing service in Dhaka Bangladesh.  The company later pivoted into logistics and food deliveries, and is valued to be worth over $100 million. Encouraged by the success of the company, Saleh went solo and founded Gokada.  

Gokada started operating in Lagos (arguably the busiest state in Nigeria) in 2017 and raised $5.3 million in venture capital in June 2019. This sum, Saleh had said, would help the company expand its fleet and offer goods and services to its drivers.  

The company raised even more funding in subsequent rounds and was set to break even by January 2020, until the Lagos state government ban of bike hailing across thousands of roads in the state, affected its operations.   

His LinkedIn profile reveals that the 33-year-old has over 15 years entrepreurial experience dating back to high school. Fahim is also an active investor in emerging markets, investing first in Colombia’s largest motorcycle ridesharing company – Picap, recently valued at $15 million. 

But it’s his horrific death that has drawn international attention. The 33-year-old entrepreneur was found dead by his sister On 15 July 2020 in his Manhattan condominium, his body dismembered and left in trash bags in separate rooms, according to multiple media reports. She had not heard from Saleh and was checking in on him.