King’s Cross kid bringing word on the street with Snap tycoon’s help
SOMETIMES you just get a feeling that a person’s going to make it big. For me, it was two years ago at an Evening Standard event for young entrepreneurs. A bunch of us middle-aged folks on a panel had just come off stage when a north London kid collared me, told me he was a budding filmmaker and demanded help from the paper.
Ahmed Faid was funny, pushy and spoke pure, rapid-fire Caledonian Road. We got him to do his stuff for the Standard’s website around the June 2017 election, shooting young Londoners’ views on the various candidates.
We lost touch, but then, over the summer he tweeted me a press cutting from TechCrunch. That cheeky kid from King’s Cross had just scooped $150,000 equity funding and mentoring from the LA tech incubator Yellow, run by Snapchat’s owner Snap Inc.
“Wow,” I said. “What was your business again?”
Faid and freelance TV journalist Nii Lartey run Dose of Society, a video platform for young people from around the world to upload their views on what is going on in their lives.
Its network of 100 citizen journalists feed their videos into DoS to be vetted for facts and taste, then sent out to the world through social media. Content can be anything, but they pride themselves on getting fast reports from global events.
“What you get is authentic voices ,” explains Faid. “The TV news will fly someone in to cover a story like, say, the rainforest fires in the Amazon. But that’s nothing like getting reports in from young local people who actually live there and breathe it.”
Faid got the bug in 2011. “London was a weird place, especially for young people my age. I felt I was being affected by things outside my control — a massive increase in knife crime, Government cuts, university fees going up, racial profiling. But I would turn on the news and there was never anything saying what us young people were feeling.
“Then came the riots. They happened for a lot of reasons but one was because young people were fed up with what was happening . I was thinking: ‘Why are young people so frustrated?’”
Rather than just sit and ponder, he went out on the streets with his sister’s camera and started asking them, putting up the responses on his YouTube channel. “The very first time I went out I asked the question: if you could change one thing in this country what would it be? And the answers were so varied: some said they wanted to implement more love and understanding, others said they wanted more tolerance, but many said they wanted less immigration. Things that I didn’t expect. We put them all up.
“So much of what we have now — Trump, Brexit — is because we don’t listen enough to people outside our own little bubbles. There are a lot of people who don’t feel what we do and we have to understand why.”
Pretty soon, he’d spend every lunch break filming on the streets, then head out again after work, generating hundreds of films.
Fast forward a few years via a local charity called the Copenhagen Youth Project, a mentoring programme at Facebook and a job Faid landed creating ad content for Havas, and Dose of Society won a prize for entrepreneurs from Snap. It includes time spent in Los Angeles learning from Silicon Valley’s finest mentors, including billionaire Snap founder Evan Spiegel.
New skills in their armoury, they’re now returning to London to shift Dose of Society towards marketing for brands and raising ad revenues.
Branded content will be the main source of income, but other opportunities include using the site’s growing subscriber base for market research. “We only want to work with brands whose morals line up with ours,” Faid says. No tobacco, no gambling, no booze.
“Evan Spiegel told me the best lesson he’d learned in business: ‘Stay true to your community.’ He said it won’t be easy; you will have people from different countries offering you lots and lots of things but you must always stay true to your mission.”
Let’s see if Dose of Society can stick to that.