After a successful two year run in Cairo, Disrupt returns this year with Disrupt!/Music!/ at Sawy Culture Wheel. The kick off took place yesterday at El Kelma Hall, where the participants arrived eager to commence the workshops and activities ahead of them.
The participants, made up of individuals and teams, took part in a six hour day full of exciting talks, lectures and workshops on Cairo’s ever growing and constantly shifting music industry, as well as trending topics in business, team building , networking and idea pitching. Sary Hany, one of Egypt’s leading young musicians and entrepreneurs arrived at 12 pm to deliver an insightful and thought provoking speech to the participants, discussing his most recent experiences with his line of work both independently as well as collaboratively with local and international organizations. Hany was joined by fellow co-founders of Key66 productions, one of Cairo’s leading music studios with an impressive portfolio and more than 10 international awards in recognition of their work. Hany’s speech was followed by an open Q&A session where participants got a chance to exchange ideas with the Key66 Team. Hesham Wahby, CEO of Innoventures proceeded with explaining the structure and benefits of the upcoming workshops, followed by 1 minute pitches by the participants.
During the second half of the day, Disrupt!/Music!/ invited some industry professionals to join in on the program and get introduced to individuals and teams. These included: Hussein El Sherbini and Ismail Hosny also co-founders of one of Cairo’s leading music studios, senior editor of SceneNoise and CairoScene Dalia Awad and co-founder of Cairo’s leading alternative music venue, Vent. The mentors circulated around the teams who have delivered clear and concise plans of their ideas and laid them out in a critical diagram that helped them in realizing their ideas by combining music, business and technology.
As the day reached a wrap up, individual participants got the chance to mingle and network with each other and were asked to form teams, which was surprisingly a smooth process for most of them given the similarity of the ideas and their already established shared knowledge. Final teams were then asked to deliver another half minute pitch, clearly stating the name of their teams, the number of members and the roles of each. This year’s Disrupt!/Music!/ in Cairo kick off ended with a total of 13 teams working on exciting new ideas to disrupt the current discourse in the music industry and all 13 of them are invited to participate in the coming three day workshops which will also host some of the most prominent names in the music industry as well business and technology professionals from across different fields. Keep updated on our Facebook page and upcoming blogs!