Navigating the Tech Frontier: An Insightful Conversation with Khalid Machchate on Boardroom Chronicles

Martin Rowinski (00:01.688)
Welcome to Boardroom Chronicles podcast. I’m your host Martin Rowinski Boardsi co-founder and CEO. Today we’re thrilled to have with us Khalid Machedi. Did I pronounce that okay?

Khalid Machchate (00:17.751)
The E at the end is not pronounced, so my shot is fine. Yeah. Shot.

Martin Rowinski (00:21.768)
Machatas. Okay. All right, I’ll start that over. Machchate. Okay. Welcome to Boardroom Chronicles podcast. I’m your host, Martin Rowinski, Boardside co-founder and CEO. Today we’re thrilled to have with us Khalid Machchate a visionary leader whose expertise spans from transformative tech to strategic policymaking.

Khalid Machchate (00:27.253)
Yes.

Martin Rowinski (00:48.6)
As the chairman of K&W Technology Group and a Forbs Top 30 entrepreneur, Khalid has played a pivotal role in digital transformation across the globe. His work in advising royal policies and driving startup ecosystems showcases his profound impact on the tech industry. Khalid, welcome to the show.

Khalid Machchate (01:11.714)
Thank you, Martin, for having me.

Martin Rowinski (01:14.108)
Awesome. I’m so excited because I know you’re in Morocco, I believe, right now, right? And you have experience in more than just Morocco and other countries, which we’ll dive into, but it’s always great to hear a perspective from other countries and the work that you’ve done. So I’m looking forward to this. So like I said, your work spans

Khalid Machchate (01:19.162)
Yes, indeed.

Martin Rowinski (01:41.697)
working with companies in Europe, Middle East and Africa. How do you adapt your strategies to cater to such diverse markets and regulatory environments?

Khalid Machchate (01:54.354)
Thank you for that question. So, you know, starting from K&W Technology Group, you know, starting to develop it 15 years ago, while the offshore model wasn’t as advanced, especially within high added value markets, as it is today.

we had to learn on the job. We had to understand how the cultural differences were between where we were having our engineers, which is mainly Morocco and Africa, to the places where our clients were. We needed to understand what they liked to see as their account executives, or also what the regulatory frameworks were. And so for us, it was really a

trial and error, at least for the first few years. And then once we were more established, we understood that our clients obviously liked to have at least one person representing the company that they dealt with in close quarters. And so we had to establish subsidiaries in the US, in Europe, and at least…

They wanted to be reassured of the competence of the staff and the project, which meant that we needed more rigorous quality controls and more fluid communication across.

between our engineering teams and the client teams. And the client also wanted to be reassured that their data was treated respectfully of their regulatory environment. So we hosted coded sessions within cloud servers that were in Europe, for example, within the Schengen area for our European clients, et cetera. So all of these are elements that we obviously learned we had to question our clients,

Khalid Machchate (03:52.156)
about. And it is it differs obviously from private sector, public sector, family offices. Each of them are more focused on a particular area or requirement than the other.

Martin Rowinski (04:07.8)
Okay. So a lot of learning as you go. Best way to get it done. Having that extensive background, and I know you also have some, obviously, background in US, how would you describe the difference in the boardroom culture between all the different areas, everything from Africa, Morocco, US?

Khalid Machchate (04:11.786)
Yep.

Martin Rowinski (04:34.77)
Yeah, everywhere you’ve done work, what do you see the biggest difference?

Khalid Machchate (04:38.846)
Sure. So it’s actually a great question. In boardrooms, the biggest difference I’ve noticed, and I think that’s also kind of culturally significant in the.

difference between European business culture and the US business culture is the board or people that are hired within a board, obviously outside of the representatives of investors are there to drive growth to the company. So mainly they’re people that will be opening doors either to funding or to new clientele or to new markets.

On Europe, it’s more on the structured governance model. So there are people that will be in audit committees, there are people that will be structuring the governance or regulatory issues. There are people that will be representing the company in other areas and really there to kind of keep the structure, focus the strategy, but not as much.

pointed towards anybody that can bring us the maximum growth, anybody that can advise us or can bring up to the table things of that nature. So that’s kind of the more regulated European side versus the more go-getter US business side, if that makes sense. Now, the Middle East and Africa are different.

Khalid Machchate (06:17.342)
a representative of family style business. And so we’re gonna bring people that we trust to our board because we want an extra wisdom or extra wise eye on our processes or our strategies. And so it’s not really a, oh, let’s see whatever resume you have as a board member, especially for independent board director hiring, but it’s, oh, who do we trust?

but also has whatever particular expertise or understanding we want. And then we’re gonna have that person join our board.

Martin Rowinski (06:55.728)
Yeah, that’s quite a difference across the board. When I said the board again, but literally. So specifically speaking, you know, US has been so focused on trying to fix the diversity, you know, just so much talk about diversity, having more diversity on boards. How is that in other countries?

Khalid Machchate (07:03.942)
It still works.

Martin Rowinski (07:25.004)
Is there a focus or has it always been there or is it less diverse? Like what’s a board look like there?

Khalid Machchate (07:33.675)
So I think that board diversity in the US is going to be focused on a two-prong model, which is one, minorities as in ethnic minorities, as well as the other prong, which is gender diversity. In most of the countries in the Middle East and Africa for at least, there isn’t much

ask for talk of ethnic diversity, because usually it’s, you know, either it’s mixed ethnicities, but they were always there. So it’s not really something that we have to focus on, or it’s like fairly unified. So again, not something that we focus on. However, for the gender part, that has been quite the push in the past, maybe a few years. We’ve

Khalid Machchate (08:33.47)
in the Middle East and North Africa region lately where we’ve had quotas created on publicly traded companies for women board directors to join. And so to be replacing, facing out male directors. So that’s kind of where it was. It’s probably kind of newer or…

later than when the US started working on the DEI for boardrooms, but it has been picking up probably four or five years ago.

Martin Rowinski (09:13.345)
And how about like in Morocco?

Khalid Machchate (09:17.034)
In Morocco, actually, the culture of boardrooms is not as prevalent outside of major corporations. And within major corporations, we started seeing the same trend of gender quotas for a boardroom, mainly publicly traded corporations or corporations that have a partial state investment. So those are the ones that have more.

structure and more control.

Martin Rowinski (09:50.544)
Got it. And in the US also, there’s a focus in creating not official boards, especially like in the mid market companies or maybe companies that are working towards growth very specifically. Maybe they’re, you know, in five years, they’re going to be looking at an exit strategy or going public. But prior to actually putting board members on their board, they want to create an advisory board. Is that even talked about? Is that something that exists?

Khalid Machchate (10:21.422)
It does exist. Obviously, it’s not probably thought about in the same way that you’ve described for US companies.

Khalid Machchate (10:48.21)
formally onboarding them on the company’s cap tables. So they’re either paid hourly or they’re paid on exit safe notes or whatever the case may be, but they’re not former executive board members because, as you said, the company has not IPO’d yet or they’re still earlier-ish stages.

And so yeah, the term advisory board is fairly well used as basically a council of wise folks that you’re going to use as your fractional, sometimes just for timely advice on whatever subject that you require for a longer period of time.

Martin Rowinski (11:37.096)
Got it. Okay, so there is some similarities. Can you discuss, sorry, can you discuss a project that you believe significantly transformed an industry or maybe a sector?

Khalid Machchate (11:40.918)
Indeed.

Khalid Machchate (11:52.226)
Hmm. Let’s perhaps say for Morocco and then going forward, just because that’s a broad question, so I just want to make sure that I answer it correctly. So, for example, the largest natural resource in Morocco is phosphate, so phosphorus rock.

Prior to 2010, perhaps, Morocco used to export the phosphorus rock itself, so without transformation. And in 10 years, the export equivalent in matters of GDP participation and financial, it has grown about a hundredfold just from

stop stopping to export raw material, which is phosphorus, and starting to create fertilizers, and more and more detailed, more and more R&D, and more and more very, very specialized fertilizers for various areas, various countries, depending on their soil, depending on their water shortage or lack thereof, to boost particularly their crops, and particular crops as well. So…

very tailored fertilizer work. And so this is like going from, I think it was maybe a $200 million a year revenue to this year about $10 billion revenue in 10 years, while pulling out of the earth or other resources about the same amount.

because there is only a certain limited amount of phosphorus or fertilizers that are used at any point in time in the world because of the limitation of arable soil that you can plant on. And so you can’t really overflow the market. Otherwise you drop the prices of the fertilizer. And so for about the same amount in 10 years, we’ve gone from 200 million to a 10 billion

Khalid Machchate (14:18.258)
operations. I guess that’s fairly transformative, especially for our country. I think this year we’re about 150 billion GDP for the whole country, so 10 billion is fairly close to 10%. So that’s pretty significant.

Martin Rowinski (14:36.376)
That is very significant. As someone who has been instrumental in shaping policies and advising at high levels of government, how do you approach the challenge of integrating innovative tech into traditional systems?

Khalid Machchate (14:56.935)
that’s a good one. Because that is, that is to nest women against the current, my friend, that is that is a difficult thing to do. So, you know, even like with my different roles as an advisor, so I was a policy advisor on the G20 level, I was policy advisor for the United Nations, for the World Economic Forum, and a royal advisor for my country. And so

Martin Rowinski (15:02.533)
Thank you.

Khalid Machchate (15:23.606)
I’ve kind of worked on various levels of policy, both on multilateral side, on international governments and on national governments. And it plays out fairly close, just because most of policy recommendation or policy professionals that are within positions of power traditionally are.

fairly advanced in age, obviously, because that’s what traditionally is a representation within those environments. And so it’s just there’s a generational difference from people that grew up with technology and people who didn’t. And so that is the importance and the understanding of the exponential growth.

and the understanding of the consequences of missing particular trains within technology is not the same, just because we haven’t lived the same. And so my role in a lot of those rooms were, one, to be understanding of that difference, two, to be able to explain why is it as important from an industrial, from a financial, from an economic standpoint, as say, heavy industry.

And to bring examples from worldwide from countries that went from being third world countries to developing countries just by implementing one pillar of digital economy. So, you know, that example can take Pakistan or Bangladesh that went from, you know, having very fairly low GDP and a lot of poverty issues.

to just saying, oh, we’re going to start a digital economy, let’s call it an industry, where the offshore business, they got the idea from India, obviously, because they started first. But they focused on it as a national driver. And going from maybe a few hundred thousand to about, was it 15 or 20 million at the last census?

Khalid Machchate (17:45.502)
of people that are working offshore and within high added value industry. So coding, AI, whatever the case may be, and the ridiculous amount of advancement within GDP that happened just by that vertical. And so you find out that a lot of these people just don’t know actually these things because these are not industries that they’ve had to look into or they’re not just.

it wasn’t part of their interests while they were working on their policies previously. So my job was to be the voice of technology in every room, trying to approach it as closely as possible to create parallels between technology or digital economy as an economic development vector to others that were previously permanent for others.

Martin Rowinski (18:44.252)
Yeah, and that brings up a great point because there are…

Two differences, you got a fast pace of technology, which is just increasing, literally every day it’s faster. I mean, look at AI and what it has done. And then on the flip side, you have the slower pace of policy making and regulatory changes that takes a lot more time. So how do you take the two and balance it? Like any thoughts on that?

Khalid Machchate (19:20.278)
Sure. So the way I would best describe it, especially because, again, I’ve had a bird’s eye view on the policymaking subject for multiple countries because working within multilaterals, you can see after the G20 presidency was over and you have the book of recommendations, you can track whatever each country has kind of done with the recommendations and how they try perhaps to implement it.

You see that countries that, one, created spaces where there are organizations within the country that are government affiliated but function on a more corporational level, have a little bit of leeway, have a little bit of budget, and have some smart people on the top can drive these sandbox

You can try things out while the regulator is looking. So under the eye of the regulator. So let’s say, for example, when cryptocurrency became a thing, establishing a cryptocurrency or a blockchain sandbox under the review of a central bank while the unit is being run by a smart person as if it was a company or an R&D center.

So we’re trying out different currencies, we’re trying out their valuations, we’re trying out paying them against other assets, we’re trying also to establish stable coins and what does that mean for the market and trying to push it to market and seeing how different individuals, consumers, buyers react to it. So this is the fastest way.

for an established government organization to get a feel for what that technology can bring from a risk standpoint, which is why policies get so slow in implementation or in creation, and from a creation or value creation standpoint. So you can see exactly that this will create value, but these are the risks that are identified and you’ve seen them firsthand.

Khalid Machchate (21:43.074)
The sandbox environment is limited in its impact on security and risk because it’s only applicable for that particular environment. And so this is the first one. The second one is in places where, let’s say there is a big push on innovation from like top leadership level. So United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, that kind of, those kinds of places where

We’ve seen the first minister of AI coming in or where they’ve worked on developing very large multi-hundred billion dollar projects that were focused on those particular areas. That’s for governments or organizations that have a little bit more leeway in their budget. Morocco can’t just because, well, we have national social security to implement. We have…

You know, we have free education that we have to budget for and we have to go figure our taxes out. So we can do sandbox because it doesn’t cost as much, but we can’t really, you know, create a 40 billion dollar A.I. investment fund like Saudi came. And so that’s kind of where the differences are. But in those countries, you’d find that leadership has a little bit more space to push for direct government to implement implication in these kind of new.

uh, verticals and, um, they’re driven by whatever, you know, ministerial or whatever government entities that were created specifically for, uh, for their space. Um, and so, excuse me, these are the two different models that I’ve, uh, that I’ve seen so far that worked, um, uh, much better than, uh, just trying to study a case of cryptocurrency. Is it yay or nay?

and going through the whole government process and parliamentary process, trying to explain what cryptocurrency is to parliamentarians without having any tangible data that is applied within the context of a specific country, which is why the sandboxes idea comes in. When you try to explain it just from a foreign perspective, it’s very difficult to pass through. And it comes with a bunch of…

Khalid Machchate (24:04.746)
ifs and buts and whatnots and that doesn’t really get things moving forward

Martin Rowinski (24:12.364)
Yeah, that’s a tough one. Being a Forbes top 30 entrepreneur, you’re also a keynote speaker. And everything else you’ve done across the globe, what advice would you give to young entrepreneurs aiming to make a mark in the technology sector?

Khalid Machchate (24:14.527)
Yeah.

Khalid Machchate (24:41.018)
Um, so just to give a little bit of background and that comes, uh, in direct correlation with my advice. Um, I grew up in a, in a fishing village with a couple of thousand people, um, in like a far remote area, sorry.

Martin Rowinski (24:55.502)
Get your picture in.

Martin Rowinski (24:59.42)
Are you a good fisherman?

Khalid Machchate (25:01.826)
Yes, hookfish and bassfish, yes. And so, no, of course, but which means that I was the farthest you can imagine from any opportunities I isolated in public school my whole life. And so anybody that sees this from kind of an external view would think, oh, that person is going to kind of go.

Martin Rowinski (25:08.584)
Sorry.

Khalid Machchate (25:29.718)
through the standard rock in their country, whatever it is. And that’s where my advice would come in, which is if you don’t open doors, if you don’t create doors for yourself through imagination, through innovation, through perseverance, there are very few people that are handed the silver spoon. And so if you wanna make it while being…

coming from a background like mine, you have to claw your way up. And, you know, handling rejection and developing resilience and perseverance were my biggest assets in building and growing my company. Now, for technology specifically, I would say today is a lot easier and a lot better than 15 years ago when I started.

And so if you have a laptop and a smartphone, you can do pretty much a whole lot of things within the technology space. I mean, it’s ridiculous. From the no code to the gen.ai, you can build the website in two minutes. Chat GPT gives you the text, and a no code tool would create the website for you. Come on, I had to code everything since I was 11.

every like single line of code, every single color change, every single title. And so it is a lot easier. But also it comes with the fact that, well, I can make a website of anything I want, but I don’t know what I want. And I’m, you know, I don’t want to get out on my couch. And I don’t, you know, I don’t feel like I have an idea that’s worth pursuing. That’s, you know, that’s not going to fall on your head. You’re not Isaac New

You really need to develop that grit, that wanting to go for it and start from there. Your first five ideas will suck. Your sixth idea will be meh and then you’ll go on from.

Martin Rowinski (27:40.388)
Yeah, no, I agree a lot with that. And I’m in the same boat as you. I didn’t have any of these tools, so I had to grind it out. But at the same time, I almost feel like that’s what built my character. I’m sure you can say the same thing. That’s what built your character, resilience and fighting for it and learning. Now you have all these tools, which is great. But like you said, you still

Khalid Machchate (27:56.97)
Oh yeah. Yep.

Martin Rowinski (28:09.72)
It also kind of in a way makes it more competitive market, right? Because the opportunity is there now for more people. So now you really got to be hungry and become resilient. And at the end of the day, I think, you know, the character is pretty much the same. You have to build that character and you have to want it. So get off the couch.

Khalid Machchate (28:28.269)
Exactly.

Martin Rowinski (28:30.748)
So you’re a keynote speaker. What is your typical keynote about?

Khalid Machchate (28:38.414)
So my keynotes go pretty much three routes, depending on audience. One is motivational. And my motivation is for entrepreneurs or for people that want to take initiative either within their own organizations, you know, working for other organizations or launching their own. And so the motivation is…

you know, the rags to riches story that is actually substantiated and that is actually, you know, that takes you through all the, you know, the clogs of how difficult it can be to go from, you know, a nobody that has no access to getting on 80,000 people stadiums. And so it’s, you know, that story motivates a lot of people to

to get out of their own heads and compare their circumstances, make them feel that they can do it because I was able to. So that’s the motivational part. Then you have technical parts, so business and tech. Usually that would be to audiences that are coming to a major tech conference or a major business conference and where I would be talking about particular trends within.

investment, deep tech, etc. And we would be targeting a particular subject that is of interest at the time, either for the organizers or for the audience. And the third one is for government leaders, country leaders, etc. That’s more kind of smaller other boards or government leader.

It’s not really a keynote at that point. You’re talking really to a smaller audience, but those are more about governance, about policy, about strategy, and giving them a few kind of golden nuggets based on my 360 degree view of working on government, working within corporations, working as an entrepreneur. And so those…

Khalid Machchate (31:01.806)
cross-sectional interactions, those observations, and those best practices are fairly unique, I say, because there’s not a lot of people that have gone through all of those fields within the same career path. And so I share that unique perspective with those audiences.

Martin Rowinski (31:26.508)
Awesome, I love it. One last question. Can you share a little bit about your personal mission and vision for future of global technology landscapes?

Khalid Machchate (31:41.606)
I would say one of my first missions is quite personal to me in the sense that you don’t see a lot of people my age on boards. You don’t see people my age on stadiums other than musicians.

those kind of particular people, but within our niches, either in business or in tech, it’s not particularly prominent. Also, you don’t see a lot of my people on global stages as well. And so one of my biggest missions is representation. So, DEI is a pretty word, but you know…

Martin Rowinski (32:08.285)
The rest.

Khalid Machchate (32:33.666)
getting it to be implemented is fairly complicated. And me representing Africans, me representing Arabs, me representing young people, I have the luck of crossing all these three at the same time. Just the fact of me being there and me being a first to the global stage.

facilitates for people like me to imagine that they can get there too. And so that is one of the reasons why I speak globally in the first place. And a lot of on a lot of these stages, it’s the first time that they’ve ever seen somebody like me. And so that is very important to me. And that is a big part of my mission. The second would be balancing our thirst for

pushing technology to the end of what it can do and its impact on both humans and nature. So we don’t have to run the motor into burns. We need to be conscious of what that means to its users, to its audiences, and to the environment that it’s in.

And so these are kind of the two main missions that I feel I’m imbued with. It’s not really something that I just thought of and thought, okay, my purpose and my mission is gonna be this as a tagline, but it’s just something that I found myself driven to, to push as an agenda and something that kind of represents me before I represent it, if it makes sense.

Martin Rowinski (34:28.988)
awesome. Well, you’re doing a great job. Congratulations on Forbes 30 for sure. Keep it up. Don’t stop. And thank you for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Khalid Machchate (34:32.535)
Thank you so much.

Khalid Machchate (34:42.383)
It was a pleasure, Martin, and thank you for inviting me. It was a great time.

Martin Rowinski (34:46.724)
Awesome. Till next time.

Khalid Machchate (34:49.805)
See ya.