My guest this week is Hicham Oudghiri, a Morrocan-American entrepreneur. The founder of Enigma, a startup that creates a data infrastructure that will help businesses make informed decisions mostly about other businesses. One of their focus points is specifically small business lending, which is notoriously difficult. And Enigma is aiming to change that and has made some progress there - among their clients are PayPal, American Express, and Capital One.

Hicham is my second high-tech guest in a row. I hope you guys don't mind. I guess it is a reflection of the world we live in or at least my sense about it. Data and data collection and exploitation of data is everywhere and we all have our concerns, fears, and frustrations about it. But the reality is that this is how the world will be for the decades to come and we better learn to deal with it and hopefully even benefit from it.

This is part one of the conversation and we focus on Hicham's family background and how the mix of Moroccan, French, and American cultures has instilled him with the values of open-mindedness, nomadic desire to explore the frontier, and at the same time appreciation of the civic values and ethics, and how that manifests in his day to day business thinking.

FIND HICHAM:

https://twitter.com/merinids

https://enigma.com/

https://medium.com/enigma

FIND WE THE ALIENS PODCAST:

www.WeTheAliensPod.com

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ASK YOUR FRIENDLY RUSSIAN on TikTok

MUSIC: "My country" courtesy of Ben Bostick www.benbostick.com

ABOUT WE THE ALIENS PODCAST:

We The Aliens podcast hosts conversations with IMMIGRANTS from all over the world who came to the US and found their path to the American Dream. No matter what their status is - undocumented, DACA recipient, permanent resident (green card holder), naturalized citizen - all are welcome here. We talk about the challenges of leaving the home country, finding the legal path, finding a way to belong in the new world, building a career, finding love, and sustaining the family traditions. We talk about IMMIGRATION as a process of growth and self-discovery, adaptation, overcoming cultural shocks, and fighting racial and ethnic stereotypes. We talk about the great contributions that immigrants make to the American economy, culture, science, and society. We also feature stories of the first-gens, FIRST GENERATION American-born, the third culture kids, who have their own set of struggles growing in between the cultures of their parents' home country and America. We talk about their battle to find their identity and carve their path while redefining what American is. We talk about philosophy, psychology, culture, language, and history. We also talk about the news of the day, things that we all worry about - but in the context of the immigrant perspective. If you love NPR, This American Life, The Daily, and Pod Save America, if you read Forbes, LA Times, The Atlantic, and New York Times, if you watch John Oliver, Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert, and/or Trevor Noah, if you are a Twitter and Clubhouse addict because you want to be closer to people, if you, your spouse, your parent, or your grandma is an immigrant-alien and you know that you and they came to this country to build and contribute, and you can't stand discrimination and belittling of their lives and contributions - this podcast is for you.