Lessons - He Built Afghanistan's Most Popular TV Network in the Middle of a War | Saad Mohseni - MOBY Group Chairman & CEO

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In this lessons episode, discover how entrepreneurship requires calculated risks and resourcefulness in unfamiliar markets.

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Understand why instinct can sometimes reveal opportunities that research misses.

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Explore how lean execution can turn limited resources into a viable business and uncover how new markets can grow alongside the businesses that serve them.

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So maybe paint a picture for listeners.

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In 2002, what was the state of Afghanistan?

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Because you mentioned it was risky.

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It was a little bit new.

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So walk me through sort of like the political climate, the cultural climate, what you're walking into when you have the idea.

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I would like to make some sort of media group, media entity in Afghanistan in 2002.

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So when you do something new, there are all sorts of risks, right?

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There's the physical risk in a place like Afghanistan.

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There's a regulatory risk in terms of, you know, will we get a license?

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Can they take the license away from us?

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How risky is it from that perspective?

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There is the business risk.

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Is there a market, you know, whether we're investing in, will it yield anything for us longer term?

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There's also issues like capacity building and infrastructure and so forth.

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But I'd...

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At every level we had to deal with risk.

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So we had to get, we became the first company to get a license.

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So I literally had to, with a dossier in my hand and then folder and paperwork, I had to go from office to office to get people to sign on.

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in terms of the documentation we required.

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And then we established sort of a way to get a license.

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We were the first ones to do it.

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And then there was the physical risk, people threatening you.

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Everyone had a gun and a machine gun, lots of militias on the streets of Kabul.

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There was the business risk because there was no advertising market at the time when we set up.

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Capacity was a major issue.

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No one had worked in media before.

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We had to get people and train them up.

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And that's just a start.

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But to do everything yourself, you get a sense of what you need to do.

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And when I say we, I mean myself and my siblings, whether it was editing a program ourselves or doing a news story or recording a podcast.

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soap opera, for example, to fixing up a generator or a transmitter on the hilltop.

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We did all of those things ourselves.

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So you get a real sense of what that business is about.

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And you look under the bonnet.

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And that in itself is very good because, you know, going forward, there's nothing we have not done when dealing with people.

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So you build a business from the ground up.

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And that is very important, I think.

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I mean, like most entrepreneurs don't worry about their physical safety, God forbid, when they're starting a business in SF.

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But a little bit different.

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So in 2002, the Taliban was just removed, but you still have a lot of danger.

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Like you said, there's a lot of militia, a lot of guns, probably a lot of fear and anxiety.

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It just permeates the climate of the country.

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And was there pushback about having...

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I would say it's not government funded, it's not government regulated, it's really just private industry media.

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Was there any pushback at all, or was it welcomed in 2002?

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Was it sort of like riding that tide of, we're done with the Taliban, we want to adopt new and innovative and things that are going to create better culture and society?

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Well, it was mixed.

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So we thought, well, let's be methodical about this.

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We did a survey of 1,000 households.

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What do you want to hear on this radio station?

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And surprisingly, most people said, we want religious programs, documentaries.

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We don't really want music.

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We want classical music, and that's it.

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So we literally thought, well, wow.

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We were totally wrong about this market.

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But then we took a risk.

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We threw out the research and this comprehensive survey, and we went with what we thought was our gut, our instinct in terms of what people would want to hear.

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And the reason why it was successful was because people actually wanted to listen to pop music.

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They wanted light banter.

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They wanted some news, but not too much news.

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They wanted fun stuff.

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I mean, but at the same time, there were elements within society, in particular at that time in Kabul, that...

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who didn't appreciate the format, our format, that is a format that you have today on your FM stations, for example.

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So there was this pushback from certain elements of society and certainly from the religious and political establishment.

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But we hung on.

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I mean, I think when you're pushing the envelope, you take it to the edge, right?

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But you've got to be careful not to go over it.

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But you're constantly pushing the envelope, which we're doing today even with the Taliban.

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So, but you need to know where the lines are.

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Now, of course, we always overstep the mark and sometimes we pay the price.

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But nonetheless, that has to be the nature of the beast, particularly in the media sector.

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And when you say there's...

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I have so many questions, but it's just fascinating.

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So first of all, I'm going to talk about overstepping the mark.

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I'm going to talk about sort of you pushing the envelope, which is just like a very... That's very entrepreneurial anyways.

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That's just something that I think all good entrepreneurs do.

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But when you look at a landscape like Afghanistan, where there is no infrastructure built...

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Just even briefly, just talk to me tactically.

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Is it raising money?

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I mean, like the cost of infrastructure to build this business just seems insanely huge.

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So did you have to raise a lot of money?

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Was it something that you self-funded?

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I don't know the actual, the origin build out for this because, again, Yeah.

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You didn't have all this existing media infrastructure in place to service a whole country.

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So that means that you have to be the one building it while simultaneously offering the programming.

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So it's not simple.

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It's very expensive.

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I'm assuming it's exceptionally expensive.

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So how do you actually accomplish this?

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Well, I mean, our initial business was actually quite, well, relatively speaking, cheap.

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I was in the country.

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I went to see the Minister for Information and Culture, who happened to be an old colleague of my dad's from the 70s.

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This very sort of eccentric man, very cultured.

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And he said, why don't you set up a fan radio station?

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And I said, what about the licensing issues?

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Well, he said, you know, we've had this meeting in Bonn.

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International community came together and we formed this government, this sort of all-inclusive government that's going to replace the Taliban.

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And we've agreed in principle to have free media.

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So you can set up a radio station and a TV station.

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But it was too early for television because no one had access to electricity.

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Radio is easy.

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You can put a battery in.

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So we thought, well, why don't we start with a radio station?

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So how much does it cost?

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How do we sustain this business?

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And at the time, there's quite a well-known author called Ahmed Rashid, who had written a book called The Taliban six months before the Taliban was dislodged and became an international bestseller.

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was basically on the books to read at every university that offered international relations.

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He became the celebrity, Pakistani national.

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He happened to be in Washington meeting with the head of USAID, this guy called Andrew Natsios.

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And he said to Andrew, yeah, I've got this young man in Afghanistan.

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He may do a radio station.

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And Natsios said, let's go and help him.

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So there are folks back in Kabul reached out to me, and we did sort of back of the envelope numbers, and it was going to cost like half a million.

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And I think they said, well, we can only do $220,000 or something around that.

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And they're actually quite reluctant.

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That's not bad at all.

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Not bad at all.

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But they did it very reluctantly because a lot of USAID government folks don't like the private sector.

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They want to work with NGOs.

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They want to work with the UN.

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They don't like to deal with for-profit businesses.

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And lucky for us, Andrew Natzios, who's a Republican, was pro-business today.

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This sounds like a good idea.

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And for us, it was...

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help us buy some equipment.

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We'll figure out a way to sustain this business.

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So we put up the three siblings, or fourth, if you include my sister who joined us later, but we put together about $350,000.

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We set up this business.

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So for just under $600,000.

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And we grew up in Australia and Australians are sort of pioneers by nature.

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We found a bunch of Australian consultants.

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We came to Kabul like,

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They didn't even do their research.

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They just showed up in Kabul.

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And next thing, we're building out this TV station, this radio station, sorry.

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And then even on the training side, we got a bunch of Aussies to come in and help with training of our staff on the ground.

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So it was not expensive per se, but it was complicated, you know, you know.

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Where do you put your antennas or masks and your transmitters and how do you service them?

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It's a very mountainous country.

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How does your signal reach the different parts of the city?

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How do you amplify your signal?

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Things like that.

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Those are things that we have to learn.

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We needed clever engineering to be able to achieve what we did.

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But it was, relatively speaking, quite cheap.

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And it literally paid for itself in less than a year.

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And then we expanded.

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We went beyond the cities.

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But how did it pay for itself if there was no advertising market?

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Because that's how radio stations, media make money, right?

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It's advertisers.

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Well, I mean, as we were developing this business, this country of 20 million people, they started to consume whether it was

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Tim cards for their telephones or cooking oil or, you know, soft drinks.

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And there was a lot of advertising from the NGO community, you know, like the particular NGO does health services, you know, why is hygiene important?

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Let's put this ad on the radio.

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So the advertising market grew quite organically as we grew.

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So that the advertising market now, apparently,

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A large portion of that was sort of do-good public service announcements, but also a lot of commercial advertising.

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So while we were setting up the business, there wasn't much advertising.

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But as we were building the business, it sort of came.

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Thanks for tuning in.

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