Fighting infrastructure and politics, this entrepreneur built Beirut's first coworking space

As he sits with his beat-up laptop and notebook phone, David Munir Nabti could easily pass for one of the customers working at the AltCity cafe. So unassuming is his stance that a newcomer to the first floor space on West Beirut’s Hamra Street would have no clue that this is one of the guys who brought Lebanon one of its first ever co-working space for entrepreneurs and startups.

“The spectrum on which people engage is huge,” Nabti tells Wamda. “The cafe wasn’t by accident.” Serving standard international salad-and-sandwich fare, the team opened the cafe in 2013, obviously as a revenue stream for the space, but, also, as Nabti stresses, for people to discuss ideas, and make discoveries here; not everyone was born to be in an office.

Since AltCity opened its doors in 2011, a lot has changed. Guiding the ship through Beirut’s rough entrepreneurial waters as Chief Entrepreneur and Organizer is a far cry from Nabti’s California beginnings. Or is it?

Going the tech route

“I’ve been interested in tech stuff” since high school, he says. His first job after graduating with a political science and international economics degree from the University of California, Berkeley was a stint at Stanford, working in the graduate journalism program, while also working as a policy compliance analyst at Google. His LinkedIn profile characterizes this period as “an interesting time doing mind-numbing work,” but he is quick to add that the tech company was very inspiring.

When he finally decided to make the trip overseas he got himself to Syria working for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, while simultaneously earning another bachelor’s degree, this time in Middle East Studies at the American University of Beirut. “I felt restless in California,” says Nabti. “When I studied I focused on political and economic transitions and I wanted to live in a transitioning country.”

Lebanon was a perfect choice.

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Fighting infrastructure and politics, this entrepreneur built Beirut’s first coworking space