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The Times Tech Podcast

Sophia Mahfooz: “It’s torture or an adventure, depending on your perspective’”

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9654 Ratings

🗓️ 9 March 2018

⏱️ 50 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Sophia Mahfooz, entrepreneur and former operations chief at Girls in Tech, on sharing a house with other Silicon Valley hopefuls (3:00), winning her first pitch competition (4:05), building a product in China (6:20), trying (and failing) to sell to the NHS (7:55), launching another company (10:25), growing up in Afghanistan (12:15), learning entrepreneurship at home (14:30), getting in to Draper University (17:20), going through hell to get funding (19:00), hitchhiking (23:00), giving the money back (29:05), starting at Girls in Tech (32:00), and leaving (33:45), the next thing (35:00), making a career in a male-dominated world (37:00), why she is so determined to work on the West coast (38:30) and meeting Elon Musk (40:15). PLUS: A quick chat with Michael Hughes, chief executive of LoopUp and founder of the Silicon Valley Internship Programme. (42:30).

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley. Before we get started today, I just wanted to thank you all for the reviews. We've zoomed past 150 five-star reviews in the iTunes stores in the U.S. and the UK, which is amazing. So please do keep those rolling in. If you like to show, it takes like two seconds, really. It's that quick. Or perhaps a tad longer if you're feeling loquacious but it really does

0:21.8

help others find the show plues so please do keep those coming in and one other note just seven

0:27.5

episodes into season two we're on the cusp of 100,000 listens which is amazing when we started

0:34.8

this thing which was really a bit on a whim the first couple days we had something like 40 people download.

0:40.2

It was pretty dire.

0:41.7

So we've come a long way.

0:43.5

And for that, I thank you sincerely.

0:46.3

But of course, we're still working very hard to make the show better,

0:49.5

tracking down the best guess, putting together those special reports.

0:52.2

And I thought, why not set a new goal? Let's go for

0:55.2

a million. Let's go for it. Tell a friend. We'll be a unicorn yet. We're not, but it's worth

1:01.9

trying, I think, no. But enough of that. Let's get to the business end of proceedings and on to

1:08.7

today's show. Yo, technology.

1:12.9

What is it all about?

1:14.5

The Taliban or the Soviets, whoever knew that families were escaping would stop them and

1:20.3

take anything that they had, you know, any money, any gold, anything that they had.

1:24.3

So it was a traumatic experience for any family that had gone through that.

1:28.7

And we ended up in Pakistan for seven years.

1:34.8

So this week we're doing something a bit different after back-to-back billionaires these last

1:39.1

couple weeks with Brian Chesky of Airbnb and Patrick Collison of Stripe, were both great.

1:46.2

I wanted to introduce you to someone who is on the other end of that entrepreneur continuum, and her name is Sophia Mafuse.

1:53.3

Sophia is only 26, but has lived quite a bit of life already, and when in 10 years' time, she's

...

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