By Dalia Abou Omar, Co-Founder & CEO of Proteinni
People often ask me how I went from being a TV presenter to running Egypt’s first premium dark butcher. Honestly? I ask myself the same question some mornings.
The truth is, Proteinni wasn’t born out of a perfectly crafted business plan. It was born out of a gap I couldn’t unsee — a market where premium, high-quality meat was either inaccessible, inconsistent, or buried inside a traditional retail experience that hadn’t evolved in decades. I saw an opportunity, and I jumped.
What I didn’t fully see coming was everything that comes after the jump.
Starting up is an act of controlled chaos. Building a vertically integrated supply chain from scratch in Egypt — where infrastructure challenges are real and logistics can humble even the most prepared operator — is not for the faint-hearted. In our earliest days, there was no playbook. We were figuring out cold chain requirements while simultaneously onboarding suppliers, building customer trust from zero, and learning the science of meat cuts on the job. Cash was tight, timelines were unpredictable, and the problems rarely announced themselves in advance. One week it was a supplier who couldn’t deliver on time. The next, it was a logistical bottleneck that threatened our entire fulfillment promise. The hardest part of the early stage isn’t the big strategic decisions — it’s surviving the daily grind of a hundred small fires, and choosing which ones to put out first.
I learned quickly that resilience isn’t a personality trait. It’s a muscle. And the only way to build it is to keep showing up.
Being a female founder in Egypt adds a layer no business school prepares you for. Not because the doors are locked — they’re not, not entirely — but because I was often the only woman in the room when the serious conversations happened. I learned quickly that confidence is not optional. Neither is knowing your numbers better than anyone else at the table. I had to earn credibility in rooms where it wasn’t automatically offered, and that made me a sharper operator and a more resilient leader.
Engineering a Business, Not Just a Product. People are often surprised to learn that before the camera and before the butcher block, there was an engineering degree. And honestly, it’s the thread that connects everything. Engineering taught me to zoom out and see the full system before zooming in on the problem. When something breaks at Proteinni — a supplier bottleneck, a margin issue, a fulfillment gap — my instinct isn’t to patch the symptom. It’s to reverse-engineer the root cause. Work backwards from the failure, map the system, find where it broke, and rebuild it better. That’s not a startup habit. That’s an engineering habit. The same discipline that taught me to hold the big picture and the smallest detail simultaneously is what allows me to think about Proteinni’s supply chain architecture while also caring deeply about how a cut of meat is presented to a customer at their door. Both matter. Neither exists without the other. I didn’t leave my engineering background behind when I stepped into the founder’s role. I put it to work.
On funding — because every founder eventually has to face this conversation. Raising capital is one of the most humbling and clarifying experiences you’ll go through as a founder. Here’s what I’ve learned from our own journey at Proteinni, and what I’d tell any startup navigating this road:
First, know your unit economics cold. Investors will stress-test every number. If you don’t understand your margins, your CAC, your churn, and your path to profitability, no amount of vision will save you in that room.
Second, tell a story that is both honest and compelling. Don’t oversell and don’t undersell. The best pitch I ever gave was the one where I stopped trying to sound like a perfect founder and started talking like someone who had actually lived the problem.
Third, fit matters more than size. A smaller fund that deeply understands your market and your stage will add more value than a large name that treats you like a line item. We were deliberate about who we brought to the table at Proteinni, and that intentionality paid off.
Finally, don’t wait until you’re desperate to fundraise. Start building relationships with investors long before you need the money. The best funding conversations happen when you have leverage — and leverage comes from traction, not urgency.
What I’ve learned above all else is this: execution is everything. Vision is the easy part. The hard part is showing up every single day and solving the problem in front of you — not the glamorous one, the real one.
Proteinni is proof that a bold idea, when paired with obsessive attention to operations, can carve out a category that didn’t exist before.
We’re just getting started
