When Jacques Saab arrived at London Business School, he wasn’t keeping his options open. Plenty of MBA students treat launching a company as one path among several, a nice-to-have alongside the consulting and banking offers. Jacques had written his entrepreneurial ambition into every essay and every interview before he ever set foot on campus. “I knew I wanted to do a startup at LBS,” he says. “It wasn’t luck.”
That conviction had been a long time coming, and it grew out of a decision he never forgot.
The one that got away
Jacques caught the entrepreneurship bug in his final year of university in Lebanon, when he co-founded a venture called Sfearia: a virtual-reality platform built to treat mental health conditions, and phobias in particular. The idea had real momentum. It won a place at the UK Tech Hub, one of the region’s most prestigious accelerators, which came with funding, an office and a genuine launch runway.
Then came the fork in the road that so many first-time founders will recognise. At the same moment, a leading consulting firm offered him a full-time role, with all the security, salary and clear progression that implied. He took the offer and let the startup go.
“It’s something I did not forget,” he says. His two co-founders went their own ways too. Jacques sensed that one day he would try entrepreneurship again, and do it properly.
Why London Business School?
Three intense years in consulting gave Jacques the technical and interpersonal toolkit he’d lean on later. Long hours, high standards, real client pressure. But by year three the work had started to feel repetitive, and the shift to remote working during the pandemic became the trigger he needed. He applied to LBS with a single, explicit goal: to build a company while he was there.
LBS, he says, was built for exactly that. “London Business School gives you the flexibility to invest your time where you feel it’s a fit.” Want to pour your energy into clubs and social life? Go for it. Academics? Likewise. A startup? The resources are all there. For Jacques, that freedom, combined with the Entrepreneurship Club, the competitions, the launchpad and constant access to experts and peers willing to stress-test an idea, is what let him iterate fast. During his MBA, he pivoted three times.
A flatmate, and a competition as a test run
For Jacques and Tarek, the co-founder question answered itself. Tarek Abboud was his flatmate, but the relationship went back much further than that. They’d met in their first year of undergrad, studied the same major, worked at the same consulting firm, and then coincidentally moved to London together for the MBA. What they hadn’t done was actually build something side by side.
They had the chance to work on something big together for the first time at LBS. Rather than slotting into an existing role in the Entrepreneurship Club, the pair pitched something of their own: a MENA Startup Competition. The students loved it, and the idea quickly climbed to LBS leadership, where it merged with parallel ambitions among the School’s alumni in the Middle East. Together with alumni, they built it and ran it.
The competition opened doors across the region and put them in front of a pipeline of startups he’s still in touch with today. Just as importantly, it gave him and Tarek a low-stakes way to find out how they worked together before betting their careers on it.
Jacques Saab and Tarek Abboud at their LBS Congregation ceremony.
Swavy 1.0, 2.0, 3.0
Jacques jokes that there’s a Swavy 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0, with plenty of mini-pivots in between. Looking back, the first version is almost funny.
Swavy 1.0 was a cashback product-discovery app with a Tinder-style interface. You’d swipe through products you didn’t know you wanted, and the algorithm learned what to surface next.
Swavy 2.0 kept the discovery engine but reimagined it as a TikTok-style feed of videos showcasing those products. This is where influencers entered the picture, and the model became a three-sided marketplace: influencers creating the content, brands greenlighting their products onto the platform, and end customers buying and, ideally, posting their own videos to earn commissions in turn.
Then reality did what reality does. Brands loved the platform, though not as a new sales channel (they already had Amazon and plenty of others) so much as for the wave of authentic video content being created around their products. Influencers were easy to onboard, because they were getting paid to do their job. The genuinely hard part was acquiring the end customers the whole model depended on.
So Jacques and Tarek made the call that defines so many good startups. They cut the hardest, most expensive piece. Out went the third stakeholder, leaving a cleaner, cheaper two-sided marketplace connecting brands and influencers. That was Swavy 3.0, the company as it exists today.
Building the team: the cold message that changed everything
If there’s one decision Jacques credits above the rest, it’s getting the right people on board, and the clearest example is the hire of Swavy’s CTO.
Early on, the founders were paying an external firm to build their product. For two students that was a lot of money, and the resulting MVP was underwhelming and inflexible. Jacques decided they needed a technical leader of their own, full stop, and started cold-messaging promising engineers on LinkedIn.
One stood out: a senior engineer at a major technology company. Jacques messaged him. No reply. He followed up. Still nothing. He followed up a third time, and that’s when the engineer finally agreed to meet. They ran a two-month pilot, working together exactly as they would if he joined, with no commitment on either side. At the end of it, the engineer decided to go all in.
“This type of person has so many other opportunities out there,” Jacques says. The lesson he draws from it is simple. The people you surround yourself with are the single most important asset you have.
Traction, and a domino effect
The LBS incubator kept giving. Two student interns, Darla and Chris Haoxin, joined the team, and Chris helped land one of Swavy’s clients, Emma Sleep, which gave the company the cash flow to start expanding in earnest. A second big client, the regional e-commerce giant Noon, came through another friend who is now full-time at Swavy. After that, Jacques says, it became “a domino effect” of brands wanting influencer marketing done well.
Where Swavy is today
Today Swavy is a company of around 50+ people, organised into proper departments with a clear division of responsibilities among its partners. It runs three revenue streams: a high-touch influencer-marketing service for enterprise clients (including governments and large direct-to-consumer brands); a self-serve platform aimed at medium-sized businesses that want to run their own campaigns; and a white-label offering for companies that need the technology built into customised workflows.
The most striking part might be the funding. Beyond a small friends-and-family round at an $8 million valuation a couple of years ago, Swavy hasn’t raised external capital, because it hasn’t needed to. The business is profitable, and there are no concrete fundraising plans on the table. Last year it generated net revenues of more than $5 million (separate from the GMV flowing across the platform), and it’s on track to do more this year, having grown exponentially since the start of last year.
Surviving the storm
That growth wasn’t a straight line. When conflict erupted in the region, key clients put their projects, and Swavy’s revenues, on standby. Jacques and Tarek responded the way they’d learned to respond to everything: with scenarios. They wrote down three or four, each tied to how long the disruption might last, and shifted into deliberate survival mode. No new marketing spend, no speculative bets, a relentless focus on keeping more than six months of runway, and aggressive collection of receivables, which is no small thing in a region where cash can take a long time to arrive.
It worked. The business has only recently returned to something like normal, with projects starting up again, and Jacques is the first to acknowledge how much of that came down to hard-won discipline rather than luck.
Lessons for the next founder
Asked what advice he’d give his younger self, or any LBS student weighing the leap, Jacques keeps coming back to two things.
The first is people. Hire those you can genuinely rely on, and look for complementary thinkers rather than clones of yourself. He and Tarek share almost identical backgrounds but think differently, which produces more arguments, held in a healthy way, and ultimately better decisions.
The second is focus, an area where he’s refreshingly honest about Swavy’s own habits. Running three revenue streams stretches the team thin, and he isn’t sure it’s the optimal setup. The deeper principle is to be attached to the problem, not the idea. Pivot quickly, and don’t fall in love with a concept the market is quietly telling you to abandon. Swavy itself only became Swavy through three rounds of saying no.
From a swipe-right shopping app to a profitable, multi-million-dollar marketplace, Jacques Saab’s story shows how rarely the best founder journeys run in a straight line. What carried him through was the willingness to keep listening, keep pivoting, and keep surrounding himself with exceptional people.
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*Jacques Saab (MBA 2023) is the co-founder of Swavy, an AI-native influencer marketing platform he built alongside fellow LBS alumnus Tarek Abboud (MBA 2023).*