Meet the mentor: Omaid Hiwaizi (1987)

Jesus College has an innovative Careers and Mentoring Programme matching current students and recent alumni with experienced alumni and leaders in their fields. One of our mentors, Omaid Hiwaizi (1987), tells us more about his career, his mentoring experience, and his advice for others about to embark on the mentoring process.

Can you tell us more about yourself?

I’m Omaid, I’m a marketer who thinks like a mathematician. My time at Jesus was a whirlwind of creativity, publicity for societies, designing newspapers, and a bit of pure maths. Not surprisingly I came out curious about the world of communications and wired to work out difficult things. My instincts led me to avoid the corporate milk round options, and through a series of coincidences I fell into my first job as a graphic designer for i-D magazine (which was far trendier than me). The Mac skills I’d picked up at College made me stand out vs. the large number of graphic design grads eager to work there. After a few years of earning little but hanging out with a lot of extremely cool and talented people (for example Edward Enninful became the Editor in Chief of British Vogue and Wolfgang Tillmans won the Turner Prize), I fell out of that world and into freelance graphic design for advertising and design agencies.

While freelancing I precociously decided to start my own agency (I was 24). My lucky master stroke was finding a couple of older partners who had client contacts. It turned out to be quite an adventure – starting as a direct marketing agency (mostly direct mail and press ads with big phone numbers) and then after 10 years, rebooting it as a digital integrated agency to embrace the then emerging opportunities of digital. I then worked in a number of larger agencies on big UK and global brands. Next was turning from poacher to game keeper – changing my focus to technology marketing – initially running marketing globally for scaling augmented reality platform Blippar. My brief was to how companies and brands how they could use AR in their products and comms, and also to educate users about this emerging technology. Since then I’ve been consulting to help technology start-ups and scaleups with their marketing – most of which have been blockchain and AI related.

What challenges have you faced?

Challenges range from refining the product value proposition (so the product offers benefits someone actually wants) through to how to communicate it so potential customers are aware, understand and take an interest in the product. This is particularly interesting with emerging technology as there aren’t direct precedents and invariably if the technology finds its place it has the possibility to disrupt and enhance markets. Key to all of this is documenting an idea and working on it to demonstrate traction, which is key to both making money and raising it! This is particularly interesting with emerging technology as there aren’t direct precedents and invariably if the technology finds its place it has the possibility to disrupt and enhance markets. 

In parallel with consulting, I’m founding businesses which apply new technology in smart way. I’m particularly interested in ideas which align impact (environment, social mobility, animal justice) with commercial opportunity. Currently I’m working on start-ups in maritime and in farming, both of which use new tech (the former uses blockchain tokenisation and the latter various agriculture & fintech) to create new financial approaches which are aligned with/enhanced by environmental impact. My core task is being clear on the mission, bringing it to life with technology, clearly communicating it and doing the dance to achieve traction (building a team, forming partnerships and finding customers/investors). Along the whole journey (which is not yet complete!)

Have you benefited from mentoring yourself and how can you help?

I’ve benefited from guidance and introductions from generous colleagues and friends opening doors, creating connections and explaining how some opaque things happen. Small contributions make a huge difference. I’m happy to help any Jesuan who’s interested in developing and launching a new business – particularly those with ideas at the junction of impact and commercial opportunity.

Omaid can be contacted on Jesus Connect the College's mentoring and networking platform. 

The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to Omaid Hiwaizi (1987).