TechTown · Draft proposal · July 2026
A young developer in Damascus can write excellent software. What she cannot do is register a company, open a bank account that works, or take a card payment from a customer in London. The talent is there. The plumbing is not. TechTown builds the plumbing.
Why now
Syria has just reopened to the world economy. A generation of engineers, designers and operators who spent fourteen years locked out of ordinary commerce can suddenly, in principle, sell to anyone.
In practice, almost none of them know how. There is no visible first step, no local example to copy, and no institution whose job it is to walk a founder from a half-formed idea to a live business with money coming in.
That is the entire job TechTown exists to do. Not another training program that ends in a certificate — a path that ends in a company, a bank account, and a first paying customer.
The model
One is wide and teaches. One is narrow and builds. They feed each other: the cohort is how we reach many founders and find out who is serious; the studio is where we go deep on the few who could become genuinely large.
~20 founders · 12 weeks · 3 intakes a year
Everyone follows the same path on the same clock: sharpen the idea, talk to real customers, build something small that works, register the company, switch on payments, get the first sale.
Mostly online, with in-person meetups where we can hold them. We teach and coach. The founders build. They own their company and every decision in it.
2–4 companies · open-ended · 9–18 months typical
Our team works alongside the founders every day — writing code, setting up the company, designing the product, opening doors to the first customers. We are, in practice, a co-founder.
Nobody enters the studio cold. Companies are invited in after they have proven something real, usually through the cohort.
| The Cohort | The Studio | |
|---|---|---|
| How many | About 20 per intake, 3 intakes a year | 2 to 4 companies at once |
| How long | 12 weeks, fixed | Open-ended, usually 9 to 18 months |
| Our role | We teach, they build | We build with them |
| TechTown's stake | 1–3% equity | 15% equity, as co-founder |
| Paid for by | Grants and partners, plus the equity over time | Its own returns |
| Best for | Early founders who need a path and a peer group | Proven founders with traction who need firepower |
| Who applies | Open application, inside Syria and the diaspora | Invitation only, usually from the cohort |
The path
Not a syllabus. A sequence of things that have to be true before a business exists.
Customer conversations, not slide decks. Founders talk to twenty real people before they write a line of code. Most ideas change here, and that is the point.
We set the whole technical foundation up with Stripe Projects — hosting, database, login, analytics — in single commands instead of days of configuration. For a founder with patchy power and expensive internet, that is not a convenience. It is the difference between shipping and not.
We use Stripe Atlas to set up a company in the United States that sits above the Syrian one as its parent — the legal entity abroad, the team and the work still at home. That structure is the thing that opens the door: it lets a founder sell to a customer anywhere in the world and be paid in US dollars.
Cards from customers anywhere, plus Stripe's agentic commerce tools: list the products once, then sell through the AI assistants a growing share of people now shop with. This matters more here than almost anywhere. It is a sales channel where nobody asks where you are from.
There is a demo day, but the only number on the slide that counts is money received from a real customer.
Stack simulator
Pick what a founder's product needs. The simulator writes the exact commands and shows what happens when they run them. Nothing is provisioned and no account is created — this is a demonstration of the workflow, not the workflow itself.
Stripe Projects is free to use. Founders pay each provider directly at that provider's normal rates, and the free tiers alone carry most products through their first year.
What success looks like
No vanity numbers. Attendance is not an outcome; a company with revenue is.
Plus two to three companies moved into the studio. And underneath all of it, the thing we actually care about: a written, tested, public playbook for how a Syrian founder gets from an idea to a paying customer — so the sixty-first founder does not have to work it out alone.
The talent was never the missing piece.
Give a Syrian founder a company, a bank account and a way to get paid, and the rest they can do themselves. That is a solvable problem, and it is cheap to solve. We would like to get on with it.