Co-founder of People of Data, running technology, education and the community programme — the meetup engine, the Skilllz curriculum and the platform the whole ecosystem is taught on.
Youssef Kamal is the Co-Founder of People of Data, and the person responsible for the half of it that has to actually work — the technology, the education and the machinery that turns a community into something a school, a university or a company can buy, run and repeat. If Magdi argues the case for why the room should exist, Youssef is the reason the room has a curriculum, a platform and a second date.
He co-founded People of Data in 2023 on a fifty-fifty basis, and the division of labour has been stable ever since: technology, sales and education sit with him. In practice that means he owns the product people experience — what gets taught, in what order, on what platform, by whom, and whether the person in the seat can do something on Monday that they could not do on Friday.
“A community that can’t teach anything is just a mailing list.”
People of Data’s core product is deliberately unglamorous — two meetups a month, free, open, and run to a standard. Youssef leads that programme, and the discipline it demands is closer to operations than to events: a speaker who actually built the thing they are talking about, a room that is worth someone’s Tuesday evening, and a follow-through that turns an attendee into a member, a member into a mentor, and a mentor into a partner.
Forty-plus meetups later, that engine is what everything else runs on. It is where the student programme found its first schools, where GenAI Club found its first members, and where the corporate work found its first clients. The long-term goal he holds is a chapter in every country, every university and every school — the same format, localised, run by people the community trained.
Youssef serves as technology lead across the group’s ventures, from a digital transformation programme for a regional travel operator to a fintech lab — the kind of work where the interesting part is never the demo but the integration, the data and the handover to whoever has to keep it running.
Inside People of Data that experience shows up as the education stack: the Skilllz curriculum and the skills matrix behind it, the learning platform, and the design of programmes like AI For Students, where fifty high-school students at Kaumeya Language School were split into ten teams, run like startups for four Saturdays, and ended with ten working AI solutions, one now in daily use inside the school and five students placed into internships.
The metric Youssef defends internally is not attendance. It is whether someone left with a skill they can be paid for — which is why the student programme ends in a pitch to real investors rather than a certificate, why the university hackathons are run on real company problems under the supervision of both faculty and practitioners, and why the corporate work insists on the client’s own data instead of a sample set.
It is a slower way to grow a community and a harder one to market. It is also the reason the numbers People of Data quotes — solutions built, students hired, programmes repeated — are things that happened to specific people rather than impressions on a slide.
A standing goal of a People of Data chapter in every country, university and school — same format, local operators, trained by the community.
The curriculum, the skills matrix and the learning platform behind every programme People of Data delivers, from high schools to enterprise teams.
Technical lead across the group’s ventures, including a digital transformation programme for a regional travel operator and a fintech lab.
Not a slogan. A test we hold every programme to — if it only reaches Cairo, or only reaches people who already had a head start, we haven't done the work.
Get into the rooms where this actually happens — meetups, GenAI Nights, hackathons and the festival.
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