DMZ Masterclasses |Map Your User Experience

Build a business that matters: define your persona, the power of iteration, and validate your vision to design human-centric impact

Mayar Hossam is a builder of systems, programs, and communities that help people grow. Her journey started at university, where she co-founded Arcadia to bring entrepreneurial thinking to school students. That instinct, to create structures that open doors for others, has shaped everything since. Over the past 10+ years, she has worked across tech, education, and impact spaces, managing €4M+ in budgets and $3.6M in funding, and building programs that have reached 250,000+ people. She has taught Innovation and Entrepreneurship as an assistant lecturer at the German University in Cairo and the Canadian Universities in Egypt, designed operational infrastructure, run large-scale upskilling programs with global partners like Google, Microsoft, and AWS, and supported early-stage founders through the messiest, most formative stages of building. At DMZ Cairo and the University of Canada’s Entrepreneurship Center, she supported 40+ startups, designed 7+ flagship programs, and helped create the kind of ecosystem where founders actually feel held, not just managed. Today, she is the co-founder and COO of Seen, a MENA-focused peer emotional support platform, and her second startup. At Seen, she built the full listener training and certification infrastructure from the ground up, training 334+ active listeners, and co-leads product, partnerships, and growth. In its first two months, Seen reached 20,000 minutes of peer support sessions, with zero paid marketing. She believes the best operations work is invisible, and what people feel instead is that things just work.