Marketing in the Age of AI Podcast Interview with Mohamed F. Ahmed

Marketing in the Age of AI: The Entrepreneurial Mindset

Intro: In an ever-evolving digital landscape, for your business to thrive, you must adapt or die. Welcome to Marketing in the Age of AI, the podcast helping you harness the power of AI and marketing tools to revitalize and grow your business. And now, here’s your host, marketing expert and author of Authentic Marketing in the Age of AI, Emanuel Rose.

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Emanuel Rose: Welcome to this episode of Marketing in the Age of AI. In this episode, we’re going to talk a little bit about entrepreneurialism, about starting a business, about using AI to test some of your ideas and your working theories, and how best to leverage these tools so that you can get off and running with the least amount of drag possible. My guest today is Mohamed Ahmed.

Dr. Mohamed Ahmed (Mo) is a serial entrepreneur and innovative product visionary whose journey has taken him from leadership roles at many well-known companies, including Microsoft and Amazon. He’s not only an entrepreneur, but he holds a PhD in computer science. He has played a crucial role in advising accelerators like 500 Startups and Techstars, and he’s taken that experience and his own experience and published a book called The Inside Out Entrepreneur. Mo, I welcome you to the show and thanks so much for spending some time with me today.

Mohamed Ahmed (Mo): Hi Emanuel, it’s a pleasure to be here with you today.

Emanuel Rose: Well, it’s always great to have another author and somebody who’s taken time to not only think about writing a book but then digging into the process of writing a book and then actually getting it out there into the world. So, congratulations and thanks for taking the time to do that.

Mohamed Ahmed (Mo): Thank you.

Emanuel Rose: What was the big motivator for you to make this happen?

Mohamed Ahmed (Mo): It comes from an experience. Most of my career and education, as you mentioned, is in engineering. I built products and I worked at big companies, you know, helping them to build those products. And then I decided I got the entrepreneur bug, so I decided to build my own startup. I read lots of books about entrepreneurship and business, and I thought that I was ready. But when I started my company, I got from one setback to another, one failure to another.

And I was almost seeing the failure in front of me almost every day. It felt to me that it was just a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’m going to see that I’m going to hit the wall, hit the wall, and actually, I’m going to hit the wall. And around mid-journey, two years after founding the company and going through lots and lots of dark days, I paused and I just asked myself, why all of that? I mean, why all those problems? Hopefully, we’re going to dig into some of those stories today. And I realized the problem is not that I don’t know how to run the company or I don’t know about business and marketing. Certainly, there is always something to learn.

But it was all about my mindset and my perspective of the journey and about myself. And with the help of a few mentors, and then me pausing and looking back again, I started to bring myself into the right mindset, the right perspective, and I started building a system for myself. And I actually started to really flip things around. Everything just changed. Two and a half years after that, I sold a company, and I learned a lot. And I said, is this a problem that I was the only one going through, or is it a common problem? So I started talking to entrepreneurs, and I realized it’s a common problem. And I said, you know what, this is definitely an opportunity to share some of that learning with other entrepreneurs and focus with them on the psychology of being an entrepreneur. What does it mean to be ready? So the book has lots of stories and also has a framework I call it the entrepreneurial conditioning framework to get someone from just wanting to be an entrepreneur to be actually ready. And I usually use this analogy: It’s pretty much like climbing a mountain. Go and ask any mountaineer, no matter how experienced they are, they would tell you before any major trip, they would need to condition themselves physically, emotionally, and in other dimensions. So why not do the same thing? The entrepreneurial journey is an unforgiving journey, pretty much like climbing mountains. And for those who watch the movie Everest, you know they can definitely relate to that.

Emanuel Rose: Yeah, well, that’s a good perspective. Because as entrepreneurs, we climb up that mountain and we get to a peak and then we see the next one over there and we’re like, “Okay, now we’re going to go climb that one.” And it’s never like you’re just done, right? We’re creative problem solvers and we want to have the opportunity to build on our successes.

Mohamed Ahmed (Mo): Absolutely.

Emanuel Rose: What were some of the challenges that you came up against and then the psychology that you had, and then the psychology that you used to get past that?

Mohamed Ahmed (Mo): Well, a lot actually. I like to tell stories, and hopefully, this story will be relevant to anyone listening to us right now.

At the beginning, just before I raised around $500,000, we wanted to build that initial product. We spent around $400,000. It was running on AWS, Amazon Web Services. You know, they give you credits. And then after around six months of building the product, we had the opportunity to present our product at a big conference. And as I was entering the conference venue, I got an email from AWS. That email was telling me, “Hey, you owe us around $65,000.” Two or three weeks before, I remember looking at our dashboard and we actually had more than $50,000 in credits. So we burned through a lot of money, $115,000 in just three weeks. And back then, we did not have any customers. We had employees, you know, we had just $75,000 in the bank, and that’s it.

So I got paralyzed at that point. I didn’t know what to do. And again, because I was, if you will, green, not yet into the everyday struggle of a startup, we were just six months into it. The first thing that came to my mind, you know what? We’re going to fail. We’re going to be just yet another statistic of those companies that fail in the first year. And it took me four weeks to actually recover, to actually just bring myself together and start to negotiate with AWS and move my infrastructure to Google after getting some credits from them. So I was able to do some hacky stuff to keep the company going and then negotiate with AWS whatever that we needed to pay them. So that’s an example of someone who does not have that resiliency, the mental and emotional resiliency, so that you can withstand those adversarial kind of events.

So that’s an example. Take a snapshot of that. Now, four years forward, after going through lots of things and again, applying that framework, we were about to be acquired by a big company, a late-stage startup, a multi-billion dollar startup. They did all the due diligence, they met my engineers, they looked at our bank accounts, everything. We were just ready to sign, and they backed off just two hours before signing the contract.

Now, for those who have worked in that case, when you go and sell your company, it’s a big distraction. You stop fundraising. It definitely impacts the momentum that you have with your customers because you’re really now into selling the company. Now all of that vanished. By then, after applying that framework, I had developed how to get into a quick rebalancing, if you will, and be able to respond rather than reacting. Less than two hours after that, I picked up the phone, I called five of my friends. They connected me with other CEOs of other similar companies. “Hey, we have an LOI from a company that’s interested to buy us. Are you interested also in us?”

And by the end of the same week, I was having five meetings with CEOs of companies who were interested in buying us. And luckily, we were able to sell the company at the end. So those two stories just to show you what it would mean to have or to be resilient and have enough robustness in your mind and have that EQ, right, the emotional intelligence, so that you are able to basically flip any challenge into an opportunity. That was the biggest, I would say, learning for me. And again, because I’m coming from a product and engineering background, I did not have this kind of thinking or how to really absorb all of that and respond in different ways. I mean, my biggest challenge was to ship on time, on budget, on spec.

That was my biggest challenge when I was working at those companies. It’s still a stressful job, but that’s completely different from being in the wild and you have sharks after you and everyone, basically just a lot of, I would say, factors working against you as an entrepreneur and against your startup.

Emanuel Rose: Yeah, that’s interesting. What are some of the principles that you have for unstoppable entrepreneurial success?

Mohamed Ahmed (Mo): There are multiple of them. Number one, your mindset is your biggest asset, and you have to invest in that. That’s non-negotiable. And your mindset, at the end of the day, just in simple terms, is your tendency towards things. So if you believe, if your tendency is that people around you are friendly, if you’re walking downtown New York and someone says, “Good morning,” you’re going to just smile in their face and say, “Good morning.” If your tendency is, “You know what, people certainly want something from you,” and if someone says, “Good morning,” in the same situation, you’re going to say, “No, thank you,” and you’re not going to even smile and just run away.

So, what’s your tendency, what’s your mindset towards those challenges? That’s number one, a principle that I always work with when I work with entrepreneurs and coach them. Number two, even though speed is very important, you want to make sure that you’re marching towards or in the right direction or towards a clear north star. What’s your purpose? Why are you building your startup? The third principle is your startup is not you. So your startup is just a manifestation of your why and purpose. So if your startup fails, then it doesn’t mean that you’re a failure, especially given that there is a lot that you cannot control in your entrepreneurial journey. So, you know, separate your startup from you. If it fails, this means you have learned something. You know, as they say, failure is the best teacher and success is a lousy teacher.

So that’s important. And then the fourth one and last one is build a support system around you. You cannot do the journey by yourself. It’s hard. It’s tough. Again, if we use the same analogy of mountain climbing, they always go in groups. They have to be together. It’s hard. It’s almost impossible for someone to go on such a tough journey by themselves. Same thing when it’s your entrepreneurial journey. You have to have that support system: mentors, advisors, your family, and friends need to be ready to support you anytime. And just keep investing in that a lot. All of these are going to elevate you as an entrepreneur.

Emanuel Rose: I love that. I think oftentimes that network of support is one of the things that entrepreneurs overlook, partly because they’re like, “I have this idea, I don’t want anybody to take it,” right? Talk a little bit about how you built your network, Mo, and what that looks like.

Mohamed Ahmed (Mo): At the beginning, I was not intentional. It just happened by chance because, you know, during fundraising, I was talking with VCs, getting to know them, getting introduced to other entrepreneurs, and so on. And then, as I was realizing through that journey the importance of those, I started to do it intentionally, even without a specific goal that is relevant to my startup.

Usually, you go and talk to VCs and advisors to basically solidify your portfolio as an entrepreneur for your startup. I said, “No, I’m going to do this activity. Each week, I’m going to reach out to someone. I’m going to get to know another entrepreneur and learn from them and get to know another expert in the industry and learn from them.” Same thing for VCs. Even if I’m not raising right now, I would just go and talk with them. Tell them what I have and seek advice. And some of them, you would click together and you stay connected. Some of them, you know, they have other priorities, or maybe your style does not match their style. Then everyone moves on. You still leave a good mark with them because at the end of the day, your main goal is to build stronger connections with other humans. This is business. As Simon Sinek says, “If you don’t know people, you don’t know business.” So it’s all about people. At the end of the day, we’re exchanging value as humans as we do business together.

Emanuel Rose: Yeah, I love that. So I guess what do you see as somebody who maybe has an idea and is thinking about it? How have startups changed now in this kind of rapid deployment of AI? How is it different than say, 10 years ago or 15 years ago?

Mohamed Ahmed (Mo): There’s a lot, I would say two years ago. The fundamentals of building a startup are still the same, and any entrepreneur needs to know those fundamentals. So for example, having AI and AI basically helping you to build prototypes quickly does not mean that you do not need to validate your idea. Idea validation is still needed.

Yes, maybe you can generate 10 ideas in a week or build 10 prototypes in a week, but why build prototypes that are meaningless? You still need to understand what it means to solve a real problem and how do you take the problem that you sensed and validate it before you go and build something. You know, when we were talking about moving fast but in the right direction, this is setting the direction. So this is important. Same thing when it comes to fundraising. You know, AI can help you, and we can talk about tips and tricks around that, but AI can help you to connect with more VCs or send more customized emails to those VCs. But at the end of the day, it’s not going to work because the fundamentals of fundraising are connecting with other humans, with VCs. They’re going to invest in you, so they need to know you and trust you. So the existence of AI will accelerate things.

The way that I think of any startup is that it goes through six stages. We’re not going to talk about the six stages, but we’ll take a few examples and let’s pick and compare and contrast before AI and after AI. So for example, let’s take idea validation. Two years ago, you would definitely go and have a hypothesis about the problem, and then you would go and talk to your customer, the typical persona that you’re targeting, to get a sense of whether this problem is an important problem or not.

With AI right now, you can definitely collect and do research. My workflow right now, and the workflow that I encourage lots of entrepreneurs to do, is go and use, let’s say, ChatGPT, do deep research, and get everything about the problem in social media. This is something that we used to do ourselves at the beginning. You know, we used to go to Hacker News, read the news, or maybe off of the website, or maybe post something and see how they’re going to respond.

With AI now, actually, there’s an interesting thing we built. Actually, the first thing is we build a persona out of the online content that we get using deep research, and then we actually feed this into the prompt of whatever AI you pick. Make the AI act as your target persona and then try to build a dialogue with that AI or maybe show the AI your prototype. You’ll be surprised by the relevant feedback that you’ll get.

Now, I don’t want anyone to really get me wrong with that. The human factor needs to be there. But rather than having three groups of interviews—the first one validating the idea, the second one validating a possible solution, and then maybe showing them a demo—maybe you can accelerate those three. So you can get a good idea about whether it’s a really important problem or not with the AI that’s going to give you the feedback. And then go and talk to, rather than talking to 10 humans, talk to five, and then quickly take the feedback and use that to build the MVP. You know, let AI analyze that for you and give you the insights. And this is something I do a lot. It gives me the patterns that I usually do not see. So fundamentals are the same. You still need to talk to humans. You still need to understand that you must validate your idea. But AI now will accelerate that for you. If you don’t know that and you say, “You know what, I’m going to just use AI for everything,” I guess you’re going to just hit a wall because at the end of the day, you’re selling to humans. So humans need to verify and validate that for you. AI is just mimicking a lot of their thinking, but it’s not everything. It misses, of course, the imagination and the background of those target customers and how to sell to them. So AI definitely can make a lot of difference. Same thing when it comes to fundraising and others. There are usually, as I said, six phases or six main areas that you need to work on. AI can definitely contribute to each one of these.

Emanuel Rose: Yeah, I like that, and I appreciate that you’re highlighting the fact that we’re talking to humans and that we have to be solving human concerns and have empathy and compassion in the process. It’s not just transactional, and the machines are never going to have the same level of empathy that you and I have for each other.

Mohamed Ahmed (Mo): Absolutely. Absolutely.

Emanuel Rose: Tell me about one or two projects that you’re involved in, either through mentoring an entrepreneur or through investing or through your network, that you’re excited about right now.

Mohamed Ahmed (Mo): The biggest thing that I’m really focused on these days is the Boundless Founder community (https://boundlessfounder.co). So I’m bringing entrepreneurs who are like-minded and who value and appreciate investing in their mindset before anything else.

And that community does two things. The first thing is connecting humans, but establishing that relationship. And then we want them to look at their journey a bit differently. We still teach them how to do the initial sales, marketing, fundraising, and all of that. But I talk with them about these, and I always handle the psychological aspect of it. We all know, for example, for you to get one “yes” in sales, maybe you need to talk to 10 possible prospects or more, right? But the question here is, how do you handle the rejections? The first one, the second one might be easy, but when it gets really dark and you have 10 in a row of rejections, what do you do? Right? How do you learn? This is something that a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with because it’s not only the rejections that they get from sales. In a given day, they get rejections from people that they want to hire, from VCs, from customers, from even partners, and they have their own problems at home as well. I mean, there are lots of rejections that all work together against the entrepreneur in the form of almost a perfect storm some days.

And how do you deal with that? This is what really keeps you going.

And there is also another aspect that we’ve started to introduce since we’re talking about AI. How can AI now accelerate your learning? So let’s say you’re now working through validating your product. You know, how do you organize yourselves? So rather than waiting for a human, now they can get some highly trained model specifically for product validation, and now they can basically chat with that model to get a clear framework and clear action items. And then the model follows up with them. And then at the end of the day, that model will sit with them, basically summarize what they’ve done to a human like myself, for example, and we even take it further together. So that’s one of my biggest projects that I’m working on right now with the entrepreneurs. And by the way, a lot of the content there is free. So anyone can go and register and become, as we call it, on the explorer plan. They just explore whether entrepreneurship is good for them or not. That’s for free. And then they can take it from that point.

Emanuel Rose: Well, that’s a beautiful gift. And of course, all that information will be in the show notes. It’ll be easy to find. Find The Inside Out Entrepreneur by Mohamed Ahmed. I highly recommend it, and I really appreciate the work that you’re doing and the care that you have about the people that you’re working with, Mohamed.

Mohamed Ahmed (Mo): Thank you, Emanuel.

Emanuel Rose: I wish you the best of luck, and I hope to have you on the show again in a few months to see how things are going for you.

Mohamed Ahmed (Mo): Absolutely. Yeah. We’ll share more tips and tricks about AI in marketing and sales. Absolutely.

Emanuel Rose: All right, you have a great afternoon. Thanks, Mo.

Mohamed Ahmed (Mo): Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Emanuel Rose: Of course. Well, there are some good things to take away from that. One is that remember that we’re working with humans and that humans have permanent domains of human concern and need to solve those challenges, and it needs to be done with human compassion and empathy. Also, that there are processes that we need to follow as entrepreneurs, and we shouldn’t skip. We should maintain those systems, use AI to help where we can, and then get people from our network, either mentors or co-conspirators, to validate the activities that we’re doing and then take it into the marketplace and test to make sure that what we believe and what we’ve assessed is accurate.

I hope you found some value in today’s episode, and I hope you take some time to dig in and find an AI tool to test in your marketing or other parts of your business. Reclaim some time out of your week so that you can either upskill or spend time with your friends and family or get outside and spend some time by yourself in nature. This is Emanuel Rose, Marketing in the Age of AI.

Outro: Thanks for listening to Marketing in the Age of AI. Be sure to subscribe wherever you heard this podcast so you never miss a future episode. Your copy of Authentic Marketing in the Age of AI is available at amazon.com or emanuelrose.com. You can also connect with Emanuel on LinkedIn.