Mental Resilience for Entrepreneurs: Lessons from Startup Highs and Lows

Mike Stohler: What if you could be doing something smarter with your money that creates income? If you’re wanting to get ahead financially and enjoy greater freedom of choice, if you want a comfortable retirement and you know you’ll have more choices, if you can do more with your money now, if you’ve wondered who else is creating ways to make their money work for them and you want actionable ideas with honest pros and cons and no fluff, welcome to The Richer Geek Podcast. We’re here helping people find creative ways to build wealth and financial freedom. I’m Mike Stohler, and in this podcast, you’ll hear from others who are already doing these things and learn how you can too.

Before we start today’s episode, I wanted to give you an update on what we’re doing at Gateway Private Equity Group. I’ve built an international team based in Barcelona, Spain. We’ve been working hard to identify high-end boutiques. Catalonia is one of the top areas for tourists, and Spain has surpassed all of Europe for hotel investing. How would you like to invest and stay in a 1,000-year-old estate, a castle built in the 1600s, a boutique situated in the heart of Spanish wine country? Go to www.gatewaype.com to learn more about this wonderful opportunity. Now, back to our podcast. Everybody, welcome back to another episode of The Richer Geek Podcast. Today’s guest is Mohamed Ahmed. He’s a serial entrepreneur, product visionary, and author of Inside Out Entrepreneurship. We’ll talk a little bit about that book. He has over 20 years of experience in AI and cloud computing. Mohamed has built and sold multiple successful companies. He now dedicates his expertise to empowering diverse founders through his entrepreneur conditioning framework, helping them raise millions and build resilience on their journeys. Get ready for insights on thriving in the startup world with one of the industry’s most transformative mentors. Mo, how are you doing?

Mohamed Ahmed: Hey Mike, doing great. Thank you very much for having me with you here.

Mike Stohler: Absolutely. I like to start our podcast with our listeners getting to know a little bit about who Mo is. What made you who you are and how did you get involved in what you’re doing now?

Mohamed Ahmed: Yeah, absolutely. I’m an engineer by most of my experience and by education. I work in big tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, or AWS. I thought that I learned enough about building companies or products, especially high-tech products. Around eight or nine years ago, when I decided to transition to become an entrepreneur, even though I studied a lot about entrepreneurship prior to that, I dealt with business people. But when I made that switch, I did everything that the experts were telling me not to do. I made all the mistakes, even though I knew that those were mistakes. I went through the typical lows and highs of building any new business. I definitely experienced a lot of transformation that took place during the journey. I realized that there’s a big piece in how you build a business that is missing in books and literature in general, which is the psychology of entrepreneurship. How do you work on your mindset as an entrepreneur so that you become much more successful than what you would even anticipate or think of yourself? As I always say, your business is going to grow as much as your mindset is growing as well with you.

So, I wrote that book and I’m working with entrepreneurs right now. I’m building the community called Boundless Founder Community where I’m helping entrepreneurs with those principles in mind to, number one, help them make that transition: engineers, product managers, who decided to become founders and build their own companies. How do they make that shift? And then how do they grow from that point to become owners or builders of a billion-dollar company?

Mike Stohler: Yeah, it’s so true. Being an entrepreneur myself and the struggles, it’s like going, “Yep, yep.” I know the mistakes that Mo made, and I made them also. I think that mental aspect is probably the biggest aspect. You can have all the knowledge in the world. You can be a 30-year programmer, a 30-year engineer, go and create your own engineering firm, and fail because you don’t know how to switch it.

Mohamed Ahmed: I have a lot of entrepreneurs telling me that, you know, for so many years, I had someone else. I had deadlines, these things that other people gave me. Now I have to create them for myself.

Mike Stohler: So let’s get into a little bit of that mental resilience and the difference of what it takes to actually make that switch. What are some of the cues?

Mohamed Ahmed: Yeah, absolutely. Let me maybe give a quick analogy or an example of what it means to move from the corporate world to become an entrepreneur. Think of yourself swimming in a pool, a warm pool on lanes. There’s a lifeguard beside you, and you’re just going back and forth. This is corporate life. Now, how does it feel when you work as an entrepreneur by yourself? It’s exactly similar to someone throwing you in the middle of the night in a cold ocean, and you do not know where the shore is. Now you need to figure it out. You see, the difference is huge, day and night. In the first one, your mindset is all about how do I go fast in that lane, and how do I make sure that I just can go back and forth, back and forth? It’s all about just spinning faster. When you switch to that other mode, you know, you’re in the middle of a cold ocean. You see that you get thrown into a completely different environment that is hostile, unforgiving, and you do not know where to go from that point. Now, what is the most important thing in that specific moment is to cool down, start orienting yourself, understand your environment, and now figure out what needs to be done to reach the shore, or at least to survive and thrive in that journey. That’s the difference in mindset that you need between the first one and the second one. There’s a huge difference. I’m not saying that one of them is better than the other, but each one of them has its own mindset and its own way to work. Now, let’s talk about the mindset that you need in being an entrepreneur, given that environment. Hopefully, that gives everyone a vivid picture of what it means to make that jump or that switch. In my book, I talk about mental resiliency and mental robustness. Because I’m an engineer, I thought of these two terms first from an engineering perspective. When you think of robustness, if you’re building a bridge, a robust bridge means that it’s a bridge that can withstand pressure. It does not get deformed or collapse. So you build it, there’s the wind, there are small earthquakes, there’s the pressure of the cars driving on it. The bridge needs to withstand it, right? It needs to continue performing its function despite all those pressures. That’s being a robust bridge. The same thing happens when you use that term or that definition for your mindset. You want to make sure you’re going to be hit by unexpected events every day. You want to make sure that your mindset stays positive, stays oriented, and in the right way so that you can keep going.

Maybe I’ll share a quick story around that from my personal experience. Six months after founding my first company, we were using AWS or Amazon Web Services. They gave us $100,000 credit, and we thought that credit was going to keep us going for a year. After working six months, we were ready to demonstrate our product. One day, as I was getting to the conference to demonstrate my product, I got an email from AWS telling me that I owed them $65,000. I was shocked. A few weeks ago, when I was checking our credits, we had more than $50,000 with them. How could we burn through more than $110,000 in just a few weeks? I got frozen, and it took me four weeks to get out of the negative mindset and the paralysis mode and to start negotiating that with them. Eventually, I was able to do that, but it took me a significant amount of time to really recover. I wasn’t robust about that event. It deformed my way of thinking. It changed. That’s when I did not have the right mindset or the robustness of my mind. There’s another story where we’re going to talk about the opposite of that, but let’s talk about resiliency for a bit. Again, from an engineering perspective, if you apply pressure on an object, a resilient object, even if it gets deformed, when you release that pressure, it gets back to its original form, like a rubber ball. You can squeeze it and it can change its shape, but once you take off that pressure, it goes back to its original form. The same thing happens to your mindset. Let’s say an event like the one that I just mentioned, that story, once that pressure goes out, do I have, as we call it in business, permanent scars that would prevent me from going back into business? Or do I learn the lesson and now I’m back into the growth mindset and the challenge mindset? Am I willing to hit the ground again and go and challenge the whole world again or not? That’s what it means to have a resilient mindset, and they both work hand in hand together. You do not want to be robust as a brick so that with any pressure you get broken. But at the same time, you do not want to be so soft that the least event or a minor event would just take you out of balance. You need to have that balance between these two. This is where you need a mentor and advisor and someone to really work with you, take you through that journey, and basically show you yourself in the mirror, hold the mirror in front of you, and tell you, “This is how you look right now, and this is how you need to change.”

The other story is how building resilience in your business can help you to really grow and turn it around. Four years into my journey, four and a half years, after I learned a lot through all those events, I got hit by so many events similar to the AWS bill that I mentioned. A company approached us and said, “We’re interested in buying you.” We were happy. They were about to give us a good offer. We went through all the due diligence. They interviewed my employees. They looked at our bank account. They looked at our source code. Only two hours before signing the LOI, they backed off. We were making ourselves ready for that acquisition. We did not fundraise. The company was definitely running out of cash because this was a big distraction for us. In the original mindset that I had, if something like this happened, I would just say, “You know what? Let’s throw in the towel, we’re done, and we’re going to shut down the company.” But in less than 24 hours, I took that LOI before anyone else knew about them backing off. Even my co-founder did not know about that. I shopped around with other companies that might be interested. I told them, “Hey, I have a company that is interested in buying us. Are you interested in taking a look, maybe buying us as well?” By the end of that week, I was already meeting with four CEOs, and we actually got a three times better deal eventually because of that. You see, the difference here is not because I got smarter or anything else. Of course, luck plays a role here, but it’s just how you respond to the event. How do you turn the event from a big threat that could take your company down into an opportunity to even gain more money? It’s all in the mind, in the mindset. Hopefully, that explains the difference and why it’s really critical for any entrepreneur to focus on mindset. To close, the most important asset for any entrepreneur is their mind and their mindset, period. Nothing else.

Mike Stohler: Yeah, that is so true. And then let’s talk about another thing. So I have the mindset, I want to do well, but the world has so many distractions. And I know when I first started, it was like, “Oh yeah, you know, I don’t feel like working today.” Well, you know, I had a bad day yesterday, and I’ll just go play golf and think about it today. There are always excuses. It took coaching. There were two different coaches that I had. One was a business coach. One was a mental coach, and you put those together. The outcome, if you do exactly what they say, is successful entrepreneurial. But one of the things that I had to do, and maybe you can talk about this, I had to have what’s called a default calendar that I couldn’t break unless something really bad was happening. At eight o’clock on Monday morning, I do this, and at nine o’clock, I do this. So it kept me focused so that, you know, I have appointments. It could be just a phone call. It could be cold calling. But you can’t just go out and say, “What Monday morning, nine o’clock, you’re an entrepreneur. Okay, what are we going to do today?” and you have no idea. So talk about just the beginnings of being that entrepreneur. You have the mindset, you really want to do it, but you have to have that focus.

Mohamed Ahmed: You’re right. Yeah, absolutely. It’s all about discipline, right? So what you’re trying to maintain is disciplined execution day after day. Now, that disciplined execution, you cannot do it by or maintain it by just feeling that you need to do it every day. You have to do it regardless, as you said. Now, you can do it either with pain, by just pushing yourself, or you can do it with the right perspective. This is where your mindset also plays a role. One of the things that I always share with entrepreneurs and coach them around is, “Look, you need to reset your mindset every day,” because we know, as you said, maybe I had a difficult day yesterday, but the challenge here is how do you reset the next day or even before you go to bed as much as you can. So that when you wake up the next day, it’s just a fresh day for you. It’s really important. That only comes when you are able to put things in perspective. For example, one of the exercises that I encourage entrepreneurs to do usually is around separating their own identity and their own life from the company. We, as entrepreneurs, most of the time confuse our own identity with our business identity. Until you get savvy enough, like you, Mike, you’ve been into many businesses for long enough, you know how to separate that. Your personal life is one thing, and your own identity—I wouldn’t say personal life, identity—this is really important. It’s easy to say “work-life balance” and “let’s separate all of that,” but that doesn’t happen unless you do that fundamental thing, which is separating your identity from your business. What I mean by that is, “Look, your business at the end of the day is one of your projects, and it’s one of your life milestones. Your life is much bigger than that.” Right? If it did not work out in that business, you know what? You learned a lot. As they say, “Failure is the best teacher, and success is a lousy teacher.” If you think of it this way, even if your business is now upside down and you say, “You know what? I know that I have a chance,” have that confidence and build that confidence that you have a chance to build another one, even much better than the other one, the first one that makes you actually come in the next day saying, “Okay, now how do I maximize my learning and how do I make sure that I’m doing the best possible response to whatever is taking place around me?” You can find all the routines, figure out different systems, and all of that. But if you’re not looking from the right perspective, all of these, you can still grind your way through them, but it’s going to be painful. You do not want it to be painful. You want it to be rewarding, right? That’s the most important thing.

Mike Stohler: Yeah. A lot of times, those most painful times of a founder’s life are some of the most important times. Like for me, co-owning hotels during COVID, a very painful time, but I’m thankful for it because I’m a much better entrepreneur now because it forces you. Just like you said, ladies and gentlemen, when something that drastic happens, you could say, “You know what? I throw in the towel. It’s not worth it. I don’t have the energy.” Or you can say, “You know what? I’m going to succeed. I’m going to do whatever it takes. I’m going to think outside the box,” and you just do it. It just really, really helps. Everybody, this is Mohamed Ahmed. We don’t have much time left, but let’s get inside some of the other chapters. His book is The Inside Out Entrepreneur. What else can we find inside that book?

Mohamed Ahmed: Yeah, absolutely. The book is basically using the analogy of climbing mountains, right? If you talk to any mountaineer, no matter how experienced they are, they would tell you that before you start, you need to condition yourself. Then they have a set of dimensions to do that: the physical, the mental, the emotional, and a few other things. Now, the book talks about the other different dimensions. Mindset is one of them. The other one is definitely emotional conditioning, which basically, how do you make sure that your emotions are not taking over your thought process? That’s the so-called thought-emotion loop. If you get into that downward spiral, or if you get caught by that, you can easily confuse facts with what’s in your head. It’s not a fact that your company is going to close, but because you’ve been thinking about it so much, that’s one dimension.

The other dimension is definitely, I even believe in the spiritual dimension that all of us have, regardless of what your belief is in general, but having in mind that, “Look, we do not have control over most of the things taking place around us.” This will, number one, give you relief. Number two, it puts things in perspective. And number three, you focus on what you really can control. You probably know this, Mike, the only thing that you can control is you, your thoughts, your emotions, and how you respond. If we focus on that, I believe that things are going to be lined up. There’s also a bonus chapter that talks about financial well-being. This is part of the conditioning. Maybe I’ll tell a quick personal story around that. When I wanted to build my first company, my wife really opposed that. Our family came from being employees, and my wife also worked at Microsoft. She said, “Well, what if it failed?” I kept thinking about that, and I made a promise. I told her, “Look, if I’m able to save, let’s say, two years’ worth of spending, will you allow me to do that?” She said, “Yes, we have a deal.” So I did that, and that made a huge difference. This is part of the financial conditioning. We cannot just throw ourselves without really planning all the possible failures. It’s inevitable that you’re going to have low moments, you’re not going to have enough money, your business is going to consume a lot of your money. How do you go through that without really breaking your financial well-being? It’s really important because otherwise, it’s going to be extra stressful, to the extent that it may actually contribute to your failure. So definitely, that’s one of them.

The other dimension talks about your personal branding as an entrepreneur and how you define yourself beyond the company or beyond the venture that you’re doing right now. So that if it doesn’t work, it’s actually an advantage for you, or you can use it to your advantage. Before recording, we were talking about the techies who want to leave Microsoft and Google and start their own company. I have an entrepreneur who was talking with me; he’s in his late forties, and he was saying, “Look, I feel that if this one does not work out, I’m not going to be employable. I’m not going to work.” “Why are you saying that? Look, if it doesn’t work, you learned a lot. Did you know about business before doing all of that?” He said, “No.” “Okay. You know about that. Did you know how to raise money from VCs?” He said, “No.” “Okay. You know all of that. And trust me, you’re now 10 times faster than your peers at getting things done. You’re much sharper than them. If you decided to go into the workplace again, even though I would love for you to continue as a businessman, but even if you decided to go back, it’s going to be a piece of cake for you. So don’t worry about that.” The most important thing is how you take all of that and make sure that you’re building on it. You’re not seeing your company’s failure as a complete setback for your whole life. So this is also part of the book. I use that book as a game, as a framework to work with entrepreneurs closely. One of the things that I personally do is I help them with their sales and marketing and how to do their go-to-market and how to fundraise. But what is different about how I work on these with them is what I call the psychology corner that I always include. When you do sales, for example, there’s certain psychology that takes place in your mind. How do you beat that? How do you make sure that you’re doing this activity in a way that you’re always on top of it? You do not feel that you’re being beaten every day. No, you’re growing. It’s rewarding for you. I guess this is the piece they’re always dismissing. I worked for a long time in Silicon Valley, and you know the mantra of “fake it until you make it.” It’s part of the hustle porn. It’s not going to just take place automatically. You have to intentionally work on improving your mindset and improving your perspective.

Mike Stohler: Mohamed, I appreciate it. Everybody, boundlessfounder.co is the website. When we click on that, what are we going to find?

Mohamed Ahmed: So there are different things. You’re definitely going to find free downloadable resources to assess your mindset. Go and check that at https://boundlessfounder.co/resources. You’re going to find a ton of free downloadable resources. There’s also a bonus chapter that we just talked about: financial well-being. Also, we have different tiers of our community membership. You can start there for free, see some of the interesting discussions, some of the free courses. Again, assess and see how you can get started with your journey. Or you can upgrade to a paid membership and get even more resources and have a live discussion with the rest of the community and myself. If you’re thinking about being a founder, if you’re struggling, I tell you, don’t do it without mentors. Don’t do it without any type of counseling. I would have failed 10 more times if it wasn’t for coaching and my mentors. I’m still best friends with my mentors and still reach out to them today.

Mike Stohler: If you’re interested, reach out to Mohamed Ahmed at boundlessfounder.co. Mohamed, it has been an absolute pleasure getting to know you and what you do. Thank you for coming on The Richer Geek.

Mohamed Ahmed: Absolutely. Thank you very much, Mike, for having me.

Mike Stohler: Thanks for tuning in to The Richer Geek Podcast, where we’re helping others find creative ways to build wealth and financial freedom. For today’s show notes, including all the links and resources from our show and more information about our guests, visit us at www.therichergeek.com/podcast. And don’t forget to jump over to Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts, and hit the subscribe button. Share with others who can benefit from listening, and leave a rating and review to get the podcast in front of more eyes. I appreciate you and thanks for listening.