Unleashing AI, Entrepreneurship, and Resilience with Mo Ahmed

Dave: Hello, Misfit Entrepreneurs, this is Dave Lucas and welcome to another episode of the Misfit Entrepreneur, where it is our job to help you unleash your inner misfit and break through to higher levels of success, wealth, and fulfillment by bringing you the best insight and information from the world’s top entrepreneurs with a specific focus on their misfit side, the specific traits, habits, and secrets that have allowed them to thrive and succeed. As a reminder, if you’re new to watching us on our YouTube channel, hit the subscribe button below. Give this video a like and comment as well. We do our best to respond to all comments as timely as possible. This week’s Misfit Entrepreneur is Mohamed Ahmed. Mohamed is a serial entrepreneur with over 20 years in AI and cloud computing expertise. He’s built and sold multiple successful companies for multiples of 10x plus, and he’s helped founders secure over 30 million in funding. He’s also the author of Inside Out Entrepreneurship, which goes deep into the mental resilience and endurance of the entrepreneur journey. With AI moving incredibly fast as it is and opportunities everywhere, as well as the mental resilience needed to really thrive as an entrepreneur, I thought it’d be great to have Mohamed on to get his take and have him share his best lessons from his journey. So Mohamed, are you ready to unleash your inner misfit?

Mohamed Ahmed: I am ready. Great to be here with you, Dave.

Dave: Well, it’s great to be on with you as well. And you’ve had a pretty amazing entrepreneur journey. And let’s start there. Maybe take five minutes or so and just tell us how’d you get to where you’re at?

Mohamed Ahmed: You know, as they say, entrepreneurship is a bug and once it catches you, sometimes it’s really hard to get through it. So there’s actually an interesting story behind that. Back in the old days when I was doing my PhD, I was taking a really hard course in computer science and obviously it wasn’t in one of the computer science buildings. One day they decided to move us to another building. And by chance, it was actually the school of business building. As I was entering that class or that room, I found a small piece of paper just advertising for a program called the Innovation Accelerator at the University of Connecticut. And back then I thought, okay, they were saying there’s good pay. It was my first year and I just wanted to buy a car. So I applied, I got accepted. The program actually consists of entrepreneurs working with graduate students and the graduate students were supposed to help them go to market. I enjoyed the program a lot. And one thing actually that inspired me to really become an entrepreneur was talking to one of the professors supervising us and I told him, look, next year, if I don’t go and work at Microsoft or Google for an internship, I would definitely come and work for you again. And he stopped and he told me, you know, why work at those companies? Why don’t you just go and build one? And that just struck a chord. And I think at that particular moment, I said, yeah, why not? And since then I’ve been really thinking and trying, even though ironically I worked at Microsoft, I’ve worked at Amazon, but that statement kept actually coming back until I decided finally to build my first startup. So sometimes, you know, becoming an entrepreneur just happens by chance. And that’s just, I would say it’s a calling.

Dave: So talk to us about the journey from there then. What was the first business you created? What happened along the way? I mean, you’ve had a number of entities over the years. Take us through that.

Mohamed Ahmed: So the first business, maybe I’ll go back, but the first business that I started was when I was at the age of 17. So back then, CD-ROMs were just something new and everyone wanted to just have them. It wasn’t really common to have a writer. It was super expensive. So I built that business at the beginning. So I was basically creating software CDs, creating music CDs, image stocks. It was back in the 90s. And then actually I progressed from one idea to another. Maybe during my PhD, I stopped. The first real startup experience was back in 2016. I had a problem with one of the companies that I was working with and that problem we were trying to solve it internally multiple times and we couldn’t. And then I said, you know what, this is a big idea. We can fix that problem much faster with a startup. And that’s actually how I started with, you know, the first real, would say, startup with a high velocity growth where I was able to fundraise from VCs and hire employees and move really fast and pivot multiple times, many, many dark days until we finally were able to do it and sell our company. And ironically, we started with cloud optimization and we ended up in cyber security, you know, a long way. You can tell that there’s a big difference between these two. But at the end of the day, when you build a company, it’s all about, you know, the company is a way to deliver your message to the world and feel fulfilled by serving others.

Dave: Well, it sounds like the art of the pivot too. You started one way and then you found the opportunity actually was for a different way and you pivoted. So that happens all the time in business, right? You know, there’s so many companies that start out for one purpose, but the real purpose that made them go is completely different. But, you know, they figured that out along the way and that’s a good lesson in general that, know, if you’re in business long enough, if you’re building businesses long enough, that’s going to happen to you. And it’s that grit and the boldness and that time to make that decision and go that way, you know, from the way that you were initially invested in that a lot of times is one of the best decisions you’ll ever make. You know, I think you can attest to that.

Mohamed Ahmed: Absolutely. And that’s why actually, you know, I’m a big fan of Simon Sinek and his, you know, start with why. And many entrepreneurs, to your point, sometimes they just start because they’re excited about a technology or about a specific problem. And that’s actually one of the motivations for me that made me write my book because I was so attached to the technology at the beginning. And the first pivot was so hard because of that, because I really felt that this is it, this is the problem. If I try to solve something else, probably I’m going to lose my identity. I wrongly attached my identity to the problem and the technology. And this is one of the very common traps, especially with technical entrepreneurs.

Dave: Speaking of the why, what was the car and did you ever get it?

Mohamed Ahmed: I’m a big fan of James Bond movies. So Aston Martin, of course, was on my top list. I remember actually we had an Aston Martin dealer close to us. And in those dark days, I would get my son, he was 16 years old back then, I would tell him, drive to the dealer and I tell him, which color do you think I should pick? I did not end up buying an Aston Martin, but it was just if I really make it and sell the company. That would be the first thing on my list.

Dave: Well, it’s funny because like that was your why for starting as a, well, it’s not funny, but it’s a great example of a why for starting your business and moving down the direction of entrepreneurship, right? There’s always a driver, right? If you can leverage that and tap into that and hold that, that does help keep you going. You said, and you mentioned it and I read it too. You did end up working at Microsoft and Amazon in the early days and you built and scaled products with them. So like what were some of the lessons that you took away from that work that you feel helped make you a better entrepreneur?

Mohamed Ahmed: It’s interesting that you’re asking that question. Working at big companies gives you one aspect of entrepreneurship. So before we dig into that, I would just want to make wide some sort of a perspective to all the listeners about what does it mean to learn some aspect of entrepreneurship from big companies? In big companies, you learn how to define the problem clearly. You learn how to build the solution for the problem. In the entrepreneurship world, there are multiple things that need to fit together. There’s the problem solution fit. There’s the product market fit. There’s the founder company fit. There are so many things that need to come together. Working in those big companies helps you actually in the problem solution fit. What kind of a problem exists there? And how can we really solve it in the most efficient way?

Now, of course, those big companies have their own ways of solving those problems, but it gives you that skill set of, again, pinpointing. Where are the pain points? How can we solve them really quickly? And how can we solve them in the right way so that we even anticipate the next few steps of the customer? If you’re telling me that I need an efficient car, for example, I may decide to build an electric car for you, but I need to think a few steps ahead. Okay, do you need self-driving on top of that? How do you charge it? How do you manage the maintenance of it? How do we make sure that we are not using the old ways of supply chain and so on? So the big companies force you to think deeply about the problem and the solution. Sometimes you need it in the startup world when you get advanced in your product. But the basic skill is something that, you know, of that matching between the problem and the solution is a big thing that I learned personally from Microsoft and Amazon.

And sometimes, by the way, just to give the other side of it, you learn what not to do at those companies. For example, you know, in big companies, you’re probably going to have lots of meetings and you have to have a consensus around, you know, decision making. That’s not something that you want to do in startups because I always tell entrepreneurs, the only advantage that you have as an entrepreneur is your speed. It’s not the money. It’s not, you know, the smarts or anything else, or I would say, an insight that no one else would have is only the speed. So if you give away the speed, then you almost lost everything in the gate. And that’s one thing that I would encourage others, especially those who are already working in those big companies, have in mind and be conscious about as they transition if they plan to transition from being an employee at an enterprise or a big tech company and then becoming an entrepreneur themselves.

Dave: Well, I really agree with and I like your thought on the difference between like building for the moment versus building for the future, right? And really understanding like, yeah, we got to meet the needs of the moment. But where is it? Where’s the, you know, it’s like playing chess, right? Because that’s entrepreneurship in a lot of ways is like doing that because you have to think of the next moves ahead. Like, all right, we’re doing this. We’re doing this well, but especially we’re going to get to talk about the AI and the transformation of things like in today’s world, right? We’re doing this interview just after DeepSeek is leapfrog Chat GPT, right? So like all of a sudden, like what’s going to leapfrog you next in your business. Like you have to be constantly thinking about how you number one, create your moat, but you protect that moat and then how you continue to leapfrog yourself. Because somebody will, you know, in your business, there isn’t a niche or anything anymore that someone cannot get access to and do anything in, right. So you have to really be thinking, you know, multiple steps ahead, like 4D chess in a lot of ways I call it, but great entrepreneurs that do that do, you know, obviously create really good lasting businesses too, right? So how do you see that? How do you see the speed? Cause you mentioned the speed, right? For entrepreneurs and for startups, like that’s an advantage, but with the speed of technology and the capabilities of AI every day getting better and compounding on themselves, what’s your thought on how to keep up? What’s your thought on how to maintain an edge, if you will, in today’s world?

Mohamed Ahmed: Let’s start with something important. First of all, do not confuse, I would tell everyone, do not confuse speed with working hard. Moving fast doesn’t mean that you need to work more hours. That’s number one. Then if we dig even further and say, okay, what does it mean to move fast? There are two things for you as an entrepreneur that you need to focus on. Number one is maximizing the learning. How do you learn really quickly? This is really important. And we’re going to get into the AI and how that can help you and the examples for that. And the second one is making decisions quickly based on enough data.

So let’s talk about the first one first. So maximizing learning means that you uncover the unknowns or you de-risk whatever you’re going through very quickly. So for example, you have a product idea and you want to know whether this product idea is a good one or not. There’s so many different ways to do it. If we talk about the enterprise way or big companies way, okay, let’s build a product or maybe a small version of it and take it from that point. This is too long. This is too slow for startups. For you, if you figure out the right questions and be able to get to the right people very quickly, then you’ll be able to learn much, much faster. So you can condense a few months into a week, for example. So maximizing the learning is very important and that requires from you to really move very, very quickly.

Now how the AI can help you with that a lot. I remember in the old days we needed to design. If I use the same example, you know, design the questions, you know, what would be the ideal profile and all of that, that would make it take me at least a week or two of research. Right now I still do the same thing. 20 minutes and I’m done. And I’m just ready to go. And this is one of the advantages, I would say, of AI. It actually removes the cognitive overhead that you may have to prepare for any experiment as an entrepreneur. And this is also another thing. Maximizing learning means that you’re having an experimental mindset. You’re just experimenting all the time.

And the second one is making decisions. And this is really important. Which is again, it’s another way of saying, you know, work with vague situations. You’re not going to have, you never have the full data. If you have the full data is probably too late. It’s probably someone has already reached out to the same conclusion way before you. So being able to make decisions quickly is also another thing. And also this is another thing that I personally use AI a lot on, bringing the insights from what is going on in the market and asking the right questions, giving the right context to AI. And surprisingly, I was also using DeepSeek the last few days to analyze a few customer or prospect interviews and give me a plan to what is next. Again, it just condensed weeks into 20 minutes, 30 minutes. And that made me actually do more. In a very short time, I get into the action much sooner than before.

You know, there’s this mantra, famous mantra, it’s always said in the Silicon Valley, get out of the office. And that’s what is actually, and go and talk to people. This is what, for example, AI and fast learning would help you to. Instead of spending four hours in the office and the other four hours in the office, now I don’t need more than one hour to plan and then the rest of my day just talking to customers and experimenting and trying new stuff. This is, I would say, key and mastering acquiring that skill or that mindset and continuing with it. I would say it’s the biggest, one of the biggest assets that any entrepreneur would have. Regardless whether you’re VC funded, you’re in tech or non-tech, it’s all about just moving fast in a way that would allow you to make decisions quickly, learn very quickly, quicker than anyone else.

Dave: You know, one of the lessons I gave and thoughts for success, I always do an end of the year episode where I give my thoughts of the year and lessons learned as well as my best piece of advice for the next year. And one of those pieces of advice was if you are not working in utilizing AI LLMs like a Chat GPT or you know, whatever it is on a daily basis in your business, you are losing ground because your competition is. But it’s still just a tool to use at this point. It’s we haven’t gotten, and this is what I would talk about it to where it actually is really like just working, doing all the work for you, right. For things, right. So I want to take just a quick one minute break. I want to dig into that. Cause I’ve seen some things lately that I think are astounding, you know, leaps and bounds. And I want to get your take on it. So we’ll do that. We’ll be right back.

[Break]

Dave: Okay, so Mohamed, before the break, I was talking about how AI is, the LLMs like ChatGPT and stuff are just a tool that you can use and the better you get at using them, obviously they make you more efficient. For example, right now, while we’re doing this interview, earlier today, I had an idea, I’ve got my RSS feed for my Misfit Entrepreneur blog. I’ve been writing that blog for nine years, right? There’s hundreds of blog posts on that, right? So I gave the RSS feed to ChatGPT and said, I want to do a 10 book series on the main, big, you know, best core themes from these blogs over the years. You know, can you outline the series? Can you create the books themselves, right? The outlines of the books as well as the content for the books for me to review and optimized for Amazon KDP and everything else that they need to be done and all that. And it’s like just right now working behind the scenes over here doing that while you and I are having a conversation, right? Like that would take me a good year to probably pull all that together and stuff.

Like the capabilities are astounding, but it’s still me prompting and me asking for it. Where I think the future is going is into AI agents that literally do like you would… Like it would actually be accessing and this is capable now because I think open AIs come out with operator. Like you can give it like my KDP credentials and say, okay, create the books, upload them, optimize them, get them up there, make them for sale, all that stuff. And it literally will do that. I know that there’s nuances to it, but that is already starting to exist. Right? So what are you seeing? Like, I mean, how can people leverage that for themselves, their businesses, and as entrepreneurs?

Mohamed Ahmed: Absolutely. I shared some of my experiences, and we can talk definitely about the future. Now, LLMs or AI right now is pretty much like a smart high schooler. If you give it an instruction about something, it will come back with answers with a similar level of thinking. But most of the time, that’s not enough. I’ll share with you my own experience for example creating some of my marketing campaigns. You can go and talk to let’s say Anthropic or ChatGPT or any other LLM model and tell them, okay, I’m trying to create a marketing campaign on social media and I would like to talk about those main ideas and it would give you something. But the question here is, is that really good? Does that really represent you as an entrepreneur?

Most of the time the answers are, as we learned, there used to be a programmer saying we learned about computers, garbage in garbage out. Well, with LLMs, I wouldn’t say it’s garbage in garbage out, but the deeper structures and content you give it, the better kind of outcomes that you’re going to get. The way that I think about LLMs or AI in general, you’re holding the mic, and the LLM is a speaker that magnifies whatever you say or whatever you do. Okay. So if you’re saying gibberish it’s going to get you gibberish, but just in a more magnified way. If you’re giving something that is superficial, not really deep enough for the LLM to give you a good outcome, you’re not going to get that outcome.

So what I learned, if I go back to the same example before talking to the LLM and telling it that I need to design a marketing campaign, I would feed it with a document that has what is my typical style, what did work before, what did not work before with me, you know, the topics, the breakdown of the topics, you know, what are those social networks that I’m going to publish at, what worked, what usually works with them, what does not work with them. Now we’re talking, I get results I almost do not even need to review because I did that front loading of giving it all the details.

So, and by the way, the same thing when it comes to any other entrepreneur, if you want to use the AI to accelerate something for you, you need to do your homework in terms of understanding the aspects of the problem that you want the LLM to help you with. And then from that point, you repeat that. So I can now create a marketing campaign for Q1. And I can learn really quickly from the instructions that I gave to the LLM before the beginning of that quarter. And then I do the same in Q2. So now you’re progressing this way.

Dave: Well, and that’s a great point because as smart as they are, they’re actually pretty dumb in the sense that they can’t yet kind of think outside the box. Whatever box you give them, your prompt is how they think. Right. So if you don’t tell it to write in your style, which is what I did when I did this, write in the same style that I write for the Misfit Entrepreneur blog. Like if you don’t tell it to do it, it’s going to write it. And that’s why you see things all the time written where you’re like, that’s AI because you can just tell that it’s very cookie cutter and everything else. It has to be like the style. What’s fun is like, you can get and say like, write this, write this marketing plan in the style of Edgar Allen Poe, you know, things like that. And you’ll see it’s fun like that, right? So you have to experiment. And that’s the thing that I’ve found over the last year plus of utilizing these tools. I’m, I would class myself as a novice compared to people who are out there. But that’s what I’m excited about agents about. Cause if you can set an agent up, right, it can really, you know, you can have multiple of you in certain areas of your business, your life working. Like it doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t have any other requirements other than power, right? You know, and it’s a way to really augment yourself.

I saw, I mentioned this in another podcast I did recently with another guest, we were talking about kind of the same subject and I watched a video the other day of a guy who basically uses operator from Chat GPT, which I think you have to be on the highest tier. And basically created with operator, gave it his credentials to Facebook and basically said, all right, go onto Facebook marketplace for this area and find every post that is looking to get rid of a piano. And then if they’re looking to get rid of the piano, I want you to message them to basically tell them that I’ll take the piano off their hands for $200. And I want you to create a spreadsheet while you do this and put all the data into a spreadsheet and then yes or no if they respond and if they do respond what their response is in the spreadsheet. Like within an hour of running this thing, it’s done all this. It’s got a spreadsheet going. It’s doing all that stuff. Like it’s got like 10 people that are like, yeah, come and get it for $200. Like it’s $2,000. Like, you know, and he’s like, all I gotta do now is just hire, I just rent a truck and I just tell them, this is the day we pick it up. And I just rent like a U-Haul truck that day, can even hire a couple of guys to go do it as contractors and pay them 50 bucks a piano and they run around and they go do it and take them to the dump. And I’ve got myself a six figure business doing that. Like, what is the world going to look like a year from now? Two, three, four, five years from now, we’re going to have, we are going to see easily the first one person shop AI billionaire at some point, you know? So what are you seeing?

Mohamed Ahmed: That’s the example that you told us. It’s a good example of someone who knows the problem very well defined. And he gave clear instructions to the AI to do it. Now I think what is going to happen in the future is we’re going to keep training the AI to get smarter and smarter. I mentioned the high schooler as the level where we are right now. We’re going to get into college level, master’s and PhD.

Dave: How close do you think we are to AGI?

Mohamed Ahmed: That’s a tricky question. I think it depends how do you define AGI, frankly, because at the end of the day, I think that AGI is a big term.

Dave: If it’s about solving, let’s say on par with human, let’s just say on par with a human. But humans are not equal. That’s also another thing, right?

Mohamed Ahmed: Right, in their IQ, sometimes, there are people who are much smarter than me and they would solve the problem in a much more efficient way than me. Are you targeting those or you’re targeting someone else? But let’s maybe even take the general definition of AGI. I think we may, with DeepSeek, and this is one thing that a lot of people are not really, I think they’re just freaking out and not getting it right. With DeepSeek, I think we’re closer than ever for a very simple reason. Everyone is saying, well, DeepSeek was able to develop something that is equivalent to GPT-01 with a fraction of the cost.

Now imagine if you’re able to run more models, crunch more data with the efficiency that those guys reach. This means that we’re closer than before. We do not need, let’s say a billion dollar to reach the AGI. Maybe we need only a hundred million dollars, which we have already right now. So I wouldn’t be surprised if someone comes over and asks us that in a year from now, we’re very close or we reached something that is close to AGI. Because, you know, the compute and AI, the cheaper it gets, the more we use it. It just compounds on itself every day, right?

Dave: Exactly. There’s that, the G-valve paradox, the cheaper some commodities, as they get cheaper, we use them more. It’s not the other way around. We use less of them, like energy and oil, the cheaper they get, the more we use them. And same thing for knowledge, same thing for AI. It’s getting cheaper, a lot cheaper right now with whatever DeepSeek guys were able to do. It doesn’t mean that we’re not gonna use GPUs as before. No, we’re gonna even use them more than before to reach that milestone and even think of what is beyond. So I think it’s closer. DeepSeek, the way I say it, think about DeepSeek as making it closer.

Dave: So, and I derailed you with that, but I wanted to get that in. So back to agents, back to, you know, like that example, like, know, your thoughts on them.

Mohamed Ahmed: So agents definitely are going to dominate. We already have millions and millions of agents being created every day today. There are some of them who going to… A lot of people thinking of agents that are only doing stuff, like the one going to Facebook page and so on, but there are going to be agents that would be ruminating about ideas and thinking for you and giving you, I would say, a memory, a super memory, where they’re going to memorize everything about what you did and based on that they’re going to help you to make decisions or even make decisions for you. So agents definitely is the way to go. And there is also an economic reason for that, which is the cost of running an agent is now significantly lower than the cost of running an ad. And also for the specialized agents, you do not need a huge LLM to be running behind it. Smaller models that would cost you a fraction of cents to run them for days will do the job. Yeah, but as I said, I used to be a software engineer. I’m seeing now agents to do the testing, to write documentation. The cost actually just from 2023 to today, it’s reduced by a hundred times. That’s even faster than Moore’s law.

Dave: Moore’s law. What did I see? It’s Anthropic, right? That’s one of the other ones. Yeah, the founder of that or the CEO of that predicts that no more need, no more programming will be done by humans after like 2026 or 2027, which is crazy.

Mohamed Ahmed: Someone to check the code and all that stuff, but no more like initial programming will be done.

Dave: All right, we’ll bring it back down to earth a little bit. It’s great conversation because this is stuff that like, it doesn’t matter what your business, if you own an HVAC company, you need to be, you can be using agents for your marketing. You’ll be using agents to help with your customer service. You’ll be doing a lot of things, right? So this affects everybody. And so, but let’s talk a little bit about your entrepreneur journey. I’d be remiss if we didn’t before we got your Misfit 3. So you have built, you’ve built a number of different businesses. You’ve got this background, right? You understand tech. What have you found are some of the most universal principles that are needed to build a great business?

Mohamed Ahmed: Number one, you have to realize from the beginning that you’re building a business. And the reason, I know it’s very simple and may look very intuitive for everyone, but me coming from a tech world and I was a technical person for a long time and seeing other technical entrepreneurs I would say feeding their startup on the VC money, they forget that they need to build a business. And building a business is very simple. You feed the business with $2, you get three in return. And a lot of entrepreneurs forget about the fact that they have to have healthy metrics at the beginning of their business as early as possible. Many entrepreneurs say, okay, maybe later on. You know, I can get the money from VCs and they keep pushing that, you know, achieving that equation of being profitable and being able to generate reasonable revenues. So that’s number one. When I talk to, especially to technical entrepreneurs, whether they’re living in the Silicon Valley or coming from outside of the Silicon Valley and, they want to mimic that model. That’s the first thing because you can easily slip into the, you know, the VC model and just forget about building a real business. And the problem is you’re going to give away a lot of your business almost for free or I would say, or less what it’s really worth.

Dave: Guard your equity with everything you can.

Mohamed Ahmed: Exactly. And you cannot do that without really building a healthy business. It’s important to have this from the beginning. We see the outliers like what happened with Facebook at the beginning and other companies. And we think this is the typical case. Those are outliers. Those are not, you know, the typical case in business. So do not, you know, basically take those as the only guidance for you as you build your business.

And the other thing is, this is also very important, especially for first time entrepreneurs, your startup does not define who you are. And this is a big mistake.

Dave: Or maybe don’t let it define who you are.

Mohamed Ahmed: Exactly. Because your startup, it’s just one project in your life. Whether it’s becoming successful or not in business terms, your life is bigger than that. You as a person, you’re a dad, you’re a husband, you’re part of a community, so you have to be conscious about that. And even if the startup did not work, then this is just a milestone. You move on and do the other startup. So this is really important.

And there’s also one thing, the last point is, the greatest startup pivot, I would say, is what you make from within. In other words, if you are now, if you feel now that you’re stuck and your mindset is not really helping you, the first pivot is not your product or who is your target customer, it’s your mindset. And you need to start with that. And then everything will fall in place after this.

Dave: That actually leads into my next question that I had, because you wrote Inside Out Entrepreneurship, which is basically that. You have to become who you want to become on the inside before it shows on the outside. You talk a lot about the mental resilience and everything. In fact, I think I’ve heard you say mental resilience beats funding. Explain your philosophy on mindset, mental resilience, and how it relates to entrepreneurship so that people can take that from you.

Mohamed Ahmed: Absolutely. Look, if we take actually the word resilience, what does it mean if we just map it to engineering when someone is building a bridge and say this is a resilient bridge? This means that this bridge can withstand, you know, the elements can withstand pressure. So this is the engineering definition of resilience. If we map this to your mind, it’s the same thing. You’re going to face unexpected events, you’re going to have dark days. How do you make sure that all those events and challenges do not take you out of balance?

And that actually was for me personally in my first business, it was a big problem for me in the first two years. Prior to starting my company, I studied a lot about startups, I talked to lots of entrepreneurs. And by the way, despite all of that preparation, I made all the mistakes that they told me not to do in the first two years. And the reason is because I was not in the right mindset. And I got derailed from the right perspective because I was not resilient enough. An event would come in, would basically knock me down for days or weeks because I felt that this event is a devastating event. It’s going to take my business down. But in reality, it will take my business down if I believe so. And it’s not if I do not let it to do so for my business and that’s all about your mindset. So the resilience is about being strong enough so that those events that are gonna hit you from left and right every day do not take you out of balance and change your mindset.

Now there’s also another word that many people use which is robustness, right? What does it mean to have a robust mindset? Even though despite all, and by the way, there’s also the definition of it in engineering. When I say I built a robust bridge or structure, this means that it can, if it got a strong enough event that would deform it a bit, it will go back to its original form. So the same thing to your mindset. Let’s say something happened and it took you out of balance. It’s going to happen, right? Now can you go back really quickly?

I’ll actually maybe share a story, a personal story. Two stories. So when I started my business, I got $100,000 credit from AWS, from their cloud services. And then, you know, we started building our product and we started going into this demonstration for our product. The day we went to our first conference to demonstrate our product, we got an email from AWS telling us, you owe us $65,000. I said, oh my God, I mean, we only have in the bank $70,000 and we’re just starting to demonstrate our product. We do not yet have that many paying customers. This is going to take our business down. And because that was one of the first major events that I went through, it took me two to four weeks actually to recover and figure out the plan and go back to AWS and talk with them.

Now, in that particular situation that I was not resilient enough, I did not have the right robustness. Now, fast forward a few years after that. Company got matured, we overcame a lot of things and a much bigger company came over. They wanted to acquire my company. We gave them access to our source code. They interviewed the team. Everything was going fine. In one day, we were supposed to sign the LOI at 6 p.m. Pacific, just two hours before it. They called us and said, we had to sign a deal with another company that is acquiring us. We cannot really acquire you. That’s a much more devastating event, I would say, because we were also running out of cash. But I tell you this. It took me only two or three hours to bring back balance to my thought process. And the very next day I contacted five other companies and they’re all interested to actually acquire us. They were actually competing for our company.

Now you see that’s the difference between the first one and the second one is the resiliency of the mindset that I acquired over time. This is an example of how a small event can knock you down and how a big event can be actually turned around to be an opportunity rather than something devastating. I just talk to those other companies as if the offer is still on before anyone else would get a sense of what is going on between us and that other company. And this is how you run your business. So this is an example of resiliency and robustness. And this is one of your biggest assets as an entrepreneur. It can definitely make you different.

Dave: Before we get into today’s Misfit 3, I want to take a minute to talk to you about a free resource available to you from the Misfit entrepreneur, the Misfit Minute. The Misfit Minute is the free weekly resource packed with useful tips, tricks, and information from the world of Misfit entrepreneurs. It not only includes further resources on the week’s Misfit entrepreneur guest, but additional links, articles, and resources to help you be more successful. It’s delivered every Friday to your inbox. To sign up, all you have to do is go to the homepage at www.misfitentrepreneur.com and you will see the Misfit Minute signup page. Don’t miss out on this great resource and all it has to help you. Sign up today and look for it this Friday.

Okay, it’s time for Mohamed’s Misfit 3. These are the three things that he wants you to take that you can put in your life, your business, make a difference for yourself starting today. And the way that I always frame this is I say, if you were going to leave this earth tomorrow and you can only leave behind your three best pieces of wisdom for the generations that come after you to help them live their best life, what would those three things be? So Mohamed, what are your Misfit 3?

Mohamed Ahmed: All right, absolutely. Now the first one, I think we touched on it, true entrepreneur strength is actually from the inside out. And that’s the whole theme of the book that I just recently published. We definitely appreciate the business success matrix, like the revenue and all of that. But at the end of the day, if you are not strong enough and you’re not able to, I would say evolve fast enough with your business. Your business at the end of the day is going to crumble because you’re at the center as an entrepreneur. You’re at the center of everything. You’re bringing resources, people, problems, money together, mixing them together to get that beautiful creation out, which is your startup. So how are you going to do all of this without really taking care of yourself?

And that brings me actually to the second one, which is entrepreneurship requires lots of conditioning. You need to make sure that you’re ready for that. And think of it like, again, what would a mountaineer do before climbing a mountain? No matter how experienced they are, they would need to go through a conditioning program. And that would include their physical fitness, their mental, their emotional, because their journey is unforgiving. And you want to make sure that you able to withstand the difficult moments in that journey. So this is very, very important.

Now, if you already went through these two and now you’re in the middle of building your startup and you feel things are not going right, the third wisdom I would share with everyone is, and I mentioned this earlier, the best pivot that you would have for your startup when things are not going is your mindset or is within. Not necessarily the product. You still need to do that. But look, your mindset, your perspective about the world is what brought you to that point. If you do not change your mindset and your perspective, probably the next point is going to be the same. Because you’re not looking within about your thought process, you’re not examining it or re-examining it. So you’re probably going to use the same way of thinking again. And probably there’s a very high chance that you’re going to end up in the same place, which you do not want to.

Dave: I think that’s an excellent Misfit 3. And that last one is so critical because that’s what happens to a lot of entrepreneurs. They kind of get stuck in that and then that’s where you plateau and they wonder why they can’t get to the next level and the next level is because they have to do that mind shift. So I love that last one. If people do want to learn more about you, where should they go?

Mohamed Ahmed: All right, so we, you know, I built a community called Boundless Founder and the website is https://stg-boundlessfounder-rpd-3buu.uw2.rapydapps.cloud. And that community is all about how do you get started with the journey, being an entrepreneur. And it applies a lot of what’s in the book. And I would love to offer your listeners a 20% discount off the subscription of that community. They will find courses, they would find also regular meetings with me and other entrepreneurs. And of course, lots of guides and resources that they can use along their journey. And of course, I would love for everyone to give my book some time, read it. And I would love to hear everyone’s feedback.

Dave: Oh, that’s great. I take it you’ll give us a link for that and we’ll link to that in the show notes and all that for everybody to find the best show notes in the business for reasons I will talk about more in a second. But first, for those of you that are new to the Misfit Entrepreneur, your first episode with us, welcome. It’s such an honor to have you with us and I hope you become a regular listener and subscriber. And for those of you that are with us week in and week out, I cannot thank you enough for your support of the show. You are what makes this go in over 100 countries every single week. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. and go out, check out the show notes of the episode. They are the best in the business. Why? Because I do them myself as part of my personal growth routine. I still go back through these episodes every single week and I take my best pieces of advice and wisdom and tips and things that I think are really important. I share them with you. So go check those out and then go out and give this episode a rating and review. Help share Mohamed’s message because we all know, and I say this in every episode, one great episode can change someone’s life. Maybe something that Mohamed shared today was that missing link that you needed to get to your next level. So go ahead and share this with others. And again, Mohamed, thank you for coming on sharing all your wisdom and insight today.

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