Rising Tides Startups

Kevin: Welcome to Rising Tide Startups, where we chat with startup founders and solopreneurs just like you from all over the globe. During our chat today, picture yourself starting your own startup journey. If our guests can do it, you can too. This is Rising Tide Startup. My name is Kevin Prude. It’s an honor to host this podcast. And I have with me my friend, Mohamed Ahmed. He lets me affectionately refer to him as Mo. Mo, thanks for joining us on Rising Tide.

Mohamed: Hi, Kevin. It’s great to be here with you. Thank you very much for having me.

Kevin: So Mo, if you and I met at a networking event, how would you introduce yourself to me?

Mohamed: An entrepreneur who made lots of mistakes, learned from them the hard way, and still trying to figure it out. But seriously, for your listeners to know about my background: I’m a technical guy by education and I would say half of my professional life. I worked at Microsoft, AWS, I’m in software space and we can talk about how I got the entrepreneur bug, but midway I said, “You know what? I really want to try starting something from zero.” And that brought me to the startup world. I built my first startup back in 2017, went through lots of ups and downs and learned a lot. That led me to writing a book, which I hope we can talk about today. From that, the entrepreneurial bug persisted with me. I thought after founding the company, maybe I’d go back and work at Microsoft or Amazon, but eventually I realized this is a fascinating space. I really want to work with entrepreneurs and continue working with that entrepreneurial mindset because it’s special, not only for the entrepreneur themselves, but also for their family and everyone around them. So now I’m working every day to inspire others to start their journey and continue in their journey because I know it’s very tempting at a certain point for others to just quit and go back to their comfort zone.

Kevin: I’ve been doing this podcast since 2018 and we’ve had so many people that came out of their corporate work into entrepreneurship. Often the thing they built, their product or service, was a direct result of what they were doing in their corporate life. It was almost like scratching an itch they had. They were building this tool just for themselves, then realized it had a much broader application and boom, there it was – an idea. So is that similar to what happened with you or was it a clean break, just starting something new?

Mohamed: It’s similar, but knowing about entrepreneurship happened with me by chance. I’ll share a story. Back in 2006, I was doing my PhD at UConn, University of Connecticut, and I was taking a very tough course called Randomized Algorithms. One day they told us we needed to move to another classroom because of renovations. We moved to one of the School of Business buildings. As I was walking into the classroom, I found a small piece of paper on the desk that I decided to sit at. It was announcing something called the Innovation Accelerator, a joint program between UConn and the state of Connecticut. They were bringing entrepreneurs together with graduate students from UConn and it was a tremendous learning experience.

Here’s what actually inspired me to become an entrepreneur. I sent an email to one of the professors supervising that program, Luke Weinstein, and I told him, “If next year I’m not working at Microsoft or those big companies, I would love to come and work again for you and for the program.” And he said, “Why do you want to go and work for Microsoft? Why don’t you go and build one?” That actually made me think, “Well, why not?” I continued the conversation with him, but I did not work at the innovation accelerator again for a very simple reason – I really wanted to try building something.

Working with other entrepreneurs and seeing that they’re truly working towards building something that the market would accept – there are no politics. It’s somehow objective. It’s a difficult and tough problem that you would go and try to fix with the least amount of resources in a very short time. That’s a real challenge. So that’s how I got that entrepreneurial bug. Since then I was saying, “I want to build my own startup.”

I had several trials that never materialized into a real company until that point when things started to happen. Any entrepreneur would have a story with their product, but I think this is what I usually tell entrepreneurs: Don’t think about technology. Don’t think only about the specific problem that you’re trying to solve. It’s good to have that, but it’s just a means for you to achieve something much bigger for yourself, for your family, for humanity. This is how you should be thinking about entrepreneurship.

Kevin: I love that. As you were talking about what your professor said to you, that’s kind of like that tagline that says as long as you’re working for someone else, you’re building their dream, and only when you work for yourself are you building your dream. This is very closely aligned with the advice he gave you.

I want to go back to the day that you walked out of whatever the last mega corporation you were working with, whether it was Microsoft, Amazon, Google, whoever that would have been. Can you remember that Friday when you walked out and thought, “On Monday, the paycheck stops. I’m actually on my own here.” What was going through your mind as you walked out of the building that day, handed them your badge and turned in your laptop?

Mohamed: You’re reminding me of some really special days. It was definitely filled with doubts. I had multiple emotions going on. First was excitement, because I was working part-time on my startup and I thought, “Okay, now I can work full-time, I’m going to do 10x better work and success is just around the corner.” And at the same time, I was asking myself, “Did I really make the right decision?” As you said, the paycheck is going to stop.

It’s like a free fall for me, as for many other entrepreneurs. You’ve jumped off a cliff and you’re in free fall until hopefully you build an airplane that will lift you off before you crash to the ground. So it was a scary day for sure. You have all those fears and no matter how hard you try to overcome them, they come back, especially when things get ugly and more difficult.

When someone asks me how it feels, I give them this analogy: It’s like swimming in a warm pool in a lane, where they set the lanes for you, everything is okay, there is a lifeguard beside you – as opposed to someone throwing you into the cold ocean in the middle of the night. You do not know which direction you should go or where the shore is. It’s exactly like that.

Kevin: You painted such an inviting picture. Everybody should want to jump in a cold ocean!

Mohamed: But at the end of the day, you become someone different. Rather than becoming that friendly goldfish swimming in a small bowl, you become a shark.

Kevin: Either that or you get eaten by sharks.

I have a theory about entrepreneurship that there are two factors that are absolutely essential for entrepreneurs. Number one, they have to have the reward of success. There has to be a carrot out there, something that says there is a reward coming for all this work I’m putting in. Generally it’s financial, but it could be lifestyle freedom, or feeling like you are having a greater impact. There could be a number of other things, but there has to be some reward at the end.

There also has to be the idea that there is a fear of failure. So you have these two buttresses on either side that you’re balancing between all the time. If you remove either of those, you almost remove the incentive that most people would have. There has to be the fear of being eaten by a shark, but there has to be the reward of “I became a shark” because I faced that challenge and rose to the occasion.

It’s interesting because if you’re in corporate life, going week to week, sitting in a cubicle, doing the work, getting the paycheck, you really don’t have those boundaries.

Mohamed: Exactly. And you brought up a very good point, which is that balance between the fear and also keeping an eye on growing and learning. That was the reason I wrote my book.

I’ll tell you a story to summarize my journey and how I had a turning point in the middle. At the beginning, when I started working full-time on my startup, I read lots of books. I even took certificates in entrepreneurship and innovation from Stanford and many other places. I felt that I knew what it takes to really build a startup. But yet in the first two years, two and a half years, I made all the mistakes, literally all the mistakes that they were warning about. Midway, I stopped and asked myself, “What’s happening here? I have those experiences, I read a lot and met other entrepreneurs before starting my journey, but yet I’m making these stupid mistakes.”

I felt back then it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. I see that I’m about to fail, I’m about to fail, and actually bad things started to happen. Midway, I had mentors who started to challenge my way of thinking and change my perspective. I reached rock bottom and realized that the fear factor was taking over. Because of that, I was no longer balanced.

I wasn’t balanced. And that’s exactly the word I use with many others. I was out of balance. As a result, I was seeing things differently. I was seeing any setback as a devastating failure rather than as an opportunity to come back.

I have lots of stories. At the beginning of the journey, just an unexpected failure coming to us would make me paralyzed for four weeks. At the end of the journey, I had a failed acquisition and I was able to recover from that in less than 24 hours. The first event was much smaller in terms of scale and impact on the business, but yet it took me emotionally down and made me unable to think clearly or think at all. As opposed to the second event four or five years later, because of the resiliency that I built over time and that perspective that changed, in 24 hours we had another company willing to buy us.

The main difference wasn’t because I got smarter or got more money. It was just the mindset, the change of perspective, and that balance you mentioned at the beginning.

Kevin: I think it’s interesting that if the principal of the second company that came in to acquire your company had talked to you four years before, they would have had a different impression of you and hence your company, because you are the face of the company.

Looking at the key points of the book you wrote, which we’ll get to in a minute, it’s so driven by the mindset around leading a company. It’s not just for entrepreneurs – it’s for people in general, for leaders. It’s a different mindset on leading a team and walking through your day. I love the thought that you said – I had to arrive at a place where I could exist in that balance without being knocked off kilter for days, weeks, months at a time if something bad happens.

Mohamed: Absolutely. This is why I always tell entrepreneurs: the most important asset you have is your mind, or I would say your mindset to be more specific. If you have the right mindset, if you’re in the right place, you can turn anything into an opportunity. And you need to invest in that.

Some entrepreneurs or wannabe entrepreneurs ask me, “Why do you believe this is really important?” I usually give them this analogy: Look at any professional mountaineers. Just before they start going to a summit, they have to condition themselves. We think the conditioning is just putting a heavy backpack on and going on a treadmill, and we think it’s only physical. But if you really dig deeper into that – and I’ve actually met multiple mountaineers and talked with them about their conditioning – it’s emotional, it’s physical, and there are so many other things they need to arrange, even in their personal lives. They have to talk with their families and make sure they’re supportive because they may die out there.

So I tell entrepreneurs it’s pretty much like that. That’s actually the gist of the book I wrote. My main message is: It’s not an easy journey, but for that journey to be rewarding and reach the summit – there’s no end game for entrepreneurship, but if you just want to be that different person, I would say the end game is you becoming that person and getting used to that – you have to condition yourself.

Not only yourself, but everything around you, your family, because your family is special. If you go through it, they’re going through it too. I have countless stories in the book about how that impacted my family and my wife, and how she almost had a panic attack at a certain point and said, “Mo, I’m out of here.”

There are so many things financially and even spiritually that you need to prepare for. It’s not going to be easy, but you don’t want to crash in the middle of the journey or just throw in the towel. You need to figure out ways to keep going and find the right ecosystem or build the right support system around you.

Otherwise, it’s pretty much like you just left your work at 5 p.m. and I’m telling you, “Let’s go climb the Himalayas.” For sure, you’re going to give up after the first 500 meters. This is how I think entrepreneurs need to approach it. And by the way, it still applies to second-time, third-time entrepreneurs. I would like everyone to think of the mountaineer analogy – they condition themselves no matter how many times they’ve climbed, even for the same summit. They need that conditioning. The same thing applies to entrepreneurship.

Kevin: As you were talking, I was just thinking about how the best consultants, the best teachers were practitioners. The training and teaching they developed is really born out of lessons they learned through their own process, not what they’ve read in a book somewhere else or heard somebody else talk about, but what they’ve actually experienced.

I want you to touch on your entrepreneurial journey that led to where you are today and then step into that transition. Talk about the business you started, go through the transition, and how that led to what you’re doing today.

Mohamed: Maybe I’ll start with a few months before that. I was working at a company called Climate Corp, a late-stage startup doing something really cool called digital agriculture. They were helping farmers and growers in the Midwest through satellite imagery and sensors on the ground to increase their yield. We were using the cloud heavily.

My manager on the first day of the job told me, “Look, I have two questions for you. Are we moving fast enough? And are we overspending? Can you check those for me?” So 48 hours later, I told him, “No, we’re not moving fast enough, and yes, we’re spending a lot. We should not be spending all of that.”

I proposed a project, fixed the spending, and we saved almost $4 million at the end of the first six months. But I realized that after a few months, we came back to the same spending patterns. Then we fixed it again, and we did that a third time. I stopped and asked myself, “Are we just a bunch of idiots repeating the same problem again and again?”

So I went and talked to others in the market, in the community of engineers using cloud back then. They said, “Yeah, we’re having the same problem.” I thought, “Okay, big idea. I think we can fix that problem. If it’s a prevailing problem and many others are suffering from it, we can build a product on top of that.” And this is how I got the idea for the startup.

Back to your first point that any entrepreneur should have a story behind their product, and that story should be a painful one. But of course, we need to separate the edge of the technology from being an entrepreneur. You could say, “I can go and work at AWS or Microsoft or Google, and maybe fix it there.” You might have the edge on the technology, but you don’t have the entrepreneurial bug. There’s a big difference.

So we started the company and after the first six months, back to the point of being out of balance, I made the same mistake we did at Climate Corp – I overspent trying to build the product. We pivoted multiple times and ended up in cybersecurity.

If you’re only after the technology and that specific technical problem is not relevant anymore, are you going to throw in the towel and say, “That problem is solved, I’m not going to be here anymore”? Or are you driven by the itch of helping others through a product and gaining your freedom to work on a problem without the politics of big corporations?

We went through a first acquisition attempt and it failed. To your earlier point, I think it failed because the acquiring company did not feel that the team was ready. That gave me feedback, so I started building the company, creating a really strong culture. Then we got a second company interested in acquiring us.

We did everything – opened up our source code to them, they interviewed our engineers, they even looked at our bank accounts for financial due diligence. We were about to sign the LOI, the letter of intent, but two hours before signing, they backed off. The reason was simple: they wanted to buy us because IBM had given them an offer to buy them, and they thought our technology could increase their price in IBM’s eyes. At the same time, they were shopping around and talking to Cisco and other companies. IBM’s CEO found out and told them, “I gave you a week to respond, but I know what you’re doing. You either sign the LOI today at 4 p.m. or there’s no deal.” So they decided to sign with IBM, and buying us would have been considered a material change, so they decided not to buy us.

With the help of my mentors and friends, I took that LOI as if they hadn’t backed off, and I myself went shopping around. That actually made five companies interested in us. I got the news they weren’t going to sign with us on Monday, and by Friday, I had four meetings with four CEOs. We were able to close a deal, though it took nine months to complete. We also had our ups and downs during that process.

This is just an example of how sometimes your mindset can make a big difference in your journey. It’s not easy. It was a very dark moment for me, and I had a few hours of feeling lost and not knowing where to go. I still remember that day very well. I didn’t tell anyone, not even my co-founder, because I wanted to absorb it and figure out what to tell them.

By the way, the picture I’m painting about what happened with this company and why they backed off – I only learned about it two or three months after. At the time, I didn’t know why they backed off. I thought there was something wrong with us.

Bringing myself together was really hard. I didn’t even tell my wife about this. She was saying, “We’re almost done.” It’s like you’re in a marathon and you’re seeing the finish line very close, and all of a sudden that finish line disappears. And not only that, someone is setting you at the back of your shoulder saying, “Just keep running.” And if you ask, “Where’s the finish line? I’m exhausted,” they say, “Just keep running. We don’t know. Just move forward.”

That was definitely a difficult moment. But it’s about how you move from one hurdle to the next and overcome them in a way that you don’t come out of the experience broken. I see other entrepreneurs who might have some success from the outside, but there’s something broken inside, and they say, “No, I’m not going to come back.”

You don’t want that. You want entrepreneurs to come back because they’re the ones creating the economy, creating jobs and opportunities, and driving the innovation we see around us. If they get broken, first, you lose that person, and second, others who are watching them might say, “Well, I think it’s better for me to stay in that big corporation. I don’t want to be in that same position. I need that golden parachute.”

Kevin: Exactly, to jump out of the plane.

So walk us through a typical day. What does it look like in Mo’s world right now?

Mohamed: As a result of all that, I said, “It’s really important for me to inspire others, inspire other entrepreneurs.” As a result of what I went through, I don’t want others to go through the same experience. It’s going to be hard, but what we want is to make it rewarding. Let them move fast, let’s accelerate their growth.

So we built a boundless founder community (https://stg-boundlessfounder-rpd-3buu.uw2.rapydapps.cloud). In that community, we help entrepreneurs. We have some free courses to educate them about the mindset and what it means to be resilient and build robustness in your mind. Then we take them from that point.

The topic may look generic, but we actually break it down into how do you become resilient with rejections in sales? How do you effectively manage your sales pipeline? How do you do inbound marketing? How do you set the right expectations for your company? Whether you’ve already got funding or not, you have to have a plan to know what’s next and what the end game is, what you want to achieve after 18 months.

We also work on how to actually build a business. I work with technical entrepreneurs – most innovators building high-velocity startups are technical and product-oriented. But they get so proud of the product and forget about building a real business that makes a profit. It has to be making money at the end of the day.

I usually start my day interacting with my community. Then I work with select entrepreneurs on their journey, helping them think right, challenging them. I oscillate between two roles – sometimes I’m an advisor and sometimes I’m a mentor. There’s a big difference, by the way.

An advisor is someone who is a few steps ahead of you in the business and can show you what’s around the corner. They can tell you, “Okay, this is your first customer. They said they’re very interested and want another meeting. This means X – it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to buy from you. And here’s how you can get them back on track.” That’s the advisor role.

A mentor is someone who challenges your mindset. I remember one question one of my mentors asked me: “Let me ask you this – you built a company, you hired maybe 20-25 engineers. Are you helping them or are they helping you? Who’s helping whom?” As a result, who should be appreciative – you of what they’re doing, or they of what you’re doing?

I still remember this analogy vividly. One of my mentors told me, “Look, being in a startup is like being in a Formula One race. In Formula One, you need three things: a track, a car, and a driver. The VCs give you the track. You are building the car, and your employees are the drivers, period.” This is a mindset you need to build.

Sometimes I work with entrepreneurs from that perspective. It’s not necessarily 100% related to the business – it’s the meta kind of ideas and thoughts you need to have.

I spend the rest of my day reading a lot and bringing what I read back to my entrepreneurs. And lastly, I work on my upcoming book. I like authorship and how a book can impact others without necessarily being there in the room. So I spend maybe two or three hours each day getting ready for it.

Kevin: We’ll include all of those notes in our show notes so people can track this guru down to help them have a different mindset as they’re leading whatever it is they’re leading.

I love the way you’ve framed the journey – that you recognized a need, people spoke into your life, you learned lessons, hard lessons. The whole idea that “the obstacle is the way” mindset says those obstacles are opportunities. You either stop or you grow from them and learn from them, trying not to fail forward.

Mo, wrap us up today talking about the book itself, the book launch, any services you want to add, and just where people can really connect with you.

Mohamed: First of all, let me announce this only for your listeners: we’re going to give them a 20% discount on the membership where they can come over and experience some of the additional material to the book.

Now, the book itself, as I mentioned, is all about how to condition yourself. It’s full of stories, personal stories. I’m trying to show entrepreneurs what’s behind the curtains, what’s happening inside. That’s why the title is “The Inside-Out Entrepreneur” – because I believe success starts from inside.

It may look like everyone talks about needing to feel you can tackle it and be successful, but there are specifics we talk about in the book. I define what resilience in entrepreneurship is, what robustness is, how you develop those, and the difference between mental resilience and emotional resilience – there’s a big difference between these two – breaking those down with exercises and strategies so you can tackle them.

Then I take it further: how do you take what you build in terms of resilience and robustness and reflect that on your employees and your family? This is very important. The family of an entrepreneur is as specialized as the entrepreneur themselves. As much as entrepreneurs need to condition themselves, they also need to condition their family and prepare them. The book talks about that.

Kevin: That’s a perspective most would never even broach.

Mohamed: I made that mistake at the beginning. Because I had misconceptions about entrepreneurship and the journey, it automatically affected my wife and family. I thought once I got the first funding round, everything would be good. We were so happy with it – “Okay, we made it.” But it turns out that’s just the beginning of lots and lots of troubles. You have more money, you have more mistakes to make.

The book also covers the body-mind connection because they feed each other, and the spiritual outlook with a focus on how to think about the right perspective of life. Entrepreneurship is not about getting free from your manager or getting rich. I know many people in Silicon Valley say if you want to get rich, go work in a big corporation – and that’s true. But what drives you should be something bigger than the technology, bigger than what’s happening in the market, bigger than running away from your company or trying to be rich. It’s much bigger than that. So what is it? That’s something I talk about.

At the end, I tell entrepreneurs or readers how to hedge the risk. One thing many entrepreneurs don’t see until they’re in it is that they are the most vulnerable person in the whole journey. VCs invest in many companies and know most will fail. For you, you only invest in one idea for the next few years. Your employees can find another job and leave anytime. You cannot leave your company unless you’re the last one out. Your customers will find alternatives if you’re not around. But for you, it’s just you and the company – you’re tied to it. That’s the nature of it.

So how do you make sure it’s just another project for you? How do you make sure you come out stronger than before? That you’re still employable, still relevant to the market? That you don’t feel disconnected, unable to do anything other than building another company and going through that pain again? This is how many entrepreneurs get broken.

I hope your listeners give the book a try. The most rewarding thing for me is someone coming back and saying, “I like that part,” or “This part saved me.” I want to have some impact, even if it’s just one aspect of the whole journey. I look forward to everyone reading it, trying it, downloading some of the companion guides on our website. I’m always just one message away on social media. If anyone needs anything, I’m happy to connect.

Kevin: We’ll make sure your LinkedIn profile is there, along with the offer you mentioned and an Amazon link to the book. Mo, it’s been such a pleasure to walk with you down memory lane through lessons learned, and see how this built you into a resilient mentor for other people, with the mindset to walk beside somebody either as an advisor or mentor, in whatever role you need to play. And really just playing your part and helping all boats rise in a rising tide. Mo, thanks again. Have a great weekend.

Mohamed: Thank you very much, Kevin, for having me. It was a pleasure talking with you.