Inside-Out Entrepreneur: Mo Ahmed on Building Resilience and Mindset

Kyle: I love the analogy. So you’ve worked with AI and cloud computing for much of your career. What specific AI tools right now and workflows have you adopted?

Mohamed: Definitely, I work with almost everything that we have now in the market, the big AI players, like Anthropic and OpenAI and others. One important learned lesson for all the entrepreneurs and everyone out there: Do not trust the AI by just giving them a very simple request. You have to have the right context and right information before you ask any AI model to help you with anything.

By the way, AI definitely can make you 10x, 100x more productive. There’s no doubt about that. But you want it to make you productive in the right direction. Are you just taking yourself down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out how to write an email? Or do you want AI to really help you figure out big strategies for your company or big initiatives for your company? This is really important.

So one of the things that I usually encourage entrepreneurs to do is learn how to use AI. And learning how to use AI is all about finding your sweet spot and experimenting. I usually experiment with: let’s take data from Perplexity, for example, and feed it into Anthropic. And after that, let me take this and do a deep research within OpenAI. And maybe after all of that, let me go back to Anthropic so that now I can write a solid sales campaign or a marketing campaign for my product.

I usually do that. I do not use a single tool. I use all those tools together. And I usually have my own workflow. And actually it’s part of what we do in Boundless Founder. We keep sharing the best practices. We keep sharing actually how we can use all those tools together to achieve a certain task or finish a project within your startup.

Kyle: That’s really cool. I just have a few personal questions to wrap up our conversation. I’ve really enjoyed everything we’ve talked about so far. Mohamed, what’s something most people don’t know about you?

Mohamed: I have two degrees, two bachelor degrees. This is something that not many know about me. I’m from Egypt. In Egypt, actually, there are two educational systems. There’s the public and private. And usually, you would apply to both. But if you get accepted in one of them, there’s no law that would force you to pull your application from the other system. But my dad told me, why not just keep doing them both? And he promised me a car, a fancy car in return. And I said, yeah, why not? I’ll do it. And I was able to do two bachelor degrees, actually one in computer science and one in business in four years.

Kyle: That’s really cool. That’s a lot of work.

Mohamed: Yeah. I remember one unforgettable day. I had four midterms in one single day.

Kyle: And then you went on to get a PhD in computer science as well.

Mohamed: Yeah, I did. And it’s all actually my dad. He encouraged me. He always had two questions when I asked him about something. He would say, is there a book for that? He’s a reader. He liked to read a lot. And the second, can we make it bigger? Can we make it 10x bigger? If you want something. And that actually is something that profoundly impacted me and made me think the same way. And obviously from the name of our community, Boundless Founder, I said, not 10X, we’re going to make it infinite.

Kyle: I love it. That’s really inspiring. He must’ve really inspired you to work so hard and achieve your goals.

Mohamed: Thank you.

Kyle: All right. So what’s the book that you recommend the most to people?

Mohamed: After my book?

Kyle: Yeah. I’m sure right now that you’ve launched your book this year. Any other books that you recommend?

Mohamed: Absolutely. There are multiple actually. If you don’t mind me mentioning some of these that would help entrepreneurs. The first one that changed how I think about my product and validation is a book called “The Mom Test.” It’s a really nice book that would teach entrepreneurs how to differentiate between someone who’s lying to you, telling you this is a good product versus someone who’s telling you the truth about your product. This is a really great book.

I’m also a big fan of Simon Sinek and his books. “Find Your Why” is definitely one of the books that I recommend everyone to read. There’s also another book by Simon Sinek called “The Infinite Game.” And that also will change your perspective about business in general. The book talks about how you should be thinking about businesses as just a continuous game. There’s no such thing called winning or losing, you just keep going.

How do you win the market? It’s just you keep staying in the markets, keep staying relevant. This is most important thing for you. He had stories of countless companies that were listed in S&P 500 and now they do not exist anymore. Do we call those winners? No, the winning at the long term is to stay in the game. So those are the three books that I highly recommend anyone to read. Some of them are focused on just the tactical part, but very impactful for your journey. The others are just higher level around the strategy that would change your perspective about life and business.

Kyle: Excellent. Thank you for the recommendations. I have a quick lightning round of questions for you now. What’s your favorite candy bar?

Mohamed: I don’t eat candy.

Kyle: Your favorite music artist?

Mohamed: Pink Floyd.

Kyle: Favorite cereal.

Mohamed: I don’t eat cereal as well.

Kyle: Mac or PC?

Mohamed: Mac.

Kyle: Google or Microsoft?

Mohamed: Google.

Kyle: Interesting coming from Microsoft. Dogs or cats?

Mohamed: Cats.

Kyle: And I don’t know if you’re into musicals or not, but Phantom or Les Mis?

Mohamed: Phantom.

Kyle: And the last question I have for you Mohamed, and we’ll wrap this up. What’s the worst thing about being an entrepreneur and what’s the best thing?

Mohamed: You’re asking tough questions, Kyle. The worst thing about being an entrepreneur is what you have to basically give away to become an entrepreneur. Sometimes you cannot be the friend that you really want to be. And sometimes you have to give away time being with your family. I would say this is the worst thing of being an entrepreneur. And in many cases, you cannot really avoid that.

The best thing is definitely the impact that you can leave in others’ lives, not by the technology. And this is really important, not by the technology, but by showing them how to become successful in life and how to look at life with the right perspective. Technology will become boring, will become irrelevant. So a lot of people or entrepreneurs who say, “I want to make an impact and build a technology that no one else built before.” Well, guess what? In two years, it’s not going to be relevant and no one is going to remember the technology, but they’re going to remember your story. They’re going to remember how you were an inspiring figure for them to do something great. That’s what really matters. And that’s, I would say, the best part of being an entrepreneur.

Kyle: I love those answers. Thank you so much for being generous with your time. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. Congratulations on launching a new book this year. I’m sure it’s going to help several entrepreneurs and I love the unique approach you’ve taken where it’s more about mindset than business advice really, but they do go hand in hand. So thanks again for being on Maker Manager Money.

Mohamed: Absolutely. Thank you very much, Kyle, for having me. It’s been a pleasure and thank you for all the great questions. Hello there. Welcome to the Maker-Manager-Money podcast. My name is Kyle Ariel Knowles and today’s guest is Mohamed Ahmed, serial entrepreneur, product visionary and author of “The Inside-Out Entrepreneur: Become the Entrepreneur You Were Meant to Be.” With 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 Boundless Founder community and entrepreneurial conditioning framework, helping founders raise millions and build resilience on their journeys. Welcome to the Maker-Manager Money podcast!

Mohamed: Hey, thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Kyle: So where are you dialing in from?

Mohamed: I’m in Seattle right now. I would say the gloomy, rainy Seattle. I’ve been here for around 15 years now. Microsoft actually brought me in. And since then, I’ve been moving from one company to another until I built my own startup. Great summer time, but as many people know, it’s gloomy and rainy most of the winter. So I got used to that.

Kyle: So I wanted to start our conversation with the entrepreneurial conditioning framework. I mentioned it in your introduction. Can you explain what it is and how you developed it?

Mohamed: Yeah, absolutely. It comes from my own experience. Maybe a bit of a background about myself for your audience. I’m an engineer by education and most of my career. I did software engineering, product management, and worked at big companies and did my PhD in computer science. I had the entrepreneurial bug early on. There’s an interesting story behind that actually.

When I was doing my PhD, I went to one of those business classes that we were relocated to because there was something happening in our computer science class. And I found a small piece of paper saying that there was an opportunity for an internship during summertime for something called the Innovation Accelerator. This was a program between the University of Connecticut, my university, and the state of Connecticut, where they bring graduate students to work with entrepreneurs to help them in their go-to-market. I said, “Why not?” because they said it’s going to be good pay. It was my first year and I needed a car badly. That was just my main motivation back then.

I applied, got accepted, and loved the program. I worked with an entrepreneur who was trying to get their company into the market, and they depended on us as graduate students to help them. Towards the end of the program, I told the professor who was sponsoring the program, Luke, “Look, if next year I’m not working at Microsoft or Google, I’m going to come and work for you because I love the experience so much.” And he looked at me and said, “You know, why go and work at Microsoft and Google? Why don’t you just go and build one?” And that struck a chord. I said, “Why not? Maybe I should think about that.”

I took a couple of graduate business courses with him, audited a couple of courses, and I fell in love with entrepreneurship. So I had that in mind even though after graduation I worked with Microsoft and did a lot of deep research in computer science, but I wanted to be an entrepreneur at a certain point.

Anyway, around eight, nine years ago, I decided to make the jump. Prior to that, I read a lot about entrepreneurship and business and tried to educate myself as much as I could. When I started my company full-time, raised funds, I kept making mistakes, one after the other. When I looked at them around midway, two years into the journey, I was telling myself everything that I studied and everyone warned me not to do, I was doing. I was making all the mistakes. And I was asking myself, why is that?

That actually made me start the journey of figuring out that framework that we’re about to talk about. Because, in a nutshell, I realized that I was not in balance. I did not really have the right mindset. Yes, you can know a lot about marketing and sales and how to do the fundraising. But if you are not in the right mindset, you’re going to have the wrong perspective. You’re going to make wrong decisions and end up making all those wrong mistakes.

So I decided to build a framework around how to build the entrepreneur – how to make sure that the entrepreneur has the strength and the mindset and the right perspective to go through all those experiences in the most efficient and effective way. That’s why the name of the book is “The Inside-Out Entrepreneur,” because I believe it all starts from inside. That’s in a nutshell my story behind that framework.

Kyle: And since the podcast is called Maker-Manager-Money, I wanted to ask you, are you more of a maker or manager, or are you one of those rare entrepreneurs who is really good at both?

Mohamed: You have to do both, right? If you are an entrepreneur, you just get that spark in your mind about an idea or a problem that you want to fix and leave an impact behind. That’s when you become a maker. Now, when you start building a company, bringing resources, bringing people, now you have to have a mix of being a maker and a manager.

I would give these two words a different name: innovation and execution. And these need to go hand in hand together. You can have the best idea in the world but with lousy execution, you’re going to go nowhere. You’re almost not going to get off the ground. You can have flawless execution, but if you’re not flexible enough to think in an innovative way to fix your problems and have a different perspective of everything around you, you’re going to go in circles. Perfect circles, but they’re not going to take you anywhere.

Kyle: That makes sense. I know a lot of entrepreneurs start out as makers and they’re making something, whether product development or something like that, and then they have to take over the reins of management, and sometimes that’s a struggle to move from being a maker to a manager. I know you were in product development for years and I think that’s what you did at Microsoft as well. Was there a transition for you? Was it difficult to move from being a maker to a manager?

Mohamed: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I would say this is the number one reason that a lot of technical entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs coming from a product background would fail, because they have a product mindset. One thing that they also have in mind is they come from an environment that is completely different from the startup environment.

In big corporations, it’s a safe environment. In many ways, you have almost infinite resources. You have people around you. You have the encouragement. You have a lot of things that would help you out. And it also has its own physics, if you will. In big companies, it’s okay to wait for one, two, three years and invest in a product until you see the results. In startups, no. It’s a matter of months because you do not have that much of a runway anyway.

So a lot of entrepreneurs, when they start, they build the product and they think that they can build it similarly to what they did at Microsoft or whatever big company they’re working at. That’s also one of the problems or the traps that I personally fell into. I had the product mentality only, but I missed the point on building a business. And this is very important. I also missed the true definition of a startup at the beginning.

I was getting into it to build a company. Yes, this is okay. But you need to think of yourself that there is a very important point that you need to cross, or I would say barrier that you have to cross before you become a full company, which is the product-market fit. Prior to the product-market fit, the way that I would define a company, you’re just a team or a bunch of people gathered together with very limited resources and very limited time to do what? To just search for a business. That’s it.

So you keep iterating on ideas and business models and different ways to reach your customers in the market over and over again, very quickly until you reach the product-market fit. Once you reach the product-market fit, now it’s time for you to scale whatever you built or whatever you learned. And it’s now free for you to perfect it and hire people who are specialized in those areas that will make your product scalable, whether nationally or internationally.

That’s really important for entrepreneurs to have that perspective. And again, this is part of the mindset. I work with entrepreneurs through my Boundless Founder community, and I usually start by giving them that overview. What stages are you going to go through? At the beginning, you’re not a company. You’re just a team, a skunk team. You’re just working on finding that product-market fit. And then after that, when you reach it, you can now start thinking of systems and company.

It’s hard because I know lots of entrepreneurs come from big companies, and they want to feel, to anchor themselves to yet another company. They feel lost if they don’t anchor themselves to a real company, which they’re building. And that makes them even fall into that trap more frequently.

Kyle: How did you learn to build a business once you found product-market fit? Was it just trial and error? Or did you have mentors or books that you read?

Mohamed: For me, definitely, I made lots of mistakes, lots of trial and error. When I looked at other entrepreneurs, I realized it’s almost the same for everyone, but it doesn’t have to be this way. I believe that there is actually a better way to do that, and I talk about this a lot in the book.

In your journey as an entrepreneur, you need to have three roles in your life. The first one is a mentor. And a mentor is not a business advisor. A mentor is someone who would challenge your mindset. They ask what are the fundamentals that you have in your mind that do not match the journey or do not match the stage of the journey? Like what we discussed right now. You think that you’re building a company at the beginning, but no, actually you’re searching for the product-market fit. And that requires a different way of thinking.

So the mentor would challenge you on that. And it’s someone that you would be vulnerable in front of intellectually and emotionally because you need to tell them what is going on inside you so that they challenge you from that perspective.

The second role is the advisor. And the advisor is someone who is ahead of you, a few steps ahead of you in business in general. And their main role is to show you around the corner, just to tell you what’s coming. If you want to fundraise from a VC, for example, you need to build a relationship and it will take you six months. You cannot do it, let’s say, the brute force way and blast them with emails. The advisor is someone who already went through those steps multiple times or at least once and would tell you this is how you should do it.

And the last role, and this is really important and maybe I’ll explain this in more depth, is the friends and family. Well, everyone would say that’s normal, you have to have friends and family, but not any friends and not the normal way for you to interact with family.

When you are in a big corporate, most of your friends and most of your connections are probably the average of what you do. They work at those big companies. But if you’re having a problem with your business and your startup and you go and talk to someone who works at Microsoft or Google or any other company who has never built their own startup, they’re going to give you the answer from their own experiences and perspective, not necessarily from what you should be thinking about or the right perspective.

So as you’re building your startup, you need to expand your circle of friends and make sure that you have friends that you can trust who already have the same mindset and the same perspective about life. Because in the corporate world, people may not necessarily have the same tendency towards taking risks as you. So if you tell them something, for them, it might just look like a problem or catastrophe. When you go and talk to another entrepreneur friend, they would tell you, “Yeah, I had this many times. Here’s how you deal with it.” It is just completely different.

And then when it comes to the family, I always tell entrepreneurs, your family is as special as you. So you need to educate them as well about the journey so that they can support you. My family, my wife contributed a lot to supporting me. And she wouldn’t be able to support me unless I told her this is how the journey should go, this is how it should look like.

For example, I have an entrepreneur who raised money, raised $5 million for his pre-seed. And his wife thought that they became millionaires because she thought, okay, $5 million, we can spend that. But it doesn’t mean that much from a financial perspective on the personal level, unless you make an exit, which is going to happen six, seven years, 10 years, who knows when this is going to happen and how it’s going to happen.

So setting the right expectations with your family so that they can support you properly is very important. It’s key to the success. That’s how I usually tell entrepreneurs or guide them through their journey – to have the right roles as they move on. And I work with them. Sometimes I work as an advisor. Sometimes I work as a mentor to help them out through that journey. It’s an art that you learn over time to mix between these two. Sometimes you stop and pause talking about the business and just talk about you, the entrepreneur, and what’s happening inside you. And sometimes you want to tell them, no, let’s just set this aside. There is a more critical business item that we need to address together.

Having someone with you in the journey is important. It’s a journey. You have to have someone with you. It’s going to feel lonely sometimes, but it doesn’t have to be always lonely.

Kyle: I really like the three different types of people you need as an entrepreneur. That makes a lot of sense. Let’s talk about your book, “The Inside-Out Entrepreneur: Become the Entrepreneur You Were Meant to Be.” What gave you the idea that you should put these different ideas you had about entrepreneurship into words?

Mohamed: It’s the experience. As I mentioned at the beginning, almost the first two years I was making mistakes over and over again. And one day I was not able to get out of the bed. It was just a complete physical and mental shutdown for me. That’s because everything that I was doing wrong caught up with me at that point – stress, loss of sleep. And then I decided to stop and think more about what was going on.

I spent almost a week at home doing nothing. My employees were calling me, my co-founder was calling me, and I told them, “Look, I just need some time to take a break.” That was a moment that changed everything for me. I said, “It’s painful. It’s very painful.” And it could lead to really severe consequences on my health, my family, and everything around me. That was the rock bottom for me, even though, by the way, the business was doing okay back then. But for me as an entrepreneur, it was rock bottom.

And I said, okay, that needs to be fixed, but is it only me or is it everyone else? Or are many others facing that? I started talking with other entrepreneurs and some VCs who opened up with me, who were also entrepreneurs themselves. And I realized it’s actually a pervasive issue. Almost most entrepreneurs or all entrepreneurs go through that.

Now the journey is hard, but the question is, can we make it a rewarding journey so that you grow without experiencing such acute pain? Then following two years, with the help of mentors and advisors, I was able to get out of that hole. Towards the end of it, I said, I need to really spread this around because the impact was huge.

I’ll share a story or a couple of stories to tell everyone the difference between having the right mindset versus not. At the beginning of my journey, just a few months into developing our product, we were ready to demonstrate our product in a big convention to a few prospects and potential customers. Just as I was entering the venue, I got an email from AWS telling us we owed them $60,000. And I had only $75,000 in the bank and no customers; we had just released the product.

When I checked our AWS account a few weeks earlier, we actually had credit with them. They gave us $100,000 credit and we had more than $50,000 remaining. So we burned through $110,000 in just a few weeks. And it was a mistake, not something that happened in our product that consumed everything in our credits.

What happened to me then? I went into a paralysis mode. It took me four weeks to recover from that. And by recovery, I mean to go back and respond to the email, try to negotiate with AWS, and try to figure out how we could get out of that and possible income sources or revenue for the company so that I could pay this over a year. I got frozen. I did not have the experience. I did not have the right mindset, and I got frozen. This is what happens when you don’t have the right mindset and don’t have the proper framework to think about everything that you’re facing in the startup.

Now fast forward four years. We had a company interested in acquiring us. They got access to our source code, bank statements, they interviewed everyone. And we were about to sign the LOI at 6 p.m. that particular day. This means that it’s almost definite that it’s going to happen. Two hours before signing, they backed off. For a very simple reason – someone approached them, gave them a deadline to acquire them, and they had to respond then.

What happened back then? In less than 24 hours, I was able to take that LOI and shop around before actually everyone else knew. Even my co-founder did not know that the company backed off. I talked to other companies, I talked to other CEOs, and they were interested. So before the end of the week, I was already having a meeting with four other CEOs interested in buying my company.

Now you see the difference between the first and the second incident is just the mindset. Even though the second one is more severe and more consequential on the company. We were about to shut down. Truly, we did not. The company was much bigger. We had 65 employees. We had a much higher burn rate. A lot of things were happening around us, but yet we were able to get ourselves out of it really quickly. And the difference is just how you look at things and how you respond back. And it’s all just inside your head.

That’s why I said, you know what? If we’re able to spread that around and make entrepreneurs more resilient, more capable of handling those tough situations, we’re going to have more startups being successful and becoming billion-dollar companies. Right now, the statistics are just flipped. We have a huge failure rate, more than 95% or 99%, depending on how you look at it. And it should be the other way around. Most of the time, it’s because the entrepreneurs are so vulnerable and not able to really move forward. The entrepreneur is the key to the success of any startup, period.

Kyle: I love how you’ve talked about balance, staying grounded, and developing that resilient mindset. What are some of the steps that you recommend for entrepreneurs to develop a resilient mindset and stay grounded and have balance?

Mohamed: Absolutely. There are multiple things that they need to be aware of. Number one, they need to be aware of what kind of mindsets they need to have and how to nurture them. There are six of them, and again, I talk about them in the book. How do you make sure that you have the abundance mindset, the growth mindset? Some of them, we already hear about them, but how do you maintain them and make them ingrained in everyday behavior? That’s number one.

If you’re able to get there and be conscious of that, the question here is how do you now make sure that you maintain those mindsets within you? And that’s the role of resiliency versus robustness. When you have a robust mindset, this means that mindset is not easy for external events to deform or change it to something that is not right. And when we say that you have a resilient mindset, if that happens, if your mindset changes because of an unexpected and strong event, then you can bring it back.

So how do you develop that skill is very important. Now, between these two, having the right mindset and being able to bounce back to the right mindset if something happens, there are lots of tactics and strategies that you can follow.

For example, I call it the thought-emotion loop – something that you need to be aware of and be able to beat within your head. When something happens to us, let’s say a bad event, like the email I got from AWS, something happens. Then the first thing, your subconscious mind triggers emotions. And those emotions trigger negative thoughts. And then those negative thoughts actually even catalyze those negative emotions and trigger even more negative emotions.

What happens is as the entrepreneur goes through that loop, they lose the differentiation between what is real and what’s in their head. They say, “We’re going to fail.” For example, that creates negative emotions as a result. “I’m going to fail. I’m not going to be able to pay that.” This is not reality. These are just thoughts in your head. The reality is when it actually fails, when it actually shuts down, not before.

The problem is when that happens and you get trapped into that loop, you basically cannot move, you cannot act. And that happened with me. So learning how to break that loop is just one tactic. Asking the five whys is another tactic. There is a lot actually that I talk about in the book.

That’s why I do not consider my book as a pure business book. It focuses on the startup psychology and the psychology of entrepreneurship. And it’s not actually separate from the business. It goes hand in hand.

For example, when I work with entrepreneurs on their sales process, how they should build their sales funnel, I always have the psychology corner in my writings, in my coaching and consulting. I tell them, “Okay, you’re going to reach out to those customers. This is how you can do it. This is how you should be building your pipeline. But remember when you do that step, this is what is going to happen inside you. And then, as a result of that, you’re going to slow down. No, no, no, you should actually move ahead, ignore those emotions, differentiate between what is real and not real and move forward.”

So now they can execute on those programs way more efficiently, especially in their early stages when they don’t have teams that they can depend on, and they have to do almost everything themselves.

I wouldn’t say there is a silver bullet or very specific steps that if you follow, you’ll be able to become more resilient. It’s a journey. You have to embrace it. The way for everyone to think about it properly is like climbing a mountain.

When you are climbing a mountain, if you go and ask any mountaineer, no matter how experienced they are, they will tell you before I start my journey, I condition myself and I have those dimensions that I work on – the physical, the spiritual, the emotional. I even go and talk to my family, make sure that everything is right. And then they equip themselves with the tools so that when they start their journey, those tools become handy and they use them when they face a tough day in their journey. It’s the same thing. This is how I encourage any entrepreneur to think about their journey.

Kyle: I love that your book is so unique in that way – that it’s not just a bunch of business advice, but it’s coming from the entrepreneurial mindset. I wanted to ask you about your successful exits. What is the most significant misconception entrepreneurs have about exits?

Mohamed: There’s a lot. An exit means that you’re definitely selling your company. You’re seeing the fruits of your work. I would say the number one misconception: a lot of entrepreneurs, when they look at the number, they think you take the whole number as an entrepreneur. The first thing that comes to anyone, if you hear that, okay, this company was sold for a billion dollars and there are two founders, you think, okay, each founder would take $500 million. No, it’s not.

Usually there are so many partners, so many people engaged throughout the process. The VCs would take their cut because they supported you at the beginning. Your employees and so on.

The second thing is it’s not a binary thing. You don’t just hand over or throw the company over the fence to the buyer and then you’re done, cleaning your hands. No, actually you need to spend time to make sure that the company is running properly. And this is the piece where you don’t see after the press release.

After the press release, there’s a lot of work as the entrepreneurs work as hard as they used to after selling the company. Yes, there is of course the pressure of running out of money or the pressure of shutting down. Maybe it’s not as imminent as it used to be before, but you still have to work really hard to make sure that this acquisition is a success.

So that’s when you look from outside. Now, taking it back to the psychology of it, this is the hardest part. When you are an entrepreneur, most entrepreneurs merge their own identity with the identity of the company. They are the company. They are the startup. And as a result of that, when they see their company now melting or integrating within another company, the brand is going away. The uniqueness of the solution is going away. You being in control is going away.

This is one of the hardest moments in the entrepreneur’s life because you’re losing control and you feel that your identity, your own identity is now just going away and just in front of your eyes. And that’s one of the hardest parts of the journey. You go all the way to the highs of being successful, having a company, someone is interested in it, and then all of a sudden the name goes away. And you have stories behind selecting the name and the logo and the domain name and everything and the employees. All of that now become just part of someone else’s daily job. And now it’s just you.

That’s why this is also part of what I work on with entrepreneurs. And that’s actually the last chapter of the book – how do you separate yourself from your startup? You’re much bigger than your startup as an entrepreneur. And you want to make sure that if an exit happens, you do not go through that stress. Sometimes some entrepreneurs get really depressed as a result of that, even though they got millions, right? Or they got what they were looking for at the beginning of the journey, but they get into deep depression as a result of that. I would say this is one of the biggest misconceptions about exits at any company.

Kyle: So what are some of the things you did personally when you went from founder Mohamed with a successful exit to just being Mohamed?

Mohamed: I did two things. I started writing the book. That helped me a lot. And the other thing is I started talking to entrepreneurs. When you see yourself now in others and you see how they’re sometimes struggling, you get two things. First of all, I look at myself again, but from outside now. When I look and work with an entrepreneur, I say, “You’re just like me five years ago, or 10 years ago.” I’m not only helping them, they’re actually helping me to really rethink about my experience. So that helped me a lot and helped me actually to learn.

Here is the surprise about the whole thing. A lot of people think that you learn most of your lessons about entrepreneurship while doing it. I learned most of my lessons after selling my company because it gave me the time to reflect. I cannot really deny that I definitely had some moments again because of that identity thing. But it helped me a lot to see other entrepreneurs and see that maybe it’s time to pass it over to someone else and help them out.

At least to make sure that their problems are, the way that I call it, an upgrade of my own problems since I’m coming from a software background. I want their problems to be much bigger than mine. And what I mean by that, whatever I went through, they don’t go through. They have other problems to go through that maybe are new to them and to me as well.

That helps a lot. And I encourage any entrepreneur actually to, even if they’re now in the middle of their journey, to connect with others who are a bit earlier in their entrepreneur journey. That will help them a lot. That will give them that perspective and will tell them also where they sit in that whole ecosystem. It’s them that really matter, not their company.

Kyle: So when you started talking with other entrepreneurs, is that when you sort of formed the Boundless Founders community?

Mohamed: Yes. That’s how that whole thing started because I wanted to not only have a one-on-one conversation with them, I wanted to encourage them to talk with each other and support each other and give them some sort of an anchor and a framework so that they are able to, again, put things in perspective. It’s all about perspective. That’s what really matters. If you have the right perspective, anyone will figure it out, especially entrepreneurs, because they’re hustlers and they’re always iterating over and over ideas again and again.

Kyle: And why did you choose the word boundless?

Mohamed: For a very simple reason, because I believe that anyone has the capacity to become an entrepreneur. And that’s number one. Number two, entrepreneurship is the art of thinking big about anything without any boundaries. If there’s a problem, we can fix it. If there’s something that anyone else needs, even if I don’t have the resources, I can still help. So hence the word boundless.

And also another thing around that is the nature of being in business. The way that I think about it, Boundless is also a synonym for infinite. Business is an infinite game. You do it over and over again. There’s no winning or losing. The most important thing is to stay in the game. Keep doing what you’re doing, learning, and elevate yourself every day. So that’s why I actually fell in love with that name myself and I decided to name the community this way.

Kyle: I love it. So can anyone join this community or is this invite only?

Mohamed: We have a free version of it. Anyone can join. They’re welcome to come over and see our framework, see how it works in general. And then there are certain parts that if you decided to jump into the entrepreneur journey, we’ll invite you into those workspaces. And we’re happy to support you through your journey, not only myself, but the rest of the community. And that’s the most important part.

Kyle: So I wanted to ask you, Mohamed, what was your biggest failure as an entrepreneur and what was your biggest success?

Mohamed: I would say, a failure, the way that you would define a failure is accepting things the way they are. That’s the definition of a failure. For me, it was at the beginning when I thought that I would be shutting down my company or just winding it down. I think I was about to really shut down the company. I was just one week away. And what helped me, something happened by chance. One VC approached me and they said we’re interested and they gave me the money.

I would say I should have thought about that differently and I could have been in a much better position back then. But I would consider that a big failure, to almost allow my company to reach that stage and giving up on it.

I would say that the biggest success for me so far is just being able to turn things around very quickly, just being an entrepreneur. For me, the biggest success even beyond that is building the community. Being an entrepreneur by myself is being able to grasp that thought-emotion loop that we talked about earlier and being able to really have that control over time on what’s going on inside my head.

Being able to master your mindset and able to master your own point of view about the world, I would say this is one of my biggest takeaways out of that whole experience. Because you know what? Control is an illusion. If you look around you, we do not have control over almost anything around us. Not your kids, no one, nothing. You have very little control over anything around you. It’s just an illusion.

The only thing that you have control on, if you want to, if you decide to do so, is yourself. How you respond and how you see things. You can change it right now. But anything else? Good luck.

Kyle: Now I know you worked for Microsoft and you’ve worked at corporate. What are the biggest differences between someone who works at corporate and someone who works at a startup?

Mohamed: I like analogies and examples. The way that I would visualize it: think of yourself at a club, swimming in a lane pool that is warm. Everything is perfect. There’s a lifeguard beside you. This is corporate life. Startup life? Someone took you out of that pool and threw you in the dark, cold ocean in the middle of the night. And you don’t know where the shore is, but you need to stay alive. You need just to survive until you reach the shore. That’s corporate life versus startup.

It’s a big difference because again, in the corporate world, you have your paycheck. I’m not trying to undermine the challenges of the corporate world, but being in a startup is a completely different mindset. And when someone says, “I just want to be my own manager. That’s why I want to go and do my own startup.” That’s not the right way to think about it because the dangers around you and the risk that you’re going through are just tremendous compared to working in a company.

The difference is huge between working in a corporate versus a startup. In the corporate world, you have pretty well-defined goals. The budget is usually handled beyond you. So you do not really have to worry about, do I have the paycheck or not? Do I have enough money to pay others or not? You do not have to care about that. If a project fails in a big corporate, it’s not the end of the world for the company, hence, it’s not the end of the world for you as well.

In the corporate world, when you move from one company to another, it’s pretty much like you hit the reset on what you did. So you take all the learnings and a lot of things maybe are not visible on the other side. But in the startup world, if your company shuts down, everyone would know. So you cannot hide it. It’s public data. It’s public information. So you have to be aware of that.

In the startup world, you have to care about the opposite of all of that. You have to care about your paycheck. You have to go and raise money. You have to take care of almost everything at the beginning – the logistics, legalities of founding a company, the accounting, the product development, everything. And you’re going to find unexpected things just hitting you from almost everywhere. You’re going to deal with customers. Some of them are not going to be as friendly as your team in the corporate world. And there’s no way to control all of that.

There are stark differences between these two. I’m not saying one is better than the other. They’re just two different creatures, two different lifestyles. And you need to be aware of those differences, because if you’re not, you’re going to just go to the startup world, get your heart broken, get some permanent scars and just go back.

You don’t want to do that. You want to go to the startup world, grow, even if you have a plan to go back to the corporate world, you can go back much stronger, much faster, much more capable. You have more information, more experience, and you can run much faster than anyone else in the corporate world. So it’s just important to have that in mind.