Podcast Interview Transcript: Mohamed Ahmed on AI and Entrepreneurship

Mike: Don’t listen to the media. Don’t listen to those kinds of stereotypes and those wrong images that the traditional media would draw about entrepreneurs. You know, you would see an article in TechCrunch or Forbes of three founders sitting on a couch. They look comfortable and they’re telling you that with a 10-slide deck they were able to raise $15 million. They make it look as if they did it just in an afternoon, right? Entrepreneurship is not what you see in the media. Get yourself ready with the right success elements. Everyone has the capacity to become a successful entrepreneur, but they need to be conditioned right. Find the right people for your journey that can take you from just an idea to a multi-billion dollar company without losing yourself and losing your life in between. Marketing, sales, everything else will come. You’re going to learn it as you build your company. Don’t worry about that. But your mindset is what matters most.

 

[Music]

 

Mike: Welcome back to Miked Up. I’m your host Mike Dooo, and today’s guest is a visionary entrepreneur with over 20 years in AI and cloud computing. Renowned for scaling companies with 7x exits, as an advisor with 500 Startups and Techstars, he’s helped founders secure over $30 million in funding. His entrepreneurial conditioning framework empowers diverse founders, fostering growth and resilience. Welcome to the show, author of Inside-Out Entrepreneur, Mohamed Ahmed!

 

Mohamed Ahmed: Hey Mike, great to be here with you.

 

Mike: Great having you on, man. We’re going to talk a little tech, we’re going to talk AI, your backstory. We got a lot of things we’re going to get into. And I’m grateful for you being on the show. I want anyone who’s tuning in right now that doesn’t know your story, doesn’t know everything about you yet because we haven’t gotten there yet, that your website, your social media, and all your information and resources is in the show notes. So people can click on that and find more about you after they tune into the interview. So appreciate you being on, brother. I’m going to start right out of the gate here talking about what everyone’s talking about: AI. It’s been out – I can’t believe this – 20 years already. So you’ve experienced it from when it became an infant to 20 years in, and now everybody knows what it is. Share the transformation and the development that you’ve personally seen from the tech side of that over the last 20 years.

 

Mohamed Ahmed: So we can definitely talk a lot about that. There’s a lot that’s going on these days. I would say it’s been going slow, slow, and then all of a sudden the last couple of years it just exploded. It’s called the tipping point, right? That 3% where like 3% of the people know about it and then from there everyone knows about it.

 

Mike: Yeah, exactly.

 

Mohamed Ahmed: I remember late in the ’90s when I was studying computer science, AI or artificial intelligence scientists did not believe that neural network things were real artificial intelligence. They thought it was just a statistical thing, just black magic, and they did not believe that this was going to make any change to AI until computers became cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And then GPUs came along and all of a sudden now we can do computations we were not able to dream of. And then even the scientists at the edge of it did not believe that they’re going to discover such features in large language models.

 

Mike: When they do – we know, who like, I don’t know if they get properly credited, but who created the first working version of AI? Do we know? Is there like a person, a scientist, company?

 

Mohamed Ahmed: It’s a collective effort. There are so many people who worked on that, and you’ll be surprised – it’s just there every day someone is just adding a little piece of it. If you think of it, I like what Steve Jobs was describing about technology. He’s saying it’s like when you look at the mountain and take a cross-section, you’ll find so many layers forming that mountain. It’s the same thing in technology, same thing in AI. There are so many layers. You do not know exactly who added that layer, but all of a sudden you see a big mountain or a big structure. And as a result, it’s like a water drop in a river, right? Like all that water that’s in there – different people contributed to it. How do you really say who, you know?

 

Mike: I was just curious because I use AI all the time now. We’ll get into kind of our use of it and how I’m excited about it to continue to grow. But I just always, anytime I see something that’s really exciting, I always like to know the inception, kind of the backstory, especially how it’s grown over 20 years. You started to get into it. What are some of the misconceptions that you still see people talking about or maybe they have that you encounter and you’re like, “Man, how do I address that?” Like, we got to get over the fact that it’s here, it’s not going anywhere, right? What are some misconceptions you see?

 

Mohamed Ahmed: Yeah, you’ll be surprised that misconceptions are now more than before because now the common person uses AI. They hear about AI every day. So they definitely have their own mental models.

 

Mike: Have it built in. Even people who don’t like, “Oh, I’m not going to use AI.” You’re using it if you’re talking to Siri or whoever on your phone.

 

Mohamed Ahmed: Exactly, exactly. So the first misconception is that AI can truly have some sort of consciousness about what is going on around them and they can think and innovate. AI, the way that I would think of AI – and it’s not my only definition or something that scientists agree on – AI or the way that you think of LLM is just a compression of the human knowledge, body of knowledge, and then it releases that again in different formats based on the questions that you ask. So it’s a – and at its core it’s a statistical model. It basically predicts what would be the next word and so on. Now, this is the basic building block, but AI scientists now started to build on top of that. Okay, if it’s about predicting the next word, now can we maybe make it think differently? Can we add questions on top of other questions? You know, like the reasoning models that we have right now? They’re at the end, they’re just LLM models that ask questions and they still, at their core, are predicting the next word, right?

 

So that’s one major misconception that everyone would have in mind. Another thing is that AI or LLM can think forward, but in reality, no, they think backward. In other words, they can reproduce whatever they were taught.

 

Mike: Or it already has knowledge of from a previous occurrence.

 

Mohamed Ahmed: Exactly. But they cannot really have that creative thinking. You know, we are as humans – you can name it in different ways – but we’re connected to something that gives us that uniqueness, that creative ideas and how we connect things together. We have anticipation and creativity and we have personality and character because we are human. And so that all plays into our decision for something, or why if I did something you would do it differently because you’re you, I’m me. And Mo and Mike are two different people that would experience life differently. So now when we think of something, it’s going to be a little bit different, where AI is just going to – if I ask ChatGPT or a different AI product that’s based on ChatGPT, they’re all going to kind of calculate a similar, very similar response.

 

Mike: Yeah, absolutely.

 

Mohamed Ahmed: And also, you know, I talk a lot about the mindset. The mindset in general for us as humans is a tendency towards something, toward a specific topic. So if you believe that everyone is friendly in the street, if someone says good morning to you in downtown New York, you’ll think, “Yeah, this is a nice person, let me respond back.” If you have a negative tendency towards people, especially in big cities, when someone says good morning, maybe the first thing that you would say is “No, thank you,” right? You think that they are going to sell you something.

 

Mike: Right, right.

 

Mohamed Ahmed: AI does not have that. And that tendency comes from our interaction with each other, our backgrounds, our childhood, our stage in life experiences. You cannot get that out of LLM or AI.

 

Mike: Yeah, and that makes a big difference. So at the end of the day, AI, the way that I think of it, is like it’s just magnifying your thoughts. If you think of it, you have a mic and a speaker. AI is your speaker. You give it some ideas and it magnifies it. You give it, let’s say, an idea about a blog post or about a piece of content, and then it just adds in the details that anyone would typically add. But it cannot select a creative, a truly creative topic for you. It can trigger some creativity within you, and this is also another thing I think AI is a companion more than a tool. And we can talk about that – how do you think of the AI as a tool versus a companion or a helper, someone that can help you with stuff? That would make a huge difference in how you can make use of AI in general. But that’s also the second biggest misconception about the future versus the past and how the AI handles that as opposed to humans.

 

And here’s the thing – I think it’s totally understandable. At first I was a little freaked out like, “Do we really want AI replacing jobs?” First thing I think most people thought is like, “We got to protect our fellow man or woman and we don’t want jobs being taken away.” That’s the first thing. Then you think, “How weird can this thing get? Is it going to be weird that we’re asking, quote unquote” – a very slang term for it would be like a robot – “Are we asking a robot to do things that normally a human would do? How is that weird?” And then you start to think about the next layer is like, “If this gets in the hands of the wrong people, can this be damaging? Could it be life-threatening? Can it be something really bad?” So I think those – that’s me speaking from experience – are the three first levels of it. And then once I got past that, I go, “Okay, how can I use this as a tool?” And this actually helped my business. And you mentioned it as a companion and an assistant. I literally use it all the time. It’s called Monica – I don’t have, this isn’t a sponsor. It’s called Monica. And it’s a ChatGPT base. Every time ChatGPT gets smarter, Monica basically updates to that latest version of GPT. And so I’ll just say like, “Hey, here’s the latest podcast episode with me and this guest. Turn into a social media post, right?” And like, give it what’s the most engaging and interesting part of this conversation that we can talk about? Like ideas, like you said. So it gets you there and now I just got to punch it into the end zone with the human side. So change words that doesn’t sound like something I would say. So like, let’s make it more Mike, right? Humanize it. But the thing is that happens in seconds or minutes when before I’d have to sit there, go through the whole hour-long interview, write up the show notes, write interesting collective thoughts about it, and then make a social media post. That could take literally an hour or more, where now that can happen in minutes. And we actually have someone on our team who writes the show notes for all of our clients. And he uses a mix of himself and AI and gets the creative process going. But also what AI is not doing, at least yet, is if you mention a resource, a book, a website, a tool, something like that, if it’s doing the show notes, it typically doesn’t create that, add it as a resource, or put it into a separate section. So there is that human element where we’re reviewing the entire episode still at a high level to make sure that everything is done really well, but we’re getting there a lot quicker.

 

Something I want to say is I don’t know if you know the science behind this or can answer this question, but what amazes me the most about AI – first of all, it’s super smart. It is great to see how accurate it is. And also when you ask for like, “Hey, give me some branding or marketing suggestions” or “give me a suggestion to ask Mo on the podcast,” it’s typically really pretty good, right? I think the technology is there where it’s useful. It’s not like sometimes technology that’s new is clunky and you don’t even really get to use it until it’s revised. It’s there. It’s functional. It’s usable. What blows me away the most is how freaking fast it is. Like you ask it to do some complex stuff and it’s spitting out a result for me using Monica again, 3 seconds later, like a fully thought-out response with all these prompts. How the heck is it so fast?

 

Mohamed Ahmed: So again, it comes to computing. The nice thing – and this is again part of the human creativity – when we solve a problem and we realize that the solution is something really phenomenal, we need it more. We keep optimizing it and we keep adding more resources until it becomes really efficient. And here’s also another thing regarding the AI taking jobs and also why the AI is getting cheaper and so on. There is in economics, there’s a nice concept called Jevons’ paradox, and Jevons’ paradox talks about there are few things in this world you can never have enough of them – like energy, like compute. Think of compute. In Moore’s Law, we’ve been for decades now doubling the performance of microprocessors and getting them 50% cheaper every 18 months.

 

Mike: Wow.

 

Mohamed Ahmed: And the same thing for storage. And yet we cannot have enough of those. We keep using them more and more and more. Actually, the cost of 1 million tokens in the last 12 months got reduced by almost 90%. And that’s because of us as humans, again, especially software engineers. When they produce a piece of software in version one, we just want it to work. And then if it’s successful, now how can we make it work smoothly?

 

Mike: Proof of successful, yeah.

 

Mohamed Ahmed: How can we make it more economically viable? And that’s a natural progression in any software development. So LLMs are facing that, and now LLM is becoming that new commodity that everyone wants. So the economics of it need to work according to that theory, the Jevons’ paradox, and that will continue to happen. You’ll be surprised how fast it’s going to get down. Right now, for example, I give you just to give you a glimpse of the future – right now everyone is saying, “Well, AI is making software development really easy.” Okay, yes, of course, and it’s making it fast. You know what? Because we’re still comparing it to the previous model. I built one application that maybe thousands or millions would use that application. Now think of a world where I develop an application in a few seconds that would do for me very specific task. I need to write hundreds of thousands of lines of code within seconds. That’s going to happen. You know, think of it like creating drugs. We used to have, and we’re still having, a single drug that would work with most of the population. And now genetic-based drug discovery and design is taking place because now it’s cheaper and faster than before to design a drug specifically to how your body would respond to it. And we’re still getting there, but software will be the same thing. And the economics of the AI will allow us to do that. It’s going to get way cheaper, way faster. And that’s something that’s inevitable.

 

Mike: I don’t even know how it can get any faster. I’m literally getting something I click a button, give it three, four prompts. “Hey, this is a marketing idea. This is what I who it’s going out to. This is the kind of I want it to be,” you know, more relaxed, right? And then it needs to solve for this. And you give it like three or four things to do, press a button, and it’s there. Like, I don’t know how it can get any faster. Here’s what I think of: I wasn’t around then, but the first time an automobile was created to the point where it was something that you saw in your neighborhood driving down the road. Previous to that, it was horse and buggy. It was bikes. Those like really – I don’t know how they call them, bone crushers, I think, because when you’re going down the cobblestone on that thing, you’re crushing your back and your bones. But like transportation, right? It’s an easy analogy to make. First we were walking, now we’re cruising in a car, right? You can get somewhere so much faster. It’s a similar percentage probably of how fast it would take if I walked or how fast it would take if I went in a car. That’s what’s happening with AI. AI is the vehicle. You’re going to get to your destination. Do you want it to take an hour or do you want it to take three minutes, right? And now you can work within minutes. Used to take us hours. You look at the computers in the ’50s and ’60s. They were the size of a gymnasium. Now they fit in your hand. I mean, it’s insane. What’s insane to me is like, what does the next 50 years actually look like? That’s exciting. It’s exciting. It’s also crazy. I don’t want to get off topic because we could start talking about flying cars and all this other cool stuff. I do believe we have the technology to do that. Just to have a funny side conversation right now. But the infrastructure is scary. People can barely drive in the lines on a road right now on the ground. Do we really want them up in the sky, free-for-all? I wouldn’t want to be up there. I’ll tell you that. It’d be fun if I’m the only one, but yeah, the regulation and all that, that’s a whole…

 

Mohamed Ahmed: It’s going to be crowded. It’s going to be hard.

 

Mike: So again, we’re getting way off topic, but AI has me thinking like all the innovations has me thinking about a lot of different things. So you’ve been working in this, you got 20 years experience seeing it from inception to what it is now, highly refined version of itself. Are there any particular industries over, let’s say, the next decade that you think are going to benefit the most from this? Do you see kind of a trend for some industries where it’s like, “Man, this is huge there”?

 

Mohamed Ahmed: So let me maybe break it down and then I can get into the industry. So any industry that flourished on the concept of sharing knowledge and spreading knowledge, this is definitely the first one that would be disrupted and would change a lot or significantly because of the AI. But again, back to that Jevons’ paradox, that does not mean that those industries are going to disappear or AI is going to take over those. It’s just we need more of that. One of them – and because I used to work as a software developer – is software. Software is structured. It definitely depends on knowledge, the software engineers and the product managers’ knowledge, where you basically reflect that in software or writing code and then you run it in a form of an application. That’s definitely one of the industries that would be disrupted. And the way that I would visualize it is pretty much like someone who launched a rocket and then it’s just going up and midway is now turning back to its launch pad, hitting whoever launched that rocket. So software engineers are the ones who created, and data scientists are the ones who created AI, and now AI is disrupting how software engineering is being done.

 

But at the same time, I do not believe that software engineering will just disappear. It will be done by AI all altogether. No, it’s going to continue, but it’s just going to have a different form. I have my son who studies now at Virginia Tech computer science, and I gave him a project last summer. I thought this project is going to take him the whole summer, but he finished it in two weeks because of course of ChatGPT. And then he came back and he asked me, “Well, I’m learning how to code right now and ChatGPT was able to finish that quickly. Will my job really disappear?” I told him, “No, let me ask you a question. What did you really need to care about during that exercise?” He said, “Maybe a little bit of coding, but mostly the architecture, how to couple things together, how to really organize my application, and so on.”

 

Mike: Exactly.

 

Mohamed Ahmed: This is the piece that AI cannot really do because it requires you to understand what’s happening in the real world and then you reflect that in software. AI cannot do that. So the new skill, the new software development skill now is about how do you design your software? How do you design the user experience properly? How do you connect that with what other humans want from that piece of software? This is where the software developers need to evolve in their job. I tried also to write an application myself. Even though the AI allowed me to write code very quickly or even not to touch a lot of my codebase, but I still had to design it. I still had to say there’s a back end, there’s a front end, this is how they can interact together, and so on. So they’re going to be disrupted in a way that not that jobs are going to disappear, but our skill set needs to evolve into a different level. We call a different in software, a different abstraction level, different layer. You need to go higher.

 

Same thing when it comes to knowledge. Before, you would hire one of those big consulting companies to write a competitive analysis report for you. That’s something that deep research can do for you in 15 minutes rather than waiting for two weeks and paying tens of thousands of dollars. But now those guys’ main job is not actually to get that report for you. Now it’s what decisions do we need to do? How can we execute on that? This is still a piece that AI cannot do and will continue to be, I would say, only in the hands of humans for a long, long time, maybe for 20, 30 years after that.

 

Mike: Music to a lot of our audience’s ears. We have a lot of – our show is focused really on entrepreneurs, business owners, people who are leveling up in life. So they could be in sales, maybe they’re not running a business yet, but they’re thinking about it. There’s a lot of people that this is their livelihood, their business, right? And so they want to know that there’s still the human element behind it. And I think just personally, that’s one thing that I do like about AI is it’s not going to get the job done completely. Like we have to tell it again, social media posts like it’s not just going to wake up and do it for you. You have to kind of give it a creative idea and then even that, tweak it because it’s still not human. It’s not perfect. Now there are like one thing I’m not a huge fan of is like the AI video editors because we’re a video production company. We do editing and I think for just a basic video, I can understand it. It’s not perfect yet. So you see when I see stuff, I can sniff it out like, “That’s AI edited,” and they’re throwing in like random B-roll and there’s a lot of “ums” and stuff left and the subtitles have a lot of errors in it where it’s not understanding what the person’s really saying. So there’s still the human element of cleaning that up, making it professional, using good B-roll, choosing an edit. Look, a movie when a director and an editor sit in a room together and they have all this hours and hours and tens of thousands of hours of making a film over months and sometimes years span of time, and they’re trying to creatively edit this into a story. They’re choosing how long do we hold on that person’s response? Do we actually show the person who’s talking or the person that they’re talking to, right? And there’s all kinds of human decisions. AI can start to get in there and do some editing and clean stuff up, but are we letting it do the creative as well? Because that’s when I think it’s going to – to me, no. The human element, being humans ourselves, we’re going to relate with someone who made a human decision on, again, how long do we hold that shot? Do we do that as a close-up? Do we do it as a master shot? I’m talking about film right now. From a podcasting standpoint, same thing. Quickly cutting between people, it can tell who’s talking, which microphone is active, so it just cuts back and forth. Sure. But I think as a podcast agency, great, now it’s a tool. It can help us do things quicker, but we still got the human side of it. Like, how is this podcast going to help a business thrive? Just simply, AI is not going to help you get to where you want to go with it, right?

 

So I want to pivot a little bit here because as I mentioned who our audience is consisting of and kind of what the messaging on this show is designed to deliver – entrepreneurs, business owners – we all have one thing in common, and you’re not in business really if you don’t make money. And typically that’s done through a customer experience that’s really important to the business. What that customer experience looks like, AI is a big part of getting involved in improving customer experiences. Can you give us an example of how and what that development looks like? Because I think that’s exciting because, again, customer experience needs to be, to me, the number one thing that a business really cares about.

 

Mohamed Ahmed: Yeah, absolutely. Let me first start with the impact of AI on entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs and building businesses, and then we can definitely dig into that.

 

Mike: Cool.

 

Mohamed Ahmed: Now, I believe that in the next few years, and I think it’s happening already, we’re seeing it happening, there’s going to be an explosion of startups and entrepreneurs trying to experiment with new ideas. If you recall 10, 15 years ago when the cloud became the thing and became easy for anyone to build an application and make it available to millions of users with just a few thousand dollars, so many startups came out because a lot of entrepreneurs believed that “I can do that. I do not need now a big infrastructure.” Now the same thing is happening right now. There is another cycle of innovation because the cost of writing code, the cost of writing applications and building companies and so on is now significantly going down, and the time to do that – to get an idea from just an idea in your head to something that others are experiencing – is now very minimal. When you even hear YC CEO talking about that, he’s saying in the last cohort, all the founders are saying that 90 to 95% of their application’s code was written by AI. So that gives you a signal that there are lots of opportunities. There’s a lot that can be done with the AI.

 

Now, how can the AI help you to build your company and how can the AI really help you to have the right customer experience, do the marketing and sales and so on? Ironically, I was actually teaching exactly the same concept to a group of entrepreneurs yesterday, and the number one thing that anyone should have, any entrepreneur should have in mind: You still need to understand the fundamentals. You still need to know what does it mean to sell? What does it mean to do marketing, right? What’s account-based marketing means in case of B2B sales? What does it mean to have a great customer experience? You have to know how to drive the car.

 

Mike: Exactly, right? Use all the buttons in the car. Imagine the first person who ever drove a car if they were teleported to 2025 and they’re driving the highest class vehicle we have to offer. All the buttons, right? You know how this thing functions. They’d be like, “There’s a damn spaceship, right?”

 

Mohamed Ahmed: So it’s just like AI. I mean, it’s all the fancy buttons and it does all the things, but you have to have a pilot behind it.

 

Mike: Exactly. Fundamentals are still the same.

 

Mohamed Ahmed: Again, for sales, for example, we know that you have to have that many rejections before you get the yes. You have to look at sales as still as a problem-solving motion of problem-solving. You’re solving the problem of your customers, and then based on that, you’re giving them the right solution for that. It’s all about also giving them the right perception about your product and how they can use it to improve their lives. All those basics need to be within your head as an entrepreneur. If you don’t have those and you think that AI is going to cover this for you, it’s not going to work. And my point is you’re going to stay at the superficial layer. You’re trying – yeah, maybe you’re writing an email, a really nicely formatted email for your marketing campaign, but you do not understand what does it mean? How many touchpoints do you need, for example, with your customer? When do you really – how do you deal with objections? Who are your customers? How to think creatively about their problems? All of these – yeah, maybe the AI can help you with a few things, but you’re the one who needs to drive all of that. So the AI now is going to accelerate your journey.

 

I give you actually an example from sales and marketing. I was also talking about it yesterday with that group of entrepreneurs, a really nice trick. So for you as an entrepreneur, one of the first things that you need to do when you get an idea is to validate this idea. Do I have a big enough market or not? Are people going to buy it or not? Now, one of the things that you usually do, you build a prototype or maybe you have a few questions, go and ask your customers, and then you do that multiple times. Now, what if you can accelerate the feedback piece? You still need to talk to humans, but what if I feed the AI with everything that my target customers want and do that initial feedback cycle so that when I go to humans and talk to humans, all the basic objections, all the basic points are already covered? Now here you go. You accelerate your feedback cycle by almost 50 or 60%. But you wouldn’t be able to do that unless you know, again, who’s your customer? You know the process. You know how to do it. Now the AI can plug in – you can plug it into that part of the process and speed it up for you and so on. So this is how savvy entrepreneurs would use AI in the best possible way, rather than, again, “just write me an email” or “just write me a sales campaign for those customers.” That’s – you’re going to get something, but is it going to work? I doubt.

 

Mike: Yeah, or it’s just too general. It’s not specific. Like, good information in, good information out, right? So again, vehicle in the hands of the right person. Do you have an experienced NASCAR driver driving the thing, or a kid who’s practicing for his road test and trying to learn how to do a three-point turn? It’s the difference of those two drivers is the difference of an entrepreneur using this, understanding how it can really work well for them and putting in good prompts, or someone who’s just kind of messing around in there. “Oh, I got it to do something,” but yeah, how is that really driving your business forward?

 

So right now I’m thinking about – we talked about jobs. There’s a lot of new jobs for people who understand this and can teach people, right? And there’s businesses willing to pay, “Teach us how to better utilize AI,” right? So there are people on their team that are still there at high level, they can utilize it and get and just operate so much faster now and more efficiently.

 

Pivoting a little bit away from AI, something that really caught my attention in your bio I mentioned it at the top of the show: You’ve helped seven times – 7x, right? – times you have successfully helped a business exit. That’s a huge thing, right? So you’ve seen it seven different times, probably more than that now. What are some of the common denominators that you’ve seen with those businesses that when you’ve helped them successfully exit? Like, because there’s a lot of people tuning in right now, we’re building our businesses, and maybe an exit is something that down the road they’re interested in. Walk us through that. What’s the common denominator?

 

Mohamed Ahmed: Yeah, let me talk about what are the things that really made some of those entrepreneurs successful. The common pattern that I’ve seen.

 

Mike: Yeah.

 

Mohamed Ahmed: Number one: they invested in their mindset and in themselves. And what I mean by that – not only to learn about marketing and sales and how to do the fundraising. This is given and you have to learn it. And everyone else in the space of entrepreneurship raising funds from VCs, they will learn about that. But learning about how do you put yourself in the proper mindset? How do you have the right perspective about the journey is key and important? Because if you have this, you’re going to significantly increase your chances to be successful.

 

I give you an analogy. Go and talk to any mountaineer. They would tell you, no matter how experienced they are, they have to do certain conditioning before they start their trip or their journey. And the reason they do that is because they know it’s an unforgiving journey. It’s tough, and they prepare themselves as a result of that. Physically, mentally, emotionally, they even make sure that their families are also buying into that. They prepare their life because it’s a big thing. If you watch the movie Everest, you would know what I mean by that. It’s a really tough journey.

 

Entrepreneurship, by the way, is a similar thing. It’s not an easy journey. It’s rewarding. You’re pushing yourself. You’re pushing the limits or the envelope. So you need, before you go into that journey, to condition yourself. Some entrepreneurs, again, if I use the analogy, they walk by a mountain with a pair of jeans and flip-flops and they say, “You know what? I’m going to climb Everest right now.” No, you’re going to die. It’s not going to work, right? So having the right perspective is number one, I would say, reason for you to become successful without burning out, without really falling during the journey.

 

Mike: You got to build that foundation, right? Your mindset has to be right going into it with the right information so you can make the right decisions, or the best decisions. You don’t always know how to make the right ones, but the best ones, and then learn from them.

 

Mohamed Ahmed: Very great foundational, yeah.

 

Mike: So having the mindset – if that’s not right from day one, your chances of success are almost zero. If it is right, you have a chance. It’s not 100%, but you’re in the ball game now.

 

Mohamed Ahmed: Exactly, exactly. And I’m a big believer of that to the extent that I wrote a book about that. It’s called The Inside-Out Entrepreneur. And I keep calling for focusing on your mindset, focusing on the conditioning, focusing on building yourself, because that’s what’s going to make you successful. Because I learned about marketing and business and sales before founding my startup, but yet I made all the mistakes that I’m not supposed to make, and for a very simple reason: because I had the wrong mindset. I was not balanced, and I was not having the right point of view about that whole journey. So that’s number one. This is very important. I would say it contributes to more than 80% of your success.

 

Now the second thing, and this is, I guess, something that is common, especially in technology companies or technology founders, especially the ones who are coming from engineering and product background: You’re not building a product, you’re building a business. And there’s a big difference because we all – that group of entrepreneurs, and I come from that group who are coming from big companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and others – they are so into building products to the extent that they forget about building business. They think if they build a product, people are going to come and use it and they’re going to become billionaires as a result of that.

 

Building a business is completely different. In very simple terms, you’re building a machine. You feed it with $1 or $2 and it gives you $4 at the other end. As simple as that.

 

Mike: Yeah.

 

Mohamed Ahmed: If that machine – you’re giving it $2 and it’s not giving you more than that, then it’s not a business. It’s just a machine. It’s a money-burning machine. And unfortunately, especially in the Silicon Valley, because there’s abundance of capital, a lot of entrepreneurs get into this mindset of, “Okay, I’m going to build the product. I’m going to get as many users as possible, but okay, but what are the unit economics? How are you going to make money?” “Well, maybe we’ll think about that later on.” Yeah, it may work, or you may see it working for some entrepreneurs, but that’s not the typical case.

 

And that takes me to the third point, which is: don’t listen to the media. I know that we’re both coming from a media background, but don’t listen to those kinds of stereotypes and those wrong images that the traditional media would draw about entrepreneurs. You know, you would see, let’s say, an article in TechCrunch or Forbes of three founders sitting on a couch. They look comfortable and they’re telling you that with a 10-slide deck they were able to raise $15 million, and they make it look as if they did this in an afternoon, right?

 

Mike: And the reality about battle scars. Yeah, and I think people see – you know, it’s a great show, I do like Shark Tank, but for every one successful story that comes out of Shark Tank, there’s so many people that didn’t even get on the show. The show is designed to be dramatic. It’s designed to be entertaining. So there’s a lot of different things going on there that are not just your typical business entrepreneur story. And, you know, they hit on a lot of things just like America’s Got Talent, American Idol – like they want to pull at your heartstrings and, you know, great show like I said, but not always the reality of like what really goes on behind the scenes. You know, and so that’s why you said we come from a media background. I’d say this podcast is more of an alt media because it’s like traditional media would be it’s on Fox, it’s on CNN, it’s on NBC, ABC, CBS, and there’s a producer who’s being told exactly what has to go on air because there’s money behind it and this and that. This show is definitely not that. This show is someone comes on, shares their heart, shares a real story, what’s going on in real life, and how can we help you get further ahead in life? And so the stories you tell today, the different things you give about AI, I want anyone who’s tuning in, how can you apply that to your own story so you can get further ahead as well?

 

One thing I know you got to run, I’m going to give some love to our sponsors. Number one, Social Chameleon US. Social Chameleon, transform your podcast. If you have a show right now and maybe it’s too much work, too much is going on, you’re trying to run your business, it’s not your forte is editing and creating content, doing all that stuff. Well, good news. You can press record and let Social Chameleon handle the rest. Go to socialchameleon.us to learn more. We’re also recording this interview on Riverside.fm. It’s the only company that I feel trusted to use for my podcast because it’s great quality audio, great quality video. Check them out at riverside.fm. And if you’re listening to this on Apple or Spotify or any of the audio players, we get it there through Libsyn.com. Libsyn.com, and they’re a trusted podcast company that they’ve been out for I think 15 years or so, and I don’t see them going anywhere anytime soon. I love their whenever I do need their customer service, which is very little, they always have a great response time and great professionals helping out. So check out Libsyn.com if you’re looking to launch your podcast as well.

 

I know you have to run. Is there anything – last 30 seconds – you want to share some advice, some wisdom, just a powerful send-off for our audience?

 

Mohamed Ahmed: Yeah, absolutely. I would like to reiterate again that entrepreneurship is not what you see in the media. Get yourself ready with the right success elements. Everyone has the capacity to become a successful entrepreneur, but they need to be conditioned right. Find the right people for your journey that can take you from just an idea to a multi-billion dollar company without losing yourself and losing your life in between. That’s really important. You’re a human building products to other humans. So you need to maintain that along the way. Marketing, sales, everything else will come. You’re going to learn it as you build your company. Don’t worry about that. But your mindset is what matters most.

 

Mike: Yeah, get your mindset right. And it’s also, as we record this, it’s May, it’s Mental Health Awareness Month. So not only get your mindset right for your business, but also make sure your mental health is right too, because you don’t want to compromise that just to be successful in business, because without that, right, you don’t have anything. So you want to make sure you connect those two things – mindset, mental health – and you get both of those things going well, you got a really great chance at success.

 

So I just wanted to thank you, Mo, for being on the show. I know there’s so much more we can get into. I’d love to have you back on at some point. We just like talk about that mountain. We just scratched a little bit of the surface today. There’s so much more layers underneath it. I’m going to let you run. I know you got to go. Thank you for being on the show. Thank you everybody who’s here with us all the way to the end. We love and appreciate you. If you enjoyed this episode, you guys know what to do. Like, you can share it with your friends. Subscribe so you can find out. And turn those notifications on so you can get more great guests just like Mo today and great episodes coming your way every week. I end every episode with these last two words: be great and be grateful. And Mo, I’m grateful for you being on the show.

 

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

 

Mike: Keep on moving on. Keep on moving on.