School for Startups Radio

Jim: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for Startups Radio. Boy, do we have a fantastic fun show for you today? Two amazing guests. First up, we have Mohamed Ahmed. He is the guy in charge of AI at Intel. He has a new book out called Inside Out Entrepreneur. We have a great conversation about it, spirituality, staying in the game, fake it until you make it, all of the great memes in entrepreneurship, the mindset conversation, and it’s a fantastic one. And Mohamed was an amazing guest.

Jim: We are back and again. Thank you so very much for being with us. Wow. Boy, do we have a resume here for our first guest today. Please welcome Mohamed Ahmed, PhD, to the show. Used to work at a place called Amazon and also at Microsoft. He was a product leader, and he is now a senior director at Intel in charge of their AI cloud infrastructure. I mean, wow. You don’t get more impressive than that. He is author of a brand new book called The Inside Out Entrepreneur, Become the Entrepreneur You Were Born to Be. Mohamed, welcome. How are you doing? Congratulations on the book.

Mo: Thank you very much, Jim, for having me. It’s great to be here with you today.

Jim: So inside out, what does that mean? Tell us about that type of an entrepreneur.

Mo: Absolutely. It comes from my own experience. I cofounded several startups, and the pains of going through finding customers, validating the idea, and all of that, most of them are internal pains. And when I chatted with other entrepreneurs, it’s just a common problem. All the other entrepreneurs, almost all of them, go through the same doubts and I would say the thoughts-emotions loop that takes them in a downward spiral. And I thought, maybe there’s something that can be done about that. So I tried a few frameworks that helped me throughout my journey. And I thought, it’s time to share that with others. So that’s why I decided to write this book.

It’s not about the business strategy. It’s not about how do you do sales or marketing. It’s focused mainly on how do you scale your mindset and how do you, as a founder, make sure that you have the proper resiliency and robustness in your mind and in your emotions to go through that journey and grow without the pains that would take you down.

Jim: How do you know if you have the resiliency or not until you’ve been tested? That’s a good point.

Mo: Exactly. You have to be tested. Actually, when I studied what does it mean to be resilient or what does it mean to build a resilient structure. If we borrowed the definition from engineering, a resilient structure means that the structure can withstand pressure. If there is an external force trying to break it or deform it, the structure will maintain itself.

So that’s the meaning of having something resilient. Now if you map this to your mindset, it’s the same thing. From the beginning, you have to design it in a way through mentors and your support network, but you cannot really know whether you’re resilient enough to withstand the journey until you’re actually tested. Right?

I think you actually have to be in it. And that’s why I believe that everyone has the capacity to become an entrepreneur. But they need to test it. And there are different ways to do that – you do not need to actually build the startup, you can work with another founder and see firsthand what it means to be an entrepreneur. But to your point, you need to be in that experience. You need to get yourself closer to actually building a startup.

Jim: Because most of the entrepreneurs I talk to and me included have been through an experience where they’re wondering how they’re gonna make payroll Friday. And I think that Silicon Valley entrepreneurship is a little different from entrepreneurship outside of Silicon Valley. The obvious difference is the venture capitalism versus non VC and all of that. But amongst us non Silicon Valley people, there’s almost a sick dark joke about “you haven’t been bankrupt yet? You’re not there. You’re not an entrepreneur until you’ve been bankrupt once or twice.” You’re not there until you’ve been off the edge. You know what I mean, Mo?

Mo: Yeah.

Jim: Until you have truly been bankrupt and come back and played again, I don’t know that you’re really a player yet. You know what I mean?

Mo: And you’re absolutely right. Simon Sinek actually said that being in business is like being in an infinite game. There’s no specific finish line that you reach. Your main goal is to stay in the game.

So even if you fail once, you need to come back, and twice and come back. This is what I call a true entrepreneur. Because at the end of the day, it’s gonna get dark, and it’s gonna get difficult, no matter what. And you also mentioned Silicon Valley and the culture of Silicon Valley. There’s a very important point that’s worth clarifying here.

Being resilient is completely different from fake it until you make it. That doesn’t mean keep pushing and eventually it’s gonna happen. That’s not gonna happen. It’s actually all about understanding or having the right perspective. You need to understand, as you just mentioned, you’re gonna go through maybe one or more bankruptcies, or you’re gonna go through one or more companies that just failed and shut down. I personally had three companies prior to the latest that did not really make it. And that’s okay. That’s expected.

And that’s actually the main blind spot that a lot of first time founders or early stage founders have at the moment. They think that those road bumps are the end of it. And I liked very much that saying when someone would tell you abandon the road is not the end of the road. It’s like you’re on a highway, and there is a sharp turn just ahead of you. That doesn’t mean from a distance, it may look to you that the road is ending at this point. But in reality, the road is turning. And it’s gonna continue from that point. You’re just gonna continue on your journey.

Think of your startup setbacks similar to that. It’s a change of course, change of direction. But you should continue doing it no matter what. Now the question here is, how do you do it without getting permanent scars? This is key because some entrepreneurs, when they go through those setbacks, they never come back. They never actually bring themselves back to the game.

Because they say, “I don’t think it’s for me.” But if they have that calling, they should come back and they should have the right perspective. Look. A startup is just a small tiny milestone in your life. You still have a lot to do. And this is a core building block of being resilient, which is having the right perspective.

Jim: About a billion different things and stories are racing through my mind right now, Mo. I have the stories I wanna tell and a hundred questions I wanna ask. I back in my twenties, I built a business. We got up to about 600 employees, 89 locations, a service business, and we’re doing very well. The world was perfect, and then we hit a bump in the road and ended up $10,000,000 in debt and wondering how to make payroll and all of that stuff. And I turned to a lot of people. One of them was my father.

And I asked him, how are you so strong right now? I’ve roped our family into $10,000,000 in debt. How are you putting up with this? How do you sleep at night? And he said, you know, I’ve buried a kid. This is easier than that. I’ve been run out of two states and lost my license in two states. This is easier than that.

And then twenty years go by and we recovered. Life went on. No one died. Some bills were repaid and things went on and new ventures were started. And then strangely, I had certainly been tested during that. I have been tested again in the last eight years, seven years. And I have frequently said that I wouldn’t live through what’s going on now if it weren’t for that little easy problem that I had twenty years ago. And, amazingly, my CFO during that problem also encountered a huge personal problem, and the Department of Justice changed some laws and way they were enforcing things after thirty years of status quo and then went back and started prosecuting people who had done it legally for thirty years but now changed. And so they were prosecuting people for violations before the law was changed.

And he ended up getting roped into that, and I asked him, how are you living through this? And he said, oh, that helps. It’s a little experience twenty years ago. Sure did help. It builds upon itself. It does get tested. It does make you stronger. Again, I don’t know if I wanna do business with you if you haven’t gone bankrupt.

And you know what’s so funny, though, is all of us build our resumes and our one pagers and stuff to make us look brilliant. And I read how brilliant you are with incredible jobs at some of the three sexiest companies in the world. But then you’ve had three companies that didn’t go as expected, and you said that’s okay. It’s expected. Some of that happens. And I’ve had my failures, and here I am bragging that I know what I’m talking about on the radio.

Mo: Absolutely. You talked for a while, those are some of my many thoughts.

Mo: Absolutely. You’re absolutely right. And look, at the end of the day, you fail when you decide that you are failing. I’ll give you two stories. At the beginning of my startup, we had a credit from AWS, a hundred thousand dollars, and we said, this is gonna run us for at least a year. We were building our product. And just at the day that we’re launching our product in a conference, I got an email from AWS, telling us that we owe them around 65 or $68,000, and we had only $70,000 in the bank. And it was one of the first major events that I went through in my startup. And it took me two to four weeks to recover.

And I mean by that to say, “You know what? There must be a solution” and start working towards solving that. It took me that long. And the reason is the perspective. Fast forward, and I’ll compare this with the other story in a bit. Fast forward two, three years, we built our business. We fixed that problem, and then we had a company that was interested in buying us and acquiring us. Those guys did all the due diligence. They interviewed our employees. They looked at everything that we do. And just two hours before signing the LOI, they backed off because another company decided to buy them, and they had to sign with them. So they put us under the bus. But ironically, at that time, I built enough resilience and the proper perspective. I took the LOI as if it’s still on, and I shopped around.

By the end of that same week, I was already talking with four other CEOs who were interested to buy our company, and we ended up selling the company. Now you see the difference between the first event and the second one is just the perspective, and how do you look at the event. In the first one, because I did not have enough experience, and I thought that this was going to take my business down, it took me almost a month to recover from it, to emotionally and psychologically recover from it and start acting on it. The second event, after developing enough resilience and having enough experience, in less than twenty four hours, I started moving. As much as it was devastating for us, we were only two months away from shutting down the company or running out of money.

But I was able to really move fast. And the reason is just the perspective and the experience again. And this is what would make a huge difference in any entrepreneur’s journey. How do you look at events and how do you respond? Because those events are gonna happen no matter what. You’re gonna have dark days. You’re gonna have people throwing you under the bus, or not really supporting you the way that you expected. Now the key here is response, not reaction. So you take a step back, think about it, and respond properly so that you get yourself out of that hole. And you’re the winner at the end no matter what, because you learn a lot throughout the journey.

So you’re one step closer to success, even if that situation did not manifest itself in a way that is useful for you.

Jim: So, Mo, what do you tell someone who comes into your office and says, Mo, I screwed up, my business partner embezzled the last hundred thousand dollars and moved to Jamaica, and I’m not gonna make payroll or rent this week. What advice do you give the person? Let’s walk through the steps. What are you gonna tell them?

Mo: First of all, step away from the problem for a while and just think about it. Because this is something that can be fixed or not. And actually, I had something similar, someone who had a cofounder, and that cofounder decided he invested with him a good amount of money, and he decided to just back off and leave the company. Now he has half of the money that he accounted for at the beginning.

So the first thing is just take a step back. And the second one is, okay, what is your main goal here? Is your main goal to stay in the business or your main goal to maybe come back after your cofounder? What really would move you forward? And then when you start really answering that question, just take your emotions out. Take your emotions out of it because you’re gonna start thinking with a bit more clarity. And there’s something called the thoughts-emotions loop. Whenever you have an event, think of it, there’s an event that hits you from outside, you get lots and lots of emotions internally. Most of them are negative.

And here’s the problem, the negative emotions sear your mind for more negative thoughts. And the negative thoughts also magnify your emotions. And the problem here is you keep going in that spiral, downward spiral. And at a certain point, you lose the connection with reality. You think that whatever you’re thinking of is the reality.

So, the second thing that I would ask any entrepreneur is, okay, write your emotions. Why do you think that you’re angry right now? Now why? Because let’s say, if I would answer this question for that specific example, because actually my cofounder took the money and ran away. Okay. Why do you think this is going to impact your life? Well, I don’t have enough money. Okay. Not having enough money.

Why do you think it’s gonna shut down your company? Well, because I’m spending, I’m burning $20,000 or $30,000 a month. Okay. Now do you think you can get that number down? You see, now you went from just complaining about it to probably getting to a possible solution.

So get out of those emotions loop, and then second, ask yourself, as they call it, the five whys. This is what Toyota invented back in the seventies and eighties to basically raise quality. Keep asking the five whys until you reach the root of the problem. Now take that and apply it to your emotions and your actions. Keep asking the five whys.

And if you ask them in the right way, you’re gonna find yourself automatically reaching a solution, and it’s relatively simple. It’s painful. So I’m not saying it’s gonna be easy, but now you’ve started to act, and take one step forward towards what you really want to achieve. So this is how I would handle it. And if any entrepreneur would come to me with a problem as big as the one in the example that you gave me, get out of emotions, ask the five whys, reach a proper response, act.

There’s no other way to do it in my point of view. Do not expect something to come and fall from the sky and save you. You’re gonna save yourself.

Jim: Though sometimes things do fall from the sky, I’ll tell you that story in just a second. But before that, I wanna say the one thing I would add to your great comments, Mo, is that I think you need to be 100% transparent with the company and let everyone know the situation.

Mo: Absolutely. Yes. No doubt about that.

Jim: Because they can become part of the solution, rather than becoming a burden on you, if you’re open with them.

Mo: The ones who are really invested in your vision and working with you, they’re gonna work with you to fix that problem and get out of that hole no matter what.

Jim: And so I was trying to raise some money to save that business twenty years ago, twenty five years ago, the one that got $10,000,000 in debt, and we were really hoping this one particular person group would come through. And they had been to visit three or four times, and we had all this momentum. And they called and said, we’re out. We’re not interested. And it’s not a negotiation. We’re out. End of story. And I was devastated, and it was over in thirty seconds.

A two hour call that we had blocked two hours for was over in thirty seconds. And I just sat there dumbfounded, absolutely dead and praying that the world was gonna end right then so I wouldn’t have to live the pain. And then the phone rang again, and it was someone from that call who wasn’t the primary decision maker who said, I wanna be involved. I wanna take it in a different direction that you hadn’t thought of. Here’s my recommendation and solution, and that did fall out of the sky.

But it also had months and months of work behind that relationship. But that’s actually the deal that ended up working.

Mo: You see, you maximize your chances of being lucky. This is also another thing. It may look like just a lucky move or someone just out of the sky doing it, but look, staying in business for a long time, being doing business in an ethical way and others observing you without you really knowing it will bring those opportunities to you.

Jim: Yes. Without even knowing it. God, you just keep reminding me of stories. We had lost a kid one time. And we’re talking, like, could be dead or kidnapped or such. And in front of 200 paying parent customers, and we set upon our crisis operations. And in ten minutes, we found the kid, and everything was hunky dory. It’s amazing the number of parents that stuck around to see how it played out to watch what happened, and then it’s amazing how many of them ended up investing in that very same business when they saw how well we handled the crisis.

Mo: Exactly. It’s how you responded to it. It’s gonna happen. You don’t have control. You don’t have control on whether it’s gonna happen and when and how. You have control on one thing. How you’re gonna respond back.

Jim: Yes. Exactly. In the book, you mentioned you have a chapter on spirituality.

Mo: Yep.

Jim: One of the things that I think is so cool about entrepreneurship is that it uses the skills, the basket of assets that you are given better than anything else, any other job, vocation, hobby, it honors God, Buddha, Mohammed, whatever, Jia, better than anything else you can do with the time you were given here on Earth. Please respond. Thoughts?

Mo: Absolutely. Look. The entrepreneurial experience humbles you because very quickly, you would realize that you have very little control on so many things. You cannot control even who’s gonna come and work with you. Even the ones that you hire, you do not have control when they’re gonna leave you. You do not have even control whether they’re gonna be all the time excited about what you’re doing or not. So seeing all of that and experiencing all of that humbles you. And it just brings that to the forefront almost every day.

You have very little control. Now the question here is, okay. I have very little control, but I thought that as an entrepreneur, I’m supposed to take my destiny in my hand and do a big business. That’s why I’m in that whole game. Isn’t that contradicting? Well, the idea here is back to the previous point. It’s not about whether you have control or not of everything around you. It’s about how do you respond, based on what happens around you.

Because the only thing that you have control on is yourself. How do you think of everyone around you? How are you going to respond back? How are you going to funnel your time and energy towards something useful? So that’s the first thing.

When it comes to thinking about elevating yourself above that whole experience and thinking from a spiritual perspective. The other thing is think of your startup, and this is a mix of spirituality and also finding your why, as Simon Sinek talks about a lot. Why are you founding this startup? Is it for you to get rich?

And I know that a lot of the thought leaders in Silicon Valley say, no. No. No. You should not think about it to get rich. I know that a lot of us are motivated also to get more money and have a better life, but that’s a byproduct of something else that is much bigger. You’re doing something in your life, helping others, one way or another, and your startup is just a manifestation of that. And that’s really important because you could do it in other ways. So for example, for me, I really wanted to inspire others to build something great. And I had that thinking a few years ago by building great products that would enable others to be more productive. But now, I thought, look, it was just a way or a meaning for me to achieve my why.

I can still achieve my why by, for example, writing a book or mentoring entrepreneurs and working closely with them. I can still make them feel fulfilled and reach their potential. So that actually made me accept the result of whatever is gonna happen to my startup. That means less pressure, a healthier person, and you can even take a lot of things in the right direction. Hopefully that helps.

Jim: It does. Great information. Great thoughts. Have you heard of this AI thing, Mo?

Mo: A little bit.

Jim: Yeah. Apparently, it’s fake. It’s all artificial, apparently.

Mo: Well, tell me more. Why do you think so?

Jim: I saw a movie about it called Terminator. Have you ever seen that movie?

Mo: Yeah. Yeah.

Jim: Apparently, it doesn’t end up so good for all of us. Alright. Let’s be curious a minute, though. Are you scared of the Chinese new initiative? Do we need to be regulated? Do we need some guardrails on this thing? Should government be dropping $500,000,000,000 into it? What are your thoughts about AI in the macro? Let’s go 35,000 feet.

Mo: You threw a lot of questions. Each one of them requires a lot of time to respond. But let me give you my perspective. Definitely, AI is something significant. The way that I look at it is, it’s an accelerator for lots of things that we’re doing. Now, pretty much like anything else, like, people used to kill each other with swords. So you could kill that many with a sword. And then after inventing guns and rifles, you can kill 10x more in half the time. So and also, you can use technology to benefit more people. If you look at agriculture in the US, maybe fifteen years ago, we used to have 5% or 6% of the US population work in agriculture.

Right now, it’s almost one and a half percent, and yet they’re producing much more than before. So AI is the same thing. It is a tool to accelerate something. And now it’s on us to make sure that it’s accelerating the goodness of humanity. So this is really important.

Now when we think about the market dynamics and the technology and all of that, we’ve been always believing that competition is a good thing. It basically stirs apart, makes people more alert, and want to compete in building something useful for others. What I’m afraid of is our politics, US politics, going sideways and building it without really considering that it can be really harmful. And I cannot really comment whether this is what we’re actually doing or not, but it looks to me that we’re moving too fast these days without really considering the ethical implications of all of that.

Jim: Yes. Very true. There’s so many different ways to look at it. I think let’s look at it from an entrepreneur standpoint and help me with this, Mohamed. I, as an entrepreneur here, it’s gonna change your business and put people out of business, and it’s going to change the way every industry on earth is operated. And then I get on chat GPT, and I have no clue what to do. I have no clue how to integrate it into my world. Talk to us about how to integrate more AI into us under a million a year entrepreneur? Where do we learn? Where do we get the resources? I’ve heard that I can create incredible artwork. I can’t do it on chat GPT. Where do we go as the under a million guy to get into this over a trillion dollar space?

Mo: Absolutely. Look. If you think of entrepreneurs and what they do in early stages, entrepreneurs are basically looking for solutions for big problems. They’re trying to solve whatever that problem is, whether it’s climate or financial or in education. They’re solving, one way or another, a big problem. Now how do they solve this problem?

They solve it by learning about the space and learning about people who are impacted by that problem. One of the fascinating things that have been taking place with AI, and because I work with entrepreneurs, I’m experiencing this firsthand. It accelerates the learning experience in general for entrepreneurs. If they use it right. Again, it’s like having the new Google.

You can search in Google for something useless, or you can have the right question and get the right answers and learn something new every day, or maybe 10 things every day. So for AI, when it comes to entrepreneurs, it’s all about how do you really utilize this, first of all, to have a better understanding of the world around you and the problem that you’re trying to solve. So that’s number one. I think it’s key for everyone. And the way that I look at AI knowledge and understanding of a problem, there’s something called the Jevons paradox.

And the Jevons paradox is an economic theory. I don’t think it’s a theory since it’s applied now, and we all know it. There are certain resources, certain economic resources. The cheaper they are, the more abundant they are, the more that we use, like oil, energy, and so on. The same thing when it comes to information and knowledge.

AI is just making us more hungry and willing to learn more, and we’re gonna get more of it so that we can solve problems much faster and much more efficiently than before. In my point of view, entrepreneurs should think about it this way. So to give you an example, when I work with entrepreneurs, I used to create a guide, a very specialized guide on how do you do fundraising or how do you do the product, maybe once every month. Now I can produce one every few days, giving lots and lots of details to entrepreneurs.

Now I could be thinking about the AI taking my job as a mentor and advisor because entrepreneurs can do this themselves, go and ask ChatGPT about this information. Or you can think about it more differently. It’s not actually about the guide. It’s about who’s gonna make you disciplined to implement whatever in that guide and walk you through that journey. Now I can spend more time doing something that is more relevant and more useful to entrepreneurs.

So in my point of view, entrepreneurs should be thinking about that. And frankly, I rarely came across an entrepreneur thinking that the AI is seeking their job or others’ job because it’s in their nature. They’re embracing new stuff to solve existing problems. So that’s my point of view on AI.

Jim: I can’t wait to see how it plays out and who the winner is. Are you afraid of the Chinese threat specifically? You mean in AI?

Mo: Yes. That new Chinese AI that they came out with.

Mo: The DeepSeek. Well, no. Absolutely not. Look. I don’t know why the markets got panicked. But look. The Chinese were able to build DeepSeek that is better than chat GPT with a fraction of the resources. And they open source it, and they are telling everyone how it was done. Now let’s just think of it for a moment. Can’t we take the same approach with the ton of resources that we have and build something that is even bigger and smarter than DeepSeek? I guess the answer is yes. And that’s what is happening.

Actually, if you take a look at what Anthropic just released a couple of days ago, even ChatGPT, they made the deep research available for the pro subscribers, the ones who pay $20 rather than $200, that triggered people to innovate more and move faster. And we have smart people. We have the resources. So that’s a good thing. That’s a healthy competition.

And we live by the capitalist system and it’s all about the competition. And the survival is for the fastest, the fittest, and so on. And we still have that in our economy, and we have that in the brains that we have and the resources that we have. It’s just a good thing to have a worthy opponent that makes you alert.

Jim: What have I not asked you that you’d like to throw out? Maybe something about the book that I didn’t get to, not your URL and all that, but thoughts. What have I not talked about that you think is important?

Mo: I think there are a couple of points that maybe we will close with. Number one, this is for all the entrepreneurs out there. Your startup does not define who you are. It’s just something that you’re doing in your life. It could take a year, two years, three years, ten years, but your life is much bigger than that. So have this in mind that everything that has a start will end someday, and this is important.

The other thing, while you’re building your startup, you’re also building yourself and your mindset. And your startup will grow as fast as you’re able to grow your own mindset. Throughout the examples and the stories that you and I went through, it’s the main difference is just how do you see things, what’s your mindset, and how do you approach problems? So, take the startup experience from that perspective. If it did not work from a business perspective at the beginning, you did not achieve the exit that you want or have a big healthy business, take a look at yourself.

Are you the same person, comparing yourself at the end versus at the beginning? Absolutely not. You probably have learned a lot. And as the saying goes, what does not kill you makes you stronger. So that’s why you need to keep yourself in the game and play that infinite game.

Jim: Mohamed Ahmed, how do we find out more? Follow you online. Get a copy of the book, The Inside Out Entrepreneur, Becoming the Entrepreneur You Were Born to Be, five star rated on that Amazon website. How else?

Mo: Absolutely. So, we have our own community website, where you can download sample chapters, the companion guides as well. It’s https://stg-boundlessfounder-rpd-3buu.uw2.rapydapps.cloud. That’s our website. And, of course, you can find the book on Amazon and Goodreads. I would love for everyone who is listening to the show and want to grow their mindset and become a better entrepreneur, much stronger as a human as well, to grab a copy and share their thoughts with me.

I would love to learn from everyone, how we can build better entrepreneurship practices, one entrepreneur at a time.

Jim: Thank you so much for being with us. We’d love to have you back, and congratulations on the book.

Mo: Thank you very much, Jim, for having me. It was my pleasure to be with you.