Why Most Founders Flame Out with Dr. Mohamed F. Ahmed

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Jeff: Welcome to the Driving Change podcast on the Evergreen Podcast Network, where we live at the intersection of neuroscience and storytelling. If you love great stories and you love understanding the mindset it takes to be a world-class change agent, then join us as our fascinating guests from all walks of life unpack their unique journeys of perseverance and passion, of expertise and experience, and be inspired to use your own story to drive change.

Welcome back to another riveting episode of Driving Change, where we really go, or try to go, beyond the headlines and deep into the minds of the leaders and change-makers who are shaping the future through purpose, clarity, and real influence. As always, I’m your host, Jeff Bloomfield. A big thanks to this season’s sponsor, Brain Trust. If you’re interested in communicating more effectively in sales or leadership, check them out at braintrustgrowth.com.

Now, today’s guest is someone who spent his career at the intersection of big tech, bold ideas, and behavioral transformation. He’s been an executive at Microsoft, at Amazon. He’s currently a Senior Director of AI, Cloud Infrastructure with Intel. He’s built a tech company that exited with a 7x multiple. He holds a PhD in computer science. So yeah, he checked the brilliant technologist box, but what interested me the most in having him on the show was what he did after that and what he’s currently doing now. He started asking a deeper question: What really drives success in business and entrepreneurship? What’s that mindset look like? What he found wasn’t about strategy or capital necessarily. It was about the internal game, the mindset, the resilience, the emotional intelligence that really determine whether a founder or an innovator thrives or flames out. And then he founded Boundless Founder Community. He created the Entrepreneurial Conditioning Framework. I need some of that. And he wrote a new book called The Inside Out Entrepreneur. All to help leaders like me and you that are listening build not just better companies, but stronger, more self-aware humans behind them. I could go on and on about all of his accolades, but at this point, I just can’t wait to dive into the conversation. Welcome to the show, Mohamed Ahmed. You are a leader, a thought leader in this space, and we’re honored to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us.

Mo: Thank you very much for the nice intro, and it’s a pleasure to be here with you today.

Jeff: So, our audience has gotten pretty conditioned from my style and approach as the host, where everybody knows we need to know a little bit about where you come from before we care about where you’re taking us. So, tell us a little bit about your origin story. Take us back to maybe little Mo, where little Mo grew up. What were your early influences? And then how did you become so interested in computer science and tech? Tell us, take us on that journey.

Mo: Absolutely. So, it started with a fight with my dad. That’s how my journey with computers started. So, my dad, back in the early ’80s, he got the first PC. And back then, PCs did not have hard drives. You only boot the PC by having a 5.25-inch disk. You insert it, you boot the operating system, and then you’re good to go.

Jeff: The old floppy disk, right?

Mo: The floppy disk. Exactly. Good old floppy disk. And my dad was just learning. So, one day he told me, of course, he told me, “Do not touch it. Do not come near it.” And of course, I did not listen. So, I went and I took off the floppy. And then when my dad came in and he tried to boot the machine, it did not boot. And he learned that I came close to it and I tinkered with it. And we had, he basically was furious, and he thought that I broke this $10,000 machine until he talked to the specialist and he told him, “No, you need to just have a new copy of the floppy.” He felt really guilty back then, and he said, “You know what? You’re going to learn computers with me.” And he got me my own PC, and the journey started from there. And he actually, he was my companion throughout the whole journey. He did not study computer science, but he was so interested in technology and the latest and the greatest back then.

And then I did my undergrad studies in computer science, obviously, and I got even more fascinated about what is possible in that space. And I came to the US. I come from Egypt, and I came to the US to do my PhD studies in distributed systems. And I was getting at bigger and bigger systems as I was progressing in my education. So, I studied supercomputers back then. And a supercomputer, think of it in simple terms, think of a stadium that has 100,000 persons, each has their own laptop, and they’re all working together on the same problem at the same time. That’s what is called a supercomputer, but I’m just trying to explain in simple terms.

And then I moved from academia to industry work with Microsoft, AWS. I was fascinated by the scale of those companies and the systems they’re building. But I got the entrepreneurial bug in between, and I decided to build my own startup around eight years ago. It was definitely one of the most fulfilling, one of the most difficult, but at the same time, one of the most fulfilling journeys because I was basically on a very steep learning curve, and I changed a lot. It just transformed me and who I am. And I got lucky, sold the company. And I said, “I’m going to do two things. Number one, I would like to inspire as many entrepreneurs to build their own companies the right way because, as you hinted at the beginning, it starts from inside. It’s not about just learning the sales and marketing. There’s abundance of data and information around that. But how do you condition yourself? This is really key.” And work with big corporates to bring in the entrepreneurial spirit within them. And that’s what I do these days.

Jeff: That’s excellent. So what I love about your story, I can almost just almost see your dad with smoke coming out of his ears when that happened. But to his credit, course correcting and recognizing that it was your curiosity that he started to fuel and see there’s fuel there, and then instead of putting you outside, he brought you inside and then allowed you to create, fostered an environment for you to be able to thrive through curiosity and learning and that pathway. And it’s funny because as you said that, I thought, “Boy, isn’t that like the perfect description of what our job should be as leaders for our people?” They don’t always act, behave the way we want them to. And sometimes we’re really critical of that. Whereas if we would actually encourage the curiosity and then point it in the right direction, look what you could turn out, right? You could turn out a PhD computer scientist who started his own business and sold it for 7x, and now he’s advising companies all over the world. So that’s pretty cool. What would you say then are the other maybe two or three values that your dad taught you that really served you well on your journey?

Mo: Absolutely. There are two things. Number one, “Can you do 10x better, or can you do more of it?” And actually, there’s a story around that. So, back in Egypt, there are two education systems. There’s the public system. When you graduate from high school, you either apply at the public universities. That’s one big centralized system where you apply, and based on your grades, you get allocated to the right college. And there’s a private system. So, usually, students, lucky students like me who can afford going to private universities, they would apply usually to both systems. And when you get accepted, even if you get accepted at both of them, you pick one and you drop the other. And that’s exactly what happened with me. And my dad actually looked at me when he saw the acceptance from both universities, and he was saying, “Hmm, why don’t you try to do both? I mean, you do computer science at the American University in Cairo, and why not you study business administration and everything around it at that public university?” I thought, “That’s impossible. I cannot really do that.” He said, “I’m going to get you a car.” So, he tried to bribe me. And then, two, three hours, I said, “Well, that’s not a bad deal. Why not?” I really wanted to have my own car, and I did it. This is just one story of him again trying to push the boundaries. And as they say, you cannot know your abilities unless you keep pushing yourself. You keep pushing the envelope and keep moving forward as fast as you can. And this is how you know your abilities.

And the other one is, and it’s funny, and I don’t know if it’s relevant these days as much, but anything that I ask him about, he would say, “Is there a book for that?” And he would always tell me, “I think there is a book for what you’re asking about.” And he would buy me the book or point me towards it. Pretty much when Apple released the iPhone, “There’s an app for that.” So, look for that. And actually, he had more than 20,000 books in his library.

Jeff: Wow.

Mo: And he ended up donating all his book library to the Library of Alexandria because Egypt was reviving that project again, and they wanted people to donate books, and he did. So, these two, and I still actually do that. From my background, you see, I have lots of books. My Kindle is full of books as well. But that’s also another thing. I think you need to be curious and always learning. You’re always learning, no matter how experienced you are, what you’re doing. You always need to read, especially books. I know with these days, people may say, “Well, I can go and ask ChatGPT,” but I’m still a big believer in books. I think I’m old enough to say books are the main source of knowledge so far.

Jeff: Yeah, that’s great. I love that. Boy, I bet the library was surprised. They put out a call for donation of books, and then somebody shows up and says, “I got 20,000. Would that do?”

Mo: That’s exactly. He got the big container to them.

Jeff: Oh. So, where was your epiphany then on? Because obviously, someone who pursues knowledge to that degree, it sounds like your dad had a fair amount of emotional intelligence as well. But you know, we can get caught up as leaders and as entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs on the pursuit of intelligence or intellect, right? Adding to our knowledge base. But at some point, every, I found, every great successful leader learns that emotional intelligence is the true pursuit.

Mo: Yes.

Jeff: And the most challenging pursuit. When did that happen for you where it clicked? You feel like, “Boy, I can be the smartest guy in the room, but if I don’t understand the emotional intelligence side about between my ears and the self-awareness and self-management and how I’m interacting with others, I’m lost.” When did that click for you and start to become a passion?

Mo: There’s a story actually behind that. I’ll share a story that actually told me the importance of that, especially from my startup experience. So, in the early days, I raised around $500,000, just a pre-seed fund to get started with our product, build it, and have something that we can demonstrate for our customers. So, we spent around $350,000 out of them, or maybe $400,000. We shipped the first version or got the first version ready. And we had a conference that we were invited to to demonstrate our product and hopefully get some customers. And as I was entering the venue of that conference, I got an email from AWS or Amazon Web Services. We were hosting our application at their infrastructure, telling us that we owed them $65,000. And the last time I checked our credits with them and how much we owed them, if any, we actually had $50,000 credits with them. So, we burned through the credits that we got from them, and we even went over that, and now we have to pay them $65,000. I had less than $75,000 in the bank, zero customers, and we were just about to demonstrate our product. And I know that it’s going to take us two, three months to get the first customer. And back then, everything went dark in front of me because I was saying, “We’re going to shut down. There’s nothing that I can do.”

Now, the event itself turns out to be normal. But what happened with me is I got paralyzed for almost four weeks, unable to act. I got into that negative thoughts, negative emotions loop. It triggered negative emotions. It triggered negative thoughts in my head. Negative thoughts feed those emotions, and so on. You go into that spiral, and it took me four weeks to recover. And what I mean by that is just going back to AWS, negotiating with them, trying to find an alternative, trying to figure out how I can get out of that. So, this is an example of when your emotions take over, and you are not able to, you do not have enough resiliency and robustness in your mindset and emotions.

Now, I’ll contrast this with another story four years after. So, four years after, we went through a lot. We pivoted our product more than once, and we raised more money, and we got a company that is interested to buy us. We said, “Okay, we’re interested to move forward.” They did all the due diligence. They interviewed my team. They looked at our bank account, source code, everything. We’re just ready. Now, just two hours before signing the agreement, they backed off. They themselves got an offer to get acquired, and they had to sign. They had it in line, so they had to sign, and for buying us, for them, is a material change, which they cannot do anymore. So, they put us under the bus, and we are now by ourselves.

Because I learned from that first story and many other similar stories, it took me two hours now to really bring myself together, get myself out of that negative thought, emotions loop. And I talked to other CEOs, and I told them, “Hey, I have an offer on my hands. Someone is interested in me.” No one yet knows that they backed off. By the end of the same week, I was already meeting with five other CEOs of other companies interested to buy our company. You see the difference here is just how you look at it and how you’re able to differentiate between the reality and what’s going on in your head. In the first case, my emotions took over, and it became my reality for four weeks, right? Second case, yeah, I had it because we’re humans at the end, and we’re going to go through ups and downs every day. But I was able to break it really quickly, and it’s a skill that you develop over time. So, those are two examples between emotions taking over versus you still acknowledging them and then moving forward, or getting over it, in other words. And that’s not “fake it until you make it” because I do not believe frankly in “fake it until you make it.” It’s all about building that resiliency inside you.

Jeff: It’s such a powerful skill, and so many folks struggle with that. And I see a lot of entrepreneurs even today. Now, you were able to, I’m not terribly good at math in my head, but four weeks down to two hours in your resilience, right? You improved your resiliency in your emotional regulation from four weeks of paralysis down to two hours of processing the emotion and then, “Let’s fix it. Let’s go.” What do you think, what are some maybe you go through some standard exercises? I know you’ve written about this as well, where you talk about this is about more about conditioning than strategy. We all want to lean into strategy. But what you’re saying is, “No, you got to condition your mind to think a certain way.” Because whether you’re an entrepreneur, intrapreneur, or not, whether you’re just an employee somewhere at a company, you’re going to come up against these moments where things didn’t go the way you thought they were going to go, and you’re going to pull the car into the ditch. And how you respond in those moments. Our brains are built for self-preservation and survival. So the problem is too many of us stay in that state of self-preservation, and we don’t move past it, and therefore we can’t be creative and innovative and problem-solve. What are some exercises or ways that you were able to condition your mind to overcome those situations faster?

Mo: Absolutely. We’ll get into that, but let me take one step back, and I want just to give everyone the big picture and how to think about the conditioning. So, if you go and ask any mountaineer, no matter how experienced they are, they would tell you, before any major trip, they would do what’s called conditioning. And what does it mean? They need to be ready physically, mentally, emotionally. They want to make sure that their lives, their personal lives also, are in order for them to go through that big trip. And those who watch the movie Everest would relate to that, how unforgiving that journey could be.

Now, the same thing when you go and do something big, whether you’re in a startup or a big corporate, you want to make sure that you are ready for such an unforgiving journey, especially when you’re building a startup. So, I wanted just to make sure first that conditioning is not a luxury, it’s not just to make you a bit stronger, it’s necessary. Think of it as a mountaineer conditions themselves, they have their own gear, and they have everything ready, and then now they start, as opposed to another guy walking in his jeans with a flip-flop. He looks at the mountain. He says, “Well, you know what? I’m going to climb the mountain.” What do you think is going to be the outcome? Maybe after one day, he’s going to give up, right? Or at the very least, he’s going to suffer a lot of pain throughout the journey rather than growing and feeling that he’s being fulfilled.

Now, what are the possible techniques? There are different and numerous ways to do that, but I’m a big fan of Simon Sinek. So, Simon Sinek has his first book, Start with Why, and that’s really core. Being connected to your purpose, why you’re doing what you’re doing, is really, really important. And why is that? Because at the end of the day, when it gets dark, this is the fuel. This is what pushes you forward. Why are you building a startup? You can ask yourself, “Because I really want to positively impact the lives of others.” All right. Why is that? What’s inside you? Until you reach what’s exactly that thing that is driving you in your life. So, that’s number one. Connecting with your purpose and your why.

Now, the other thing is, do not confuse what you’re doing with who you are. One common mistake, for example, with lots of entrepreneurs, and obviously that happens with execs, they define themselves by what they do. If I ask you who you are, they would say, “I’m an entrepreneur. I have this company.” Now, the problem is, if something unexpected or negative happens to your company, you feel the same. Your emotions and your self-worth are connected to whatever that business is doing. That’s not right. Your business is going to go up and down every day, right? It doesn’t mean that your self is also going up and down with it. Don’t do that. This is also one of the number one of the early pieces of advice that I give to founders and entrepreneurs. So, that’s really important.

And then there are tactics, everyday tactics, like for example, and I do this every day. If I really feel that I got caught into some emotions that I don’t like, the first thing I ask myself, “Why am I feeling this way?” And then I do the Five Whys, you know, the Five Whys that Toyota came with for quality assurance, and then everyone in the US adopted that back in the ’80s. You can still apply that actually to yourself. You ask yourself, “Why am I feeling this way?” And then you have an answer, and then, “Why is that? Why is this actually making me feel like this?” And then, “Is there something that I can do about it?” And so on. So, those tactics, as you use them, will allow you to easily take a step back, detach yourself from those events, and now address them as an independent party, right? You’re just trying now to tackle them in a more objective way. You disconnected your emotions from them. And of course, there are lots of other things. We can definitely get into philosophy, like how much control you have over things. You would realize that you do not have that much control, and as a result of that, you feel more of an inner peace, like Master Shifu in Kung Fu Panda. So, that’s definitely a state that you want to reach as much as you can. And I discuss a lot of that in my book because this is really key. You’re going to face those every day. You’re going to be slapped every single day as an early-stage entrepreneur with lots of unexpected events: people leaving, losing customers, funding that you expected to come is not coming, big surprises in the market or with competition. There’s so many things, and it’s always going to be something else, right? So, it is the natural state of things.

Jeff: Well, you, we could take your response there and probably have a whole separate episode just on that response. A couple things you said that really struck me was, and we talk a lot about this, is it’s coming down to identity. If you don’t understand your core identity, then under pressure, under stress, you will operate out of emotions that don’t serve you well. And a lot of times, they’re not even real, right? You make up the story. I often say that the most important story you’re going to hear today is the one you’re telling yourself. And if you don’t have the ability to regulate those emotions in that moment, and for those who are, I’d love your comment on, I’m thinking back to your example when you were going to the show, and you were already behind the eight-ball with AWS on your fees, and then all these things were stacking up, and it took you four weeks to recover in that. When I talk to other business owners and entrepreneurs, and I experienced this myself at times, it’s the amount of workload and pressure and stress in our transactional to-do list where we function in the analytical network of the brain constantly. And so, when something happens unexpectedly, it’s almost like the emotion gets amplified, and it almost takes over, and the amount of stress you feel from all the other things because you’re on the hamster wheel, right? You’re running a million miles an hour. How do you help entrepreneurs, really anybody, it’s not just entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs, how do you help them recognize that part of what you’re talking about can only be done with intentionality in your day-to-day calendar? Like, you have to have time to think. You have to have time to process when you’re not, when the bullets aren’t flying, and you’re not running on 12 on the treadmill. Do you have any tips and recommendations for us on how to do that?

Mo: Absolutely. You know, first of all, as you hinted, when you do everything, you need to always connect with the purpose. Now, the other thing is, any activity you do has its own psychology, and you need to learn that. So, for example, we can talk about sales. If you’re in sales, it’s known in the field that you have to talk to maybe 10 persons, 20, to get one yes. So, you’re going to get 19 or 18 rejections throughout your journey. Now, the problem is not in those hard facts. The problem is how do you deal with that? And that’s actually one of the main differences between how sometimes I deal with entrepreneurs versus others. When I teach someone how to do fundraising, I focus on the psychology of that, their psychology and their counterparty’s psychology. This is key for them to first of all understand themselves and what is going on inside them because this is the only way for them to keep moving forward. It doesn’t mean that we are just disconnecting ourselves from the facts. You have to consider the facts and always look at them. But you need to understand the psychology of sales. When I go and tell, I sell to someone, how do they make the decision, when, and what is the best way for you to approach them? So, for example, the way that I think of sales, sales is problem-solving. So, you first of all, you need to go and talk with your prospect or customer as a problem solver. You are the problem solver for them. You’re solving one of their problems in life. And then the other thing is, when you get rejected, what does it mean? How do you convert that from rejection to progress? Every time you get rejected, there’s something that you need to learn about that person, your sales process, your product, whatever that is. There are many things that you can learn about. And that’s always the core principle that I drive everything, either myself or with entrepreneurs or anyone I work with. I dig deeper into the emotions, the thoughts that happen in your mind. And humans are humans. It doesn’t matter where you come from, what’s your culture. I know maybe in Silicon Valley and in the US specifically, we’re in a culture where we embrace failure and move forward more than many other cultures, but we still go through the same emotions. It’s a universal thing, no matter where you’re coming from. So, that’s, I would say, the key point here.

Jeff: Yeah, that’s great. And I love, because sales is a good topic, right? Because everyone has to go through it. It’s a good way because those folks who are selling every day are the ones who get the most rejection. So, they’ve got to deal with so much of that psychology. I often say that the best sellers I’ve seen communicate so effectively that what they do is they create a belief in the buyer that becomes so strong that the buyer has no choice but to see it as riskier to not say yes than status quo. And those who can communicate that effectively, they understand the psychology of that. And when it doesn’t happen, they don’t take it personally. It’s not part of their identity, right? And that’s what you’re getting at is just move on, learn, move on.

Mo: Yeah. And here’s the thing also, if you just think again of how much control do you have over things around you, even our kids, when they’re young enough, they have their own needs and desires. You cannot really control that. It’s not right anyway to control it. But if you think that there are so few things that you have control on, but what you can be 100% sure that you can control is your emotions and your thoughts. If you don’t have control over that, as many other philosophers would say, if you can control yourself, you can control the whole world around you.

Jeff: Yeah. You mean kids can do what they want? You mean like a dad could tell a kid not to mess with his computer and his floppy disk, and he’s still going to do it?

Mo: So, on your journey, you’ve had such rich experiences in Microsoft, Amazon, and Intel. You’ve had such great divergent experience. So, you’ve had big corporate experience and what it looks like to function in those environments, and then you started your own startup, and you understand that. What would you say the biggest difference is between the, I don’t know if it’s the creativity and the innovation as much as it is the ability to get stuff done and the differences in those two environments?

Mo: First of all, let’s just, I always like to draw analogies. So, to compare being in a big corporate versus in a startup is pretty much like the difference between these two situations. Imagine yourself or visualize yourself swimming in a swimming pool where you have lanes, the water is warmed, you have a guard, and everything is just perfect. In big corporates, it’s most of the time, I would say, not really for executives, but most of the middle management and below, it’s a controlled environment, and everyone is vested in your success because your success is a success. The startup is pretty much like someone threw you in the Atlantic in the middle of the night. You do not know where the shore is, and now you need to figure things out.

Jeff: That’s a great analogy.

Mo: So, that’s the difference between. The shore could be just behind you, right? But because it’s dark, and you may get nervous, and you get the fear of dying or drowning, you may just lose the sense, you cannot bring yourself together and lose your sense of direction. So, that’s the main difference between, I would say, startup and a company. Now, what does it mean then, working in a big company versus in a startup? Now, the main, and this is I always say to entrepreneurs, the main difference between a startup and a corporate is speed. If we talk about money, corporates definitely have more money. If we talk about people, they have more people. If we talk about smartness, they definitely have smart people. Insights into the market, they also have the insight on the market. So, the main difference, because you have more people working together in big corporate, they need to communicate, that drives them slow.

I’ll tell you this, actually, AWS is known for its fast-moving pace, and that’s what I felt when I joined AWS. And then, after building my startup and selling it, now I’m talking to my friends back again at AWS, and they’re complaining that they’re moving too fast. I would tell them, “This is from 0 to 10, 10 being fastest, this is five out of 10 compared to startups.” So, moving fast is number one. And moving fast does not mean working more. Moving fast means making decisions much faster than before.

Jeff: Yeah.

Mo: Or than, I would say, the enterprises. So, that’s one thing. The other thing is, all those topics that we talked about, about controlling your emotions, getting your north star visible to you or clear to you. All of that is also something, it becomes mandatory actually in the startup world. And in big corporates, they have plans, they have goals. The machine is already set pretty much, so you need now just to move faster. Again, if we use the analogy of the lanes, what do you do? You just move faster in the lane, or maybe move from one lane to another. That’s the goal. Not to undermine the corporates, they have a big role in our life, and they definitely contribute a lot to the economy and innovation, but in startups, it’s just a different game. And that’s again, back to the conditioning piece. That’s why you need it. It’s a big deal.

Now, there are lots of stories right now in the AI world, where did the big breakthrough come from? From a startup company. Even though Google has been doing it longer than OpenAI, Microsoft also has been doing it, but the company that really made the disruption is a startup because now they’re in the middle. They felt that they’re in the middle of the Atlantic. They need to figure out something, right? Otherwise, they’re going to die, right? For other companies, they need to figure out something and innovate. But if you don’t, there’s no imminent danger, right? You’re not going to die. You’re not going to, or it’ll at least be a slower death.

Jeff: Yeah, exactly.

Mo: So, yeah, so those are, again, if you notice, I’m talking more and more about the psychology of things because I believe that this would put you in a different, I would say, different track altogether.

Jeff: No, that’s so good. And I love the analogy, too. And I think, you know, you need emotional intelligence and emotional regulation as much inside of corporations as you do inside of startups, but it’s different because the effect of not doing it has a greater ripple, right? If you’re in a corporation and you have a bad day and you don’t regulate your emotion well, you might be perceived as someone that I can’t promote as quickly through to the next swim lane, but all is still probably fairly okay unless you violated some HR rule or something. Where in a startup, if you can’t do that emotional regulation, there’s already a lack of swim lanes. There’s already a lack. I mean, you are the guiding principle, so and the guiding light, so it affects everything faster.

So, you said something I’d like to spend some of our remaining time on. You, someone with your pedigree here, everything from the quantum computing that we’re learning and you add into the AI now and where we’re going with AI. On one extreme, you got people saying, “This is insane. Within two years, AI is going to take over, and humans are going to be slaves.” To the other extreme saying, “No, AI is just a fad, and it’s not going to be as impactful as everyone thinks it is.” Now, I’m somewhere completely in the middle, but I would love, I see the benefit and the value to us as a small business already, but I can also see the inherent perils if we’re not careful with how we utilize AI. So, let’s talk about it first from a technology standpoint, then we can look at it from an ethics standpoint after that. So, let’s start first by the technology. What have you learned about AI? What do you like about it? What do you think about it? And how do you see it moving forward in our culture?

Mo: Look, six months ago, I used to define AI as just a compression of the internet. It just collected the whole body of knowledge of the internet, it compresses it in a way, and then it just spits out that knowledge in a different way. But right now, especially with the recent advancements in how the models can really critique their thinking, it’s a higher, it’s still, by the way, still a statistical model at the end of the day, but it’s a statistical model not only around the words but around ideas now. So, “Okay, this is the next idea. Should I be thinking this way or that way?” So, AI definitely is another big moment in our history of technology and tools where everything is changing. Our tools, including computers, they used to be passive tools. You use them like a hammer. The hammer will just hit and break as hard as you hit with it something, right? But right now, this is a passive tool, but an actively working tool towards your goal. This is something new. This is unprecedented. So, that’s definitely, there’s definitely a lot of disruption that’s going to happen. Now, of course, how fast can we move? It depends at the end how fast also societies can really adapt to that.

And I’ll tell you a funny story from even my own experience with my son. So, my son right now, he studies computer science at Virginia Tech. Luckily, I did not make the same mistake of my dad, but anyways, I’m trying to inspire him in different ways. But I gave him last summer a project for just a virtual internship, if you will, and I told him, “Go and build that project for me.” And I thought this is going to keep him occupied for two months, but he was able to finish it in less than a week, and he said, “I’m done.” And, “Okay, how is that?” He said, “I tried GPT, and I did that, and I did this.” But here’s also one thing that happened with him. He said, “You know what? I’m going to spend now the next week trying to understand the code.” The code that he wrote, or that ChatGPT wrote for him. I told him, “Why do you need to do that?” He said, “I need to understand code.” I told him, “No, but what kind of knowledge did you really need to drive ChatGPT?” And we started to talk about some architecture, a few technologies, and so on. And I told him, “This is what you need to learn. This is how you can adapt with AI.” And I told him, “You know what? If I get an engineer and he would tell me, ‘No, I don’t believe in AI,’ I wouldn’t hire him. I would tell him, ‘I’m not going to fund your inefficiency.'” So, it’s inevitable. You have to deal with AI. But the key here is how do you deal with it and how do you use it? And what I see right now, whether engineers or entrepreneurs, they deal with AI as their companion one way or another.

Here’s one hack that I do myself, and I recommend others to do. Right now, I write everything that I do every day. Just a small one-line journal. Just create a journal. If you’re already doing that, this is great. And I write sometimes even what I think I missed, what I think I could improve, and so on, myself. And I log things, and then I feed it into ChatGPT or Claude from Anthropic, and I start asking, “Okay, give me what happened this week. What did I miss? How could I improve next week? I said at the beginning of the week that I need to do these three tasks, and I think I failed in one or two of them because of that. What do you think is the reason? Is it a problem with estimate or dependency or something else?” And then it starts giving me. And even here, sales also, another cool part, Anthropic, you can give it access to your email and calendar. So, it can see how you organize things against your to-do tasks, and now it can give you where the gaps are. So, you can become way more efficient, and you can have way more insights. Sometimes when I go to a conference, I even give it my agenda, and it helps me planning it. So, that’s how I use it as a companion. So, it’s just making us, I would say, superhumans, if you will, one way or another, if you use it right. If you only say, “Well, it’s just a tool. I’m going to just use it with a driverless car to get from one point to another point,” you’re still going to get the benefit, but you’re not going to see how revolutionary it can be in your life.

Jeff: Yeah, I love that. I love the example. I’ve gone so far to drinking the Kool-Aid that I, you know, I gave mine a name, and I talk to him differently, and I have him write, you know, he’s kind of become my brain science coach, right, as we go through stuff and how much to be more efficient with a lot of what we’re doing. Now, are you of the school of thought that everyone’s panicking that I talk to or hear or even talk to about, “Oh, it’s going to cost so many jobs?” Because everyone right now, obviously, the human brain is built off of self-preservation. We’ve said that earlier. Humans focus at twice the urgency around risk of loss than they do pursuit of gain. All that economics work, all that stuff. Everyone’s so focused on how many jobs are about to be lost in the next couple of years. But every once in a while, I’ll stumble across someone who says, “Yeah, but AI is going to create as many jobs as it takes. If you’re smart and understand how to use AI, these companies are going to be popping up all over the place that now are AI-oriented.” Now, are you of that school of thought where you’re saying, “Yeah, but you got to kind of keep, you got to lean into this. If you don’t…” Let me frame it a different way. I heard someone say recently that, “I’m not going to hire someone to replace you. AI is not going to replace you. I’m not going to replace, I’m sorry.” He said, “Yeah, I’m not going to replace you with AI. I’m going to replace you with someone who knows how to use AI.”

Mo: Yeah, exactly. And that’s the key here. Look, there are going to be some disruptions. We have to admit that. There is some sort of shockwaves that we have to all feel and absorb, and at the end of the day, how do you want to deal with it? And again, back to the mindset, how do you look at it and how do you drive your career moving forward? I think the problem is in everyone’s velocity. So, for example, this is what I see with corporate America right now. Corporate America started to realize that AI is doing a lot of what many of my people can do, and then they started to do some, I would say, replacements or becoming leaner because they do not need as many people. Now, the number one thing that I usually warn others around is, don’t be that frog in the boiling water. Do not wait until your corporate tells you or your company tells you, “You know what? AI is coming.” And if you do not embrace it, you should be faster than them, even if you feel that you’re in a different world, even if it’s science fiction for them, but be ahead of everyone. So, that’s at the individual level. And as you said, there are AI, let’s say, call them AI-native startups and companies that are built on top of AI. Those are the ones that you need to really work with them. And as I mentioned, I’m not going to hire an engineer who doesn’t know how to use AI. Actually, I was surprised, there are YouTube channels and articles right now just dedicated to how do you use AI with your software engineering, to become a software engineer. And that’s interesting because it became a skill that you need to learn from others, and it’s not just, as they call it, just VIP coding. I know that they’re talking about it a lot these days. It’s a cool thing, and I think it’s contributing to a lot of people’s productivity. But if you don’t know how to do it, you’re going to just go in circles. You’re going to go in loops. And that’s what happened with me when I first started. So, yeah, move fast. Be aware of your surroundings. This definitely will make you ahead of the curve. And I think it’s inevitable. We’re going to have that change pretty much when the US economy moved from industry-based and production-based to becoming a knowledge-based economy. Yes, we had those disruptions, and some people went through some pain. But this is how the whole society moves forward. I think this is going to happen with AI, and as you said, it’s going to create more opportunities, roles that we did not think of. I mean, did we have a website admin job 20 years ago? We did not have that, right? Or maybe 25 years ago, we did not have that. That’s a new job. Did we have SEO 20 years ago? We did not have that. Now it’s, yes, it’s going away because now SEO is being redefined, but we’re going to have something different, right? Let’s say AI optimization engines or something like that that requires humans, requires some critical thinking from a human.

Jeff: Yeah. And everyone, I mean, listen, you and I grew up in a time when we call back to all the people that the “get off my lawn” guy saying, “The internet’s going to destroy the world.” Like every technological innovation, there’s a school of thought that it’s so disruptive that it’s going to destroy everything. The reality is, humans are adaptable, and we’ll adapt to this. And the folks, I think, like yourself that are encouraging folks, get out on the front end of this thing. Everyone’s going to have to change. There’s going to be some disruption to everyone’s life to some degree or another on the continuum. Why not be out on the front end of this? Imagine back when you started even seven, eight years ago, if you had access to expertise in AI, how fast you could have gone from ideation to creation to capitalization? You could have shrunk that time frame down using AI probably by half, if not greater. And that’s what today’s entrepreneurs have, advantages that no other time in history did entrepreneurs have, using AI to help accelerate their ability to market, is my opinion. I don’t know if you would agree or disagree with that.

Mo: I 100% agree, and I think we’re going to have an explosion of startups in the next few years. Now it’s much easier than before to experiment with the idea, validate it, and build it. You know, the YC, Y Combinator, that number one or famous accelerator in the Bay Area, they’re saying all their recent cohort founders, 90% or more of their code was written by AI.

Jeff: Yeah. And they got funded by millions of dollars. Right. Right. Nobody cares who writes the code. They care that it works. Right. Right.

Mo: Just now, the short, it’s a much shorter time right now from ideation to delivering the value.

Jeff: Well, let’s, boy, I can’t believe we’re out of time already. Let’s land the plane. Tell us a little bit about, as we close out, Boundless Founder Community, Entrepreneurial Conditioning Framework, your new book, The Inside Out Entrepreneur, and give us some direction on what you’re working on today and where we can go learn more about you to have you come speak or just kind of get coached by you. What can we, how can we tap into Mo at a deeper level?

Mo: Absolutely. I would love to connect with everyone. My book is called The Inside Out Entrepreneur. There’s a copy of it just for everyone to get the visuals of it. And the book again, it talks about that conditioning framework. How do you start or move easier from whether you’re an engineer or working in a corporate to become an entrepreneur? Full of stories. And I made it in a way or wrote it in a way so that you just get entertained by stories like the ones that we chatted about today. And then I said, I wanted to take this even further and keep the discussion going with as many entrepreneurs as possible. That’s why I founded Boundless Founder, and the website is boundlessfounder.co. It’s a community where you can connect with other fellow entrepreneurs, and I teach entrepreneurs how to become more resilient as they build their startup. So, as I mentioned at the beginning, you’re going to learn about the idea validation. You’re going to learn about the fundraising and how to become an entrepreneur. But I focus on the psychological aspect of it, on the conditioning aspect so that your chances to be successful are much higher. Even if you do not end up building a company or your company did not end up where you wanted it to be, I can guarantee you that you’re going to be a much different person. You’re going to grow. You’re going to feel the fulfillment of the journey. Boundless Founder.co. And here’s one thing that I would love to offer your audience, Jeff. It’s free to join the community, get some of the courses, and then to get more advanced resources is paid. We’re going to give everyone 30% off on the paid plan if they want to really upgrade their journey, and we can leave it in the show notes here.

Jeff: That’s fantastic. Thank you for that. So, if you’re listening out there, I don’t care if you think you’re not an entrepreneur, but if you have ideas that you feel like need to be in a community where you can get your ideas expressed more, whether it’s inside the company you’re in or you have ideas of what to do to start up a company, get surrounded by these founders and go to boundlessfounder.co. Check in the notes. Go in there, sign up, do the free plan, upgrade when you need it. Read the book. Mo is really an expert in this space. And what I love about him the most is not just an expert in the space of the practical and tactical strategic ways of becoming a founder to innovation. He’s also the psychological and the mindset of resilience that it takes to do it because he’s done it. He’s walked the path, and he knows he knows how to help you walk it as well. So, Mo, this has been great. Really appreciate you coming on. This is, I’ve got a lot of work to do. I want to go now and do for myself. So, I know the audience, I’m sure, took a lot away as well. Thank you.

Mo: Thank you very much, Jeff, for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

[Applause]