Maker Manager Money - Entrepreneur & Business Owner Inspiration
Hello there. Welcome to the Maker Manager Money podcast with Kyle Ariel Knowles. This podcast is about entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, founders, business owners, and business partnerships, from startups to stayups, to inspire entrepreneurs to keep going and future entrepreneurs to just start.
Maker Manager Money - Entrepreneur & Business Owner Inspiration
Inside-Out Entrepreneur: Mo Ahmed on Building Resilience and Mindset
Join us as Mohamed "Mo" Ahmed, Ph.D., shares his journey from software engineering to entrepreneurship, his challenges transitioning from a maker to a manager, and the importance of developing a resilient mindset. He discusses his Entrepreneurial Conditioning Framework, which emphasizes the significance of mindset in navigating the ups and downs of the entrepreneurial journey.
In this episode, we dive deep into the entrepreneurial journey and explore valuable insights that can help aspiring and seasoned entrepreneurs.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- The Importance of Mindset: Mo emphasizes that entrepreneurship starts from within. He developed the Entrepreneurial Conditioning Framework to help founders cultivate the right mindset. It’s not just about having a great idea; it’s about maintaining a resilient and balanced mindset to navigate the ups and downs of the entrepreneurial journey. As Mo puts it, “If you are not in the right mindset, you will have the wrong perspective.” This is a crucial reminder for all of us to focus on our internal state as we pursue our goals.
- The Role of Mentorship: Throughout the episode, Mo discusses the significance of having mentors, advisors, and a supportive community. He outlines three essential roles: a mentor to challenge your mindset, an advisor to guide you through business decisions, and a network of friends and family who understand the entrepreneurial journey. This holistic approach to support can make a world of difference, especially during challenging times. As Mo wisely states, “You have to have someone with you; it’s going to feel lonely sometimes, but it doesn’t have to be always.”
- Navigating Exits and Identity: One of Mo's most profound insights is the misconception surrounding exits. Many entrepreneurs merge their identity with their startup, making it difficult to cope when the company is sold or changes hands. Mo shares his experience transitioning from founder to just being himself after an exit, highlighting the importance of separating one’s self-worth from the business. This perspective can help entrepreneurs maintain their mental health and resilience during significant transitions.
In this episode, you'll learn about:
- The entrepreneurial conditioning framework and its development
- The balance between innovation and execution
- The importance of mentorship and community support
- Key strategies for building resilience as an entrepreneur
- Insights from Mo's book and personal experiences with startup challenges and successes
BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS
- The Inside-Out Entrepreneur: Become the Entrepreneur You Were Born to Be by Mohamed Ahmed
- The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers & Learn If Your Business Is a Good Idea When Everyone Is Lying to You by Rob Fitzpatrick
- Start with the Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek
- The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek
Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur or a seasoned business owner, this conversation is packed with valuable insights and practical advice to help you thrive in your entrepreneurial journey.
FOLLOW
Kyle Ariel Knowles: Hello there. Welcome to the Maker Manager Money podcast. My name is Kyle Ariel Knowles. And today's guest is Mo Ahmed, serial entrepreneur, product visionary and author of Inside Out Entrepreneurship. Become the entrepreneur you were born to be. With over 20 years of experience in AI and cloud computing, Mo has built and sold multiple successful companies. He now dedicates his expertise to empowering diverse founders through his Boundless Founders Community and Entrepreneurial Conditioning Framework, helping founders raise millions and build resilience on their journeys. Welcome to the Maker-Manager Money Podcast, Mo.
Mo Ahmed: Hey, Kyle. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: So where are you dialing in from?
Mo Ahmed: So I'm in Seattle right now. I would say the gloomy, rainy Seattle. And I've been here for around 15 years now. Microsoft actually brought me in. And since then, I've been just, you know, moving from one company to another until I built my own startup. Great summertime, but as many, many people know, it's gloomy and rainy most of the winter. So, you know, I got used to that.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: So I wanted to start our conversation with the entrepreneurial conditioning framework. I mentioned it in your introduction. Can you explain what it is and how you developed it?
Mo Ahmed: Yeah, absolutely. It comes from my own experience. Maybe a bit of a background about myself for your audience. So I'm an engineer by education and most of my career. I did software engineering, I did product management, and I worked at big companies and did my PhD in computer science. And I had the intrapreneurial bug early on. There's an interesting story behind that. Actually, when I was doing my PhD, I went to one of those business classes. We were just relocated because there was something happening in our computer science class. And I found a small piece of paper saying that there is an opportunity for internship during summertime for something called the Innovation Accelerator. And this is a program between the University of Connecticut, my university, and the state of Connecticut, where they bring graduate students to work with entrepreneurs to help them in their go-to-market. I said, yeah, why not? Because they said it's going to be a good pay. It was my first year, and I needed a car badly. That was just my main motivation back then. I applied. I got accepted. And I loved the program. I worked with the entrepreneur who was back then trying to get their company into the market. And they depended on us as graduate students to help them in that. Towards the end of the program, I told the professor who was sponsoring the program, Luke, look, if next year I'm not working at Microsoft or Google, I'm going to come and work for you. because I love the experience so much. And he looked at me and he said, you know, why go and work at Microsoft and Google? Why don't you just go and build one? And that struck the chord. And I said, why not? Maybe I should think about that. And I took actually a couple of business graduate courses with him. I was allowed to do that and audited a couple of courses. And I've fallen in love into entrepreneurship. So I had that in mind, even though after graduation, I worked with Microsoft and I did a lot of research, deep research in computer science, but I wanted, I had this in the back of my mind is to be an entrepreneur at a certain point. Anyways, around eight, nine years ago, I decided to make a job. And prior to that, I read a lot about entrepreneurship and business, and I tried to educate myself as much as I can. When I started my company full-time and raised fund, I kept making mistakes, one mistake after the other, one mistake after the other. When I look at them and around midway, two years into the journey, I was telling myself everything that I studied and everyone warned me not to do, I was doing. I was making all the mistakes. And I was asking myself, why is that? And that actually made me start the journey of figuring out that framework that we're about to talk about. Because in a nutshell, I realized that I was not in balance. I did not really have the right mindset. Yes, you can know a lot about marketing and sales and how to do the fundraising. But if you are not in the right mindset, You're going to have the wrong perspective. You're going to make wrong decisions and end up making all those wrong mistakes. So I decided to build a framework around how do I build the entrepreneur? How do I basically make sure that the entrepreneur has the strength and the mindset and the right perspective to go through all those experiences in the most efficient and effective way? That's why actually the name of the book, The Inside Out Entrepreneur, because I believe it all starts from inside. And we can talk more about that, but that's in a nutshell, my story behind that framework.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: Okay. And since the podcast is called Maker Manager Money, I wanted to ask you, are you more of a maker or manager, or are you one of those rare entrepreneurs who is really good at both?
Mo Ahmed: You have to do both, right? An entrepreneur, they just get that spark in their mind about an idea or a problem that they want to fix and leave an impact behind them. That's when you become a maker. Now, when you start building a company, bring in resources, bring in people, now you have to have a mix of being a maker and a manager. You know, combine the innovation with the excellence of execution. And I would say, I would give these two words a different name, innovation and execution. And these need to go hand in hand together. You can have the best idea in the world and with a lousy execution, you're going to go nowhere. You're almost not going to fly off the ground. You can have a flawless execution. but you're not really flexible enough to think in an innovative way to fix your problems and have a different perspective of everything around you, you're going to go in circles. Yeah, perfect circles, but they're not going to take you anywhere.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: Okay, that makes sense. I know a lot of entrepreneurs start out as makers and they're making something and whether product development or something like that, and then they have to take over the reins of management. And sometimes that's a struggle to move into kind of more of a management than innovation. I know you were in product development for years, and I think that's what you did at Microsoft as well. Was there a transition for you? Was it difficult to move from being a maker to a manager?
Mo Ahmed: Oh yeah, absolutely. That's, I would say this is the number one reason that a lot of technical entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs who are coming from a product background would fail actually after that, because they have a product mindset. And one thing that they also have in mind, they come from an environment that is completely different from the startup environment. In big corporations, it's a safe environment in many ways. You have almost infinite resources. You have people around you. You have the encouragement. You have a lot of things that would help you out. And also, it has its own physics, if you will. In big companies, it's OK to wait for one, two, three years and invest in a product until you see the results of that. In startups, no. It's a matter of month because you do not have that much of a runway anyways. So a lot of entrepreneurs, when they start, they build the product and they think that I can build it similarly to what I did at Microsoft or at whatever the big companies that they're working at. And that's also one of the problems or the traps that I personally fall into. I had the product mentality only, but I missed basically a point on building a business. And this is very important. And I missed also the definition, the true definition of a startup at the beginning. I was getting into it to build a company. Yes, this is okay, but you need to think of yourself that there is a very important point that you need to cross, or I would say barrier that you have to cross before you become a full company, which is the product market fit. Prior to the product market fit, the way that I would define a company, you're just a team or a bunch of people, you know, gathered together with very limited resources, very limited time to do what? To just search for a business. That's it. So you keep iterating on ideas and you keep iterating on business models and you keep iterating on different ways to reach your customers in the market over and over and over and over again, very, very quickly until you reach the product market fit. Once you reach the product market fit, now it's time for you to scale whatever you built or whatever you learned. And it's now for you to perfect it and hire people who are specialized in those areas that will make your product now scalable, whether nationally or internationally. So that's really important for entrepreneurs to have that perspective. And again, this is part of the mindset. I work with entrepreneurs. through my Boundless Founder community. And I usually start by giving them that overview. What stages are you going to go through? At the beginning, you're not a company. You're just a team, a skunk team. You're just working on finding that product market fit. And then after that, when you reach it, you can now start thinking of systems and company. It's hard because I know lots of entrepreneurs, they come from big companies, back to the original point, and they want to feel, they want to anchor themselves to yet another company. They feel lost if they don't, you know, anchor themselves to a real company, which they're building. And that makes them even, you know, fall into that trap more frequently.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: So how did you learn to build a business once you found a product market fit? Was it just trial and error or did you have mentors or books that you read?
Mo Ahmed: For me, definitely I had lots of mistakes. I made lots of mistakes, lots of trial and error. When I looked at other entrepreneurs, I realized it's almost the same for everyone, but It doesn't have to be this way. I believe that there is actually a better way to do that. And that's why, and I talk about this a lot in the book, in your journey as an entrepreneur, you need to have three roles in your life. The first one is a mentor. And a mentor is not a business advisor. A mentor is someone who would challenge your mindset. What are the fundamentals that you have in your mind that do not match the journey or do not match the stage of the journey. Like what we discussed right now, you think that you're building a company at the beginning, but no, actually you're searching for the PMF or the product market fit. And that requires a different way of thinking. So the mentor would challenge you on that. And that would be a person that you would be vulnerable in front of, intellectually and emotionally vulnerable in front of them. because you need to tell them what is going on inside you so that they challenge you from that perspective. The second role is the advisor. And the advisor is someone who is a few steps ahead of you in business in general. And their main role is to show you around the corner, just to tell you what's around the corner. If you want to fundraise from a VC, for example, you need to build a relationship, and it will take you six months. You cannot do it, let's say, the brute force way and blast them with emails. He's someone who already went through those steps multiple times, or at least once, and would tell you, this is how you should do it. And the last rule, and this is really important, and maybe I'll explain this in more depth, is the friends and family. Well, everyone would say, well, that's normal. You have to have the friend and family. But no, not any friends. and not the normal way for you to interact with family. When you are in a big corporate, most of your friends and most of your connections are probably the average of what you do. They work at those big companies. But if you're having a problem with your business and your startup, and you go and talk to someone who works at Microsoft or Google or any other company, they never build their own startup. probably they're going to give you the answer from their own experiences and perspective, not necessarily from what you should be thinking about or the right perspective. So you need, as you're building your startup, you need to expand your circle of friends and make sure that you have friends that you can trust who already also have the same mindset and same perspective about life. Because in the corporate world, not necessarily people have the same tendency towards taking risks as you. So if you tell them something for them, it might just look like a problem, a catastrophe. When you go and talk to another entrepreneur friend, they would tell you, yeah, I had this many times. Here's how you deal with it. It's just completely different. And then when it comes to the family, I always tell entrepreneurs, Your family is as special as you, so you need to educate them as well about the journey so that they can support you. You know, my family, my wife contributed a lot to supporting me, and she wouldn't be able to support me unless I tell her this is how the journey should go. This is how it should look like. So for example, I have an entrepreneur who raised money, raised $5 million for his pre-seed, and his wife thought that they became millionaires because she thought, okay, $5 million, this means that we now can just spend, or the company worth now $25 million, we have those. But it doesn't mean that much from a financial perspective, you know, on the personal level, unless you make an exit, which is going to happen six, seven years, 10 years, who knows when this is going to happen and how it's going to happen. So setting the right expectations with your family so that they can support you properly is very important, is key to the success. So that's how I usually, you know, tell entrepreneurs or guide them through you know, through their journey to have the right roles as they move on. And I work with them. Sometimes I work as an advisor, sometimes I work as a mentor to help them out through that journey. And I would say it's an art that you learn over time to mix between these two. Sometimes you stop and pause talking about the business and just talk about you, Mr. Entrepreneur, and what's happening inside you. And sometimes you want to tell them, no, no, no, let's just set this aside, there is a more business, you know, more kind of a critical business item that we need to address together. This is having that someone with you in the journey, it's a journey, you have to have someone with you, it's gonna feel lonely, sometimes, but it doesn't have to be always, you know, lonely.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: Okay, I really like the, the three different types of people you need, as an entrepreneur, that makes a lot of sense. Let's talk about your book, The Inside Out Entrepreneur, Become the Entrepreneur You Were Born to Be, what gave you the idea that you should put down in words these different ideas you had about entrepreneurship?
Mo Ahmed: It's the experience. One day, actually, so as I mentioned at the beginning, almost the first two years, I was making mistakes over and over and over again. And one day, I was not able to get out of the bed. It was just a complete physical and mental shutdown for me. And that's because, you know, everything that I was doing wrong caught up on me right now at that point. You know, loss of stress, loss of sleep is nice. And then I decided to stop and wait, you know, or at least think more about what is going on. I spent almost a week at home doing nothing, even, you know, my employees were calling me, my co-founder was calling me and I told him, look, I just need some time to take a break. And at that That was a moment actually that changed everything for me. I said, look, it's painful. It's very, very painful. And it could lead to really severe consequences on my health, my family, and everything around me. And that was the rock bottom for me, even though, by the way, the business was doing OK back then. But for me as an entrepreneur, it was a rock bottom. I said, OK, that needs to be fixed. But is it only me? Or is it everyone else? Or many others are facing that. I started talking with other entrepreneurs and some VCs who opened up also with me, who are also entrepreneurs by themselves. And I realized it's actually a prevailing issue. Almost most entrepreneurs or all entrepreneurs go through that. Now the journey is hard, but the question is, can we make it a rewarding journey so that you grow without experiencing such an acute pain in your journey. Then following two years, with the help of mentors and advisors, I was able to go out of that hole. Towards the end of it, I said, you know what? I need to really spread this around because the impact was huge. And I'll share a story or a couple of stories to just tell everyone the difference between having the right mindset versus not. At the beginning of my journey, just a few months into developing our product, we were just ready to demonstrate our product in a big convention to a few prospects and potential customers. Just as I was entering the venue, I got an email from AWS. telling us you owe us $60,000. And I had only $75,000 in the bank and no customers, we just released the product. And when I checked our AWS account a few weeks earlier, we actually had credit with them. They gave us $100,000 credit and we had more than $50,000 remaining. So we burned through $110,000 in just a few weeks. And it was a mistake. It was not something happened in our product that consumed everything in our credits. What happened to me then, I went into a paralysis mode. It took me four weeks to recover from that. And I mean by the recovery here is to go back and respond to the email and try to negotiate with AWS and try to figure out how can we get out of that and figure out also possible income sources or revenue sources for the company so that I can pay this over a year. So I got frozen. I did not have the experience. I did not have the right mindset, and I got frozen. This is when you don't have the right mindset and don't have the proper framework to think about everything that you face in the startup. Now, fast forward four years. We had a company interested in acquiring us. they got access to our source code, bank statements, they interviewed everyone. And we were about to sign the LOI at 6 p.m. that particular day. And this means that it's almost definitive, it's going to happen. Two hours, just two hours before signing, they backed off. And for a very simple reason, someone approached them, gave them a deadline, to acquire them and they had to respond then. So, what happened back then is in less 24 hours, I was able to take that LOI and shop around before actually everyone else knows, even my co-founder did not know that the company backed off. I talked to other companies, I talked to other CEOs and they were interested. So before the end of the week, I was already having a meeting with four other CEOs interested in buying my company. Now you see the difference between the first one and the second one is just the mindset. Even though the second one is more severe and more, you know, consequential on the company. We were about to shut down. Truly, we did not. The company was much bigger. We had 65 employees. We had, you know, a much higher burn rate. You know, a lot of things were happening around us, but yet we were able to get ourselves out of it really quickly. And the difference is just how you look at things and how you respond back. And it all just inside your head. And that's why I said, you know what, this is something, if we're able to spread around and we're able to make entrepreneurs more resilient, more capable of handling those tough situations, we're going to have more and more startups being successful and becoming a billion-dollar companies. Right now, in my point of view, the statistics are just flipped. We have a huge failure rate, more than 95% or 99%, depending on how you look at it. And it should be the other way around. And most of the time, because the entrepreneurs are so vulnerable and not able to really move forward. The entrepreneur is the key to the success of any startup, period.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: I love how you've talked about also in our previous conversations, you know, balance, staying grounded and developing that resilient mindset. What are some of the steps that you recommend for entrepreneurs to develop a resilient mindset and stay grounded and have balance?
Mo Ahmed: Absolutely. There are multiple things that they need to be aware of. Number one, they need to be aware of what kind of mindsets they need to have and how to nurture them. There are six of them, and again, I talk about them in the book, like how do you make sure that you have the abundance mindset, the growth mindset? Some of them we already hear about them, but how do you maintain them and make them ingrained in everyday behavior? That's number one. Okay, if you're able to get there and be conscious of that, the question here is, how do you now make sure that you maintain those mindsets within you? And that's the role of resiliency versus robustness, right? When you have a robust mindset, this means that that mindset is not easy for external events to deform it, to change it to something that is not right. And when we say that you have a resilient mindset, if that happens, if your mindset changes because of a very unexpected and strong event happens or takes place with you, then you can bring it back. So how do you develop that skill is very important. Now, between these two, I mean, having identifying the right mindset and being able to bounce back to the right mindset if something happens, there are lots of tactics and strategies that you can follow. For example, I call it the thought emotion loop is something that you need to be aware of and be able to beat within your head. When something happens to us, let's say a bad event, like the event of the bill that we got from AWS or the email that I got from AWS, something happens. Then the first thing, your subconscious mind triggers emotions and those emotions trigger negative thoughts. And then those negative thoughts actually even catalyze those negative emotions and trigger even more negative emotions. And what happens is, as the entrepreneur go through that loop, they lose the differentiation between what is real and what's in their head. They say, we're going to fail. For example, negative emotions as a result, I'm going to fail. I'm not going to be able to pay that. This is not reality. It's just in your head. The reality when it actually fails, when it actually shut down, it's not. And the problem is when that happens and you get trapped into that loop, you basically just, you cannot move, you cannot act. And that will happen with me. So learning how to break that loop is just one tactic. Asking the five whys is another tactic. There is a lot actually that I talk about in the book. And that's why the book, my book, I do not consider it as a pure, I would say, business book. It focuses on the startup psychology and the psychology of entrepreneurship. And it's not actually separate from the business. It goes hand in hand. So for example, when I work with entrepreneurs on their sales process, how should they build their sales funnel? I work closely with them. I always have the psychology corner. in my writings, in my coaching and consulting, I tell them, okay, you're going to reach out to those customers. This is how you can do it. This is how you can build, you should be building your, uh, your pipeline. But remember when you do that step, this is what is going to happen inside you. And then, you know, as a result of that, you're going to slow down. No, no, no. You should actually, you know, move ahead. ignore those emotions, differentiate between what is real and not real, and move forward. So now they can execute on those programs way more efficiently, especially in their early stages when they don't have teams that they can depend on and they have to do almost everything themselves. So it's not, I wouldn't say there is a silver bullet or there is a very specific steps that if you follow, that you're basically be able to become more resilient. It's a journey. You have to embrace it. The way that for everyone to think about it really properly, think of it as like climbing a mountain. When you are climbing the mountain, if you go and ask any mountaineer, no matter how experienced they are, they will tell you, before I start my journey, I do the conditioning myself. And I have those dimensions that I work on. the physical, the spiritual, the emotional. I even go and talk to my family, make sure that everything is right. And then they equip themselves with the tools so that when they start their journey, those tools become handy and they use them when they face a tough day in their journey. So it's the same thing. This is how I encourage any entrepreneur to think about their journey.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: I love it that your book is so unique in that way that it's not just a bunch of business advice, that it's more coming from the entrepreneurial mindset. So I wanted to ask you about, you know, you've had several exits, successful exits, and I wanted to ask you what the most significant misconception entrepreneurs have about exits.
Mo Ahmed: Oh, there's a lot. So an exit means that you're definitely selling your company. You're now, it's time for you to see the fruits of your work. I would say the number one misconception, a lot of entrepreneurs, when they look at the number, they think you take the whole number as an entrepreneur. The first thing that comes to anyone, if you hear that, oh, okay, this company was sold for a billion dollars. And there are two founders. You think, okay, each founder would take $500 million. No, it's not. There are so many partners. There are so many people. That's number one. Engaged throughout the process. The VCs would take their cut because they supported you at the beginning, their employees and so on. The second thing is not the binary thing. You just hand over, you throw the company over the fence to the buyer, and then you're done. You just clean your hands and you're done. No, actually, you need to spend time to make sure that the company is running properly and so on. And this is the piece where you don't see after the press release. After the press release, there's a lot of work. Entrepreneurs work as hard as they used to be after selling the company. Yes, there is, of course, the pressure of you know, running out of money or the pressure of shutting down, maybe it's not as eminent as it used to be before, but you still have to work really hard to make sure that this acquisition is a success. Now, so that's when you look from outside. Now, taking it back to the psychology of it, this is the hardest part then. When you're an entrepreneur, and this is where the misconception where most of the problems, you know, take place. When you're an entrepreneur, most entrepreneurs, merge their own identity with the identity of the company. They are the company. They are the startup. And as a result of that, when they see their company now melting or integrating within another company, the brand is going away. The uniqueness of the solution is going away. Them being in control is going away. This is one of the hardest moments in the entrepreneur's life. because you're losing control and you feel that your identity, your own identity is now just going away and, you know, just in front of your eyes. And that's one of the hardest, I would say, parts of the journey. You know, you go all the way to the highs of being successful, having a company, someone is interested in it, and then all of a sudden the name goes away. And you have stories behind selecting the name and the logo and the domain name and everything and the employees. all of that now become just part of someone else's daily job. And now it's just you. And that's why this is also part of what I work on with entrepreneurs. And that's actually the last chapter of the book, is how do you separate yourself from your startup? You're much bigger than your startup as an entrepreneur. And you want to make sure that if that happens, you know, the exit happens, you do not go through that stress of, you know, and sometimes some some entrepreneurs get really depressed as a result of that, even though they got millions, right, or they got what they were looking for at the beginning of the journey. But they get into deep depression as a result of that. This is what I would say this is one of the, you know, biggest misconceptions about existing setting your company.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: So what are some of the things you did personally, when you went from, you know, founder Mo with a successful exit to just being Mo.
Mo Ahmed: Yeah, I did two things. I started writing the book. That helped me a lot. And the other thing is actually, uh, started talking to entrepreneurs. Uh, you know, when you see yourself now in others and you see how they're sometimes struggling, you get two things. First of all, I look at myself again, but from outside now. When I see them, you know, when I look and work with an entrepreneur, I say, you're just like me five years ago or 10 years ago. It's not only, I'm not only helping him, he's actually helping me to really rethink again about the, you know, my, you know, my experience. So that helped me a lot and helped me actually to learn. And here's actually the surprise about the whole thing. A lot of people think that you learn most of your lessons about entrepreneurship while doing it. I learned most of my lessons after setting my company because it gave me the time to reflect. I wouldn't, you know, I cannot really deny that. Definitely. I had some low moments again because of that identity thing. But it helped me a lot to see other entrepreneurs and see, okay, you know what, maybe it's time to pass it over to someone else and help them out. At least to make sure that their problems are, the way that I call it, is an upgrade of my own problems, since I'm coming from a software background. I want their problems to be much bigger than mine. And what I mean by that, whatever I went through, they don't go through. They have other problems to go through them that maybe those problems are new to them and to me as well. So that helps a lot. And I encourage any entrepreneur actually to, even if they're now in the middle of their journey, to connect with others who are a bit earlier in their entrepreneurial journey. That will help them a lot. That will give them that perspective and will tell them also where they sit in that whole ecosystem. It's them that really matter, not their company.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: Okay. So when you started talking with other entrepreneurs, is that when you sort of formed the boundless founders community?
Mo Ahmed: Yes. Yeah. That's, that's how, that's, that's how that whole thing started because I wanted to not only have a one-on-one conversation with them. I wanted to encourage them to talk with each other and support each other and give them some sort of an anchor and a framework so that they are able to again, put things in perspective. It's all about perspective. That what really matters is if you have the right perspective, you know, anyone will figure it out, especially entrepreneurs, because they're hustlers and they always iterating over and over ideas again and again.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: Okay. And why did you choose the word boundless?
Mo Ahmed: For a very simple reason, because I believe that anyone has the capacity to become an entrepreneur. And that's number one. Number two, entrepreneurship. is the art of thinking big about anything. And I would say without any boundaries. If there's a problem, we can fix it. If there's something that anyone else need, even if I don't have the resources, I can still help. So hence the word of boundless. And also another thing around that is the nature of being in business. The way that I think about it, boundless is also synonym for infinite. Business is an infinite game. You do it over and over again. There's no winning or losing. There's the most important thing is to stay in the game. Keep doing what you're doing, learning and elevate yourself every day. So that's why I actually fall in love with that name myself. And I decided to name the community this way.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: I love it. So can anyone join this community or is this invite only?
Mo Ahmed: So I, we have a, we have a free version of it. Anyone can join. They're welcome to come over and see our framework, see how it works in general. And then there are certain parts that if you decided to jump into the entrepreneur journey, we'll invite you into those workspaces and we're happy to support you through your journey. Not only myself, but there's also the rest of the community and that's the most important part.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: Okay. So I wanted to ask you, Mo, what was your biggest failure as an entrepreneur and what was your biggest success?
Mo Ahmed: I would say, so let's, let's take a step back. A failure, the way that you would define a failure is accepting things the way they are. That's, that's the definition of a failure. And for me. It was at the beginning when I thought that I will be shutting down my company or just winding it down. I think I was about to really shut down the company. I was just one week away. And what helped me is just something happened by chance. One VC approached me and they said we're interested and they gave me the money. I would say I should have thought about that differently and I could you know, could be in a much better position back then. But I would consider myself, this is a big failure to almost leaving my company to reach that stage and giving up on it. I would say that the biggest success for me so far is just being able to turn things around very quickly, just being an entrepreneur. For me, the biggest success even beyond that is building the community. But being an entrepreneur by myself is being able to grasp that thought emotion loop that we talked about earlier, and being able to really have that control over time on, okay, what is going on inside my head? There's that loop that is about to get started. I need to cut it and stop it right now. Being able to master your mindset and able to master your own point of view about the world, I would say this is one of my biggest takeaway out of that whole experience. Because you know what, the control is an illusion. If you look around you, we do not have control almost over anything around us. Not your kids, no one, nothing. You have very little control over anything around you. It's just an illusion. The only thing that you have control on, if you want to, if you decide to do so, is yourself. How you respond and how you see things. You can change it right now. But anything else, you know, good luck.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: Now, I know you, you worked, uh, you know, for Microsoft and, uh, and you've worked at corporate. What are the, the biggest differences between someone who works at corporate and someone who works at a startup?
Mo Ahmed: I like analogies and examples so that the way that I would visualize it, think of yourself at the club, you know, swimming in a lane pool that is warm. You know, everything is perfect. There's a lifeguard beside you. This is corporate life. Startup life, someone took you out of that pool and threw you in the dark, cold ocean in the middle of the night. And you don't know where's the shore, but you need to stay alive. You need to just survive until you reach the shore. That's corporate life versus startup. It's a big difference because again, in the corporate world, you have your paycheck. I know there are challenges. trying to undermine the challenges of the corporate world. But being in a startup is a completely different mindset. And when someone says, oh, you know what? I just want to be my own manager. That's why I want to go and do my own startup. That's not the right thing to think about, because the dangers around you and the risk that you're going through are just tremendous compared to working in a company. So that's a difference is huge. The difference is huge between just running, you know, working in a corporate versus startup. Now to bring it back a bit to the specifics, you know, in the corporate world, you have pretty well defined goals. You have, you know, the budget is usually being handled beyond you. So you do not really need to worry about, do I have the paycheck, you know, or not. Do I have enough money, you know, to pay others or not. You do not have to care about that. If a project fails in big corporate, it's not the end of the world for the company. So hence, it's not the end of the world for you as well. In the corporate world, you know, when you move from one company to another, it's pretty much like you hit the reset on what you did. So you take all the learnings and, you know, a lot of things maybe are not visible on the other side. But in the startup world, if your company shuts down, everyone would know, right? So you cannot hide it. It's a public data, it's public information. So, you have to be aware of that. In the startup world, you have to care about the opposite of all of that. You have to care about your paycheck, you have to go and raise money, you have to take care of almost everything at the beginning, the logistics, the legalities of founding a company, the accounting, the product development, everything, right? And you're going to find unexpected things just hitting you from almost everywhere. You're going to deal with customers. Some of them are not going to be as friendly as your team in the corporate world. and there's no way to control all of that. So there's stark differences between these two. I'm not saying one is better than the other. They're just two different creatures, two different lifestyles. And you need to be aware of that, of those differences, because if you're not, you're gonna just go to the start of the world, get your heart broken, get some permanent scars and just go back. You don't want to do that. You wanna go to the start of the world, grow, even if you have a plan to go back to the corporate world, you can go back much stronger, much faster, much more capable. You have more information, more experience, and you can run much faster than anyone else in the corporate world. So it's just important to have that in mind.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: I love the analogy. So you've worked with AI and cloud computing for much of your career. What specific AI tools right now and workflows have you adopted?
Mo Ahmed: Definitely, I work with almost, you know, everything that we have now in the market, you know, the big AI players, you know, like Entropic and OpenAI and others. And one important, I would say one important learned lesson for all the entrepreneurs and everyone out there. Do not trust the AI. by just giving them a very simple request. You have to have the right context and right information before you ask any AI model to help you with anything. And by the way, AI definitely can make you 10x, 100x way more productive. There's no doubt about that, but you want it to make it productive in the wrong direction. You're just taking you down into the rabbit hole of trying to figure out how to write an email. Or do you want the AI to really help you figure out big strategies for your company or big initiatives for your company? This is really important. So one of the things that I usually encourage entrepreneurs is learn how to use AI. And learning how to use AI is all about finding your sweet spot and experimenting. So I usually experiment with Let's take data from perplexity, for example, and feed it into Anthropic. And after that, let me take this and do a deep research within OpenAI. And maybe after all of that, let me go back to Anthropic so that now I can write a solid sales campaign or a marketing campaign for my product. I usually do that. I do not use a single tool. I use all those tools together, and I usually have my own workflow. And actually it's part of also the community. We do that in Boundless Founder. We keep sharing the best practices. We keep sharing actually how you can use all those tools together to achieve a certain task or finish a project within your startup.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: Oh, that's really cool. I just have a few personal questions to wrap up our conversation. I've really enjoyed everything we've talked about so far. So what's Mo, what's something most people don't know about you?
Mo Ahmed: I have two degrees, two bachelor degrees. This is something that not many know about me. Back in, I'm from Egypt. And in Egypt, actually, there are two educational systems. There's the public and private. And usually you would apply to both. But if you get accepted in one of them, there's no law that would force you to pull your application from the other system. But my dad told me, why not just keep doing them both? And he promised me a car, a fancy car in return. And, uh, I said, yeah, why not? I'll do it. And I was able to do, uh, do, do two bachelor degrees, actually one in computer science and one in business. And in four years, that's really cool.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: Yeah, that's a lot of work.
Mo Ahmed: Yeah. One day I remember one day I was at that, that unforgettable day. I had four midterms and one single day.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: And then you went on to get a PhD in computer science as well.
Mo Ahmed: Yeah, I did. And my dad, it's all actually my dad. He encouraged me. He always had two questions. When I asked him about something, he would say, is there a book for that? He's a reader. He liked to read a lot. And the second, can we make it bigger? Can we make it 10x bigger? And that actually he is something that profoundly impacted me and made me think the same way. And obviously from the name of our community, Boundless Founder, I said, no, not 10X, we're gonna make it infinite.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: I love it, that's really inspiring. He must have really inspired you to work so hard and achieve your goals. Thank you. All right, so what's the book that you recommend the most to people?
Mo Ahmed: After my book?
Kyle Ariel Knowles: Yeah. I'm sure right now that you've launched your book this year, but, uh, any other books that you recommend?
Mo Ahmed: Absolutely. There, there are multiple, actually, if, um, if you don't mind mentioning some of these that would have definitely entrepreneurs, the first one that. That change how I think about my product and validation, uh, is a book called the mom test. It's a really nice book that would teach entrepreneurs how to differentiate between someone who's lying to you, telling you this is a good product versus someone who is telling you the truth about your product. This is a really great book. I'm also a big fan of Simon Sinek and his books. So, you know, Find Your Why is definitely one of the books that I highly recommend everyone to read. There's also another book by Simon Sinek called The Infinite Game. And that also would change your perspective about business in general. The book talks about How you should be thinking about the business as it's just a continuous game. There's no such a thing called winning or losing. You just keep going. How do you win the market? It's just, you keep staying in the markets, keep staying relevant. This is most important thing for you. We had stories of, you know, countless companies that were listed in, you know, SMB 500, and now they do not exist anymore, right? Do we call those winners? No, the winning at the long term is to stay in the game. So those are the three books that I highly recommend anyone to read. Some of them are focused on just the tactical part, but very impactful for your journey. The other one are just higher level around the strategy that will change your perspective about life and business.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: Excellent. Thank you for the recommendations. I have a quick lightning round of questions for you now, Mo. What's your favorite candy bar?
Mo Ahmed: I don't eat candy.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: Your favorite music artist?
Mo Ahmed: Pink Floyd.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: Favorite cereal?
Mo Ahmed: I don't eat cereal as well.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: Mac or PC? Yeah, Mac. Google or Microsoft?
Mo Ahmed: Google.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: Interesting, coming from Microsoft. Dogs or cats? Cats. And I don't know if you're into musicals or not, but Phantom or Les Mis?
Mo Ahmed: Phantom.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: And the last question I have for you, Mo, and we'll wrap this up. What's the worst thing about being an entrepreneur and what's the best thing?
Mo Ahmed: You're asking tough questions, Kyle. The worst thing about being an entrepreneur is what you have to basically give away to become an entrepreneur. Sometimes you cannot become, you cannot be the friend that you really want to be. And sometimes you have to give away time with your family. That's, I would say, this is the worst thing of being an entrepreneur. And in many cases, you cannot really avoid that. The best thing is definitely the impact that you can leave in others' life. Not by the technology, and this is really important, not by the technology, but by showing them how to become successful in life. and how to look at life with the right perspective. Technology will become boring, will become irrelevant. So a lot of people will say, or entrepreneurs will say, I want to make an impact and build a technology that no one else, you know, built before. Well, you know, guess what? In two years, it's not going to be relevant and no one is going to remember the technology, but they're going to remember your story. They're going to remember how you were an inspiring figure for them to do something great. That's what really matters. And that's, I would say, the best part of being an entrepreneur.
Kyle Ariel Knowles: I love those answers. Thank you so much for being generous with your time, Mo. I've really enjoyed the conversation. Congratulations on launching a new book this year. I'm sure it's going to help several entrepreneurs. And I love the unique approach you've taken, where it's more about mindset than business advice, really. But they do go hand in hand. So thanks again for being on Maker Manager Money.
Mo Ahmed: Thank you very much, Clyde, for having me. It's been a pleasure and thank you for all the great questions, especially the last few ones.
