Resilience Unravelled - Building Resilient Entrepreneurs with Mohamed Ahmed

[00:00:03] Hi I'm Dr Russell Thackeray and welcome to Resilience Unravelled, a podcast with new ideas, new thoughts and new thinking about resilience. Guests with remarkable stories, products and services that can really power up your own mindset and resilience. You can also go to our site for more information, to ask questions or to access some of our resources at www.resilienceunravelled.com. Let's get started!

[00:00:32] Hi all and welcome back to Resilience Unravelled. As I arrange my hirsute locks into place, I'm delighted to be talking to another hirsute person in front of me. Mohamed Ahmed is sitting in front of me. Mo, good afternoon. Where are you in the world? Mo, Hi Russell. Thank you very much first of all for having me. I'm in Seattle. Oh lovely. Mo, really? Today is sunny Seattle. We're usually gloomy and rainy but today it's sunny. So we're lucky. I love Seattle.

[00:01:02] It's one of my favourite American cities. I didn't realise you were there so that's absolutely fantastic. So that side of America is beautiful isn't it? It's really amazing the difference between San Diego right up to you. It's amazing. Yeah, even though we're in the same time zone but it's definitely an evergreen state. But please don't mention San Diego. I envy those guys. 65 degrees year round. Sunny. You can do surfing even in December. So yeah. But that's the case here in Seattle.

[00:01:31] You said that about the weather. The last time I was in Seattle we did that train ride from Seattle to Vancouver and it was so warm there was a load of nude people who were nude bathing in the sea because the train goes across it. So I didn't ever expect to see that in America. But there you go. You probably did that summertime. There is a saying here in big tech companies Microsoft, Amazon and all those companies are here. Summertime is the high season to hire people.

[00:01:56] Because this is how you can deceive them to come over. Great summer, long days and sunny days. Wintertime is the opposite of that. It's still nice in the wintertime. We have a mild weather. Barely we have any snow but very short days. Yeah, good. Look, we could spend 40 minutes chatting about weather but we shouldn't. So I know I'm a British person. We talk about tea and weather all the time but here's my tea. We've talked about the weather. So Mo tell us a bit about yourself.

[00:02:25] Yeah, absolutely. I'm an American Egyptian engineer. So I came to the United States around 17 years ago for my PhD. Most of my experience and my education is engineering. And I joined Microsoft, joined Amazon and other companies building products and software.

[00:02:45] And then I got the entrepreneurial bug at a certain point and I decided to co-found my own company. And that was a transformation that I experienced by itself. So I went from being an engineer who knows how to build products and I thought that I know how to build a business to now becoming a businessman. And that transition myself had a lot, lots of ups and downs, especially the downs.

[00:03:08] And that actually made me to think differently about how do you live impact in life, which made me write a book and help entrepreneurs. I switched my whole mission from just building products and technologies to actually building entrepreneurs and leaders who are going to build those technologies for the future.

[00:03:28] And here I am. And even though I'm still close to the technology in general, but I work very closely with entrepreneurs, mentoring them, advising them, sometimes investing as well in startup companies. Yeah. Interesting. I guess there's something, isn't there about that mentality of coming from a different country into the States and what, how is being Egyptian?

[00:03:50] Another question I want to ask, which is something about how does being Egyptian give you a difference or a different way of seeing the world or a different way of thinking about life? Yeah, absolutely. That's a really good one. And you're the first one to ask me actually this question. But coming from Egypt, you generally coming from a different country and living into a new place, you probably got come over with some misconceptions and some, some biases that you have from the, from the beginning.

[00:04:20] And then when you come and deal with people here, you realize humans are just the same everywhere. They do the same thing every day. They have the same concerns. They have the same ambitions and dreams. Some countries are luckier than others that they think of problems that are a bit higher level. Some countries, they have to think about everyday grind more often than others. So that's number one. That's the first thing that caught my attention.

[00:04:45] The other thing is, even though the American culture, at least the way that I see it, I saw it from outside, glorifies individualism. It's all about one single person rights and the pursuit of happiness in general. But I realized this country was built by large companies and large teams, and they have to work together. And you have to really blend into those large organizations to build something great.

[00:05:12] And lastly, definitely the entrepreneurial spirit that the U.S. especially has it compared to many other countries. All countries have that, but the U.S. has the largest concentration, I would say. And because it's a capitalist system built on top of equal opportunities and the second chance, that also something that caught my attention. I saw that living in front of me and experienced that every day.

[00:05:36] And that's also one of the things that made me really excited about being in the U.S., learning and growing from the initial position that I came with, just a young engineer with bachelor degree to PhD and then becoming a businessman at the end. So that's also something that I would say not many systems can offer that. Yeah, interesting. I thought you were going to say something about coming to a new country gives you a set of skills and perspectives.

[00:06:07] You have to fight harder. You have sometimes greater barriers in front of you. So you build more resilience because you've got to succeed not in your first culture. In your second culture, you get a different perspective, all that sort of stuff. So it's interesting that you've come up with a different answer to that. So that's fascinating. And also, of course, when you move to becoming an entrepreneur, there's a different mindset again, isn't there? There's a different way of seeing the world, thinking about the world. Arguably, it's interesting some of the things you've said. There are lots of opportunities. That's true, but it's not an equal playing field.

[00:06:34] And, of course, actually the cost of failure is quite low over there compared to some organizations. If you lose out there, everybody loses. And you don't carry the cost of your own failure away. You can easily wipe that off. And I often find that's quite interesting. Entrepreneurs win when they win. And the social fabric of the country loses when the entrepreneur gets it wrong. So that's quite interesting as well. And often labor laws and things are interesting like that.

[00:07:00] Because there's a sort of this myth around the American dream and American entrepreneurialism, which isn't necessarily true. But there are some things which are true, aren't they? And there's this mindset thing about being an entrepreneur is quite fascinating. What do you see as that root of entrepreneurialism? Is it a greed, a hunger, or difference? What would you say? Because we all know it, don't we? But it's really hard to put your finger on it. Yeah, absolutely. Definitely it's not black or white.

[00:07:26] And definitely there is the desire of people that they want to be richer. They want to have an impact. But I would say the deeper cause for all of that is everyone wants to leave an impact. They want their life to be extended beyond their life or existence on this earth. They want to leave some legacy behind them. And now you mentioned a very important thing, which is success and failure. And I think this is what differentiates, I would say, an environment like the Silicon Valley versus in other places.

[00:07:56] In the Silicon Valley, failure is a badge of honor. Or the failure in the traditional sense is a badge of honor. And actually, statistically, in the Bay Area, they're saying if you already built a startup that failed, the second time you build it around, there's 66% more to be successful in the second company. Because as they say, failure is the best feature. And success is a lousy teacher. So this is very important.

[00:08:23] I would say this is also one of the things that I realized and saw in the Silicon Valley. And also, it's important for everyone who is looking at the United States from outside, the United States itself is not equal, is not internally the same. If you fail in the Bay Area, it's okay for you to go and you can go and raise fund again for a second company. And VCs are going to even praise you that you're trying to do it one more time.

[00:08:48] If you go to other places, I don't know, maybe in New York, they're not as receptive to this kind of failures. They will still give you money, but it's not with the same attitude and same openness they would see in the Silicon Valley. So this is really important. And also, maybe one last point about that, is what's being said in the media versus what's on the ground. The media definitely always highlight the extremes, the extreme successes and extreme favors,

[00:09:19] again, to catch the attention of readers and the audience in general. And what is on the ground is a bit different than that. You may find, let's say, two or three founders sitting in a couch, taking a really nice picture, and they would tell you and then use that here's the slide, the 10 slides deck that they used to raise $20 million. And everyone thinks that this is success and it's easy to happen. It's not really that easy. There's a lot of work that's taking place behind it.

[00:09:48] It's important to think about success and failure differently. And based on that, you can now start acting also differently. Your life is going to change because a lot of entrepreneurs, they think that when their first company does not work, they say they shut it down or do not get the exit that they want, that they're done. And now they should just not think again about startup. To the contrary, they're now way more, I would say, educated about the process,

[00:10:17] and they're more likely to be successful the second time. And even if they're not in the second time, it's all about trying over and over. One thing that I really loved from Simon Sinek when he was talking about the business as the infinite game. There is no, it's not like the old games that we used to play when we were young. You would just win and that's it. It's the more realistic games that we see these days. You keep playing. And the most important thing is you keep yourself in the game. The same thing when it comes to business.

[00:10:47] The most important thing for you is to keep playing or keep yourself in the business. And then you progress from one step to another. You just keep upgrading your position, if you will. And this, if you think of it this way, if you have that in your mind, I would say your resilience is, or I would say your ability to be resilient is going to expand. You're going to think of things, I would say, in terms of the bigger picture,

[00:11:14] rather than thinking of just that specific business that I need to go through. No, that's fine. Fail in that, move on, build another one. You're going to be way more successful. Now, that's interesting. Give me lots to think about there. So it's interesting. I guess you're right about that thing, about failure. For me, failure is all about learning. Because if you don't have the learning, then you won't bounce forward. You just bounce back. And often bounce back words as well. So that's quite interesting.

[00:11:40] I also think that's quite interesting what you're saying about success and failure in the Bay Area. Because I just wonder how much that's got to do with the fact that these are major technology investments. Investments. So sometimes there's sort of return from those tech returns. From a portfolio of 20, 30 tech things, you're going to have one unicorn in it that's going to be completely transformed. Whereas in New York, you might be doing auto or more traditional businesses. Not always. It's the thing like film investment as well, isn't it? It's really hard to know what's going to be the hit.

[00:12:10] So you have to invest in the spread of things. But then coming into this entrepreneur thing, it's quite interesting. Because what you're implying here, and I don't think you did say it, but I just want to check what you're saying. You need to have that resilience to keep going, don't you? If you've got an idea, if you fail, you've got to keep selling and selling. And you get this idea that the chutzpah, they're pushing, they're selling, they're getting out there and facing up and such. It's very part of that American culture. Which is odd.

[00:12:37] Because often over here, I'm dealing with scientists who are in early stage investments. The idea of selling is far from that. The idea is they want to sit in a chemistry lab and discover some amino acid. And then somebody else will come along and do that. So it's that thing about being an entrepreneur, isn't it? It's where does that selling thing come through? I wonder if it's more to do with the American psyche than it is to do with, say, over here, where those two things are much more pushed apart. Yeah. Maybe let's start.

[00:13:06] Let's take a step back and talk a bit about resilience. And there's also another quality that I would say an entrepreneur need to have, which is robustness in general. Because I have that engineering background. So I decided to go and just check what's the definition of robustness in engineering and resilience in engineering. And the question that I had in mind, does that apply to our mindset or not? Now, and I talked a lot about that in my book.

[00:13:30] So robustness in engineering, if you're building a bridge and you want to call that bridge as a robust bridge, this means that this bridge can withstand the pressure, the elements, and anything that tries to break it down or deform it. So that's robustness in general. So if you have a robust mindset, this means that you're trying to keep your mindset in the right or you're keeping your mind in the right mindset most of the time. So this is number one.

[00:14:00] Now, what does it mean then to be resilient? That's also really important. From an engineering perspective, a resilient structure is a structure that if that structure faced tremendous pressure, that it deformed its shape one way or another. And then once you release that pressure, that object can go back to its original form. So if you talk about the rubber ball, it's highly resilient because when you compress it, it will deform.

[00:14:30] But once you remove that pressure, it will go back to its original shape. Now, let's map that to the mindset. And what happens with you, and map that again to the sales motion that you talked about. Every time you try to execute on something or make a change in your business, you're going to face undesired events, undesired responses. And those are going to impact your mindset.

[00:14:55] They're either going to change your mindset, let's say, from being positive to maybe negative sometimes. I'm just using simple mindsets here. And sometimes they're going not only to change them, but they might even change them for an extended period of time. So after so many rejections, for example, as you try to sell, you become just negative and sour about your business and your ability to make a change.

[00:15:23] So you lost your robustness and you lost your resilience. Now, that's why when you think about, let's say, selling and doing anything for your business, you always have to have enough, I would say, solid mindset so that you do not get impacted that much.

[00:15:42] And if that happens, I would say, I wouldn't say if, when that happens, because it's going to happen no matter what, which is having a mindset away from the one that you want to be at, you want to make sure that you'll be able to go back. So what does this mean? So for example, if I work with an entrepreneur and they're about to sell their product, they have been developing their product for six months and now they're ready to sell it to the world. We talk a lot about the psychology of sales.

[00:16:12] And I think this is what really differentiates the great entrepreneurs versus an entrepreneur trying to figure it out. A great entrepreneur understand that, look, I'm going to face so many rejections. How can I face those rejections and use them as stepping stones to learn? Rather than an entrepreneur using those rejections as a way to tell themselves internally, oh, okay, my product is not really good. I'm not really a good engineer or product leader. I'm going to quit.

[00:16:42] So that's a big difference. I know in the American culture, it's all about sometime or in a lot of places you may hear fake it until you make it and push through and all of that. I don't believe that this is going to work. I tried it myself and it did not work. Now, so you need to dig into the core of that, which is how do you become a resilient person?

[00:17:04] So managing these two, the robustness and resilience and having that right balance and always trying to think of the problems that you're facing as just another stepping stone for you to learn. It's going to make you stronger over time. It's going to give you the right perspective. That's going to make a huge difference. Okay. Interesting. So I was just thinking as you were chatting there, I was just thinking about the sort of difference between our approaches.

[00:17:32] Because in business psychology, you see, what's really interesting here is I'm agreeing with a lot you're saying, by the way, before you start. But obviously, I don't want to find a point of difference. Otherwise, we just sit and agree with each other, nodding our head at each other. So business psychology took its, what was developed in the 50s and 60s, and it took the words it uses from engineering, from the workplace, which is why in psychology we have words like stress and pressure and resilience and capacity and bounce back and all those sorts of things.

[00:17:59] But, and it's interesting talking to an engineer because I think you'll get this straight away. Okay. The big difference between your model and mine, to which I absolutely agree, everything you've said in engineering is true. But in psychology, the difference is the pressure in engineering is external. And in psychology, the pressure is internal. And that's the difference, isn't it? And that's the difference you're talking about.

[00:18:22] It's the way that we view the world, whether we see something as pressure, how we cope with that pressure, how we make choices about pressure, and how we thrive under that sort of environment. How we reframe, how we use tools and techniques to do that. And so that's the, your ability to be resilient is actually that sort of process. Because everything else that we talk about being pressure is just really expectations and overwork. That's, and that's just part of it as well. So that's where the just push through thing comes through.

[00:18:48] Because actually, if you've got 73 things to do in your inbox, spending more time doing them is going to get you there. It's just one of those things. And actually, some people really love that and some people don't. So, and so I get that. And that's absolutely fine. So it's just making sure that we understand the slight cigarette paper of difference between our two approaches. Because I guess when it comes to some of the things you talk about as your remedies, we might disagree on some of those things. But we'll broadly agree on everything.

[00:19:12] So we're both saying that, I think, that the key attribute a business had is the ability of the leader or the top team or whatever it might be, to be really good at managing their cognitive and mental states. Is that fair? Absolutely. And I think we're even agreeing more here. Because there's usually a lot of entrepreneurs, to your point, they confuse internal versus external pressures and facts.

[00:19:43] There's what's the thought emotion loop. So let's say an event takes place. The first thing that happens is you probably respond emotionally. Because, again, it's against your expectations. You expect the customer to tell you, yes, after all that time that you spent with them. But they tell you, no, we're not going to go with you. So that actually triggers some emotions. And then as a result of that, those emotions might also trigger some negative thoughts. And then those also feed into those emotions. And then you go into that spiral.

[00:20:12] And as a result of that, if you live too much into that loop, you lose a sense of what's real and what's inside your head. So you may, for example, actually, maybe I'll tell a story here that happened with me. In the early stage of my startup, we had initial funding. I spent around four months building the product. And we were going to a conference exactly just one hour before that conference.

[00:20:41] I got an email from Amazon Web Services that we were using for our product. And they told us, you owe us $65,000. And we had only $75,000 in the bank. Now, at that particular moment, it was just the dark moment for me. Especially that was the first test or the first, I would say, stress, major stress that I faced in my business. We built our product for four months. We do not yet have any customers.

[00:21:08] It's going to take us a while to get the first customer and get any revenue. And AWS told us that we need to pay them that amount of money. And I have employees and I have others. And I had only $75,000 in the bank. And that particular moment, lots of thoughts and emotions went inside me. And because I did not yet develop the resilience and robustness that I talked about earlier, it took me almost four weeks to recover from that event.

[00:21:35] And what I mean by a recovery here is to go back to AWS, negotiate with them, figure out a plan. And now let's solve that problem. So that thought emotion loop or that pressure, yes, there is an external pressure or external, I would say, change that happened. But the majority of what crippled me to move was internal. Yeah. Now, fast forward four years after that, another story relevant to this. We were about to be acquired. The company that was about to acquire us, they did all the due diligence.

[00:22:05] They looked at our bank accounts. They interviewed my engineers, everything. And in just two hours before signing that letter of intent, they backed off. Because another company decided to buy them and they had to sign with them really quickly. So they cannot make a material change and bias. Now, that second situation is more, I would say, threatening to the company. The company at that point was much bigger. We were also running out of money because we were distracted by that acquisition.

[00:22:32] But the main difference here, that thought emotion loop that I'm talking about did not take me more than one or two hours. And I broke it. And I decided to take that LOI before anyone else knows that the company backed off. And I shopped around and I talked with different other companies. By the end of the same week, I was meeting four CEOs of four companies interested in buying my company. See, that's the difference.

[00:22:58] It's, as your point, what's inside versus the outside would make a huge difference between how do you make a setback or an undesirable event to something that could be an opportunity for you. And actually in the second, so in the first one, my co-founder knew about it and it was just a big drama for both of us. And the second one, no one actually knew about it until I figured out the solution. Even my co-founder, I did not tell him that the other company backed off because I wanted to really act in a calm and structured way.

[00:23:28] So that's a big difference. Yeah. Interesting. It is interesting. I don't want to get lost in semantics, but what you're describing there in modern world has nothing to do with emotion. So we'll stay out of that one. It's all about neurotransmitters and such like in modern psychology. But it is absolutely the case though, isn't it? That mental state, that experience, that consideration, that actually harnessing your cognitive load, that being able to shuffle cognitively the different problems which are going on with experience is the key.

[00:23:58] But also, and also what you said there was four years have passed and you'd obviously learned a heck of a lot in four years. And I think what's interesting, isn't it? Sometimes when we're working as coaches and such like, all we're doing is giving perspective to say to people who've gone through it maybe the first or second time, someone has been through it five or six times. Yeah, you'll get through this because you just need to do this and this because we just need to get faster, don't we, at this problem? Because resilience is something that can be learned. I don't think people really understand that.

[00:24:28] And I don't define the two things differently as robustness. But both of those things are skills. Both can be learned. And actually, I think sometimes people don't realise there's two ways of learning it. You can learn it in advance, theoretically, and you learn it after the event through reflection. But you also learn it in the moment if you're completely self-aware. And I think that's the problem, isn't it? We don't learn. We don't learn as leaders or managers that idea of how we need to be our own scientific

[00:24:58] experiment and being able to look at ourself. It's interesting, financial literacy is one of the biggest problems that we have as entrepreneurs. But we don't look at ourself in that sort of way. We don't see ourself as a set of balance sheets or profit losses in terms of what we do and how we think and all those different ways of thinking ourself as an asset. It is fascinating how often entrepreneurs burn out because they don't invest in themselves. And you must see that. Yeah, absolutely. You're spot on.

[00:25:25] So there are three roles that any entrepreneur needs in their journey. And usually they confuse them together. So there's the advisor. The advisor is someone who is ahead of you in the business and usually would show you around the corner. They would tell you, look, if you go and talk to this customer and they say that this means that they're going to buy or not buy. And here's how you act. This is an advisor. This is a business advisor. And that's different from the mentor.

[00:25:54] And that's the second one that you need. So the mentor, at least from my experience and the way that I define it, is someone who would challenge your mindset and show you things differently. For example, when I had one of my mentors talking with me through different experiences, he was always asking me a question. I didn't understand at the beginning. He was telling me, do you think you're helping your employees by giving them a job?

[00:26:20] Or do you think that they're helping you by executing on your vision, even if they do not 100% believe in it? Who's helping who? And then when you just try to think about that and look at that same, at your position as a leader from those different angles, it challenges your mindset. And then the last role is having a friend, but not just any friend or a family member who

[00:26:47] did it before, who would understand what does it mean to be an entrepreneur? So with all those three roles, definitely that will help you a lot. And actually, my mentors are the ones, to your point earlier, the ones who made me look at myself in the mirror more often. They are the ones who told me, you're tired, you're exhausted, and you need to take a break. I did not feel that, but they were able to show me that.

[00:27:16] And also one thing, and that was one of the best advices that I got. When I sold my company, I felt, you know what? This is great. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm going to go and build another company right now. My mentor told me, no, just wait. And I thought, okay, I can wait two, three months. He sold me at least one year and prefer two years. Because in that one year, you need to go, first of all, fix some of the things that got broken in between, take care of your health, your family, so many things.

[00:27:46] And also you're going to now learn a lot from these two years. Even though I did not at the beginning buy that, but frankly, in these two years, after selling my company, and I was still working with the company that acquired us, I learned way more than what I learned the prior two years. For a very simple reason. The dust settled down. Reflection. Exactly. And I spent more and more time to think about why did that VC, that certain, that specific

[00:28:15] situation rejected me? Why did it happen? How did that happen here? How did that take place here? And then just reflecting and reflecting made me actually now learn about those situations way more than just being in that grind of the everyday grind of the startup. And actually that's what made me write the book and be convicted about, okay, that I need to write down everything I learned and move it or pass it on to others.

[00:28:45] So yes, that's to your earlier point, learning and reflecting is hard. You need someone from, you need someone looking at the situation from outside. And also you need to give yourself a chance to learn. We usually do not give ourselves a chance to do that. Yeah, it's true. And of course, you just moved into a different business model because you're selling books now in education. So tell us about the book because it's got a really intriguing title, The Inside Out Entrepreneur.

[00:29:13] I'm guessing it's because you want to look at yourself from inside rather than outside or am I off beam there? Absolutely. Being an entrepreneur is definitely starts from within. And you and I were talking before we started recording. It's all about how do you grow with your company? And you're not going to be able to grow. Your company will not grow unless your mindset and you as an entrepreneur grow with it so that

[00:29:38] you can move from just an idea or someone who's building a product demo or MVP to having a seed A, B, C, and then hopefully a public company. So that requires from you to really grow. Now, the whole idea of the book is to make entrepreneurs think differently about their journey. Think of it like mountain climbing. If you go and talk to any mountaineer, before they start their journey, they have to condition

[00:30:06] themselves physically, emotionally, and many different other aspects. The same thing when it comes to becoming an entrepreneur. The fundamental question is, how do you set yourself for success? And how do you condition yourself before you start your journey? Because if you just rush into it and you do not think strategically about yourself and your position in that whole game of being an entrepreneur and being in business, you're

[00:30:36] going to face lots of issues and you're going to cripple and you're going to slow down pretty much what happened to me. I spent five years in that specific startup and I think I could maybe compress my learning in two years if I considered the framework like that. So the book, again, talks about what does it mean to be resilient? What does it mean to have robustness? How do you condition your family with you as well? Because I believe that the family of the entrepreneur, they are as special as him or her.

[00:31:07] Also, how do you condition yourself spiritually? How do you build your own, I would say, branding so that you do not attach yourself to your company? And this is a very important aspect. A lot of entrepreneurs confuse their own identity with their startup identity. So if the startup fails, they think that they failed rather than thinking of it as just a stepping stone to what's next. So also through my personal stories and sharing all of that with them, hopefully that would

[00:31:36] help the readers to realize what there is some stuff that I need to prepare. And maybe just for fun, a quick story. My wife was opposing 100% for me to go and build a startup. And this was part of the fact. And probably a wife would think wisely about the commitments and what we need to do for our kids and so on. So I made an agreement with her and I told her, look, if I have enough saving that would take us two years or more, would you allow me to go and build a company? She said, yes, you have a deal.

[00:32:06] And we had the deal actually for that. And when I had this, basically she said, okay, you have my blessing. You go ahead and do it. I would say this is part of the financial conditioning. This is something also how do you set yourself for success? In the end, the entrepreneur, as much as they're very critical and important for the whole ecosystem of building startups and innovative products. But at the same time, they're the most vulnerable element in that whole process.

[00:32:34] If you think of the VCs, they usually invest in many companies and they know that most of them are going to fail. But the founder only invests in one idea for a significant time of their life. If you think about the financial risk, they stop taking, they leave the comfort of their startup, their corporate or other regular job. And they decide to take almost a no paying job. And sometimes most of the time, actually they pay from their pocket and on so many risks,

[00:33:03] so many hurdles that they have to go through. So that's why they need to really invest in themselves. It's all about investing in yourself. But that has to happen in a methodical way. You have to be strategic about it and have the marathon mindset rather than having the sprint mindset. Because everything around you will tell you to run fast without really telling you which direction you should run into. So that's really important. How do you set your North Star? Yeah.

[00:33:34] No, it's all true. It all sounds like really useful stuff. So call the insider entrepreneur. And where can we get hold of it? So the book definitely is on Amazon or they can go to my actual community website. So I built a community around that called Boundless Founder. And the book actually is the first in a series. So this one handles psychology and talks about how do you prepare yourself, as we mentioned.

[00:33:59] And then there are more books that are coming later this year and next year talking about now timeless strategies to become, I would say, super entrepreneur. How do you become this kind of entrepreneur that would think of critical decisions the proper way? So boundlessfounder.co is the website. And also there is a bonus chapter that they can download for free. There are also some companion, I would say, material for the book, work sheets and guides

[00:34:28] that anyone can download for free to get a sense of what kind of framework the book is discussing. Brilliant. Okay. And if people want to look out for you on social media, where else should we look there? Yes. So my personal website is muhammadfahmed.com and they can find me definitely through the Boundless Founder or they can search me with the same name either on Google, LinkedIn, Twitter. So Muhammad F as in Frank Ahmed. And they will be able to find me.

[00:34:58] And I would love to hear from either someone who is currently an entrepreneur or thinking to be an entrepreneur or just working as a professional in a big company. And they want to change their mindset and think as entrepreneurs within their job. I would love to hear their stories and see if we can, if we can change their mindset and set them for success. Brilliant. Excellent. We'll just, we'll put links in the show notes, obviously, and just particularly the spelling of your name, because it's not a traditional spelling.

[00:35:28] So we'll just make sure that's easy to link to. That's great. So it's, Mo, it's been great. It's been really fascinating talking to you. And I know we could chat a lot longer, but I just need to be a bit more respectful of your time than just drone on for another couple of hours, yattering away. Thank you so much. And Founder.co sounds fascinating. Maybe when we hang up in a couple of seconds, I'll ask you a bit more about that. But thank you for spending time with us today. It's been really brilliant. I really do appreciate it. It's my pleasure, actually, to chat with you, Russell. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you.

[00:36:23] Thank you. Until next time on the next edition of Resilience & Ravels.