This video details Molham Aref's entrepreneurial journey, highlighting his successful exits from two companies, HNC and Retek, and his current venture.
This video details Molham Aref's entrepreneurial journey, highlighting his successful exits from two companies, HNC and Retek, and his current venture, RelationalAI, which has attracted significant funding.
We're telling the story at a high level, but what we skip over in our memories sometimes because we remember the happy endings. We don't remember the torture, the staring at the abyss and the nearly going out of business. And interestingly, in my experience, success is more dangerous to founder dynamics and board dynamics than failure. When you've actually built something and now you have something to lose and people get scared when that happens. Unfortunately, I've lost a couple of friends on this journey because everybody wants to be a startup person and not everybody's really wired for it. In my view, it's grueling and requires comfort with risk. Operating in the fog of war, that's easier to do when you don't have anything. But once you've created something of value, it's like, oh crap, don't want to lose it. All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the dealmaker show. So today we
have a founder a really incredible founder repeated founder a founder that has done it many times very successfully so with great exits you know he's done it on the bootstrapping way on the not bootstrapping way raising money from people just like right now he's doing something amazing you know in the world of AI you know which you know everyone I mean he's been involved with this whole space for a long time before he was even called AI so we're going to be talking about all the good stuff building scaling financing exiting and brace yourself for a very inspiring episode. So without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, Molam Arif. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Alejandro. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. So originally born in Beirut in Lebanon, but you moved quite a bit there, you know, with your family around Switzerland, Egypt, all over the place. How was life
growing up for you? Yeah, I mean, this is what was normal for me. My dad worked for a multinational uh company called Dupont and uh every few years we just have to pick up and move and I think there's something very um valuable about the experience of like being the new person in an environment where you're not quite sure about the culture about the language uh you know this environment sort of changes and uh you learn to listen and observe and to absorb and adapt and really you learn uh about sort of the sort of common thread bads in humanity, right? No one has a monopoly on the on good. No one has a monopoly on bad. And every every culture, every society has its own strengths and uh appealing uh aspects of it. So, well, you you mentioned something very very profound there, learning to adapt and I find that for you having had the chance of moving from one place to another, uh making
friends again, you know, especially at a young age, I'm sure that that shaped you a lot. I'm sure that that has served you very well in your entrepreneurial journey. So I guess how do you think you know like that really made who you are today? I think it's essential. uh I still keep up with friends I made on the journey here and uh even you know the the transition to college and the transition to graduate school and getting into startups and after sort of the the the exit from my most recent startup before this one um I um at the time I had a daughter who was um I don't know eight or nine years old and I wanted the same experience for her so we moved from Atlanta to New York so she could have the experience um of of moving and adapting and we stayed in in New York City for a couple of years and I moved to the Bay Area and uh it's not as international as the experience that I had but it's
still um you know I think it's great for her and and I want it for her. I want it for everybody. I think we all we all do better when we're exposed to uh more things. So So out of all things how did you started getting involved with the whole world of let's say AI back then it was called computational technology. Yeah, computational intelligence was the term we used in the early 90s because there were we were in the middle of an AI winter and AI was seen as like a really bad thing. You we called it uh either computational intelligence or um data mining or database mining. Uh there was also a reemergence of neural networks. So that was allowed to say neural networks. Uh but the last thing you could call it was AI. Uh and so yeah, just basically in business these whether you know you're running a small business or a large business uh but in particular if you're larging uh running a large
business you're deploying hundreds of millions billions of capital to inventory to capital to wireless spectrum um uh uh to uh manufacturing capacity to transportation to labor like all of this sort of all of these decisions can be make or break decisions and you want to make them with the benefit of the best analysis. And over the years, you know, humanity has invented, you know, techniques for doing that. Predictive technologies that help you understand what your customers or what the market might want or prescriptive technology to help you manage logistics. You know, this is the stuff that was invented uh around World War II to help deploy armies and logistics of armies because uh you know, armies win and lose by because they have uh ammunition and food and you know uh manpower and so all of these things are technologies have been developed over the years that we deploy uh that really
can make the difference between a an organization or a business being successful or not. So that's how I got into it. I got into it also sort of just out of curiosity and interest about how to teach computers to make decisions like we do you know how can we recognize uh things in images or how can we understand text or um you know all of that is uh is deeply deeply interesting scientifically and talking about interesting quite interesting too is the shift from AT&T you know after your um you know your your studies at Georgia Tech to uh doing IPOs I mean it's quite a different experience there yeah I really chased my interest. So, you know, when I I I started my first job was with AT&T. I took a summer internship with them to work on computer vision in an advanced um uh development group out of uh Atlanta at the time. I was going to Georgia Tech and really loved the work and at
the end of the summer they offered me a full-time job and uh basically I just I just jumped on it uh because the work was so fascinating. Uh and then after 2 years um it was difficult to commercialize some of that work inside of the bowels of very very large organization and we would sort of take it and demonstrate it to big organizations and they would want it and then we just didn't have the the muscle for uh commercialization. So I left to join a startup that was doing neural networks applying it to fraud detection and uh to supply chain problems and so on. And I really want I just followed my interest in the technology in things that I thought could start approximating human intelligence. Okay. And so big company, small company, small company allowed me to see it commercialized. And you know, sometimes you just get lucky. I joined a company that was doing great technology but also
had a great management team. And um even though I worked in Atlanta at the time, the company was based in San Diego and we went public in 1995. Top 10 IPO. We were in Time magazine. uh the Time magazine that has Mark Andre on the cover and you know when Netscape and Spy Glass and these sort of early internet companies went public, we were in that batch and um very very fortunate to learn about that aspect of uh of the journey and so those you know AI and entrepreneurialism and startups became my my my interests uh professionally. I mean know obviously in this case HNC networks you know then you know RET you know both IPOs uh both opportunities where you were able to experience being one of the first employees to all of a sudden ringing the bell. What are some of the u patterns you know that you can associate from one to another when it comes to uh ingredients that cause success? Yeah,
this is this is I think this is good to know and good for folks to know in general. So in both of those companies, not only did we have really cool capable technology, we had really interesting go to market motions and moes. Okay, with HMC at the time, the breakthrough was helping banks um detect credit card fraud. Uh and so this is we take that for granted now, but in the early 90s um you know, banks were starting to issue lots of credit cards and fraud was a really big problem. And uh developing a a solution that sort of did that really well was very important and that's its own story. But what was also really important is we created a consortium. Every every time we signed a bank as a customer, they entered a consortium that for fraud and they all contributed their fraud data to this consortium. And so we had access to more data and uh we were able to stay ahead of the competition
because our…