Obaid Ahmed

In just 7 weeks, we've turned the idea Outhad AI! 🚀 into a revenue-generating startup, thanks to the incredible support from Anthony Swindell and the gener8tor team. 🙌 Join us on December 11th at 6 PM at the gBETA Beloit Showcase as we share our story, talk tech, and showcase how Outhad AI is shaping the #future of e-commerce with AI-powered #recommendations. Learn more about us at 🌐 outhad.com – we can’t wait to see you there! #startup #AI #entrepreneurship #ecommerce #innovation

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𝗡𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗴𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗛𝗶𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗠𝗮𝘇𝗲: 𝗟𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗲𝗱 𝗼𝗻 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮 𝗪𝗶𝗻𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗧𝗲𝗮𝗺 When I first founded FutureIK Technologies, I was excited but also overwhelmed by the task of building a team from scratch. With no prior experience in hiring or leading a software team, I found myself grappling with fundamental questions: How do I evaluate candidates effectively? How can I ensure they have the right skills and fit for our startup culture? In those early days, my approach was simple yet time-consuming. I conducted 10-15 minute calls with each applicant to get a sense of their expertise and suitability. With only a handful of applicants, this method worked well, but as our company grew, so did the number of resumes - skyrocketing from 200-300 to over 8,000. The initial approach quickly became impractical. I soon realized that while skills can often be learned, attitudes are much harder to change. This insight led me to prioritize hiring individuals with the right attitude and a strong willingness to learn. Filtering resumes based on specific skillsets became a crucial step, but even then, I needed to refine my evaluation methods. Psychometric tests emerged as a valuable tool, offering deeper insights into candidates' personalities and fit for our company culture. One of the most significant lessons I learned was the principle: "Hire slowly, and fire quickly." It’s not about the individual being ‘bad’ or ‘good’; it’s about finding the right fit for both the company and the person. Sometimes, the best move for both parties is to part ways and allow each to thrive elsewhere. Building a successful team isn't just about finding skilled individuals; it's about assembling a group with a shared vision and complementary strengths. Each member’s contribution is vital to achieving our collective goals and successfully launching our products. I’d love to hear from others who’ve navigated the hiring process. What strategies have you found effective in building and leading a great team? Let’s share our experiences and insights to help each other grow! #HiringLessons #TeamBuilding #StartupJourney #Leadership #RecruitmentStrategies #FutureIKTechnologies #FutureIK #AstaCMS #Entrepreneurship #HiringTips #TeamSuccess #CompanyCulture

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I recently had the chance to sit down with Bilal Asif's GenieTalks to discuss something every startup founder faces: how to effectively go to market with limited resources and a technical audience. We discussed: ✨ The shift from product development to distribution (marketing!) mindset 🎯 Finding your target audience + the right channels 🧑‍💻 Building a personal brand as an engineer-founder 💸 Marketing strategies on a tight budget 💡 Using content-first approaches to maximize long-term impact Catch a sneak peek below 🎥, and tune in when the full episode drops on Monday! #startups #bootstrapped #marketingtips #contentstrategy #podcast

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Learn how to test Generative AI and the Products/Features built on it. This is an interactive tutorial. Bring your current and possible future testing problems and quesions--and hear others! ❗ Please signup so we can have more folks in this session than in Tariq King's session!! I couldn't bear to lose to him, even superficially, for the first time! Get ready for the future and meet similarly curious folks. Sigup @ https://lnkd.in/gPdTCV7s

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I’m incredibly excited to have delivered a TEDxGPCET talk on a topic that I’m deeply passionate about Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the Visually Disabled. In this talk, I explored how AI is transforming the world for individuals with visual impairments by enabling greater independence and improving access to opportunities in education, employment, and daily life. From voice assistants to smart navigation tools, AI is pushing boundaries, and we’re just scratching the surface of its potential to create a more inclusive world. Some key points I touched on: ✅ The future of AI-driven assistive technology for the visually disabled. ✅ Real-world examples of how AI is empowering visually impaired individuals to live more independent lives. ✅ The need for inclusive innovation as technology continues to evolve. Thank you to the TEDx team for this incredible opportunity, and to everyone who has supported me on this journey. I can’t wait to see how AI will continue to break down barriers and make the world more accessible for all. If you’re interested in learning more, I’d love for you to check out the full talk https://lnkd.in/ddPC6qfE NSRCEL IIT Mandi Catalyst i-Hub Gujarat IIT Mandi iHub and HCi Foundation iCreate Microsoft for Startups Pune International Centre LVPEI Incubator Global Disability Innovation Hub Sarthak Educational Trust AssisTech Foundation (ATF) #TEDx #AI #Accessibility #Inclusion #AIForGood #VisuallyDisabled #Innovation #SuketAminTEDx

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If you missed our Product Management event featuring Hooman Shahidi, Chief Product Officer at SimpliSafe, it is published on VentureFizz today: https://lnkd.in/erAceZWg Hooman is one of the top product leaders in the industry with over twenty years of brand and product management experience spanning the consumer technology and consumer packaged goods sectors. Before joining SimpliSafe, Hooman served as the Vice President of Product Management for iRobot and previously held various roles at Proctor & Gamble. Here are the topics that we cover: * A walk through Hooman's professional background and the products that he's led. * How the product teams are structured at SimpliSafe & the complexity of the business across hardware, software, & services at scale. * Working effectively with cross-functional teams - hardware, software, QA, design, marketing, operations, finance, etc. * How PMs should think about their product roadmap so that you are current with technology trends, but not far behind or too far ahead. * Best practices for getting feedback from consumers. * Biggest opportunity PM’s have when thinking about commercializing products. * Building, leading, and managing a high performing Product Management function. * How will AI change the role of product management? * Career advice for working your way to a CPO position. * And more! #productmanagement #hardware #software

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3 Months of Building RozMarrah: A CTO's Perspective What a wild ride these past three months have been! As RozMarrah's CTO, I've had the privilege of steering our technical journey alongside my incredible partners Ali Sikander and Gul Sher Khan. Here's a glimpse into our engineering adventure: Technical Milestones 💻 • Launched and iterated our MVP three times, each version stronger than the last • Scaled our infrastructure to support 6,000+ users (and growing!) • Currently architecting our secure payment system • Building sophisticated recommendation models to enhance user matching The Engineering Reality Check ⚡ Being a junior-year student CTO comes with its unique challenges. I've had to make some of the toughest calls of my career: • Shelving perfectly good features because our infrastructure wasn't ready yet • Learning to prioritize stability over flashy new features • Managing technical debt while maintaining rapid development But here's what makes it worth it: Working with Ali Sikander and Gul Sher Khan, we've discovered that some of our "limitations" were actually blessings in disguise. Those features we couldn't implement early on? They evolved into even better solutions through user feedback and team collaboration. Our Technical Evolution 📈 • Started with a basic matching system → Now developing AI-powered recommendations • Current WhatsApp-based outreach → Scaled to managing a 10,000-student network and growing • Creating a new model for quicker and easier job posting and rapid connections Yes, we've faced our share of "nos" - from VCs, angel investors, and industry pros. But as an engineering team, we've turned each rejection into a learning opportunity to make our platform more robust. RozMarrah isn't just an app we're building - it's our vision for revolutionizing how Pakistanis handle daily tasks. And from a technical standpoint, we're just warming up. The best code is yet to come! #TechStartup #PakistanTech #StartupEngineering #RozMarrah #CTOLife #StudentFounder #TechInnovation

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How Dr Umair Khan PhD and I raised USD$425K in pre seeds for Sahl AI. (2/3 of the funds were raised from angel investors and operators.) If you would have told the Ammar few years back that you'd be able to close $425,000 in investments with only an idea, story and an LOI, I wouldn't have believed you. The following tactics helped with our fund raising: → Tell a simple and clear story → Practice your story → Land the investors together → Don't react to valuations, let the market decide → Keep the frame in your control → Incentivise existing investors for referrals → Don't waste time with people who won't invest → Close quickly Simple checklist that worked for us. (Note: the above won't work if you don't have the fundamentals down: a high quality team, clear strategy, and a solid understanding of the market.) Will this checklist work for future fund raises? We are planning a fund raise in 3-months, so we'll see 😀. If you are interested to learn what we are building at Sahl AI, and how we are simplifying healthcare, let's talk.

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AI, Problems, Ideation, Experimentation: A workshop today with hands-on AI skills training from Iqbal Ali and me. What was the mission?  👉 Learn core foundational principles and techniques to use AI in a conversational way  👉 Gain this knowledge through practical exercises  👉 Apply this knowledge to your own tasks Why does this help? 🛠 You start by using a chat AI to do specific tasks 🛠 You eventually create a prompting workflow for doing them 🛠 You then turn this into a custom GPT or document 🛠 You build it into your production or back office systems So what did the workshops do? We just lit the touchpaper. By showing people how to use some 'Lego' bricks, they learned to build castles! What about these? ✔️ Two production AI solutions built in 6 & 8 weeks ✔️ Rebuilt experiment backlog to use AI checks and inputs ✔️ Started AB testing language translations and images using AI ✔️"AI has become my business partner and enthusiastic intern, saving vast amounts of time and energy" ✔️“It has changed how we approach things in our experimentation team. We used to rely on it just for crunching numbers and writing reports, but now it's like having a helpful teammate who assists with research and makes it simple to explain our findings to everyone involved.” ✔️"It has tightened up the whole discovery and experimentation process and my team uses it every day. Not only has it prepared us for an AI assisted workflow - it has helped me overhaul the current programme." For teams working on products, there's a clear path we see from being "exposed to tools", to fundamentally rewiring the way people test and change stuff. The way you do research & discovery, explore problems, define them, ideate solutions and construct hypotheses - all are improved in various ways. The biggest findings during and after the workshops can be summarised here: * Increases quality and diversity of ideas * Improves the understanding and definition of problems * Acts against 'solution bias' during ideation * Coaches staff in how to think in a scientific way * Helps people write a decent hypothesis * Improves overall experiment quality and design * Amps up the skill levels of LESS experienced people disproportionately The last is such an interesting point, as is the psychology around how AI ideas are expanding the creativity and solutions teams come up with. We see augmentation here with teams - people are doing mainly the same tasks, just way better and faster now. It also opens up new possibilities - things we could not have dreamed of running experiments on before. More info on cohort, one-one and company workshops coming soon! #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GPT #LLMs #AIDevelopment #MachineLearning #HandsOnAI #AIWorkshops #AITraining #AIInBusiness #Experimentation #Ideation #Innovation #TechWorkshops #AIImplementation #AITransformation #ProductDevelopment #AIResearch #AIAugmentation #Productivity #AIWorkflow #AITools #TechLearning #BusinessGrowth #TechTraining

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There have been more reports and hand wringing lately of people getting serious sticker shock for "serverless" workloads. People have been attracted to the "serverless" dream for quite some time for multiple reasons including both cost && devex. One is the exact opposite of the aforementioned pain -- that is an expected lower bill, however, for anything that is not a toy you will *never* realize these financial gains. Keep in mind many of these serverless providers are built *on top* of the big 3 clouds to begin with. Right now you can get an always-on instance for ~$4/month at most cloud providers which will scale infinitely better than serverless workloads ever will. This is even before you take into account that most most of these clouds have crazy good free tiers to begin with. The second part of this equation is "no servers/no devops". You don't have to use hosted "serverless" offerings to get the same developer experience. You just need an operating system that was built for the cloud. Unikernels offer a 'no ops', 'no servers' approach that remove all the time cost and foot-guns of provisioning servers. They also remove all the security/performance woes that come with using something like containers. Half of these serverless vendors don't even segregate traffic amongst their customers - you can totally just talk to other tenants instances (which is crazy!!) (insert "We Take Security Very Seriously"™ here). Then there is the idea of cloud/vendor lock-in. I can take the exact same app and deploy it to 13 different providers in seconds with unikernels. This is where the hypercloud idea really starts kicking in with unikernels. With unikernels - instead of provisioning servers you just provision apps. While you can configure it to your hearts content you are not managing them and that is a massive difference. You don't have weird limitations like not being able to use ipv6 nor do you have crazy arbitrary limits on requests/second or request timeouts or any nonsense like that. Then there is the idea of "persistence" which most of these serverless offerings don't do out of the box - the cloud-native buzzword which is a euphemism for being able to do something super basic and necessary like run a database (such a shocker that you would need to attach a database to your webserver). Do yourself a favor next and instead of pushing your app out via serverless - start with https://ops.city unikernels instead.

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Solid advice to founders from the co-founder and CEO of Databricks, Ali Ghodsi 👇 Target other startups first. Ali draws on Geoffrey Moore’s book Crossing the Chasm, which identifies five key groups in the tech adoption cycle: 1️⃣ Innovators 2️⃣ Early adopters 3️⃣ Early majority 4️⃣ Late majority 5️⃣ Laggards Ali’s advice is especially relevant for AI-focused founders, given the myriad of risks (security, privacy, explainability, and so on) that come with putting generative AI models into production. It is difficult to target established, traditional companies—the laggards—as an initial market. These large enterprises come with a labyrinth of security requirements, bureaucratic red tape, and drawn-out sales cycles. Beginning with other startups increases the likelihood that a product will be adopted and provides a powerful way to collect early user feedback. Establishing this data flywheel can help an AI startup differentiate their model and iterate their way to product-market fit. Salesforce and Dropbox used this particular playbook. Once you've proven your model with startups, then you can set your sights on enterprise 🚀

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Too often, we get caught up in pursuing perfect outcomes, forgetting that innovation is a journey of trial and error. Check out my full Dialog interview with Mourad Zerroug, CTO at Splash (SplashThat.com): https://lnkd.in/eMgEyBt9

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Part 2 of the webinar. How you can unleash AI in travel. Qasim Gulamhusein Lee Mooney Imran Lakha

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Google spent two years investigating 180 teams, and their findings redefine the traditional notion of a #DreamTeam. Gone are the days when an assembly of top-tier talent – the engineers, MBAs, and PhDs – assuredly meant victory. Google's Project Aristotle led by Abeer Dubey and Julia Rozovsky, dug deep into the intricacies of team dynamics. Their study, involving 200+ interviews and evaluation of 250+ team attributes, crafted a new formula for the ultimate team. Here's what they discovered: 1. #Dependability: Meeting deadlines and living up to expectations is a commitment, not just a trait. 2. #Structure and Clarity: Talent alone doesn't cut it. Clear goals and defined roles streamline chaos into a concerted effort. 3. #Meaning: Work that resonates with personal commitment morphs a job into a passion, a game-changer. 4. #Impact: Teams believing their work creates a positive difference are the game-changers. It's about gazing beyond the desk and at the horizon. 5. #PsychologicalSafety: The final piece to the puzzle. A platform where risk-taking is supported, voicing opinions expected, and questioning is encouraged. Imagine a team that incubates one's authentic self. What steps is your organization taking to nurture these aspects? Are you cultivating an environment where every person feels secure and emboldened to contribute their best? Let's put these findings into play and aim to build not just teams, but super-teams as Aristotle said, "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." So, are you ready to challenge the old norms and redefine your dream team? *** Like what you read? Then click that like button, share this post, and follow me for more insights into #productivity, #strategy, and #leadership.

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My latest episode is about what you need to know about AI!

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AI has cleared the businesse arena from dead bodies. This is a perfect moment to start your next startup and enter a clean field. I love the “maze” methaphor by Garry Tan. Watch the video!

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Excited to share my thoughts around how Almanac is thinking of AI as a force multiplier for agriculture efficiency and precision - with the farmer at the epicenter #digitalagriculture #ai

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