Building With Mahmoud Khedr:

Lessons On Building A Business Through Event Planning, Mental Health Education, And Social Impact

Mahmoud Khedr was born under the scorching hot Egyptian sun in 1996. He spent the first decade of his life moving between Saudi Arabia and Jordan. 

Mahmoud’s father had been the first member of the family to leave Egypt and get a job in another country. Coming from a family of farmers, the economic prospects for them were limited. Mahmoud’s father was the first in the family to get an education and this allowed the family to travel to new nations and experience new cultures. Mahmoud’s family had a more comfortable lifestyle financially when they were living in the Middle East. After moving to the United States, adding to more kids into the family, their struggles multiplied exponentially as his parent’s income remained the same.

His family grew from a total of nine people when they arrived in America to eleven in a span of two years. Mahmoud was accustomed to getting an allowance that meant something back in the Middle East, but it converted into only a dollar every few days in the States. He saw that a lot of his friends had enough money to buy lunch while he didn’t. Because of this, Mahmoud decided to save all the money he got and only spent them when his family took him to a discount store called DollarTree.

He was fascinated by the fact that a lot of the items in the store only cost a dollar and a lot of his favorite snacks were packaged in bulk. Purely by accident, Mahmoud started reselling airheads candy to his friends. His friends asked him how did he get so much candy and he saw an opportunity to flip his money. This gave him a sense of financial freedom, turning a dollar into five, ten, and more. He recalls this as his first entrepreneurial experience.

During his last year of high school, Mahmoud was introduced to Virtual Enterprise International, an educational nonprofit that hosts a business simulation program. After his regular classes, Mahmoud was tasked to learn how to develop a business idea, build a prototype, and then virtually sell it to a simulated market. This exposed Mahmoud’s mind to the possibilities of starting his own business and how it could be practically done. The program helped him fall in love with the idea of creating and running his own business. 

In the summer after he had graduated high school, he returned to Egypt on vacation with his family. Unfortunately, his father had lost his passport. Due to the long process of getting a new passport, Mahmoud had to forfeit his admission into the University of Albany’s school of business. Upon returning back to the United States, he had to leverage his network to find something to do while applying to a new college.

He reached out to his network at Virtual Enterprise International and after speaking to the executive director, was offered a job as a program associate. At the same time, he was then introduced to an alumnus of the VEI program who was running a startup. The startup, called Linute, was promoting an anonymous social media platform, specifically for college students (the company eventually changed its name to Tapt). Mahmoud decided to volunteer for the team during his gap between high school and college while working for VEI.

Juggling two jobs, Mahmoud helped Tapt get $23,000 in funding through Kickstarter. Impressively enough, he had worked with the team for a year and a half, mainly volunteering until the end of his experience thereafter becoming their marketing director. All of this work was done because he wanted to acquire the experience of working in a startup.

Volunteering as a gateway to gaining valuable work experience was Mahmoud’s main tactic for growing. He wanted to learn from the founders of the startup. His ultimate goal was to take the experience and use it to start his own company. The unexpected benefit from his year and half of volunteering for the startup was that it lead to five more internship opportunities when he started college.

Mahmoud also believes that an alternative to volunteering is simply using skill training platforms online. Using websites like Skillshare, Udemy, or Coursera and other free platforms can be a great way for college students to get valuable experience that can make them competitive after graduating.

Mahmoud had already acquired valuable work experience before even starting college. Being hopeful after losing his opportunity to go to the University of Albany, Mahmoud applied to other business colleges. He was denied multiple times, six times by Baruch college, going through three application cycles before enrolling at the City College of New York (CCNY). 

Even though he did not get into the college of his choice, Mahmoud saw that he could make an impact where he was. Since there was no business program at the college, Mahmoud decided to help create and nurture an ecosystem for entrepreneurship inside the school. There was already an organization that was raising capital for startup ideas developed at the school but, Mahmoud wanted to spread the idea of entrepreneurship to the entire student body. At the time, there was a general lack of interest in entrepreneurship.

Alongside a team of other aspiring students, he created the Entrepreneurship Student Club of CCNY. The mission was to become the interdisciplinary force of collaboration and innovation at the college. The primary method they used to do this was through hosting events.

His club was able to get business owners such as Gary Vaynerchuk and John Henry to speak at CCNY. They were able to accomplish this by simply being creative and persistent. It took Mahmoud over a year contacting Gary on Twitter before he came to speak at an event. High profile speakers get bombarded with speaking requests and invitations every month, so the best approach for Mahmoud was to show them that he really wanted the speakers to attend. This was done by Mahmoud’s ability to plan out and schedule an event as far in advance as possible. He was also respectful of a speaker’s time and remained flexible so that they took him and the entrepreneurship club seriously.

Another way to get a high profile speaker’s attention is to go to events they are already attending. Mahmoud used this tactic multiple times. He told event organizers that he was a college student so that he could gain their attention and sympathy. He would go to the event’s website, find out who were the organizers, and he would offer to market and volunteer at the event. He also wasn’t afraid to follow-up relentlessly until he got a response, often emailing, tweeting, and direct-messaging the same person. This strategy helped him get free conference tickets at multiple events while he was still in college. He made sure that financial barriers didn’t stop him from attending any conference he wanted to attend.

Mahmoud’s process for creating a successful event always began with three questions: “What do you want the audience to feel? What do you want the audience to learn? What do you want them to use in their lives afterward?” Answering these questions with the help of his team was always the first step in planning a good event. Mahmoud learned that these questions helped his team pick the right speakers, create the best setting for the event, and get students to actually attend them. It also helped them identify whom they needed to partner with—a lot of the club’s initial failures were due to a lack of partnerships and prior planning. 

One essential lesson Mahmoud learned from event planning is to always assume that the lowest amount of people invited will show up. As an example, if a hundred people said they will come to an event and the actual attendance was estimated to be forty people, the number of reservations had to be higher than two hundred. Using this as a reference point helped to increase event attendance over time. Before graduating, he used his experience managing the entrepreneurship club to move his career prospects forward.

Mahmoud did more internships aside from event hosting and even tried creating a food delivery app. After that idea failed, he vowed that he would only create a business based on a problem that he deeply cared about, aligned with his personal mission, and had a high potential for learning and growth. He later summarized his general mission as: "To end people's unnecessary suffering and help them realize their full potential.”

Using the experience of event marketing, planning, and hosting helped Mahmoud to transition to starting his own business called FloraMind. FloraMind is an education company aiming to empower young people to flourish through skill and strength-based mental health education. Mahmoud made this company with his two co-founders that he met in college, Danny Tsoi and Khandker Ahamed.

The team had their own struggles with maintaining their mental health throughout their lives. After conducting research on youth mental health, they were shocked by statistics like One in four young people are diagnosed with a mental illness and fifty percent of mental illnesses start at the age of fourteen [1,2] that made them angry and ultimately spurred them to take action. Their initial idea was to build a chatbot that helped people get more access to therapy. Realizing that there were already apps providing this service, they pivoted to hosting events at high schools. The team discovered that the best approach to tackling the youth mental health crisis was to focus on prevention and early intervention: they do this by educating young people knowledge about mental health and equipping them with the tools and skills necessary to cope with their issues.

Providing mental health education to every young person across the world became their mission. The team doesn’t classify themselves as mental health experts. Instead of calling themselves experts, they create and leverage partnerships with mental health professionals to create workshop content suitable for teenagers.

Although Mahmoud believes in the power of technology, he is very careful with his team’s approach in incorporating technology into FloraMind’s services because of technology’s current use by teenagers. “To support mental health, I think [technology] has to be designed very intentionally and very carefully, if we are going to design something that is going to help the youth.”

When asked why he chose this particular market to get into he wrote to me saying, “I chose to focus on mental health and youth because it's an extremely hard problem and cannot be easily solved by creating a "sexy" app or platform. I think that's where most entrepreneurs get it wrong, especially in the education field. You can't throw technology on everything and expect it to be fixed. The easy thing is creating an app. The harder thing is deeply understanding the problem you are trying to solve and doing things that are initially not scalable. In-person workshops are not very scalable, but they give us deep insights and understanding about the field we're in. We'll be taking that knowledge and insight to build out more scalable models using technology for sure - but we will always have a human and in-person component. Especially because humans are social beings and we need the in-person touch! And it is true that while there are not that many competitors in our particular focus area, it is extremely hard to be innovative and creative with funding models!”

Mahmoud’s entrepreneurial ventures shifted from technology to event hosting because he followed the path of least resistance. Instead of following the trend of creating or joining a tech startup, he went into the less competitive field of mental health education.

What’s helped him the most in his journey so far has been the time he’s spent thinking about what he wants to build for his life and questioning everything he has ever been taught that is labeled as a “truth.” “Why should you do the thing that you’re told to do?” is a question he proposes that we all think about. The need to slow down and not move too fast is another idea that he focuses on. “If you move too fast and focus too much on work, you’ll forget to focus on [your] relationships.” 

His belief is that the best way to start a career isn’t only to collect a list of volunteer positions, internships, and startup gigs. Instead, one should spend time asking themselves what’s the purpose of gaining these positions? 

“Figure out how your culture and the experiences you’ve had with people shaped your identity. How does your culture and experiences affect how you think about yourself?” Answering this will impact the trajectory of your career and it may even shift what your priorities are. It will also help you enjoy the process of creating a career, not just focusing on results and outcomes. 

Mahmoud is focused on his own mental health, something that he’s only become aware of as a result of working on FloraMind. This means taking the time to not seek validation and not rush into things. What he’s trying to do is live the right example before offering advice to others.

He used to believe that happiness came from landing an internship or job at X Company. Now he’s more focused on just the process of creating an impactful company that changes young people's lives. There’s beauty in enjoying the process and not just realizing the visualized idea of what something will be.

If you move too fast and focus too much on work, you’ll forget to focus on what makes you happy.

In the future, Mahmoud’s happiness will lie in his ability to help his family be more financially free and change as many lives as possible. Managing his own mental health better and exercising more are other goals he has. His picture of a great career is one that allows him to establish closer bonds with his family and fundamentally transform industries, businesses, and people -- on a global scale. 

His mission can certainly be adopted by anyone and there’s definitely a lot to learn from his journey. The biggest takeaway being—don’t rush, the dream will be built over time. Just take time to reflect on yourself and don’t only focus work, your mental health is the foundation for any great work that you want to do.

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You can connect with Mahmoud and follow his journey on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter.

Sources:

1. World Health Report: Mental disorders affect one in four people 
2. World Economic Forum: Half of all mental illness begins by the age of 14