On the Record with Jama Mohamed, CEO of Sahara Cloud
Hometown: Born in Boston but grew up in the Northern VA/DC Metro area.
Three words to describe yourself: Industrious, thoughtful, opportunistic
Hobbies: Anime fan (one of my businesses is an animation studio); investing (traditional, day trading, and crypto more recently)
Can you talk more about the relationship between hardware and software (co-)development today? Are you seeing software innovation stall out waiting for hardware to catch up?
I wouldn’t say that software is stalling out, but more that the software ecosystem is seeing a lot of rapid growth and innovation, and the hardware ecosystem isn’t keeping up.
There are two sides to hardware: the chips themselves and the products you create with chips. For example, in order to support machine learning these days, new chips have to be created, and we’re seeing a lot of chips with very special purposes. In that sense, hardware is innovating to support software. But, on the other hand, if we look at the process by which people make products with these chips, not much has not changed there in the last several decades. This is where Sahara Cloud focuses—trying to find ways to do physical things more efficiently. Take COVID, for example, we saw people trying to do things in a more agile and remote way, but it’s been hard to do that in the hardware space because, traditionally, developing hardware has been a physical process. It’s hard to virtualize because there’s a lot of custom compute involved. We’re trying to make product development as a whole faster and more efficient, and hardware is the first place we’re starting.
Would you say Sahara Cloud is an AWS for hardware engineers?
That’s actually often how I explain it to less technically-minded people, and this gets back to the conversation of how hardware is changing. Over the past few decades, we’ve seen that hardware has gone from an esoteric, complicated, analog thing to being more digital.
These days, you don’t need the high-level, physics background to understand electrical engineering and build devices. Electronics in general is moving more towards the software space, and, as a result, a lot of the functionality that used to require custom analog circuits is being packed into smaller chips with digital interfaces. This means you can build very application-specific devices that collect, process, and send data to the cloud really easily, and that’s where IoT growth has come from this past decade. You can make billions of simplistic devices with new chip technology,, send them out into the world, and then you can use them to collect data or interface with the real world. Once you realize that the IoT can be this simpler interface, you can do a lot of things for engineering—you move from hardcore engineering to a more hybrid or digital type of engineering.
Building on that, can you talk about digital vs. analog electronics?
Most of the value that today’s devices create is the ability to capture data points and do significant processing on the edge. Datapoint capture used to be done purely in analog, but today’s chips are more integrated, so much of the analog complexity is being packaged up such that the engineers don’t have to deal with it. For example, rather than building out a full power management circuit, integrated battery management chips are encapsulating most of the complexity under the hood and exposing simple digital interfaces. What engineers do really have to deal with is digital stuff, such as connectivity and data models. But regardless of whether you’re dealing with a digital or analog component, however, the real problem is that the process for making and testing those physical devices is still the same—you have to be there and physically do things. Our goal is to move both types of engineering problems fully into the digital domain without sacrificing accuracy—it becomes much easier to solve these problems when the data is in the cloud and you have the option to access remote hardware. If you’re able to leverage a true “AWS for hardware” solution in the cloud, you can complete 90% of your product before turning to the 10% of development that you can’t digitize. For that reason, we’re starting with the digital components first at Sahara Cloud, but from there we do plan to expand to support traditional, analog models, as well.
What would you say you are most excited about for the future of Sahara Cloud?
The single most exciting thing for me is changing the product development paradigm. We’re at this inflection point in which companies are changing their product development processes. It has created an opportunity to rethink how engineering should be done—not “how is engineering performed now” but “what is the most efficient way to perform engineering moving forward?” If we can correctly define that for the future, not only will companies and corporations be able to make things more efficiently, but individuals will become empowered. In 5-10 years, a non-engineer individual should be able to have an idea and build it without an engineering background and without a lab.
You started Sahara Cloud as an MBA student. How do you think this affected your work as a Founder? Do you think it made it more challenging? Or has it been helpful in terms of networks and resources?
While I would certainly say it’s been difficult at times, it was definitely the right thing to do, and I think the company benefited from starting in this position. As a founder, there’s always the risk-reward consideration. But, as an MBA student, I was willing and able to take more risks because the worst-case scenario was not actually going broke and ending up on the streets. Starting the company during my degree allowed me to build on the company without focusing intensely on certain metrics like traction, etc… It also helped me to build out the team, as all the entire current team members are from my program.
Speaking of that, can you tell us the background of how Sahara Cloud was started and how you and your co-founders/fellow MBA students came together?
The idea originally came from my experience as a consultant where I was building products for startups and had identified issues around inefficiency. Towards the start of my MBA, I thought I wanted to get into VC, but I was also really itching to solve this issue, so I decided to build a prototype and see how it went. At some point, as we continued to develop the product, it seemed worthwhile to pursue as a company. In terms of building a team, I knew going into business school that one of the most valuable aspects was going to be the other students. Very early on, I focused my efforts on recruiting teammates by talking about my startup, learning about the backgrounds and experiences of my peers, getting a feel for what people thought of the idea, etc… Over the years, we were able to build up the team that needed to be built.
I know you have some VC experience—how do you think that has impacted your outlook as a Founder?
The major takeaway is understanding what matters in evaluating an opportunity, especially from a non-founder’s point of view. When you’re the founder, you care about money, but there’s a lot of other things you’re considering at the same time. From an investment perspective, ultimately it’s the returns that matter. It’s been extremely helpful to see what matters most from a business standpoint, as well as understand how to evaluate if you’re really doing well. I’ve learned this not only from my VC internships but also from finance classes at business school. I took a lot of classes that were about financial modeling, evaluating deals, etc… and it’s an important lens to have. Founders often ask themselves “what looks good to an investor?” but what really matters in those conversations is “what does a good business look like?” That’s something you don’t necessarily understand if you’re purely inside the company with no broader business experience.
Now that you just passed 2 years as a Founder, is there anything you might have done differently?
They say hindsight is 20:20, but in this case, it’s not so clear cut. A few years ago, a friend of mine asked me how much money I would have by now if I had just gone to work for Google straight out of undergrad. And, while obviously, I would have had a lot more money, I wouldn’t have the skills or the perspective that I have now. I wouldn’t be the person I am now—someone who takes risks. Honestly, I don’t even know if I would have been able to start Sahara Cloud if I had worked at Google for the past 5 or 6 years without all of this experience.
Are there any life lessons you live by?
“Never complain. Never explain. Just get it done”. My dad came here from Somalia in his early 20s with no money. When I was a kid, he was working three jobs to support us, and that was his motto. It kind of goes against the mantra of self-care, but the way I see it, things go right, and things go wrong. Most of the time when things go wrong, it’s not your fault, but it can greatly affect you. At that point, you can either complain and feel sorry for yourself, or you can deal with it. For example, there is great value in fighting for rights and equality, but while doing that, you can’t just stop and only think about all the injustice in the world. You need to do what you need to do while also moving the needle forward. When things go bad, I just figure out how to solve it.
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Jama Mohamed is the CEO of Sahara Cloud and has over a decade of experience in engineering and entrepreneurship. Before entering the MBA program at UCLA, he graduated from Caltech with a degree in Electrical Engineering and had founded multiple startups. Most notably, he founded a successful engineering consulting firm that helps pre-seed and early-stage hardware startups develop products. He also has experience working in VC, having been an associate at both PLG Ventures as well as Techstars LA.
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