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In this episode, we’re live from London to sit down with Mahdi Yahya, the founder of Wa’ed Ventures-backed Ori, which was recently acquired by Brookfield Asset Management and merged into Radiant, a vertically integrated AI infrastructure company combining power, capital, compute, and software into a single proposition.
Mahdi fled Lebanon during the 2006 war at 19, took a taxi to Damascus, flew to London with no degree, and has spent the last two decades on one of the most unconventional founder journeys I've come across: telecoms, drama school at the Drama Centre London, an experimental art-and-technology gallery that nearly bankrupted him, a partnership with Ericsson that led to edge computing, and eventually eight years building what he calls the genetic code for AI infrastructure.
We cover:
Why Ori spent six years building speculative infrastructure technology before the market existed for it, and what it was like knocking on a thousand doors to find the one investor who said yes.
How ChatGPT turned a use case they were exploring into the use case that justified everything they'd built since 2018.
Why the Brookfield acquisition happened and what Radiant unlocks in terms of capital, power, and global scale that Ori couldn't access on its own.
Why Mahdi believes intelligence is becoming a sovereign asset on par with electricity grids and water systems, and why most countries don't need to build their own foundation model to achieve sovereignty.
Why founders who try to build "the company" too early, hiring heads of HR and finance before product-market fit, are actually making it harder to attract the people they need.
How he closed a $40 million deal in a day and spent six months closing half a million, and why there's no such thing as a set sales cycle in AI infrastructure.
Why the cost of over-investing in AI infrastructure is going to be cheaper than the cost of under-investing.
Timestamps
00:00 – Intro
01:00 – What is Radiant and the Brookfield deal
05:00 – Adding character to "boring" infrastructure
09:00 – Leaving Lebanon at 19: taxi to Damascus
12:00 – Why drama school? Arts meets technology
16:00 – Room One and the path to founding Ori
19:00 – Raising money for speculative tech in the UK
23:00 – The ChatGPT moment and going all in on AI
26:00 – Building the team: right people over best people
31:00 – Hiring for exceptional work over experience
37:00 – Sovereign AI and the Gulf data center push
45:00 – Are we overinvesting in AI infrastructure?
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