Mo Gawdat

Mohammad’s background is as an Engineer, paired with an MBA degree from Maastricht School of Management in the Netherlands.

Mo has a career of 27 years, starting at IBM Egypt as a Systems Engineer before moving to a sales role in the government sector. Moving to the UAE, he joined NCR Abu Dhabi to cover the non-finance sector. He then became acquainted with the consumer goods industry as Regional Manager of BAT. At Microsoft he assumed various roles over a span of seven and a half years, in his last role at Microsoft he headed the Communications Sector across Emerging Markets worldwide.

Mo joined Google in 2007 to start its business in Emerging Markets. Over a period of 6 years, Mo started close to half of Google’s operations worldwide.

In 2013 he moved to Google’s innovation arm, Google X, where he led the business strategy, planning, sales, business development, and partnerships. The business team under Mo’s leadership has designed innovative business models analogous to the disruptive technologies X creates and has created deep partnerships and global deals that enabled X to thrive and build products fit for the real world

Alongside his career, Mo remained a serial entrepreneur who has cofounded more than 20 businesses in fields such as health and fitness, food and beverage and real estate. He served as a board member in several technology, health and fitness and consumer goods companies as well as several government technology and innovation boards in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. He mentors tens of start-ups at any point in time.

Mo Gawdat is the author of “Solve for Happy: Engineering Your Path to Joy” (2017). Dedicated to his son Ali Gawdat who died in 2014, the book outlines methods for managing and preventing disappointment.[3] It draws from a number of different philosophies and religions, although Buddhism, Stoicism and Mindfulness are central tenets.

The book also covers Mo's adherence to monotheism and controversially advocates intelligent design over evolutionary theory, making claims that the time required for random mutations to create complex organisms being too large to be considered a likely cause.

• The man who invented a happiness algorithm — and learnt to cope with his son’s sudden death (The Times - March 28, 2017).
• One man's mathematical formula for happiness (The Independent - April 10, 2017).
• New book uses an engineering approach to find happiness (ABC NEWS - April 10, 2017).
• Google exec seeks the equation for happiness (Channel 4 - April 9, 2017).