·E14

Mahdi Yahya (Ori / Radiant) on Getting Acquired by Brookfield, Building the Backbone of Sovereign AI, and Why Intelligence Is Infrastructure

April 13

52 mins

Episode Description

In this episode, we sit down with Mahdi Yahya, the founder of Ori, which has just been 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 Mahdi took a taxi from Beirut to Damascus during the 2006 war at 19 and what he was chasing when he arrived in London with no degree and no plan.
How an experimental art gallery called Room One became a "financial disaster" but directly led to the founding of Ori through a partnership with Ericsson on 5G use cases.
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.
Why if somebody is a maybe, you fire them, and why experience and logos on a CV are not reliable indicators of exceptional work.
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.

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Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction

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Transcript:

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Follow Jamie Lane on LinkedIn:
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Follow Mahdi Yahya on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mahdi-y/

Check out Radiant:
https://radiant.co/

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