Welcome to Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM, however, the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul, and blues. My guest today is Mahdi Yahya, Founder and CEO of Ori Industries, an AI compute company building the invisible layer between artificial intelligence and the physical world. And Mahdi's the president of Radiant, the first fully integrated AI infrastructure platform. Having left university after 6 months to launch a data centre networking company, Mahdi returned age 23 to follow a long held passion for theatre, studying drama while also running his business, as you do. Combining tech and the arts, he founded his second business, Room One, working on, amongst other projects, and I've seen this, the Damon Albarn produced musical, ‘Fabulous Wonder.land’. It was fantastic. And with a belief that global infrastructure would need to be newly built, Mahdi launched Ori in 2017, and I'll tell you what Ori means later as well, based on their future vision rather than data and reality and creating the technology before the customers and the market called for it. How brave is that? In February this year, Ori was acquired by asset manager Brookfield Partners and merged into Radiant, with Mahdi accessing a $100 billion AI infrastructure investment programme.
Mahdi Yahya is my Business Shaper. I'm just going to enjoy saying your beautiful name many times until I get it right. You were like, Elliot, at some point, just give up and just say Mahdi.
Mahdi Yahya
Give up.
Elliot Moss
I know, I give up. Thank you. It's great to have you here. Um, founder of Ori and then merged, acquired as it were, um, and this new entity called Radiant. Tell me in your own words the headline what Radiant does. And then I want to ask a bunch of questions because it's, we're in the world of AI, we're in the world of infrastructure, we're in the world of different and brand new. What's it look like?
Mahdi Yahya
Sure. So maybe I'll tell you a bit of a longer story to get to what Radiant actually does and what it is. Everyone in the world interacts with AI through an application or a website and so on. But the real work in AI happens in the background, you know, to deliver these models to, for these models to actually give you answers and operate in the way they operate today, there's a whole infrastructure operation that happens in the background to make them work. Uh, and we work in that area, so Radiant is in that area. And when I talk about infrastructure, I mean there's a software that runs on this infrastructure that makes sure the models are delivered in the right way. There's physical very large-scale servers that actually sit in what we call data centres. And then there is huge amounts of power and energy that is being consumed by these servers to deliver AI for us as we know it today. And these components need to work like in cohesion together so that we can basically deliver AI in the right way. And also they need to constantly evolve and grow from here. And they're very expensive. You know, this infrastructure is extremely expensive. It requires vast amounts of capital and capital to be deployed in the right way so that we can basically keep scaling it from here as AI continues to scale. So Ori specifically started about 8 years ago, founded the company 8 years ago to build first that software layer to run AI across this infrastructure. And as AI started to scale, we started deploying our own servers, our own infrastructure, these high-performance computing servers run AI computational today. So when you ask ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude something, that millisecond when, you know, it's thinking, the answer is actually using one of these servers in the background somewhere to formulate an answer and then send it back to you. So we, we built the software, we built the infrastructure, and as AI started to grow and grow and grow, and the demand is, you know, unprecedented, unprecedented.
Elliot Moss
Hungry for energy.
Mahdi Yahya
Hungry for energy, hungry for compute. You quickly realise that you need capital partners, you need energy partners to scale this. So the four components today to actually make AI work is powered land, data centres, energy, capital, compute, you know, the servers, and then software. So Brookfield had powered land and the capital, as you know, they're one of the largest asset managers in the world. They're one of the best capital deployers in the world and capital allocators in the world. We built the best software in the world and we had the best team in the world to actually build large-scale compute infrastructure.
Elliot Moss
It was a marriage made in heaven.
Mahdi Yahya
Exactly. So merging these four components together basically formed Radiant today. And Radiant is an AI infrastructure company that is building the backbone of, you know, the next era of AI as we see it.
Elliot Moss
That's an excellent explanation of exactly what Radiant is about, and actually, as we all think about AI, it isn't just what's happening in your phone, there's a lot of stuff going behind the scenes. Um, you're Lebanese. You came to Britain 20 years ago.
Mahdi Yahya
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
We worked out mathematically, not using an AI model, but just simply, yeah, good old-fashioned maths. Um, have you been conscious of the fact that you are an immigrant? Has that shaped, do you think, the way you look at life? Or is it something else that's made you a serial founder, that's made you move from the arts to technology so seamlessly and all the other things that we're going to talk about?
Mahdi Yahya
You know, I never thought about it. I never thought of myself as an immigrant. Um, and you know, like there's something in the Lebanese psyche, you know, like you just go somewhere and try and do something.
Elliot Moss
Amazing trading people, I mean, you are everywhere in a fabulous way and renowned for being brilliant with business and making things happen.
Mahdi Yahya
Yeah, I think, I think, um, we have agency is what I call it. Like, you know, we have like a very strong agency to just do things.
Elliot Moss
Why do you think that is?
Mahdi Yahya
I always think about that. I don't know, to be honest. It's ingrained in the society, in the culture, I think, in the psychology, uh, partly it's a survival instinct as well, you know, like, um, I don't remember the country not being in a state of chaos or war throughout my lifetime and before that as well, you know, and not just Lebanon, I mean, the entire region always had chaos and wars and, you know, from the Romans to the Ottomans to the British to now, you know, you know. Uh, so it kind of gets ingrained in psychology, I think, the survival instinct of just doing something.
Elliot Moss
I think I've read about you talking about businesses being at, you know, the truth about businesses is at the edge of chaos. And in a way that is replicating, you know, art and business are kind of all there together. And that in a way you're just used to dealing with that because that is your life.
That's a, that’s a theory that the Netflix founder actually came up with and I really, like that, and I believe in it as well. Like, you always, to operate a successful business, you always need to be operating on the edge of chaos, I think. So it's not very chaotic, but at the same time, it's not regimental, you know?
Elliot Moss
Mm. Yeah, it's not A follows B follows C. There's nothing linear in reality about running a business. And then I think about your mum and your dad, and mum into art, you're into art. Dad, come see the data centre, son. And I read again about the sense of smell of this place. And I remembered my own dad taking me.
Mahdi Yahya
Where did you read that?
Elliot Moss
Ah, you know, I have Stuart. Stuart and I, we read places. He goes to places that most people don't go to. Um, legitimate places, obviously, I hasten to add. Don't worry, Mahdi, it's not the dark web. We haven't used your technology to go deep, but we weren't quite deep. But that sense of, I remember my own dad taking me around chemists when I was a kid. And I remember even now, aged 55, the smell of a chemist. You still remember the smell of a data centre. What is the smell of a data centre when it's at home?
Mahdi Yahya
It smells like metal, metal and rubber, because there's so many cables and so much metal. And it's very cold because it requires, um, cooling systems.
Elliot Moss
Cooling systems, yeah.
Mahdi Yahya
Because the systems there, like the servers and the machines and everything else that sits in there, produces a lot of heat. So cooling is a big part of the data centre. And air cooling. I mean, now we talk about liquid cooling, different forms of cooling. Back then, air cooling was what everyone used, and it's extremely cold.
Elliot Moss
You liked it?
Mahdi Yahya
I loved it.
Elliot Moss
Why?
Mahdi Yahya
I mean, I love science fiction as a kid, I've always loved science fiction. So it is a form of looking into the future type of science fiction environment, you know, and it's not something that a kid gets to see very often, right? So I was lucky that I actually went to a data centre at an early age. And I didn't expect that I'm going to work in data centres, to be honest, when I went there, you know. Now when I'm doing it, I look back at it and say maybe that experience affected me or shaped me in some way. But back then it was just an exciting place to be in, and it's a, it's a different world that not many people get to see and it's a, it’s a utopian place, I'd say. So like, all these machines humming with sounds, and, uh, it's cold, and you see all these cables running across metres and metres and metres and rows and rows and rows of servers. It just gets you thinking, you know.
Elliot Moss
It just gets you thinking. I bet it does. Mahdi Yahya is my business shaper. T here's going to be much more from him. He's the president, Mr President of Radiant, and he was the founder of Ori amongst other things as well. Much more coming up from him shortly. Right now we're going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Innovation Series, which you can find on all the major podcast platforms. Lydia Kellett invites business founders to share their practical advice and industry insights for those of you thinking about starting your very own thing. In this clip, we hear from Tariq Ralph, architect and founder and CEO of Catalogue, a digital work hub aiming to give people a radically simpler way to coordinate work.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast, and you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your favourite podcast platform. My guest today is Mahdi Yaya, Founder and CEO of Ori Industries, an AI compute company building the invisible layer between artificial intelligence and the physical world and Mahdi's the president of Radiant, the first integrated AI infrastructure platform with Brookfield behind it. And you explained incredibly eloquently how that all works and the coming together of everything. So you dropped out of university first time round and then and later on went and studied theatre.
Mahdi Yahya
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
You're in the world of technology. Your mum, I mentioned, I briefly mentioned she was an artist or enjoyed art, and you saw that. Explain to me how you see yourself as a creator and yet you're in the world of tech.
Mahdi Yahya
Um, so I came to London, right? So, and then I thought, I don't think I have the patience to learn coding at university and go and study like computer science and I wasn't that excited about business school. I thought, like, I can learn that through doing and so on. I've always had an appreciation for the arts in general, performing arts and, you know, being in London, it's the theatre capital of the world. So I thought, we'll give it a try. We'll go to drama school, it's not even theatre school, so it was proper drama school. And, you know, it's a way to understand humans for me was going to that because I always look at plays, you know, when you read the play, you're looking at a two-dimensional reality of the characters. When you create a play, then you start creating more dimensions to that. And a lot of work happens in the background to understanding why a character is saying a certain thing, you know, like their internalised drivers and what basically is driving them to do what they're doing and to say what they're saying and how these shape their relationships with the other characters. And I thought that's a really strong view to look under the hood of how humans interact. And, you know, I've always believed that whatever you're doing in life, you know, you need to understand how humans react and why they do what they're doing in order to, you know, achieve what you want to achieve.
Elliot Moss
Yeah. And I can see that side of it. But there's the other side of it, which is the artist in you. And I quote, "You have to do it. You have to create something. It defines you. It fulfils you." So if you're not William Shakespeare writing the play, your Mahdi Yahya and your creating businesses?
Mahdi Yahya
Yeah, that's how I see it. I mean, I see creating businesses is also a form of art. It’s a different medium, but you are, it's a creation, right? And we as humans, we create things, you know, that's what differentiates us from a lot of other species, right?
Elliot Moss
Yeah.
Mahdi Yahya
We get things done, we create things. A lot of times we destroy things as well, but we create a lot of things as well, right? And the form of creation can come in so many different shapes, I think. So even creating a business is a form of creating something or creating…
Elliot Moss
Well, you bring things into the world. So Sama Telecom, you were 20 when you set this business up.
Mahdi Yahya
Yes, yes.
Elliot Moss
Uh, Room One, which I think was the Damon Albarn part, that was part of that.
Mahdi Yahya
Yes.
Elliot Moss
You created that. And now Ori, you create that. This is, there's a lot in you.
Mahdi Yahya
I mean, we have a lot of agency, as I said before, you know.
Elliot Moss
He's smiling. There is a lot of agency for this man.
Mahdi Yahya
Yeah, I think, I mean, I don't know where this comes from, right? Like a lot of people, some people ask you, where does this come from? Where this idea comes from and so on and, and I don't know. I don't think anyone knows. Like, why do people create things and why do people don't create things, right? And I just think it's something you're born with. And there's an internal drive that basically pushes you towards making things happen, I would say. And I don't know where that comes from, to be honest, but I do know it exists and it's constantly been driving me since I was a kid.
Elliot Moss
Obviously, part of the journey of making things, Mahdi, is finding the right people to help you make them. And a few years ago, you made an acquisition of a very small team of 3 people and I'm guessing some of those people are still very…
Mahdi Yahya
They're all still there.
Elliot Moss
They're all still there. Are they part of your senior leadership team? Is it the João? Is it, there was a couple of people I noticed in the…
Mahdi Yahya
João, Gonçalo, and Daniel. They're all part of the leadership team as well in Radiant now.
Elliot Moss
Right. That's what I figured because I was looking at them. I thought, I bet you they're the people. So how do you, what are you looking for? What are you looking for and how do you know when you found it?
Mahdi Yahya
Oh, that's a very hard question, um…
Elliot Moss
I like hard questions.
Mahdi Yahya
Of course. The main thing I've learned over the years is, uh, you look for attitude. That's the only thing that matters when you're working with people, you know. You can have people with the best CVs and the best logos behind them and all the years of experience, but if they don't have the right attitude, all of that doesn't matter within the environment that you're building. Because some people could work better in different environments, other people can work in your environment and so on. So Like when a person does not work out in a company, it's basically they don't work out within a group of people and the stage that company is, and therefore the stage of development this group of people is, the way I see it. So to be successful at building teams, you need to think about all of these variety of different things, whether it's the stage of the group and the development of the group and how advanced this group is, how advanced your company is and what you're building is. And normally the most successful people that scale with that and constantly evolve with this group are the people who have the right attitude towards it.
Elliot Moss
Coupled with the attitude of the people, you as a leader need space. And again, I understand that you have said very early on, I need space to think.
Mahdi Yahya
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
And most businesses are running and everyone's not looking where they're running. They're just running. How have you carved out space? In all of these different endeavours so far?
Mahdi Yahya
Most of the time I try and dedicate mornings for thinking. It's the best time, I think, for me at least, to think.
Elliot Moss
I think your father said the same. Mornings are the time for thinking.
Mahdi Yahya
How did you find that?
Elliot Moss
Mahdi is getting freaked by the powers of Stuart Silver, producer.
Mahdi Yahya
Yeah, so, um, look, again, building a business is just making a series of decisions. And you need to get these decisions right most of the time. If you make a series of wrong decisions, you're going in the wrong direction and things might fall apart. And to make the right decisions, sometimes you make decisions on a gut feeling immediately and you get the right decision as well. But sometimes you need to give that decision some breathing space and some thinking time before you make it as well. And I think with experience, you start basically creating a balance between what can be made based on a gut feeling and what needs a bit more time to think about it before you make that decision so that you can increase the percentage of right decisions you're making over a period of time.
Elliot Moss
And does thinking time for you, Mahdi, does that involve being both solitary and with a few trusted people, or is it purely a solitary thing?
Mahdi Yahya
Purely solitary. Purely solitary. Um, I either go for a run or a walk as well in the morning, or sometimes I just sit and listen to some music as well, some jazz. So yeah.
Elliot Moss
It's like we told you to say that. Final chat coming up with my guest, Mahdi Yahya, and we've got some Donald Byrd for you and him too. That's in just a moment, don't go anywhere. Maybe carry on thinking for a bit.
A lot of what you've done over the years is guessing what the future might hold. I'm not worrying about whether it will or not, but you kind of, you're hedging your sense of thinking, which has delivered the answer to, oh, it's probably over there, has been right so far. Now look forward. Now the next few years, thinking about AI, thinking about the internet, thinking about that, what does it look like from your perspective? Best guess.
Mahdi Yahya
So with AI, I truly believe that intelligence is becoming infrastructure. The same way as electricity is infrastructure, waterworks are infrastructure.
Elliot Moss
So it's on tap?
Mahdi Yahya
Yeah, in a way it's on tap. And the way we produce AI today, we are basically converting energy into intelligence. You have these large compute machines and data centres that are consuming a lot of energy and they're spitting intelligence on the other end, basically. So I believe like the next iteration or the next evolution that is going to happen over the next few years is in the energy sector. How do we deliver energy? How do we deliver power? How do we consume it? How do we build it? How we distribute it as well. There's a lot of people working in that space. I think there's still a lot of work to be done in that space.
Elliot Moss
In climate-friendly ways as well, right? I mean, there must be a renewable element to this.
Mahdi Yahya
Of course, of course.
Elliot Moss
Significantly important.
Mahdi Yahya
I mean, when I talk about power, I'm talking about the envelope of power in general, like energy in general. So that includes renewable and everything else. But even renewable is still, is, is not what we, the shape renewable is today is not what we're going to have in the future, I would say. And I think most energy is going to become renewable. But the way we deliver power and energy to our civilization today is going to change a lot, I would say. And there's a lot of room for innovation there. And that's something excites me at the moment.
Elliot Moss
And in the room for innovation there, young humans coming up into the world, you know, our children in 20 years, our children in 10 years, what are they going to need to be good at, in your opinion?
Mahdi Yahya
You know, I think about this a lot because I lived in a time before the internet. We lived in a time before the internet, right? So the access to information we had was so different, than it is today. And then you have people who were born in the internet age, and they're used to a different form of access to information. And now we have people born in the AI age. So there's people who will not know the world without AI. And the thing about AI is that it kind of creates a uniform layer of intelligence over everyone, I feel. And in a way, it kind of removes individuality from us as humans. So, you know, the thing that I think about the most is how do you keep individuality? How do you create individual humans, you know, and people who deep down know who they are and can actually create things? Because if everything is uniform, then the act of creation changes a lot, I would say. So how would writers be in the future, right? Today everyone uses AI to write things, and that's a uniform way of writing things now because it basically writes it in the same way for everyone else.
Elliot Moss
Mm.
Mahdi Yahya
If Shakespeare or T S Eliot or Hemingway or anyone was born today, would they be these writers or not? And how would we get the same type of people moving forward with the access to AI?
Elliot Moss
And for you personally, I mean, I look back at your working life, Mahdi, and I go success after success after success and obviously…
Mahdi Yahya
Well, it wasn't all success, right?
Elliot Moss
The straight line everything is easy when you just look at it from, you know, 20 years later or whatever and I'm sure it wasn't quite like that. For you personally in the world of business, what's the number one challenge in the context of everything you've just said?
Mahdi Yahya
The challenge has always been the same from day one, is to find the right people to work with and it still is today, I would say. And that's the number one challenge for everyone, is to get the most intelligent and the most, uh, driven people to work with you and to have them on your team or be part of their team.
Elliot Moss
Good luck working and finding those people, I'm sure you will. It's been fabulous talking to you. Just before I let you go back into the metaphorical data centre, the cold metal meets, what was it you said? Metal meets?
Mahdi Yahya
Rubber.
Elliot Moss
Rubber. The smell of metal and rubber. Just before I let you disappear over into that world again, um, what's your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Mahdi Yahya
The Moon Song by Pat Metheny. It has one of the best double bass solos, I think, out there. And I love the sound of double bass and the thing with the double bass is that it's always in the background, but it kind of makes sure everything is ticking properly, you know? And many people don't notice it, like, you need to focus really hard to notice where the double bass is. And, you know, in a way, I always feel my job is like a double bass, you know, because I'm always basically making sure the rhythm is correct. And while we're on the edge of chaos, we're also moving forward and actually operating together in the right way. You know, all the teams operating together and creating the right environment. And it has, I mean, I love the sound of the double bass in general so this piece basically portrays that because you have the guitars and the different instruments in, and then they give some time to the double bass to come to the front and say a few words and then go back to leading basically the rhythm of the band. You know, so it's a beautiful story, that piece, the way it's weaved.
Elliot Moss
The Moon Song from Pat Metheny with Charlie Hayden, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Mahdi Yahya. And I hope you could hear the double bass there pulling the whole thing together. He talked about so many things that were important. He talked about agency and talked about the art of creation and how both are his internal drivers for making things happen. You look for attitude, critical when you're thinking about business and founding businesses that operate at the edge of chaos, as he said, and finding those people that can deal with that and indeed flourish in that environment. And in simple terms, he talked about businesses being a series of decisions and the role of thinking in that is absolutely critical. And he talked about how important it is to find the space to do that. Really brilliant stuff. That's it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds of more guests available for you to listen to in our archive. To find out more just search ‘Jazz Shapers’ in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.