Hello and welcome to Business Athletes everyone 👋 

Each week, we’ll explore the athlete-like habits behind a different founder, and provide you with practical tactics that you can quickly apply in your day-to-day.⚡️

This week, I sat down with Mohamed Omar, co-founder of Pera (building Becca), an AI relationship companion built to strengthen the bonds we’re quietly losing in the modern world.

Mohamed story reads like a film: abject poverty in Nairobi, a scholarship to the UK to study at LSE, then a promising career in high-finance at a distressed credit private equity fund in New York.

Then walking away from all of it because the meaning didn’t match the trajectory.

What makes Mohamed unique is the combination of rigor and soul: he thinks like a philosopher, feels like a humanist, and operates like an athlete. 

He sees entrepreneurship as “the business of solving problems,” and he’s obsessed with solving the most human one there is: how we connect.

Let’s get into it. ⚡️

Play A Game That Matters

From Nairobi to New York

I grew up with nothing - like, genuinely nothing - below the poverty line in Nairobi. 

Education was the only light I had. I was lucky enough to be a little smarter than the average kid, and that opened doors. 

I earned a scholarship, moved to the UK, then ended up studying PPE at LSE. From there, life took him to the world of high-finance working at a hedge fund and then at a distressed credit private equity firm in New York at age 23.

If you told my 10-year-old self that, I would’ve bitten your arm off.

But when I actually got there, something felt empty. I had everything; the role, the apartment, the trajectory, the potential to be a millionaire by 30. And yet, I felt nothing.

So I asked myself a question that changed my life: ‘If I keep doing this, is this a win for humanity…or a selfish form of survival?’

Coming from a religious background, that question mattered. And logically, I ran the Naval Ravikant test: Would my 90-year-old self be proud of this?

My answer was no. 

Once An Entrepreneur, Always An Entrepreneur

Then I connected the dots backwards. I’d always been entrepreneurial.

In secondary school, I ran a tuck shop because the school wouldn’t sell what students wanted.

Then at uni during COVID, when everything went online, I needed to make money. I helped students with their exam prep, leveraging what I was good at and trying to get paid for it. 

That’s a bit about me. Once I find a problem I look at all the ways at solving that problem, not matter how unconventional or unexpected. 

I’ve always been drawn to solving problems no one else sees or wants to touch.

When I finally took time off work and journaled seriously, one line came out of me that I still live by: ‘What can I do that makes my eyes smile whenever I do it?’

For me, that wasn’t finance. It was problem-solving. It was building. It was creating something that could genuinely make someone’s life better.

So, becoming an entrepreneur wasn’t a career pivot. It was me returning to who I’ve always been.

Championship Mode

Redefining Human Connection

Our mission at Pera is simple: We want to flip human connection on its head.

Right now the ‘what’ is Becca - an AI that lives where your relationships live. 

She understands your world, your people, and helps you show up better.

• Have you spoken to your mentor recently?

• What did your friend just share?

• Are you looking to find the right cofounder?

• How are your relationships strengthening or weakening over time?

Social media made us hyper-connected but lonelier than ever. One in ten male suicides is tied to loneliness. People can DM anyone but feel unseen.

There’s LinkedIn for networking, CRMs for sales, feeds for broadcasting.

But no system for the most important category in your life: your relationships.

That’s what we’re building. Helping people by surfacing the right moment to care. Increasing people’s surface area for care. 

Becca helps people be the friend, the sibling, the partner they want to be, but their environment doesn’t always let them be.

Lessons From The Field

Philosophy Meets Startups

One of my professors used to say the greatest trick philosophers play is convincing you that logic is perfected. There is no perfect system.

So here’s how I see startups: There’s the science, and then there’s the art.

The science is validating the problem. Talking to people. Understanding the niche. Making sure the pain is real.

The art is everything after that… scaling from 1 → 100 → 1,000 → 1,000,000.

That part is like dancing in a dark room.

Since there's no perfect system, the job isn’t to eliminate ambiguity. It’s to be honest about what you can know, test it, then accept that the rest is improvisation.

When Somethings Goes Wrong (And Something Always Does)

My frame of reference is that things going wrong is the default state.

We’re problem-solvers. So when something breaks, it’s not: ‘We fell off the perfect path.’ There was never a perfect path.

My previous startup failed because of regulatory hurdles. We likely needed three years of runway and we didn’t have it.

Looking back, if we had the mentality we have now of “tweak, pivot, keep going”, maybe things would’ve been different.

With Becca, everything is fluid. Kateryna and I expect things to go wrong.

Launches won’t be perfect. Code won’t behave in production. But none of that is existential. It’s just the next problem to solve.

This is the journey of entrepreneurship. It’s what we signed up for. We might as well have a strong purpose behind it all, and also, just enjoy the journey. 

Training Ground

Few Reps, Perfect Form, No Compromise

I read a lot, genuinely, that’s my default state. I’m not a TV guy.

I’d rather have a book or a long-form podcast because it slows my mind down enough to think clearly.

But the biggest change in my workflow came from being honest with myself.

I had this huge laundry list of things and I kept lying to myself that I’d magically get through it. I’d end the day overwhelmed, with 20 half-finished tasks, and zero flow.

So I stripped it down.

Now I pick one to three things a day, max. And then I obnoxiously focus on them. If it’s not in the top three, it’s noise.

No half-finished important task bleeding into tomorrow because I got seduced by busywork.

When those loops close, momentum compounds.

Recovery Through Activity

I don’t rest in the traditional sense. Reading is a rest. Thinking is rest. Long walks are a rest.

Those moments help me zoom out: Are we still solving the right problem? Are we still aligned with the championship?

Focus is everything, and rest helps me find that focus whenever I need it. 

The Business Athlete Mindset

What does being a ‘Business Athlete’ mean to Mohamed?

Being a Business Athlete means bringing intentional discipline to everything I do; not through brute force, but through clarity of focus.

What does winning the day mean?

Finishing the 1-3 things I committed myself to every day.

Process or Results?

Process. Results are noise in the short term. I can only have pure control over the inputs at all times.

Mind (thinking first) or Body (acting first)?

Mind. I’ve always loved thinking and building frameworks.

Life’s ambition?

To make my 90-year-old self proud, not impressed.

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