Mo Gawdat is the former Chief Business Officer of Google [X] cofounder of Emma.Love; host of the popular podcast, Slo Mo: A Podcast with Mo Gawdat; author of the international bestselling books Solve for Happy, Scary Smart, That Little Voice in Your Head, Unstressable, and Alive; founder of One Billion Happy; and Chief AI Officer of Flight Story.

Mo has an impressive combined tech career of 27 years, starting at IBM Egypt as a Systems Engineer before moving to a sales role in the government sector. Venturing in to the UAE, Mo joined NCR Abu Dhabi to cover the non-finance sector. At Microsoft, he assumed various roles over a span of seven and a half years, eventually heading the Communications Sector across Emerging Markets worldwide.

Mo joined Google in 2007 to kickstart its business in Emerging Markets. He is fascinated by the role that technology plays in empowering people in emerging communities and has dedicated years of his career towards that passion. Over a period of 6 years, Mo started close to half of Google’s operations worldwide.

In 2013, Mo moved to Google’s infamous innovation arm, Google [X], as Chief Business Officer, where he led the business strategy, planning, sales, development and partnerships.

Google [X] does not attempt to achieve incremental improvements in the way the world works, but instead, it tries to develop new technologies that will reinvent the way things are and deliver a radical, ten fold—10X—improvement. This leads to seemingly sci-fis such as: Project Loon, which aims to use high-altitude balloons to provide affordable internet access to the 5 billion people on every square inch of our planet; Project Makani, aiming to revolutionize wind energy generation using autonomous carbon fiber kites; as well as self-driving cars, Google Life Sciences, and many more.

The business team under Mo’s leadership designed innovative business models analogous to the disruptive technologies [X] creates and 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 cofounded more than 20 businesses in fields such as health and fitness, food and beverage, and real estate. He has served as a board member in several technology, health and fitness, and consumer goods companies as well as several government technology and innovation boards across the globe. He mentors tens of start-ups at any point in time.

Through his 12 years of research on the topic of happiness, Mo and his son Ali created an algorithm and a repeatable, well-engineered model to reach a state of uninterrupted happiness, regardless of the circumstances of life. In 2014, this model was put to the ultimate test when Mo lost his son Ali at age 21 to preventable medical error during a simple surgical procedure.

In his attempt to honor Ali and deal with his tragic loss, Mo wrote his international bestselling book, Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy (2017). The book’s happiness equation and its dedication to Ali serve as the pillar for Mo’s personal moonshot: a mission to deliver his happiness message to one billion people around the world (#onebillionhappy). The book became an international bestseller, and his message has reached millions so far.