Mo Gawdat

Gawdat was born in Egypt, the son of a civil engineer and an English professor. He showed early interest in technology.[3]

Gawdat's background is as an engineer, paired with an MBA degree from Maastricht School of Management in the Netherlands.

He 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 United Arab Emirates, he joined NCR Abu Dhabi to cover the non-finance sector. He then became 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.

Gawdat joined Google in 2007 to start its business in Emerging Markets.

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 Gawdat's leadership has designed innovative business models analogous to the disruptive technologies Google X creates and has created deep partnerships and global deals that enabled Google 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.

Gawdat is the author of Solve for Happy: Engineering Your Path to Joy (2017). Dedicated to his son Ali who died in 2014, the book outlines methods for managing and preventing disappointment.[4] It draws from a number of different philosophies and religions, although Buddhism, Stoicism and mindfulness are central tenets. The book also covers Gawdat'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.

Gawdat is separated from his wife Nibal, whom he met at university. Their daughter is called Aya. Their son Ali died in 2014.[5]

• 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).
• Can this man save the world from artificial intelligence? (The Times, September 29 2021) Mo Gawdat is the Silicon Valley supergeek who believes we face an apocalyptic threat from artificial intelligence.