by Ishpreet Khanuja
To be a founder is to be in a state of constant evolution—to consistently reroute while making sure your efforts still align with what you set out to achieve. In a recent Ask A Founder webinar, Talent Samurai founder and Investor Readiness program alumnus, Mehdi Rahman reflects on the lessons he has gathered and implemented over two decades of building innovative talent solutions. His story is both inspiring and insightful, offering valuable advice to all entrepreneurs and leaders.
With seasoned experience in scaling enterprise platforms and cultivating cultures across industries, Rahman has helped shape innovative solutions since his early career days, staffing over 1,400 locations at McDonald’s and spearheading Best Buy’s Canadian expansion soon after. What followed then was a career journey involving senior leadership roles at global powerhouses such as Luxottica, Publicis Health, and the leading children’s entertainment company of Paw Patrol fame, Spin Master.
His passion to help drive transformation led him towards a personal pivot as a startup entrepreneur. Having launched a home services app across 30 North American cities and co-founded Secret Pirates to advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals through a children’s show, Rahman reveals, “These experiences really pushed me to think about work in a different way and how to apply these learnings and make them accessible to small, medium-sized enterprises or to organizations that were striving to be the best of the best. There is a unique and beautiful moment in time right now where so many new technologies are accessible, and a lot of principles are very available to allow people to be successful and grow their business.”
Now, Rahman has set his sights on transforming the future of work with Talent Samurai, a responsible HR platform dedicated to identifying talent potential by eliminating bias and paving the way towards an equitable and efficient talent ecosystem. They are developing an AI-powered platform that streamlines every step of the hiring process and helps enterprise teams quickly fill high-demand roles with ease with research-driven questions optimizing intake and smart interview coordination.
Lesson 1: Your Problem Statement is the Solution
“One of the first lessons I’ve learned as a consistent theme—coming from corporations, then making the transition to the startup world and helping businesses grow and scale—is that the organizations that are making a profit year in, year out, always have a very clear problem statement. They know the problem that they’re looking to attack. They know that there is a market aligned with this problem and that someone is willing to pay at least a dollar to have someone else solve it for them.”
With the uncertainties that come with current sector-wide restructuring in in technology, Rahman believes success follows those who understand the market, the need and their customers well enough to be able to capture and recreate the initial traction that any good idea generates. He states, “The individuals and the teams that have a problem statement defined are able to repeat that over and over again. They have a persona at the centre of the problem and they are looking to serve that person. They have done the research, both qualitative and quantitative, and they have data to back it up.”
Lesson 2: Know Thy Business Plan
It takes enormous passion and hard work to start a new venture, which is why asking the difficult questions when things are finally going well can be challenging. But Rahman champions this process and recommends leaning on large language models (LLMs) to help construct the initial business plan. He also emphasizes the importance of using frameworks that help incorporate insights from the local markets, as opposed to taking a boilerplate approach, stating, “While I had a full-time job, I would work on a business plan on the side. I knew that the business plan was important to me, so I needed to dedicate 45 minutes a day to that. And now with Gen AI and LLMs, what I achieved in a month I could probably achieve in 45 minutes.”
In addition to having fairly good context of the problem your idea seeks to solve, LLMs can help in identifying competitors, optimal marketing channels, and potential partners. He emphasizes, “As you create a story and you understand the different needs and applications of your product, solution or business, know all the people in your network and what they actually do. Some of those friends and family could be early-stage investors. Some of them could help you through the bootstrapping stages of starting your business. Some of them could just be the persona.”
Lesson 3: Recognize What is Urgent and What is Important
When asked about managing time during overlapping projects, Rahman notes how prioritization has always been his superpower. Using the holidays as a time of reflection since his early 20s, he uses Eisenhower’s Matrix as a guide to classify what projects he considers important versus those that are urgent, stating, “I also know that although those things that are urgent are moving other people’s goals forward, it’s important because those are the companies that are paying my bills, so I have to take care of that urgent item, even though it’s not important to me because that’s how I get paid. So, it really is understanding my stakeholders in my life, understanding all the things on my task list, and then really assigning what’s urgent and what’s important.”
Lesson 4: Build Better Teams
Rahman also shared insights about people management. He expressed the importance of surrounding yourself with domain experts and knowing your business and its trajectory well enough to envision the areas where you may need support. But he believes the responsibility of the founder goes beyond being surrounded by the right people, noting, “It’s about making sure that they understand what is expected of them and what to expect of you—establishing clearly the founder-employee relationship. As a leader, that is the burden of leadership—being clear with people and giving them clarity on their roles and deliverables in what can be an agile and uncertain environment at times.”
One must also ask themselves if the employee has enough resources, encouragement and support to perform at their best. Rahman recounts how his time at Best Buy and McDonald’s taught him the importance of celebrating every little win as a team, saying “Celebrate the little wins because they will turn into big wins and the big ones will turn into enormous ones. That’s how we grew across Canada.”
Bonus Lesson: YOU are the founder
There is no cookie-cutter formula for business success but the one thing that’s certain is its unpredictable nature. A founder, forging his/her own path can be a scary, unforgiving and oftentimes lonely endeavour. It can also be equally fulfilling and freeing. As Rahman acknowledges, the founder owns the glory and the burden, and it is imperative they have the strength to define success on their own terms. He expresses, “I have to always remind myself that I’m the founder. I’m the one taking the shot. I’m the one that’s making myself vulnerable. And I should be proud of that, and I should listen to my inner voice along the way. Again, take advice and know the inevitable paths. But at the end of the day, the accountability goes to you.”
Watch our Ask A Founder video with Mehdi Rahman here.
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