About
I started my professional career when I was 18 years old, just a few months after starting Computer Science degree in FCIS-ASU. Over the next few years, I worked across wide range of roles in the tech stack, jumping between very early-stage startups, small local companies, and a game studio once.
After a few years of that, A friend introduced me to Ali, the founder of ArqamFC a sports data company trying to solve the lack of quality data coverage in football. This turned out to be the most educational experience of my career so far (and the most eventful)
I joined Arqam when I was only 21 years old. I made (more than) a few mistakes and definitely bit off more than I could chew, but these challenges shaped who I wanted to be and defined my career path.
During my 3 years there, I grew from an engineer (well, I actually joined as a data scientist) to a tech lead, watching the company grow from less than 10 employees and a tech team of 4 to over 100 employees, and later the Statsbomb acquisition. It's probably safe to say I touched every codebase and component at Arqam/Statsbomb.
When I decided to leave, it was one of the hardest decisions I'd ever made. Most of what I knew, I learned there. Most of my friends were still there. But I felt I had reached my growth ceiling at the company.
In early 2021, six months before I left Arqam, my close friend Ibrahim joined a UK seed-stage startup called Factmata. Founded by Dhruv and a group of ML researchers from Meta in 2017 after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, they had raised around $4.5M to tackle misinformation and fake news on social media.
Ibrahim and I talked a lot about the company's struggles with raising more money or gaining traction. The technical issues scaling their ML models, which was making it harder to monetize as a product.
A few months later, the board hired a new CEO, Antony, who was looking for someone to productionize their research-heavy ML technology. In June 2021, after talking with Ant, I joined Factmata to lead the team in building a product around their ML models.
This was one of the biggest technical challenges that I faced. The Models were slow, the infra was manually created. I remember Antony making a calendar slot in the team's shared calendar every time he wanted to present the product to someone so it doesn't hang.
In the first month, I was working nearly 100 hours a week on solving this. The setup unnecessary complex. I created a new cloud account, rewrote everything in terraform, refactored all the infra and the deployment and got the app to work seamlessly in less than half the cost of what it was before.
This convinced Ant that we can do it. He gave me a blank check for nearly a year to "rebuild everything".
I remember one time in the all-hands Ant was introducing a new employee and he said: "Adham is the only guy who is busier than me you probably don't want to disturb or block him". This was a very stressful time, the team's backlog was stuffed and we had only a few months of runway.
During that time, I discussed it with my wife and we made the decision to stay in Cairo despite the depressing political and economical situation. We were expecting our first child and Factmata was unable to pay salaries for the next 9 months - defending that decision wasn't easy at all. It felt like driving off a cliff you can clearly see, but somehow arguing that hitting the brakes isn't the right choice. This was the most stressful period of my life.
The Factmata team gave everything they had, which made this period slightly easier. We managed to raise a small round to keep us going while building what we saw as promising products. We even signed a couple of big agencies, though it wasn't enough to cover our salaries.
During this rough period, I turned down several big-tech offers in Europe – a decision that seemed crazy to everyone, including myself. But I trusted Antony (our CEO) who was in a similar (arguably tougher) situation. He convinced me we could get this over the line, I could join big-tech by-the-end of year if we didn't exit or grow.
A few months later, we began acquisition talks. After lots due-diligence meetings auditing emails and hour-long "integration" talks, we got a deal from Cision, the largest PR media monitoring company in the world. I still remember receiving the Cision paperwork 9 am in the morning on the day my wife was delivering our baby.
Since joining Cision, Life changed. I was promoted to Senior Staff Engineer after 6 months, and we've seen most of our Factmata infra become core features in Cision's large products like CisionOne and BrandWatch.
In my first two years at Cision, I moved between different teams in the data org – between Data Platform team, Content Search, and MLE. Currently, I'm an IC leader in the Data & MLDS org in the CisionOne BU.
In 2023, my close friend Amr, who quit his job and spent three years researching Egypt's agriculture ecosystem he decided to start an agriculture data company, Cutlivaet. He first invited me as a tech consultant, but after a few months I joined as a part-time CTO to build tech-for-good technology that improves the life of small-holder farmers.
In early 2024 I started an MBA at Edinburgh Business School in 2024, specializing in strategy. As I always loved study and academia, but didn't feel the need for a CS study. So I wanted to look at adjacent programs that can allow me to grow my leardership and business skills.
In late 2024, Cultivaet became a 500 Global portfolio company which is a significant achievement that we didn't expect at all.
Finally, I'll leave you with this quote by Thomas Jefferson
"I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it."
Want to chat? Reach out to me at adham.ehab@hey.com | Twitter | LinkedIn.
Or book a meeting directly.