Episode 34: Attitude & Action: If You Set Your Mind To It, You Will Succeed With Eli Fathi
Many sectors, naturally, have their own notions of leadership, but the best leaders adhere to two simple but strong principles: transparency and integrity. Amy Vetter interviews Eli Fathi, the CEO of MindBridge. Eli shares his journey from living in a one-bedroom home with his siblings, grandma, and parents in Israel to coming to Canada to begin his career journey. Learn how his upbringing shaped his success as a leader to be transparent and always put integrity first.
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Attitude & Action: If You Set Your Mind To It, You Will Succeed With Eli Fathi
In this episode, I interview Eli Fathi CEO of MindBridge, the developer of the world's first auditing tool based upon artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies that uncover errors in financial data. Eli has been a technology entrepreneur for over 30 years and founded or cofounded many successful technology companies. He was recognized as the 2018 AI Leader of the Year by the Digital Finance Institute and is a prolific speaker, including talks at the AICPA, Startup Canada Day and TEDx. Eli also gives back to the community by mentoring future business leaders and sitting on boards of various nonprofit organizations. During my interview with Eli, he shares his journey from living in a one-bedroom home with his siblings, grandmother and parents in Israel to coming to Canada to begin his career journey. Learn how his upbringing shaped his success as a leader to be transparent and always put integrity first.
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I'm with Eli Fathi from MindBridge.ai. Eli, do you want to start off and give a little background on yourself?
I am a serial entrepreneur. MindBridge is my seventh company. I had three exits before and I'm a diehard supporter of entrepreneurship. I mentor a lot of people, both men and women. To support a lot of women's issues, I believe that we need to get more women into the tech business. I'm excited to be on your show.
I'm excited to have you here. We've talked before and it's always a good conversation, but this conversation will be a little bit different because we're going to go a little bit into your background and understand you as a person and how that's affected you as a leader as well. Where are you from and how were you brought up?
I did a TED Talk, and I'm going to summarize a little bit the presentation that I made. I was born in Israel. I was 1 of 9 people in one room. I don't remember that. When I was five years old, we moved to one-bedroom where my parents had one room and six kids. Occasionally, grandma will be in one room. This is where I grew up. My father had fruits and vegetable stores. We’re expected to work. After school, we'll go and work. There was not a lot of anything those days, but I never felt poor because no one else said anything. It was lots of fun. After school, we would go and help in the store, and my father taught me the hard work and so is my mom. You wake up at 4:00 in the morning, go to the market to buy the fruits and vegetables, come home at 6:30, eat breakfast, go and open the store. We sell fruits and vegetables and then come back at night at 6:00, eat dinner, watch TV for an hour and go to sleep at night. The next day, that whole cycle started again.
For me, it was living with five siblings plus our occasional grandma, and in those days, there was no internet. There was a phone. Even if you can afford it, it was like gold. We cannot afford it and there is no television. What do you do? You tell stories. You spend a lot of time with your parents and sibling telling stories and I used to visualize. That's one thing that I always remember. I go to bed and visualize me standing in front of blue lakes with big green trees. When I go to bed I said, "This is where I want to go. This is where I want to be." When I was 22 years old, I came here to Canada and I went to school. It's interesting because my father gave me $500 and a suitcase. That's what I came up with in here. I remember going to college and there was a lecture about velocity and acceleration. There was no internet. What would you do? You go back home and you look at the dictionary to understand what the words are and then you study for the next session. You go through that every day. You try to read the lecture and make notes and make sure that you are doing well.
Backing up a little bit, college. Were your parents college-educated? How did that even happen coming from that background?
That's all related to my mom. Mom believed in education and my father went to grade five. That's all. My mother went to high school.
Where were they from?
They were born in Iraq. For my mom, education is key.
Why was that? Where did she see that it was important?
She was bright. What happened was when she was young, she had an infection with one of her eyes and being a girl growing up in the ‘30s and ‘40s, that's why I feel strongly about women and women education. They feel that with one lazy eye, they stopped education. Otherwise, she is a brilliant woman.
This is a big move, moving from Israel to Canada. How did you choose the college? How did you get accepted, afford it and all of that?
I always set goals and I have three goals. By the age of 30, I wanted to have a child, a home and my second degree. I knew that I was going to do Master’s. I know that I would not do a PhD because I want it to be practical. I didn't want to be a professor. When I was accepted to university, I came here on August 23rd to Canada. By that time, all the registration was accepted. My sister who passed away to cancer convinced the registrar to say, "You're already four years behind in somebody that was born in Canada. Why won’t you let him in?" They did. On August 23rd, they accepted me. I said, "I don't have a good master of the English language. Let me go to college." I did and you can tell my marks because it started with Cs and Ds and when I finished, it was straight As. When I finished university, I was Summa Cum Laude at 9.3 but it was just the master of the English language. For me, to learn the language, I did in school plus watching The Flintstones and all the good TV shows.
Your sister was already at that college and was able to help?
No, she lived in Canada and that’s one of the reasons that we came to Canada.
She facilitated that for you. That's nice that you have that to help you get over here.
I remember working a summer job for $20 a day, $2.50 for an eight-hour day. At the end of the week, you get $100 minus the deduction. With student loans and working, that's what we were able to do. As I said, my wife and I stayed close to the college because we could not afford to take the bus. Our entertainment was to take the bus, go to the mall and have ice cream as a treat. That's what we did.
How did you meet your wife?
At college. At the bus stop, as a matter of fact.
When you went to college, how did you know what degree you wanted to go start with or where did that come from? Was it from your dad being an entrepreneur? Where did you begin with it?
My sister suggested that Electrical Engineering would be a good time to go into and that's what I did.
That's what you graduated in?
Yeah, Electrical Engineering.
Did you like it?
Yes.
With Electrical Engineering, what did you end up doing with it?
I became a designer of hardware in assembly level language. At this point in 1978, you started to have microprocessors which are the main building blocks of PCs. When you did real-time systems, you needed to design the hardware circuit board as well as program the microprocessor. That's what I did and then I decided that I would like to do my Master's. As I said, my goal was to do my Master's and it was in Microprocessor Project Management. It's how to manage the development of multiprocessor-based systems. I wrote the thesis, I had four publications out of it. I was a prolific engineer. I had about twelve publications as well as a book that I wrote on Microprocessor Software Project Management. I was prolific in the engineering side for the first three years of my career.
With this transition, you have student loans and you're going into your first career. You've grown up pretty humble, living in a one-bedroom house or apartment. How did that affect you with going into your adult life?
Transparency And Integrity: The most important things in life are friendship, family, hard work, commitment, and meeting expectations.
It taught me what is important in life. It's friendship, family, hard work, commitment, meeting expectations, all of the things that when you have nothing else except yourself and the family, it's important. This is what's important at the end of the day. Up to now, I'm much of a family man. I'm married to my wife for years. It's all about family and that's what it taught me.
From building that, what was your trajectory after that? How did you get into the business side of running companies?
One of my professors at the university had a dormant company and I was working at one of the most secure positions in terms of job security. My daughter was born. I felt my entrepreneurial spirited got awakened and I said, "Why don't we find a contract for three months and I will leave work and I will join you and let start this company?" which I did. My daughter was born and a week later, I left a secured job to start on three months contract and I never looked back. Since then, this was seven companies later.
What was that company?
This company was a consulting company that design fault-tolerant computers. At that time, the microprocessor was starting to become important. It was also the notion of single failure was an issue, especially in military systems. We started to develop fault-tolerant computer systems.
What did you start learning from moving from subject matter expert role into running a business or you're making this pivot into leadership? What did you draw upon to be able to make that shift?
In the first two positions, I was more on the engineering type. It was the third company onwards that I was the key leader to look at the whole team. There is a difference when you are a partner with somebody and you are looking at the engineering side versus when you are the CEO and you're looking after the whole company facets. You don't get paid until your people get paid. It's the same thing on the boat, the captain eats last or whatever you do, and you have to take care of your people. That caring, this is something that I learned from back home and the fact that you have to take care of everybody else, make sure that they're happy for everything to function properly.
What was that company that you were the first CEO with?
One of my first exits was a company that did what I knew best, which was real-time systems. We designed and supported industry and government with real-time based systems, both hardware, and software. That company ended up purchased by a company from the US.
With that, when you're talking about taking some of those lessons of caring about people, what are some things that you put into place and culture-wise, so people did feel nurtured whether it's by you or the people that they were reporting to as well? How do you monitor that culture to make sure that's happening?
One of the things that are important to me is transparency. I feel that this is important. As I was building the different companies, I remember mentoring people. I talk about integrity first. You have integrity and transparency. Basically, when sunshine, sunlight, sun rays show, it bleaches everything. If you put it in the sunshine, you put a shirt that has tomato stains on it, it will bleach it. That's why I believe in transparency and integrity because nothing can be hidden and people know what's going on. I feel that is some of the elements that I embedded in the company. One other is delegation, relying on other people and having this relationship I always became friends. I said, "If I'm going to hire somebody, I would like to be able to feel that I can go to their house and I can invite him to my house." In many of the cases, the people that I work with became friends and friends for life.
I know though as a leader, sometimes that line of friendship can be hard because you also have to make hard decisions as a leader as well with the people that work with you. How do you maintain that line of friendship and leadership so that it's still effective, you're not being walked on as a leader or if you have to make the hard decisions that you can do it in a generous way?
I feel that it is a function of the people that you're hiring. It takes two to tango as the story goes. If you want to have people that you're going to become friends with, they understand their company situation. They understand what is needed and they will react in a professional way and they will never take advantage of their side. To me, the personal and the professional side are separate, but because of the integrity and transparency, there is no reason that two mature people or a group of people cannot be here in a mature way because you know exactly what's going on. You know what has to be done. You don't have to convince anybody. That's what you do.
Interviewing is an important and hard thing to do as a leader. Do you have specific questions you ask or things you're looking for when you're interviewing somebody to know that it’s going to fit into the culture when you say it's a two-way street that you can watch for certain things during the interview process?
I interviewed all the people in the company until now and I look for a couple of things. One, I started with culture. I want to make sure that the individual cares about more than just work. I look for things like, "Do you volunteer for anything? Are you a person that has hobbies related to not what you do at work, but rather beyond work?" If you're just work-related and don't care about the world around you, you probably would not be a good communicator. You would not fit into the team. When I look at these things, I look at the behavior. Are you a doer or are you somebody that does not care as much? These are the things that are important to me because as a manager, especially if you're not a doer, it becomes difficult to be part of a big team because you cannot grow and you cannot delegate. People look at you and want to make sure that you are the best gunslinger that there is and if you're not, then feel that, "Why are you leading me? You don't deserve to be the leader." Depending on which position it is, I want to make sure that culture is number one and then the functions associated with what they do.
How do you make sure people are delegating?
I wrote about eighteen blogs and one day I hope to turn it into a book. In these blogs, I give examples of what you should do. I talk about different areas. I talk about culture, how-tos with customer success, different topics but each blog has two parts to it. One part is what I called Business Guides. The second part is the Business Rules. In order to remember it, each of the business rules has some metaphor examples. For example, how to eat an elephant? One bite at a time. It’s things like that. I have a story that talks about it. One good example is something about Stephen Covey, the famous author who talked about sharpening the ax. This is going back to Abraham Lincoln that said, "If I have six hours to cut a patch of trees, I will use the first four hours to sharpen my ax, then I'll use it." The whole idea is to give them guidance about how to do it and people will remember it because you're giving them examples about what needs to be done.
This also goes back to your upbringing with your father, delegating to all of you and knowing that he couldn't have accomplished what he did. You can't do it all. There would be no way, but he made it in a way that all of you wanted to do it. It wasn't something you were frustrated about doing or that thing, but you were learning along the way. That's an important part of delegation because there's no way for someone to get to the next level or learn the next thing if you're micromanaging. You should always be ready to prepare someone to be your replacement one day.
We have ten mantras and one of them is, “No micromanagement.”
Let's talk about MindBridge a little bit. When did you get to MindBridge? How long ago?
I did not start the company. This company was started by one of my mentees. I joined six months later. We joined forces and it's been a great partnership since then.
When you talk about putting the mantras in place, as a leader now that you come into the organization, you've been a leader for a long time, are there certain things that you do right away based on what you've learned as a leader to make it an effective culture company?
Culture is the most important thing that a company can have, especially as you grow. Think about simple math. You start with two people and then you have, let's say 10 in year one and you have 20 in year two, then 40, 50 and 100. If you don't have the mantra, an example, going from 50 to 100, which happened to us the year before, what happened? Do you have 50 people 100% equal to what the year before that has no corporate history? How would they know how to teach the next 200 or 100 people if they don't have the mantras in the corporate? The only way to do that is by having these mantras and knowing that this is where the Bible is for the company. These are the guides that we’re going to follow. By having that, that's the only way that you can grow a company and maintain the culture without losing it along the way.
How do you come up with those mantras? Do you have them? Are you developing those with your team or how did you put those together?
These happened to have ideas and comments I learned for 40 years in the business and I ran them by the team and got them to vet and enhance them. Each letter in MindBridge has a meaning. It has a mantra. M is Make a difference and do good in the world. I is Integrity first. N is No micromanagement and so on. Each letter means something and it has a lot of value because it gives you guidelines, guardrails of what to do and what not to do.
There are a lot of corporations that have corporate cultures set like these values and whatever they call it in their company. How do you monitor that it's happening? It's one thing to put it together. Like you said, as you start scaling as a company and people weren't as close to it when you developed it and they're newer, how do you make sure they continue to live those values, those mantras, whatever you put into place?
We have to remind people and we have not done it enough but we had all staff update and we had one individual randomly picked from the people that we have. We talked about the mantra and we asked them to give an example of how they adhere to this mantra. I intend to continue to do that every about 6 to 8 months to remind people what the mantras are. When you come to our office, you will see them on the wall, but being on the wall is not good enough. It's practicing.
That's always the hardest part and I've seen with companies where when they evolve from small to scale, that starts getting lost along the way because it's not a constant reminder that those things are in place. What is it about what you're doing that is different but the same from the rest of your career? How do you continue to learn and expand yourself at this stage of your career as well?
What is different this time? If you look at my career, there are numbers of revolution or evolution that took place. The PC revolution, the internet revolution and we're dealing with another evolution. I'm not talking about the COVID, I'm talking about the AI revolution. The AI revolution changed everything. We are now poised. We are the beginning of a marathon that we’re probably at the first 1 mile of a 26-mile marathon. We haven't seen the key impact of AI on our life. We already see some, if it's Alexa or Siri, but this is the beginning of massive changes because of the AI revolution. We happen to run on top of this AI revolution but in the process, we've identified some area that is crucial to the success of the world itself. What does that mean? If you look at the world, before COVID, the world transaction or GDP was $85 trillion. Five percent of that $4 trillion got lost into the ether due to mismanagement. That's a big impact on the economy of the world. Only $200 billion of that got caught. What we are doing at MindBridge is to try to rectify that. You want to make sure that the transactions and the $85 trillion transactions are all to do with financial transactions. It's either government or it is corporations.
Transparency And Integrity: Make sure that each individual cares about more than just the work they're doing.
When you look at this financial transaction and if you can identify these $5 trillion of anomalies that exist, you're going to make a big difference in the life of many people. Many people are looking at, "Do I have the right decision?" If you look at corporations, we're not dealing with the individuals, but rather we're dealing with corporations being enterprise or government. It's staggering. They did a study of 1,100 C-level, the top 1,100 executives. They asked them, "Do you make decisions based on the data that you have?" Over 55% said that they are not sure what’s in their data, in the financial data. Most worrisome is that over 70% said they believe in flawed data or insufficient data. We want to change that. We want to identify and what we call verified by MindBridge. We want to tell people when you put your financial data through our system, to our software, you are assured that this data is correct and you can make a decision based on that verified by MindBridge.
That’s a big goal to have. When do you feel you will achieve that or what percentage are you there with that?
We are in the early stages of that process. In terms of our product, we already have quite a lot of the base technology. We already have many customers, but it's a massive product. We expect probably by the end of the year to have the majority of the functionality, which included all the subledgers. We already have a GL, AR, AP. We add in the other sub-ledger. We'll have the ability to have a product that we'll be able to present. With these three, you already have 80%, 90% of what you need. Still, if you want to have a complete fully all subledgers, probably by the end of the year, we'll be there. It’s exciting for our customers. That's why I said M is Make a difference. We want to do good in the world.
That's an important mantra and value to have. When you're repeating that, all the people that work there understand how they're making a difference and how their jobs make a difference and making an impact on their customers and so forth.
It's nice to sell a product that you believe in, but it also a product that makes good. It's much easier to sell something that you believe in.
I like to do some rapid-fire questions at the end of our interview. You get to pick a category. The category is family and friends, money, spiritual or health?
Family and friends.
Things or actions I don't have that I want with my family and friends?
Since I was young, on Friday night, we used to have dinner all the time. As we came to Canada, I stopped that and I feel that it's something that I wish I can recreate. For example, I read that Neil Diamond every Sunday, he goes to his mom for dinner. I’ve read it years ago. I would like to recreate that with my family. You do it when the children are young and they are used to it and then when you stop doing, it's difficult to go back. It's one thing that looking back I would have liked to have done.
My son makes sure we do it at least once a month if not more. It's nice to do that time together where you calm down. Things or actions I do have that I want?
I want more time with my family. I'm blessed, my wife and I have been married for many years. We spent a lot of time with our daughters and I want to spend more. With the limitation of work, I love work. Both my wife and I work and we love work. I would like to do more of that.
Things or actions that I don't have that I don't want?
Drama. I'm lucky, I'm blessed that we don't have drama and we have two loving daughters and one grandson. We have no drama and I'm glad that we don't have drama.
Things or actions that I do have that I don't want?
The FaceTime that we do now, I would like to do more face-to-face. With COVID, the limitation that you have, my other daughter does not live in Ottawa, so I cannot see her. We see her FaceTime, but I would like to do face-to-face.
Like human time. It's amazing how you have this need that you don't realize until it's taken away. I know you have a virtual conference coming up. I'm speaking at it. Do you want to end talking a little bit about that conference on how it's going to help the users that come?
First of all, thank you for being the keynote. We're excited. We wanted to do it in person and everything was set up to do it in person and given COVID, it's going to be online. We have Robyn Stacey. Edmond Emperor is going to be there as well. I'll be talking as well. We want to describe to our users. It's a user conference and what we would like to do is give them the latest and greatest of what we've done in terms of the product. We want to expose them to thought leaders like yourself and Stacey and things like that. We want to bring them up to the speed of all of the things that are happening in the world of AI and software tools
The one thing that COVID has changed forever and will change is we're going to go more online. We're going to go more to the Cloud and our pool. It's timely that what we're doing they're going to be using it usefully as they go on from this onwards. When we come out of COVID, probably a lot of people will start to be staying. If they are not on the Cloud yet, they will move to the Cloud because it makes no sense. As a matter of fact, we are looking at it. I wrote on Fortune Magazine that people are saying that the big Fortune 500, 30% of them are saying, "Do we want to go back to the way that we were? It looks like we are working well with this online.” It's interesting.
It goes to show agility, how you've changed your conference fast. You're already in the Cloud with what you do. To be able to access now many other people even in other countries for this is exciting as well. With everything that can be looked at as a hurdle, there's a lot of positive that comes out of it. You are at the cusp of AI technology that a lot of people are going to learn a lot and have access to information they otherwise wouldn't have. I'm looking forward to being a part of it. I'm grateful to be a part of it. Is there anything else you'd like to make sure you leave as a message for our readers?
There are two messages. One, you have to believe in yourself. When I did my TED Talk, I talk about the following. For you to succeed, it's all about mindset. It's all about believing in yourself. There are only two things that a human being can control, your attitude and your action. Attitude has to do with your mindset. If you set up your mind to succeed, you will succeed. I read some sentence that is cool and it's only ten words. Each word is only two letters. I leave you on that note, "If it is to be, it is up to me."
Thank you so much for being my guest on this episode. It was a great conversation as usual. There were many learnings and there will be a lot for people to take away from this. Thank you.
Thank you, Amy.
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For our Mindful Moments with my interview with Eli, I want to start with his humble beginnings of being 1 of 9 people living in a one-bedroom home. Working from a young age where he saw his father as an entrepreneur that didn't have much schooling, but was working hard and all of his family contributed as well for the success of that business and for the betterment of that family. That's an important lesson that we can learn young in life is what our part is and taking care of others and that nothing is a given. Him talking about his experience of being a child in this way and visualizing what he wanted his life to be like one day when he talked about being near lakes with green trees and having a goal at 30 to have a child, house and second degree. These visualizations that we create in our heads whether intentional or unintentional are important in our mindset.
Also, making sure we achieve the things that we want to in life and that it's intentional rather than letting life happen. It's important that we do step back and think about our personal goals, not always the goals of our jobs and what our managers might tell us our goals are or what our business plans are, but our personal goals and visualize what that might look like. Not just the goals itself, but how do you want those to feel and what would that look like in your life? It can become real. As you make little steps along the way where he had to work extra hard in college to make sure he followed the language as well as got good grades and a hard degree, it's important that he could hold on to that visualization and know how he wanted to feel at the end even when things are hard. We all are going through hard moments with this pandemic but also this happens in life that things don't necessarily go exactly the way that we want. Visualizations are important for that.
It was also important as we talked about his shift and pivot into leadership and the difference between being a subject matter expert and being a leader. A lot of people can sometimes struggle with that shift that we get promoted to a leadership position that we've never been trained to be a leader or what is important. The fact that he could draw upon his family experiences and knowing how he watched his father delegate, which became an important leadership quality for Eli as well, but also that caring that his family had for one another and making sure that they all did well and were taking care of. That was something that he brought into as a leader in culture. We talked about some key areas of leadership for him when creating cultures that when you're coming into an organization, sometimes we focus on the work, we focus on the technical side, but the people are the most important thing of making sure a company is successful.
His three areas were transparency, integrity first and delegation. Part of delegation is that respect, that friendship, respect of that you trust that person to do their job, but you also are caring that you care about them. Where there's not this line of delineation where someone feels like you're not approachable. That's important because when we do have to give hard advice, it's better when someone knows that you're coming to it from a compassion standpoint, that you're their friend and you want the best for them. If we're going to create a culture like that, it's important that we develop a process from interviewing to make sure that we enter into that culture, the right people that agree with those values that we put in place.
As you're thinking about your leadership journey, think about what values, culture, mantras, whatever you want to call it, that you've put in place, how you're monitoring them to make sure that it is sticking, that people are abiding by it. How do you develop the interview process so that you can make sure that people feel comfortable coming into that culture and they will fit in? As he talks about, you can consistently keep scaling a business to get larger and larger. As a business gets larger, people become further away from when that culture was developed or even understanding the beginnings and history. Having these mantras, these values are important.
Lastly, one of the biggest things that he talked about with these values was that at the end of the day with the work that we do, it's important that we feel like we're making a difference. How we make a difference is through our mindset that we can look at things like what MindBridge is doing and think, "That's such a lofty goal. It might be insurmountable." We can have the mindset or the attitude that we will succeed. If everybody comes together with that same mindset and feels it from their heart space, that even on days that things aren't going well, you will still make it and you will make it together. What happens is you've got this culture where people are caring, but they know that they're making a difference as a company, but also as human beings.
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About Eli Fathi
Eli Fathi is CEO at MindBridge, developer of the world’s first auditing tool based upon artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies – Ai Auditor – to uncover errors in financial data. Eli has been a technology entrepreneur for over 30 years, having founded or co-founded many successful technology companies.
Eli was recognized as the 2018 AI Leader of the Year by the Digital Finance Institute and is a prolific speaker, including talks at the AICPA, Startup Canada Day on the Hill, and TEDx. Eli also gives back to the community by mentoring future business leaders and sitting on the boards of various non-profit organizations.
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