Mohammed
Shalabi

I discovered hackathons in 2018 and something clicked. You show up on Friday night with nothing. By Sunday morning you have a working product, a pitch, and a panel of judges deciding if it is good enough. No safety net. No second draft. Just build.

2018. First place at Apps World (Badir). Top three at the Front-End Intensive (CODED and SFCSP). First place for UX and UI (Aqwas and SFCSP). Best UX Team at the 7/7 Bootcamp. Built Mazeej at KAUST x Junction.

2019. Second place at DevFest (Google). Second place for best senior project (Takaful). Built WSM at Homathon.

2023. First place at Filmathon, Saudi Film Commission. A 150,000 SAR grand prize during Red Sea Film Festival.

Hakawati started in 2017 because I wanted to build something that was mine. It grew from a side-project into a studio. The game took shape through 2021 and caught a feature in Arab News and Saudi Arabia's official Instagram.

By late 2022 we were on stage at the VR Awards (AIXR) in Rotterdam. That trip also took us to London. I was mentored by Rodrigo M. Terra, founder of ARVORE Immersive Experiences and an Emmy winner. Through 2023 the studio exhibited Wamdah at Red Sea Film Festival in Jeddah, and Ithra picked up collaborations.

Hakawati runs alongside every other chapter in this story. It is the proof that building is not something I do for work. It is something I do because I cannot stop.

After years of competing, I started getting invited to the other side. Mentoring at hackathons is a different challenge. You watch teams build in real-time, and your job is to help them see the gaps before the judges do.

I mentored at the Designathon, guiding teams through UX and product thinking under pressure. I mentored at the Food and Beverage Hackathon, helping teams turn rough ideas into working demos. The skill-set is the same, but the perspective changes everything.

At Intelmatix the challenge changed. Instead of forms and permits, I was building UIs for Agentic AI platforms, digital twins, and geospatial data visualization on Deck.GL. The whole job was to take analytics that would take an analyst twenty minutes to interpret and turn them into something a decision-maker could act on in five seconds.

I led R&D on modern frameworks and tooling. I pushed the platform to get faster with every release. Along the way, the team showed up at LEAP23 and ran MCIT collaborations.

Olo is a Saudi group built on one thesis: the gap between people and work is software-shaped. Under one house, two companies take opposite sides of that line.

Olo Academy is the education arm. Bootcamps in digital product management, business analysis, AI, and fintech. Five-day "Beacons" for career accelerators. Over ten thousand learners trained. Graduates placed at American Express, Riyad Bank, Misk, and more.

Hailaman is the placement arm. An AI-native applicant tracking system built for the Saudi market: PDPL-compliant, Saudi-labor-law-aware, bilingual by default. Azzam, its AI assistant, writes job descriptions, scores candidates, and cuts weeks off every hire.

Mohammed is the CTO of Olo.

In 2025 I flew to San Francisco with Olo, the ecosystem combining upskilling and hiring that I co-founded, to pitch it at Silicon Valley Summit through the Misk Accelerator x Plug and Play program in Sunnyvale.

I met Saeed Amidi, the founder and CEO of Plug and Play. I sat in Oracle's sessions on building scalable GenAI applications for startups. I competed in the Manus AI Hackathon. I met Healey Cypher, co-founder of Boompop.

It was the first time I took something I built entirely on my own and put it in front of the people who fund the next generation of companies. That changes how you think about everything you build after.