Mohammed
Shalabi

I found hackathons in 2018 and something clicked. You show up Thursday night with nothing. By Saturday morning you have a working product, a pitch, and a panel of judges deciding whether it's 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, the Saudi Film Commission. A 150,000 SAR grand prize during the 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 came together through 2021 and earned features in Arab News and on Saudi Arabia's official Instagram.

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

Hakawati runs in parallel with every other chapter in this story. It's the proof that building isn't something I do for work. It's something I do because I can't stop.

After years of competing, the invitations flipped, and I started showing up as a mentor. It's a different kind of pressure: you watch teams build in real time, and your job is to help them spot the gaps before the judges do.

I mentored at the Designathon, coaching teams through UX and product thinking against the clock, and at the Food & Beverage Hackathon, helping them turn rough ideas into working demos. Same instincts, opposite side of the table.

At Intelmatix the problem changed shape. Instead of forms and permits, I was building interfaces for agentic-AI platforms, digital twins, and geospatial visualization on Deck.GL. The whole job: take analytics that would cost an analyst twenty minutes to interpret and make a decision-maker act on them in five seconds.

I led R&D on modern frameworks and tooling, and 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 upskilling-and-hiring ecosystem I co-founded, to pitch it at the Silicon Valley Summit through the Misk Accelerator x Plug and Play program in Sunnyvale.

I met Saeed Amidi, founder and CEO of Plug and Play. I sat in on 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 put something I'd built entirely on my own in front of the people who fund the next generation of companies. That changes how you think about everything you build afterward.