BIOGRAPHY
Mo Gawdat is a bestselling author and founder of #onebillionhappy. The former Chief Business Officer at X (formerly known as Google [X]) is well known for his work on the secret to happiness, which includes the book Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy.
Mo began his career in engineering with a role at IBM Egypt. Here he moved from sales into the government sector, before joining Microsoft where he led communications across new emerging markets. In 2007, Mo Gawdat joined Google, heading up a team responsible for kickstarting the search giant’s operations in 50 new markets across the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe.
Mo Gawdat’s career has given him unique insight into the role of technology in empowering communities, a theme which he draws on when speaking. He has dedicated years of his career to his passion for technology, leading a number of different projects in partnership with elite engineers.
Some of Mo’s most celebrated projects include Project Loon, which uses high-altitude balloons to supply communities with affordable internet access, and Project Makani, which aims to transform wind energy generation using carbon fiber kites.
Mo Gawdat’s career as an entrepreneur has also seen him co-found over 20 different businesses across a range of industries including food and beverage brands, real estate organisations and health and fitness companies. He’s also on the board of several consumer goods companies and he’s dedicated to mentoring exciting new startups.
Despite his enormous success, Mo realised at the age of 28 that his career hadn’t brought him happiness. As an engineer, he set out to fix the problem by examining provable facts and applying logic. Thirteen years later, Mo suffered a devastating loss when his son Ali passed away during routine surgery. The tragedy led Mo to a new mission in life, which later became known as his happiness model. The idea was simple: happiness is a choice.
His book Solve for Happy represents Mo Gawdat’s 12-year research on happiness, offering an engineer’s point of view on a topic most often approached from a spiritual or psychological perspective. After leaving [X] in 2018, Mo’s life is now dedicated to spreading this message of happiness and #onebillionhappy.
In 2019, Mo Gawdat co-founded Today, a project that aims to reinvent consumerism for the benefit of the consumers, retailers and our planet. In 2020, Mo launched ‘Slo Mo: A Podcast with Mo Gawdat’, in which he explores the extraordinary lives of everyday people.
Mo has written several more books, including ‘Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World’ (2021), and That Little Voice In Your Head: adjust the code that runs your brain (2022).
For more information on Mo Gawdat, contact VBQ Speakers founding agent Leo von Bülow-Quirk.
MO GAWDAT: SPEAKER
Mo Gawdat is a passionate and moving speaker who shares his message of happiness in a way that never fails to engage audiences.
His commitment to helping people find happiness has led to a number of high profile speaking engagements all over the world in which he discusses what it means to find happiness – no matter the circumstances.
As well as being a sought after keynote speaker, Mo Gawdat is available to work with smaller groups for seminars and workshops – helping teams to nurture happiness and collaboration in the workplace and in their daily lives.
Gawdat also speaks on a range of technology-related themes, from the power of an innovative mindset to the tech trends that are set to reshape the way we do business all over the world.