Amr Awadallah is an Egyptian born computer scientist and entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley. What’s particularly interesting about Amr’s story is that he had no interest in becoming an entrepreneur. His plan was to become an academic and teach computer science back in Cairo. But while at Stanford University where he was doing his PhD, the startup bug hit him and he launched his first venture, Aptivia, back in 1999, which was later acquired by Yahoo. He went onto found Cloudera which went public back in 2017 in an IPO that raised over $4 billion. Now on his third venture, Zir AI, Amr is hoping to revolutionise the way we search online. In this podcast, Awadallah talks about his entrepreneurial journey, the key ingredients of a startup ecosystem and why paying it forward is so important.