Omar Sabbagh, Co-Founder, Bidaya

Omar Sabbagh, co-founder of Bidaya, met with me recently to talk curiosity, building in Calgary over SF, and lessons learned from startup to startup.

Bidaya is an all-in-one AI platform for winning government contracts in a fraction of the time, with powerful discovery, analysis, and proposal writing features.

Who is Omar?

Omar is multi-passionate, someone who's interested in many things. I'm curious, I like to experience things. Some of those things are related to fun adventures, some are to fitness, some to my career and work, and some  to family. I try to make the most out of each of those experiences. And right now, the chapter that I'm in is the founder, husband, and cyclist chapter. 

My whole career I’ve followed my curiosity; starting at one of Calgary’s few unicorns, then at Shopify, working on the Shop app. After, I acquired a startup, ListingAI and grew that. And now, I’m working on Bidaya, an AI platform for helping Architecture, Engineering, and Construction firms win more work. 

What did your time at Shopify look like?

It was real fun. It was a culture that really valued entrepreneurship. A lot of people at the company had their own side hustles, and it felt like entrepreneurs were throughout the company. If you had an idea, you were encouraged to go out and explore it. We had dedicated hack days. For a curious person like myself, it was amazing because we got to learn from smart people and had space to explore your ideas and explore your side hustles.

It was a really good experience. I learned and grew from it, both personally and professionally.

And what came before that?

Before Shopify, I was working at a firm in Calgary called RS Energy Group, one of the few Calgary unicorns. I was there right after my graduation, and was with them near the tail end of their success. They were a company that not many people know about still.

What I respected most about them is they just tried to make the right decision without having a playbook for growth - they made their own. The management team was smart, focused and cared about their people. Seeing that in a 200-person organization was extremely impactful when it comes to informing decisions I make and the path that I follow now as a small team. 

How do you think the experience at these startups before shape how you approach Bidaya now?

I joined Shopify after Covid when the stock tripled in price and life was good, not in the early days where things were really rough. It gave me perspective on what it looks like once you're past a certain point. And it made it seem possible if you just keep going. 

How much do you think the experience previous work led into your confidence in starting Bidaya?

Right now I think the experience we're lacking is when times are rough and you're going from zero to one – when you're a 30-person team, how do you get to 100? I think that's the part that's missing.

With ListingAI, it was just me, I didn’t have a playbook. I basically had this idea that startups are either worth nothing or billions, but that there should be something in between, that the asset of the company is worth something. I made a bold decision in acquiring ListingAI, and I didn't know anyone else who made the same decision at the time, aside from one or two people that I found on a podcast and reached out to on LinkedIn.

That process of being like, there's an idea, I'm going to try and follow it and use data and perspective to make good decisions over and over and over. Not having someone tell you what to do, but trying to figure out what is important and what you should ignore. 

And I think ListingAI is an example of what a Calgary startup could look like because you're not given a playbook here. You kind of just have to make bold decisions and then just play it by ear until you get to a certain point.

Unconventional paths can sometimes be - especially for a place like Calgary - the way to go. You just make a bold decision and then try to make the right call at different points in time over and over and over. And you'd be surprised at how far you go.

Do you think of Listing AI as a crash course in running a company?

I think it was a crash course in decision making and resilience. The parts that I didn't learn from it were the teamwork piece. ListingAI was harder to run because it was just me making a set of decisions, being a solo founder is really tough.

Now it's more about how I can build systems that scale where I'm not the bottleneck.I would say ListingAI was probably the hardest thing I've done when it came to knowing what to do. Focusing as a solo person is really, really tough. It's very lonely. You get in your own head about the decisions that you're making. It was harder then than it is now, because now I have people that are smarter than me that I can bounce ideas off and can run with the work.

What did the tools around you like AI look like at the time?

I was chasing my curiosity. I had this idea that being able to create structured data out of text was really cool. I wondered if we could look at reviews and then be able to give something a score about how good a restaurant is or how livable an apartment is based on those reviews.

What AI looked like back then was basic text understanding that you had to hack together. There wasn't just an API off the shelf that you could lean into. I was in these forums tracking weird startups in Europe who were pioneers in text understanding and natural language processing. I'd say it was very early and the capabilities weren't there. But if you were on the leading edge, you could make a useful product. To get to the leading edge you had to bury yourself in forums and look at random tools and stitch something together.

Whereas now there's an infinite amount of ideas you can have and it's a lot more about the execution post-idea. But then even getting to a working product was a lot of work, especially for someone that was non-technical or semi-technical like myself. And the landscape definitely changed post-GPT for sure.

It taught me a lot about how people react to new tech. I felt like I was living in two worlds – one where San Francisco people are trying to predict the future and they're working on the leading edge, and then there's your average person who is actually using the tools. It made me see how valuable it was to be the person that bridges the gap between the two. I was able to use that perspective on both sides to try and bring it into the product and make something useful.

Also, because AI was kind of trendy, people were curious and interested in figuring out how to use it for use cases like the one that I had in real estate. So there also was a tailwind of interest that helped as well.

How have the tools changed since then (late 2022)?

I would say it's a lot easier to learn a new concept that you've never been exposed to. If I was to try and build Bidaya back then,  I'd have to Google search things, try to do my own research to figure out concepts in an industry that I haven't particularly worked in - it would have been a lot tougher.

Building got easier, learning industry dynamics got easier. And then the tools that you can use to build something are there as well. Now I can solve a new class of problems with LLMs that didn't exist before.

What has gotten harder is distribution. It’s now really difficult because you have to do more to impress. I would say it's still just as hard to go from building a product to getting adoption, because it doesn't build the business for you, it just makes it easier to access information. So there's parts that got way easier, parts that stayed the same, parts that even got a little more challenging.

I think you can get started easier. I would say it's easier to do things that were really hard before, but those things don't necessarily translate to success because there's a lot of noise. Of course, it's easier for me to build a dashboard that wouldn't have been possible before. But that dashboard's ability to become a business or contribute to the building of a business has gotten harder because the bar didn't just get lowered for me, it got lowered for everyone.

What led you into Bidaya?

Again, it was following curiosity. While I was at Listing AI, I did a small consulting project with someone who I had bought my car from five years prior. I met up with him and he was like, “Hey, I teach proposal writing and I'm trying to figure out how to use AI. I think it's going to change everything, but I don't know how.” So I did a small consulting project with him, looked under the hood and realized that LLMs are going to change everything about how he does business. Then I built a prototype that went well and then started rolling that into a business. That snowballed into where we are now.

What have been the defining milestones from foundation to now?

There's been a few pivotal moments along the way. One was definitely learning enough about building products to get the first few versions out. Finding my co-founder is another, having him join has been great just to have a peer, but also to be able to have some synergistic skill sets.

Joining House 831 was a big one. I mentioned how hard it was being a solo founder before, and having a community around you definitely helps with that. It even actually got me my first check.

Having a few mentors, being able to meet them and make some key decisions with their input has also been really great. And raising money will be pivotal in the long run, it kick started  the start of the growth that we're hopefully going to experience in the long run.

Building in Calgary – does that matter to you?

Don't tell me what I can and can't do. Just because you didn't see it happen in Calgary doesn't mean someone can't do it. And blindly following the commonly traveled path doesn't mean you're going to succeed. Maybe I still won't succeed, but at least it won't be because I was in San Francisco. That's not going to be the reason.

I'd like to think that the outcome of success is independent of where I'm located physically. And if I can do it in a place where I can stay closer to family, where I can contribute to an ecosystem rather than contribute to brain drain, then at least it's a noble fight and one that I'm happy losing, knowing I at least tried.

How do you keep focus?

I think it's about trying to not get distracted by things that feel like you're making progress, but not actually causing progress. Focus and attention, it's a scarce resource. Use it wisely.

I'm very strict about where I allot time into those buckets – being a founder, being an athlete, being a good partner, being a good son. I think that focus, whether it's in your life or spent inside the company, is the common denominator in what has gotten me to this point.

If something interferes with my curiosity of being a good partner or being a good son or being a good athlete, then that's where I intentionally turn it off.I don't create hard cutoffs without at least letting it go over first and then kind of pulling back.

What are you proud of?

That's a great question. I don't know if I look back enough and appreciate the little wins as much as I probably should.

I am proud that I didn't have to move elsewhere to build this. There's a lot of pressure from everyone around me to go to San Francisco, and every third investor I talked to was like, you should try and do YC. I'm happy that I didn't cave and have kept it here.

I'm proud of the progress that we've made in a limited amount of time and what we've been able to build. I'm proud of how much we've learned and been able to use that as part of the business. When we started, we were something else than we are now. We kind of just follow where demand is. We're pulling on a thread. 

And that I can keep a balance or that I have some sort of balanced life where I'm not completely lost in the sauce.

What comes next?

I think what comes next is the next chapter of post-funding growth. We've been able to, in a scrappy way, build to where we are now. And now it's about creating leverage and then trying to make the best use of that funding to build a brand, get in front of more customers, and keep making the best product that there is in the space that we're in.

I think of things in terms of chapters, and we're just closing off the chapter of scrappily, in a bootstrap way, building something that has traction and is working for customers. And then now this next phase is about reiterating and refining and just seeing what kind of systems we can build so that we can accelerate how fast we're moving. And we can learn from what's happening around us to make sure we're going in the right direction.

Thank you, Omar.