Ex-Goldman Banker Exposes The Secret To Building a Billion Dollar Company

Mariam Ahmed is the co-founder of Menza, an AI intelligence platform for consumer brands. 

Born and raised in New York, she studied computer science at King's College London before joining Goldman Sachs.

Today she's growing Menza toward a billion-dollar company, backed by Y Combinator and featured in Forbes. 

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Follow Mariam Ahmed:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariamaahmed/

https://menza.ai/

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0:00 Intro

2:07 Growing up in New York

4:26 From medicine to coding

7:40 Inside Goldman Sachs: how to find winners and losers

11:21 The dinner that ended her finance career

15:02 Last day Friday, flew Saturday, YC on Sunday

17:11 The real reason they got into Y Combinator

20:56 100 conversations in one week to find the idea

22:40 What Menza actually does

23:40 Why 80% of her YC batch is already dead

27:09 The brutal truth about having no boss

33:14 How to build with zero money in 2026

34:06 "You don't need to fundraise anymore"

36:18 Building a billion-dollar company on Islamic values

39:46 America's abundance vs Britain's scarcity

45:59 The failures she's most proud of