What are your greatest accomplishments?
- I’ve been rejected loads of times from hundreds of companies, founders, and investors. But I never stopped. All these failures paved the way for my recent successes.
- I spent years battling social anxiety, loneliness, and addiction. I documented the process, shared it publicly, and built a community around it. I now run The Chalant Society, where every week I take strangers to lunch and help them get out of their comfort zone. The same fears I used to have, I now help others work through: https://instagram.com/thechalantsociety
- My university reached out to feature me and the work I was doing: https://ramimaalouf.com/uc-orbit-vid
- I work for Mark Manson now on purpose.app. He’s someone whose work shaped how I think about life years before I ever thought I’d be in the same room as him. Kind of wild.
Tell us about the most difficult challenge (technical or non-technical) you took on that you’re proud of. What made it hard, and how did you work through it?
Overcame limiting habits like social anxiety and developed systems for focus, self-awareness, and resilience. Had to learn so much about myself and do a lot of work to break out of those patterns, but it has been incredibly rewarding. I’ve also battled and overcome (legal) addictions that held me back from living a more fulfilling life. All of these hardships led me into becoming a more resilient person.
What have you built from zero to one?
Ember (https://heyember.me) Autonomous AI matchmaking. I learned about how to make AI think more like humans and given the ability to match make people autonomously through graph databases and GraphRAG. I share a small demo in here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rami-m_i-think-i-found-a-way-to-make-ai-think-like-activity-7374494387558301696-vYUZ
- I was fascinated with the idea of having the centralized AI friend that knows everyone around you is able to automatically match you with the right people at the right time based on your calendar or location.
- For that idea to be brought to life, I had to learn context engineering and giving LLMs a human-like memory and decision-making capabilities. That was done through GraphRAG and several other techniques. I livestreamed that learning process: https://www.youtube.com/live/4YP-mUO-tL4
- I launched it at UCalgary and UWaterloo: https://heyember.me/ & https://uw.heyember.me/
- struggled with the cold-start/chicken-in-the-egg problem. Didn’t have the bandwidth to spread it so I decided to move on to https://getaudora.app
Audora (https://getaudora.app) Audora is a real-time AI communication coach that helps early-stage technical founders and non-native speakers articulate their vision in high-stakes situations. Unlike rehearsal tools, Audora lives on your desktop and wearable devices (e.g. Meta glasses) to analyze behavioral patterns and provide live, psychological nudges during actual investor meetings and sales calls. Audora also tracks your performance over time to diagnose the specific unconscious habits (like monotone or anxiety-induced rambling) that are silently holding you back.
- MacOS MVP built with Swift is live and functional
- Closed Alpha with 20 high-intent early-stage founders
- Organically grew a waitlist of 100+ users through building in public on LinkedIn/X with zero paid spend
- Successfully integrated the Meta Glasses SDK for the initial wearable prototype
Purpose.app (https://purpose.app) Contracted to rebuild the onboarding from the ground up
You can find everything else I’ve built at orbitlabs.studio
What’s the most complex technical concept you’ve learned outside of school or work?
Context engineering. specifically, giving LLMs a human-like memory and decision-making capability through GraphRAG. I was building Ember, an autonomous AI matchmaking system, and I needed the AI to reason about people the way a well-connected friend would: knowing not just who you are, but who you should meet and why, based on your calendar, location, and social graph. None of that was in any course. I figured it out by obsessively reading papers, experimenting, and livestreaming the entire learning process so others could follow along: https://www.youtube.com/live/4YP-mUO-tL4
Why do you want to work at a startup instead of a large company?
I’ve done both. At IBM the work was impactful but it didn’t align with what I genuinely cared about and I wasn’t surrounded by the people that I wanted to be surrounded by
At a startup you’re surrounded by people who are just as ambitious as you, working on a problem they care about as much as you do. It’s such a rare and powerful feeling. That’s the environment I want to be in.
If you were to start a company, what would you want to explore? If you have a specific idea, tell us about it. If not, what types of problems are you most interested in?
I already have. Audora is a real-time AI communication coach that helps founders and non-native speakers articulate their vision in high-stakes situations like investor meetings, sales calls, networking. It runs on your desktop and Meta glasses, analyzes your speech patterns in real time, and gives you live nudges when you start to drift or lose confidence. It also builds a behavioral profile over time so you understand not just what you’re doing wrong, but why.
The big vision: millions of people miss life-changing opportunities every day because of how they communicate. It’s a skill gap that technology can close. I believe that given the trajectory of wearables and real-time AI, we’re at the first moment in history where communication itself can be measured, coached, and improved in the moments that actually matter. getaudora.app
aside from communication I generally love solving problems in the health tech space. This is why I joined Purpose.app