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
