I first “met” Nader Khalilin March of 2000, he was fund raising for his startup at a time called Paneau ( I still don’t know how to say it but I know it’s French ).  Paneau had a very intriguing business model.  It was an Out of Home advertising (OOH) play for the Uber’s and Lyfts, and what made it so unique is that it was building IP to reroute your trip if you get a local business to sponsor the ride.

Now this all sounds amazing, but if you look at the date of when we connected.  It was COVID ! And in a span of months there were no cars on the street, let alone Ubers and Lyfts.

Now a normal entrepreneurial team would just fold and call it quits. But not Nader, Alec Fong, and the gang,  they spun an amazing side project in a weekend !  They asked “what is the best thing you can do to help a local business that is currently closed ?” And their conclusion was to buy its products or services now, for it to be redeemed in the future, when the world opens again.   That side pivot on their website went viral, and was even featured in local news in San Diego, the guys came out from this side project as  the hero’s who saved local businesses.

Now this composition of a founding team showed me first hand the power of a founding team with complementary skill sets , the “seller” in Nader and the doer in “Alec”, to simply be able to hide in a cave over a weekend and come out of it with a product. And this insight allowed us at Nama Venture to double down on the need that any startup we’d invest in should demonstrate that firstly it’s a team, and that the founding team has complementary skill sets.

Now while the guys were hacking and coding non stop. They came across a problem that was frustrating them non stop.  their code would work beautifully in their dev environment but the minute they push it to QA or Production, everything would break.  And at that point they thought to themselves, if we are facing this problem and we are good coders, imagine how many engineering teams are facing this exact problem.  So they stepped back and said we are solving the wrong problem !  instead of solving for OOH advertising in an Uber, let’s tackle this problem ! And as simple as that, Paneau was killed and Brev.devwas born.

Oh, and this time around they said we are not applying to YC, we are not leaving San Francisco ( at that time the cool thing was to leave SF and go to Austin , Miami, etc) and we are not gonna be remote , and I’m thinking to myself, these guys are the poster child of the word contrarian !

Now if you ever hear Nader talk. He’s a combination of putting a super geek and a CEO of a publicly listed company in a blender, he’s so damn smart that at best I’d understand half of what he’s saying, big words with the geekiest of terms inside them and I’m just trying to hang on in the conversation before I fall off.  And now as any good investor, I wanna sell the product, so I’d reach out to dev shops in MENA and large enterprises and tell them “we cracked the code on solving the dev environment challenge”. I’d say imagine having your dev environment in the cloud and you push the code …., and no one knows what the hell I’m talking about. But I’d still send them to the website and make an intro. One day I heard Nader say “ Mohammed , it’s simple man, if your local dev environment is your pet.  Then we make your dev environment like cattle “ and I’m like , I see it now ! I can sell that.  So I started going around saying pet cattle pet cattle to any potential customer of Brev. And honestly I’m not sure how much business I got them, probably not a whole lot. but I sure tried 😁

Now at that stage, when I touch base with Nader, I’d get a vibe from him that the product is not there yet, it’s not gelling how it should be, but he would give the news with a level confidence that you know he’ll get there, he just had a calming way of relaying that confidence with a bit humor too, so you’d leave his calls with ease and a smile on your face.

One day I touched base with him and he’s like, Mohammed, something weird is happening at Brev, people are signing up to our product not really for the “dev problem”. But for our GPUs.  It turns out the geniuses at Brev have extended their services to offer a dev environment for AI developers.  And at this point everyone in Silicon Valley is pivoting to AI , even the domains are changing from .io to .ai.  And that turned out to be a blessing for Brev , everyone is pivoting to the AI universe, but no one has access to the coveted NVIDIA chipsets that you need to “train your models” etc..

So Nader calls me again on one of our catchup calls and he’s like we nailed it, we finally have a product that fits the market.  Now at this post I’m a little pissed cause I finally got the hang of the Pet Cattle pitch and now my great pitch is gone ! He’s now throwing at me names of chips and hardware I’ve never heard of in my life, and I’m a technical guy and I’m a CCIE ( retired network engineer ) but I have no idea what this guy is saying. And frankly I don’t know how to pitch this “pivot “ in MENA !

Things at this point are trending up for Brev, and Nader now has a ridiculous mustache and started sharing content online, establishing thought leadership in his space, and you get the feeling that the Brev team is really building a community around Brev. He has this great way of making geeky language funny, and relatable.  And from all these efforts,  this super small company that had this little product in AI took notice, that company was NVIDIA ( Of course in super small we mean 3rd largest company in the world in Market Cap ) lol

Now with Nader we’d always have to chase him to get a hold of him. It would take weeks, maybe a couple of months sometimes to lock in a Zoom meeting, but one day, Nader sends me a message and he’s like Mohammed we need to talk ASAP.  Now of course in my business if a founder calls you and they need to talk to you ASAP, 99% of the time the news is that they are shutting down.  So I have to get mentally ready to give them the pep talk and tell them that it’s ok, you failed for the right reason etc..  and if you wanna do it again I’m willing to ride with you again etc… and he’s like “we’re getting acquired.” And he waits for what feels like 3 hours and says “by NVIDIA“ and the rest is history.

This Brev team is simply the epitome of the successful founder DNA.  They have a hindering tenacity to keep at it, and keep chipping at the wall of challenges, till one day they simply got so good that they could not be ignored.  I have no doubt the Brev team will do wonders inside of NVIDIA, and they will be great at creating the right committee of software developers for NVIDIA chipsets, and we can’t wait to partner with them on extending these tools to support developers on MENA.

Mr. Nader, you, Alec, and the rest of the Brev team simply rock.

Mohammed.