Entrepreneurs lose a lot of sleep worrying about making payroll and paying bills. Sammy Wahab is no exception.
But the co-founder and chief executive officer of Mozzaz has something to jump-start his day: A mobile app that helps improve the lives of people who suffer memory loss or can’t communicate with the people around them.
“There’s a total sense of satisfaction and not because it’s your own company, but it’s actually about the fact that you’re doing something that makes a difference in a person’s life,” Wahab says.
Mozzaz enables patients and their care providers to customize management of their treatment, leading to better health results. It does this by collecting and securely storing patient information in the cloud, and integrating it with clinical management and electronic health record systems to help clinicians make better treatment decisions.
It serves those with congenital mental disorders such as autism; stroke or aphasia patients; and those with neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s.
“The clinicians love that data, because they know what issue you’re facing and how to create intervention plans to address that,” he says.
This isn’t Wahab’s first time down entrepreneurial lane. He talked about his previous startup life in the late ‘90s during this month’s Upstart Breakfast.
“We had always planned to do another startup,” Wahab says “In my previous life we had built large enterprise systems and B2B hubs, and yes, they look cool they sound cool, but they don’t give you same level of satisfaction that this gives you from a value delivery perspective – and that’s what drives us.
Wahab enjoyed the success of BlackBerry in 2008, but he couldn’t shake his passion for his own start-up. As the health care community showed growing interest in his idea, he left BlackBerry to work on Mozzaz full-time in early summer of 2012.
For both Wahab and his co-founder Rini Gahir, the idea for Mozzaz came from their personal difficulties in having children with disabilities.
“My co-founder’s son, he’s autistic – non-verbal, and my daughter was diagnosed with Type I diabetes, so we were actually thinking of building a product for both of them to provide collaborative care using mobile technologies,” he says. Managing diabetes involves a lot of data which endocrinologists use to adjust insulin levels, and capturing all of it, and accurately, was a struggle.
So he thought, “How can we use mobile and cloud technology to help these kids and to develop a solution to help in their day-to-day life?”
The common thread between congenital and neurodegenerative patients is that speech is the first thing to go. As Wahab explains, “You really can’t communicate, or your motor skills are not there to do your daily functions or you suffer from memory loss.”
Sometimes people just need help with daily living, like having notifications to remind them to brush their teeth, or which pill to take and when.
“We don’t solve the entire problem, but we make life a little easier for them,” Wahab says.
He cited a young lady with non-verbal autism, who would get frustrated flipping through her binder to communicate with caregivers in her Toronto group home.
The difference was pronounced after only a few months of beta testing. A huge smile now crosses her face as she whips out her tablet to use the Mozzaz pictograms to ask for a particular movie she likes to watch.
“It’s satisfying, even though it’s a small thing, but it makes her life better that she can carry that [tablet] and communicate,” Wahab says.
Although the impact is huge, the market size isn’t.
“I know I am focused on a very small sector,” Wahab says.
But recreating the same success he had in the ‘90s isn’t his motivation.
“I am more passionate about the product, rather than trying to build a $200-million-dollar company; it’s about giving people what they want to make their lives better,” he says.
Wahab plans to build his company in Waterloo Region after relocating to Waterloo from Oakville.
“This is a place to build a company… It’s the ecosystem that’s very attractive here,” he says.
He attributes that to the region’s talent pool, which has deepened since the restructuring at BlackBerry.
“Besides technical talent, we have suppliers, graphic designers, PR people, marketing people and any kind of support services you need and talent you need to grow a tech company; that’s why I find this is a great place,” Wahab says.
Mozzaz grew from the cramped basement of Wahab’s house to a shared suite with four other companies at the Accelerator Centre. Now occupying a large suite plus two smaller ones, the team has grown to 12 and is looking to hire more.
Wahab learned from his first experience as a startup entrepreneur, and from the time he spent at BlackBerry during its rapid growth.
“A lot of people have the wrong perception; they don’t understand the pains that they have to go through to build a company,” Wahab says. “That’s the beauty with a startup; there is no black and white, you just have to figure it out along the way – there’s lots of grey.”
