I started my journey in Amman

, whereI was a student at the New English School. Iwas doing well and was into computers, but atthat time (1993), I hadn’t heard o the Internet.I applied to the Massachusetts Institute o Technology (MIT), because everyone wastelling me it was a great school. When I got theMIT application, I wrote the essays multipletimes and flled all boxes as required. But onebox was difcult to fll, or understand in the frstplace. It said: email. I had no idea what emailwas. I went to the encyclopedia; ound nothing.I asked all my riends and no one knew what itwas, and I had to leave that box blank.

 w lck  hv b ccp MT   ll chlhp

. I still didn’t knowwhat email was, but at MIT I was introducedto the magical world o the Internet, and fnallyfgured it out. It blew me away, and that waspre-Internet, pre-browser, pre everything. I wentto MIT intending to be a mechanical engineerlike my ather, but I ell in love with this worldo network computing and then I discovered theweb. At that time, I was one o the ew people atMIT to have a website in those days.

 lz h h h , h

, can give you access to all sorts o inormation that was otherwise very hard toget and it was in real time. We were readingresearch papers rom other universities withouthaving to talk to anybody. I realized there wasa big business in the Internet world. I actuallydid many websites or dierent departments atMIT. And then someone paid me an obsceneamount o money to build a website thatexplained how the web worked.

Whl  w    g  hp L.

At the time, the most popular productwas something called Lotus Note whichallowed companies to have what we now callintranets, but at the time it was proprietaryand they were looking or ways to move theinrastructure they have to the Internet. I wasvery lucky to get a job at the group that wastrying to get Notes onto the web. And this iswhere I learned about the corporate world andI understood what it meant to build sotwareproessionally. I was a sophomore then and itamazed me how a big corporation like Lotuswould hire a 19 year old to write core pieces o its inrastructure. At that time I wrote the veryfrst web mail application or Lotus.

 gg  M  cpgphc,

I went back to work at Lotuswhere I ocused on a product called LotusQuickPlace which created a segment calledTeamware. The environment there was allabout innovation, and redefning the rules. Iwas a resh graduate and the youngest guy onthe team, and this is when I got my frst patentin 1999. One o the things I noticed was howthe innovative process worked, and becauseI kept exposing mysel to dierent domains Irealized that an idea that didn’t ft in one areacould be applied elsewhere and succeed. Myidea allowed people to upload a new look and eel to any website without talking to thesystem administrators. At the time, it was abig thing - the concept o “themeing” that yousee on sites like wordpress today, where onecould create a collaborative space and have auser-tailored experience. In a corporate setting,a company would buy this product rom Lotusand brand it to become theirs.

Th l pc    L wcll L Cc

or which I was thelead server architect. For that project I took an unconventional approach to building theproduct, which received a lot o resistance buteventually it led to the beginning o Web 2.0.

Bsrappng 

 l vhg  w vlv , f h w cpll  lwg.

I you work in a cocoon and don’t gettimely eedback rom people, you won’t beable to build a great product. Today at Google,we are on a two-week schedule o delivery andI am trying to make it even shorter, because itis very important to iterate, to go through theiterative loop o design, test, push, eedback,and redo it all over again.

Oc  g  US gc  2005

, Ihooked up with a Lotus colleague named MussieShore – the best product designer I've ever met– and we were exploring ideas. We were bothinterested in this transormational thing that washappening with mobile devices and that waspre-iPhone. We looked at the numbers and sawthat text messaging and instant messaging weregoing through the roo. People were connectingand communicating in ways that we hadn’tseen beore. However, i you looked at howpeople communicated it was still one-to-onecommunication. And we thought that we couldmake this better. So we started with the idea o how we might allow people to share things theycare about with the people they care or. Wecalled the company Zingku.

W c p wh l  cz 

. Forexample one was a service that provides book names with a short bio and an option to buy thebook via sms. This is the beauty o the web, wedidn’t have the data, we collected it rom Amazonand Google and Wikipedia and so on, and weaggregated it and then through the cloud weoptimized it or search. Over a year we amassed

how i did it

Sami Shalabi

A Beautiful Mind

Sami Shalabi made history by becoming the irst Jordanian to sellhis company to web giant Google. The young entrepreneur is stillmaking history, adding to his cachet o inventions and patentsevery so oten. He did it all through capitalizing on his strongestasset – his mind. As told to

oula Faraa

VENTURE MAGAZINE