Jamal Labani, CEO of Solidrange: For a special Ramadan edition of our My Morning Routine column,we spoke to Solidrange CEO Jamal Labani (Linkedin). Edited excerpts from our conversation:

My name is Jamal Labani, and I am the CEO of Solidrange. My background is pretty unconventional for this space. I studied chemistry and pre-med in the US, but after volunteering in a hospital for a year, I realized I definitely didn't want to be a doctor. The reason I chose chemistry in the first place was because I got 100% in all my high school subjects except chemistry, where I got a 92%. It was the hardest subject for me, so I wanted to tackle it.

I’ve always had an entrepreneurial fire in me. Even in college around 2011, I started a pre-Uber delivery service called Ox Arabia, delivering McDonald's to campus and offering special Arab home-cooked meals.

I eventually shifted into compliance and business development . When Saudi Arabia's National Cybersecurity Authority was newly formed around 2018 and the Vision 2030 transformation journey was underway, they wanted compliance in every industry to ensure the best results. In my field of medicine, they introduced Saudi Central Board for Accreditation of Healthcare Institutions. My co-founders and I saw a huge gap because all the standards were written in English, and the medical managers didn't understand English well enough. They were doctors, not compliance experts, so the standards were not comprehensive for them.

We recently raised a USD 2.4 mn seed funding round to integrate AI into our product offerings. I am a non-technical founder running a cybersecurity company. This might seem unusual in our industry, but we are fully backed by major VCs like Seedra and STC’s Tali Ventures because of the incredible team we’ve built and our commitment to listening to our clients.

While I rely heavily on our CTO Ahmad Tahir for the deep technical execution, I’ve taken it upon myself to bridge my own knowledge gap by completing courses from MIT and Harvard in coding and AI. I didn’t do it for the certificates, but because I want to truly understand the technology we are building and how it solves problems. My philosophy has always been that you don't need to write the code yourself as long as you can build a resilient team, understand the broader perspective, and deliver exactly what the market demands.

A core philosophy behind our product is data sovereignty. We all know there are international platforms that end up not having the best interests of our region in mind. When we talk about GRC, we are dealing with classified information. Being a sovereign Saudi product builds immense trust. Clients know everything can be hosted entirely on-premise, meaning they control it entirely, and ensuring there is no external single point of failure. This trust extends beyond Saudi Arabia — we have clients in Qatar and are building strong pipelines in Bahrain, the Emirates, and Kuwait.

We are built on resilience and effort. I'm the biggest failure ever — I've failed way more times than I've succeeded, but I always come back to find out what went wrong. Even our logo reflects this: it's made of hexagons and triangles. I was watching the Discovery Channel and saw how bees use hexagons and how Archimedes used triangles — they are the strongest, most resilient shapes in nature.

I actually love Ramadan. Beyond the spirituality, it's the best time to catch up on work because everybody else is taking time off and relaxing. You don't have this luxury of time for the rest of the year as you're just running from one thing to another. I spend more than 12 hours in the office during the holy month.

I usually wake up naturally around 8-8:30am without an alarm clock. I always make sure I have an hour for myself before starting work. I don't like going to the gym in the morning, so I spend the first 30 to 60 minutes stretching or doing yoga, and reading or listening. Notebook LM has been great to me for the past year — I've listened to more than 60 books.

I arrive at the office around Dhuhr prayer and stay at my desk until Iftar. I keep it simple with a date, Greek yogurt, and coffee, then I head straight to the gym to play basketball for 20 to 30 minutes. Sports have been very important to me mentally to get my energy up and clear my head. After that, I go home, eat my actual breakfast, and jump back to the office.

I pray Isha and two Rakats of Taraweeh at the mosque next to my office, and I'm usually back at my desk by 9:30p . I stay late — one day I left at 2am, and my team was there with me. I never ask them to stay, but they see the work I am putting in and they come too.

I live by two slightly contrasting pieces of advice. I come from a family with very high expectations, and my dad always quoted the Hadith: “God loves that when you do something, you do it well.” But at the same time, I live by the idea that “perfection is the enemy of completion.” You need to find the sweet spot between doing your absolute best and not letting perfection stop you. Sometimes you don't need a ten out of ten right away; you just need to go from zero to one, and then perfect it step by step.

My favorite piece of art is a painting by Jan Steen called “The Happy Family.” I bought a miniature version of it for my house. It depicts the proverb saying “as the old sing, so pipe the young,” a concept that exists across many cultures, from Egypt to Saudi Arabia to Holland.

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