We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Mohamed Yassin. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Mohamed below.

Mohamed, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What do you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry?

The biggest misconception in the venue booking industry is thinking that simply creating a directory or marketplace solves the problem. Many corporate players have essentially built digital versions of the Yellow Pages – they list venues but don’t address the fundamental friction in the booking process.
Let me share a story that really drove this home for me. Last year, I watched my close friend try to plan his birthday party. She had a spreadsheet with 15 potential venues, and despite using several well-known booking platforms, she still spent three weeks playing phone tag with venue managers and waiting for basic information about pricing and availability. She’d find what seemed like the perfect venue online, only to discover it was booked solid for the next 18 months or well outside her budget. This isn’t just inconvenient – it’s causing real stress for people during what should be exciting life moments.
Corporate solutions often prioritize breadth over depth, trying to list as many venues as possible without ensuring a quality experience. They’re solving for search, but not for booking. At Litty, we’ve learned that building deep partnerships with venues and developing smart software solutions that provide real-time availability and pricing isn’t just a nice-to-have – it’s essential for actually solving the problem.
The industry needs to shift from thinking about venues as listings to thinking about them as dynamic spaces that need sophisticated technology and partnership approaches to be properly marketed and booked. That’s how we’ll truly modernize this space.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I remember sitting with another friend one night, watching her try to plan this corporate happy hour. She had about 15 browser tabs open, was juggling multiple phone calls, and kept saying ‘Why is this so hard?’ That moment really stuck with me.

I’d spent years working on some pretty complex stuff – like building systems for self-driving cars at Uber and working on large-scale platforms at Google. My dreams were always big, I wanted to solve really hard problems for humanity. But here we were, struggling with something as seemingly simple as finding a nice bar for a team event. We’re literally sending robots down the street, but we can’t easily book a venue for a birthday party?

Me and my sister Menna have been talking about starting a company for years now. Menna has this natural ability to get things done and get them done super fast. She was always the star child in the family, since she graduated High-school at fifteen and college at eighteen. When I told her about Litty she instantly jumped on it, helping map out how we’re going to get it from a conversation to a real business.
The funny thing is, people often ask me if working with my sister is challenging. But honestly? It’s been incredible. Me and Menna can go back and forth talking about a very complex problem until we come to a solution that just makes sense.

Every time we tell someone about Litty, they immediately get it. Just today, I was reading an email from a woman who’s planning her birthday party. She found this super cool new venue called Little More on our platform – and literally went from discovering it to having it booked in under an hour. The only question she had for the venue was about the music genre, and when they said house music, she booked it 60 seconds later. That’s exactly what we’re going for – making the whole process seamless. It’s funny because whenever I’m explaining Litty to someone, they usually cut me off halfway through like, ‘Wait, this doesn’t exist already?” or “No way, I needed this last month!’. Some times they even pull out their phones in disbelief to check Google to see if this doesn’t already exist. Its an obvious solution to a problem that’s existed for a long time. That’s when you know you’re solving a real problem. When people don’t just nod politely – they actually interrupt you to tell you how much they need it.

At Google and Uber, I worked on impressive technical challenges – building systems for billions of users and helping cars make split-second decisions. But while the scale was massive, I rarely got to see how my work directly helped real people. Now, I get messages from venue owners saying ‘Thank you – I used to spend hours every day just responding to basic questions about availability and pricing.’ Instead of abstract metrics about user engagement, I see specific moments of joy. We’re not trying to revolutionize transportation or build the next big tech platform – we’re just making it easier for real people to plan meaningful moments in their lives. When you can point to specific people whose daily lives are better because of what you built, that’s when you know you’re solving the right problem.

If there’s one thing I want people to understand about Litty, it’s that we get it. We’ve been there – struggling with spreadsheets, playing phone tag, dealing with outdated information. And we’re not just throwing technology at the problem. We’re building something that actually works for both sides – the venues and the customers. Because at the end of the day, it’s not just about booking a space – it’s about creating memories without the headache. For venues, we’re as flexible as possible to make sure they can use our platform without having to change their current day-to-day expectations. We pose no restrictions to them, and let them talk freely with customers. For customers, we try to help you find exactly the venues you’d like in as little time as possible.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I’ll never forget our first venue call. It was with this very popular multi-floor bar in New York City, I won’t name it but you definitely know it. I had rehearsed my pitch probably fifty times, had a ton of Google Docs spread out on my monitors in front of me. Right when the call started I launched into this carefully prepared speech about Litty and our vision. They basically cut me off mid-sentence and said, ‘We don’t need to do that. Besides, our calendar is way too complicated to share’ Then they hit me with the classic ‘we’re too busy to talk further’ and just… hung up.

You know that moment in movies where everything goes quiet and you’re just sitting there, phone in hand, wondering what just happened? That was me. For a split second, all these doubts came rushing in. Like, maybe there’s some obvious reason this doesn’t exist already that I’m too naive to see? Maybe I’m trying to solve a problem that these industry veterans know can’t be solved?

But here’s the thing the kind of beautiful thing about this whole journey – that turned out to be our only call like that. Almost every venue we talked to after that was not only interested, they were excited. What we discovered was that venues actually really wanted this solution; they just wanted to work with someone local who understood their needs, someone who was committed to making their lives easier, not harder. Being on phone calls and emails all day answering the same questions isn’t fun or easy. I was offering a way to solve that.

Looking back now, I’m almost grateful for that first call. It taught me early on that rejection is just part of the journey, and sometimes the people who say ‘no’ the loudest are actually helping you refine your approach for all the ‘yes’s’ that follow. Plus, it makes for a pretty good story now that I can laugh about it. Who knows? Maybe one day we’ll actually get that bar onboard getlitty.com.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

Everyone talks about pivoting like it’s this massive, dramatic shift in direction. But in reality, pivoting is just part of our daily DNA at Litty. It’s about being nimble and not getting too caught up in any single solution.
What we’ve learned is that you can’t afford to spend weeks perfecting something when you don’t even know if users want it. Sure, we could spend days making a button look absolutely perfect, but will that actually help someone book a venue faster? Will it help them find what they’re looking for more efficiently? Those are the questions that matter.

What’s actually exciting – and this might sound counterintuitive – is when users complain about something not working or not making sense. Because that means they’re trying to use it, they see the value, and they want it to work better. That’s pure gold for us. Solving problems for engaged users is infinitely more valuable than building perfect features that nobody needs.

This mindset has become core to how we operate at Litty. We build quickly, learn from real customers, and adjust based on actual needs rather than assumptions. Sometimes that means letting go of ideas we loved, but that’s exactly what keeps us moving forward and actually solving real problems.

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