Mo Katibeh is the co-founder of RingCentral and is currently the chief operating officer (COO) of RingCentral. He was also an early employee at eBay and the CEO of his own start-up before joining RingCentral. In this article, you will learn about his experiences.
Katibeh grew up in al-Alam, Syria and earned his MBA from the University of California at Berkeley. He started college in Canada, but transferred to the University of California at Berkeley because he felt that it would be easier to gain experience working with people and building skills without being distracted. As an undergraduate he was a TA for computer science courses and enjoyed it so much that he decided to get his MBA to broaden his career options.”
Mo Katibeh learned English as a second language while growing up in Syria, but did not have issues understanding what people were saying. He went to Canada and met his wife, as well as some of his close friends and other Syrian students. One of them, a Syrian-American, helped him get a job in the U.S., which was at eBay back in 1999.
Katibeh was working as an inventory analyst at eBay when he realized he wanted to start his own company. He worked in finance for ten years, first with consulting firm Booz & Company and then with the investment firm Thoma Cressey & Company. He eventually became a partner in both firms and helped build their analytics practices.
RingCentral
After leaving eBay, Mo Katibeh started RingCentral with his friend and former eBay colleague Michael Feroozi. They wanted to create a business communications platform that would be easy to use and could replace legacy systems. Their approach was to make a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business phone system, which would allow office employees to communicate with each other using a computer or smartphone and then seamlessly connect them with others on their network who were using the same application.
RingCentral is based in Belmont, California, but Katibeh has lived in San Francisco for the last ten years.