Bijan Moallemi, known to most as "Bij," is not your typical tech CEO. With a background in competitive tennis and corporate finance, Moallemi's path to founding Mosaic, a cutting-edge financial planning and analysis platform, was anything but straight. Yet, it's precisely this diverse experience that has shaped his approach to entrepreneurship and problem-solving in the fast-paced world of tech startups.
Born and raised in San Diego, California, Moallemi's story begins with his parents' journey. "Dad was actually born in Iran, he came to the States when he was 18, escaped the revolution, and met my mom in college in Ohio, of all places," he recalls. This blend of cultures and his father's incredible work ethic laid the groundwork for Moallemi's future success.
"He graduated with two degrees in three years, paid his way through college working three jobs," Moallemi says of his father. "I think a lot of that work ethic, grit, tenacity, everything that he had was kind of instilled in our family from the beginning."
Growing up, Moallemi channeled much of that energy into tennis. "I was pretty good growing up, and I took things quite seriously – I was number one in the country, won a few national titles along the way," he shares. This competitive spirit and discipline would remain a key winning attribute throughout his professional life.
After graduating from UC San Diego, where he continued his tennis career at the D2 level, Moallemi found himself entering the job market during the challenging economic climate of 2009. His first role was in corporate finance at Qualcomm, which provided a solid foundation in financial fundamentals for large cap companies.
However, after about a year and a half, Moallemi began to feel restless. "I kind of looked at the ladder and the next 10, 15, 20 years, and it would have been going from associate to senior associate to whatever. And I got a little bit scared, to be honest," he admits. "I thought, 'Hey, you know what? This has been an amazing ride for me, but this isn't really what I see myself doing for the next decade plus.'"
A New Year's trip to the Bay Area with friends working in tech opened Moallemi's eyes to new possibilities. "I didn't really know what tech was at the time, but I walked away from that weekend feeling like, 'Hey, wow, there's just this special buzz and excitement in the air in San Francisco. I need to break into tech,'" he remembers.
This realization led Moallemi to Palantir, a then-rapidly growing tech company that would become the crucible for his future entrepreneurial journey.
"The company was around 100 people. We'd just done a fundraising round at a billion dollars," he says of Palantir when he joined. The contrast with Qualcomm was stark: "I think my first day I didn't even have time to get an apartment, so I'm staying in my boss's parents' house down the road in Menlo Park.That first day I've got the CEO over one shoulder, I've got the CFO over the other – I probably left the office at midnight that night."
It was at Palantir that Moallemi met his future Mosaic co-founders, Joe Garafalo and Brian Campbell. Together, they faced the monumental task of scaling Palantir's finance function from virtually nothing, to supporting a 3,000-person organization doing three-quarters of a billion in revenue.
"We inherited pretty much nothing," Moallemi explains. "We had an amazing company that was just growing like a weed. But on the finance side, we had no infrastructure. We couldn't answer the basic questions: How much money are we spending? Where is our money going? Who owes us what money?"
This challenge led Moallemi and his team to innovate out of necessity. "We realized that the only way for us to stay afloat was first – sleeping on couches under desks, just cranking 24/7. We did that for about a year. That wasn't sustainable," he recounts. The real solution? Building something to help scale.
"We built a small little SWAT team that became technical," Moallemi says. "We figured the way to solve this problem was to become tech-enabled." The result was a system that could provide answers to business questions in hours or minutes, rather than weeks or months.
After seven years at Palantir, Moallemi and his co-founders each went on to become CFOs at other high-growth, VC-backed companies. It was during this time that they realized the problem they had solved at Palantir was far from unique.
"We stayed best friends and so we're kind of comparing notes at night. And that's when the light bulb went off for us," Moallemi explains. "We realized, hey, our Palantir story – which was again, all out of just necessity, so we weren't working seven days a week – turns out that this is a ubiquitous problem."
This realization led to the founding of Mosaic. "We felt like we had solved this problem at scale at Palantir. We'd solved it again four or five times with other companies," Moallemi says. "And we're sitting back feeling like we'd become domain experts. There's something here in the space that we're seeing and maybe others aren't yet."
The transition from successful CFO to first-time founder wasn't without its challenges. "There was this two, three-month period where I was the first of my two co-founders to quit my job and everything seemed kind of nice and amazing on paper," Moallemi recalls. "And then it's like, okay, where are we going to start? How do we actually do this thing?"
The reality of startup life quickly set in. "As soon as you start to look at your bank account going down each week, it's like, we gotta get moving on this thing," he says. "This idea that we had in our head that seemed so perfect at the time is suddenly that much more real."
Mosaic's early days were marked by intense focus and hustle. "We started with a very focused target persona, which is B2B software companies at the intersection of where the finance function becomes important," Moallemi explains. To compete against much larger, established companies, they had to be "very, very focused and intentional."
This focus paid off as demand for their product exploded. "We went from a handful of customers to a few dozen really quickly," Moallemi says. But this growth wasn't just luck or word of mouth.
"It's rolling up your sleeves," he emphasizes. "For us, it was leveraging our own network, shaking down the tree and figuring out who do we know, and being willing to do whatever work. – in some cases, it was actually doing core finance work for them via services for free to get them to adopt the software. Stuff that doesn't scale and just leaving no stone unturned."
The COVID-19 pandemic presented both challenges and opportunities for the young company. Originally based in San Diego, Mosaic had to quickly adapt to a remote-first model. "We were on the fence to be honest. And then suddenly with COVID, everyone was remote, even me and my two co-founders who were just five minutes down the road," Moallemi recalls.
This shift opened up new possibilities for talent acquisition. "The big pro [for us] being the aperture of who we could go target wasn't just limited to San Diego talent. It was talent around North America, talent around the world," he says. However, as the company grew, they realized the importance of creating regional hubs, which they’ve established now in Toronto, Seattle, Austin, Los Angeles and more.
For Moallemi personally, the transition from CFO to CEO has been a journey of growth and learning. "I think one of the biggest learnings and growth areas for me is… it's really easy to just get fixated on the numbers," he reflects. "The things that you need to do, especially in a startup, you can't always compute mathematically; you're taking things from zero to one."
This shift in mindset extended to sales as well. "A few years ago, me and one of my co-founders generally were more introverted individuals," Moallemi says. "But you’ve got to go out there, you’ve got to expose yourself to a degree. And those first 20, 30, 40 conversations were definitely quite rough. A lot of ‘nos’, a lot of, ‘I don't understand what you guys are doing.’"
Despite these challenges, Moallemi found a new source of motivation in direct customer interactions. "As a founder, I can say there's no better feeling than having this vision in your head for something that you're building, and being out there on the front lines selling it, and then going through the customer journey, seeing customers buy the product, adopt the product, and then get all the value that you imagined from using it," he shares enthusiastically.
Looking to the future, Moallemi sees vast potential in the intersection of finance and technology. "Most functions inside of an organization, they have been blessed with amazing technology that has made their lives better. That has made them more powerful at their jobs over the last 20, 30, 40 years, and especially over the last decade," he observes. "And on the finance side, candidly, we've kind of gotten the short end of the stick."
This gap in the market is precisely what Mosaic aims to fill. "When done properly, he role of the CFO can be one of the most strategic assets and roles inside of an organization," Moallemi asserts. He's particularly excited about the potential of AI to augment financial professionals. "I don't think humans are going away anytime soon. But I do feel like there's a lot of opportunity to pare back all those mundane repetitive tasks that your finance user is doing, and augment them with AI to make them more powerful, and more efficient in their jobs."
For Bijan Moallemi, the journey from competitive tennis player to corporate finance professional to tech entrepreneur has been one of constant learning and adaptation. His unique background, coupled with his experiences at Palantir and as a CFO, have positioned him to tackle one of the most persistent challenges in modern business: making finance more agile, data-driven, and strategic. As Mosaic continues to grow and evolve, Moallemi's vision of empowering finance professionals with cutting-edge technology is slowly but surely becoming a reality.
