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I was born in Dièppe, France, moved to east London at eight. Trained as an engineer and started at Goldman Sachs at eighteen, placed on the wrong team.
These days I’m a co-founder at Draper with Mustafa and Aaquib, where we turn founders into industry authorities. Mustafa and I met at an agency and spent two years there on YC founders and a16z-backed companies before we went and did our own version of it. The thesis hasn’t moved since, that content is product and product is content, and Mustafa has asked me to stop saying it.
Before Draper I built Simply Smashed with my brother, out of the back of a flower shop. London’s highest rated burger joint on Google. 4.9 stars across 3,000 reviews, and not a pound of paid marketing behind any of it. He runs it now and runs it better, which I get told regularly.
I also built MiniDeed as a student, a social app where likes became penny donations. It raised £26k for charity across 25 countries and still takes donations daily.
On the side I build small Muslim software, things like dhikry and vibenasheeds and Bilal. I’m a tinkerer more than anything.
I was 18 and got placed on the wrong team at Goldman Sachs. They'd just launched a technology apprenticeship, first cohort ever, and I was supposed to go into a traditional software engineering role but instead I ended up on something called the voice engineering team where the second youngest…
I got 6 A*s and 5 As at GCSE. Then I got BBDD at A-level. Nobody's mentioned the GCSEs since. But I still hear about the A-levels. At 16 I was coasting and I didn't even know it. I thought being smart was a personality trait and not something you actually had to maintain. And A-levels are the…
The best thing I did at Goldman Sachs was talk my way onto someone else's janky side project. Mehti prayed next to me every day. One afternoon on the way out I asked how it was going. I meant it as a greeting. He heard it as a question about his startup, and started telling me everything. He'd…
A hacker posted crypto slop from Brian Chesky's account and nobody thought he'd been hacked. They thought he'd started using ChatGPT. We're so deep in the AI content era that a founder posting something that sounds a bit off just reads as normal now. Every post gets filtered through "did they…
Italy has a machine that churns espresso and cream into slush and I've thought about little else since. Crema di caffè. It comes in a cup with a spoon, and some places call it caffè del nonno, grandad's coffee. The best I've managed describing it back home is "slush coffee" and that does it no…
I keep entering domains the slow way in the fastest era in history. Twice now and I'd do it again. You can go to Claude right now and start building in a domain you have zero expertise in. And it might work tbh, in fact, we're in the most competitive era of software in history because of…