Chapters
The story so far.
01 Dièppe
I was born in Dièppe, northern France. Rural, quiet, and barely a halal takeaway in the whole town. The highlight of my childhood was the drive to Paris to visit my uncle, because Paris meant a grec sandwich from the kebab shops. Happiness on a plate. I have been chasing that sandwich professionally ever since.
We moved to east London when I was eight, where Dad and my brother ran an Italian restaurant called Anima D’Italia. His signature was the tiramisu and mine was eating it. By sixteen I was waiting tables there.
School gave me my first public humbling. I got 6A* and 5As at GCSE and then BBDD at A-level, and while nobody has mentioned the GCSEs since, I still hear about the A-levels.
02 MiniDeed 2018–2021
My first startup, co-founded as a student. A social app where every like became a penny donation to charity. All of it went to charity and none of it to us, which tells you everything about our business model.
Donations went from £37 a month to £2.7k a month. Twenty-five countries, £26k raised through likes alone. We refused to show follower counts because they felt toxic, and a lot of people churned because the app stopped giving them the hit they came for. You cannot opt out of the attention economy by pretending it isn’t there. That lesson cost me three years and became the foundation of everything I now do at Draper.
The app still takes donations daily. Sadaqah jariyah beats MRR.
03 Twenty-five hours 2019
In January 2019 I flew to New York with my friend Arefin. I was interrogated and held at JFK for twenty-five hours, then refused entry. No reason given. I held the story in for two years, then wrote it up in three parts: the interrogation, the cell, the reflections.
That wasn’t the first system I’d been on the wrong end of and it won’t be the last. It’s a big part of why I build. Nobody has to give you permission to start something of your own.
04 The Tiramisu Response Unit 2020
March 2020. My parents were stranded in Bangladesh, Dad high-risk, his restaurant shut. Me and my brother took it over within the week and launched a tiramisu delivery service, free delivery, the two of us doing everything. I named it the Tiramisu Response Unit. Still the best brand name I have ever come up with and I have had a few since.
We ran a pizza programme for the community at the same time, and MiniDeed’s Ramadan campaign broke its own records in the middle of it all. The busiest stretch of my life. The empty kitchen it left behind becomes important in chapter seven.
05 140 days 2021
About to graduate, savings not sustainable, flight abroad already planned. So I set a public challenge: 140 days to launch a food concept before I leave. Authentic grec sandwiches for East London, the first proper French halal kebab in the UK. I mapped my unfair advantages, tested the name by Twitter poll and voicenote, and built it all in public before that was a phrase.
Then I deferred the whole thing. Grec Bros never launched. Everything I learned in those 140 days turned up two years later wearing a different apron.
06 Simply Smashed 2021–2026
We launched from the back of a flower shop in 2021, in the kitchen the pandemic left us. By 2023 it was public. By 2025 it was 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.
My favourite receipts are the small ones. Delivering a missing item myself on a Boris bike in five minutes, and the bloke taking the bag without a word. Asking customers to please keep their socks on, because it had become a communal living room. Order fulfilment going from 50 minutes to 8, which nobody claps for.
I left in January 2026. My brother runs it now, and runs it better.
07 The cluster 2022–2025
Around the burgers, a run of smaller bets. SIMPLYCLO raised £15k for Palestine with a hoodie collection made in Bangladesh, then wound down properly when bootstrapping got heavy. Killing a venture well is an underrated skill.
Peruvian Street Kitchen exists because of a lunch spot from my Goldman days I couldn’t stop thinking about. Sixteen failed attempts at the green sauce before it clicked. Simply Foundation, funded by burger profits, has put four huffadh through so far.
08 Thoughtleadr 2025–2026
I joined Thoughtleadr as Creative Director and left as Head of Training, which meant I finished the job teaching the method rather than only running it. The clients were YC founders and a16z-backed companies.
Nobody at the restaurant knew. I was taking calls with founders who had just raised, then going back out to the pass. The work I thought I was doing was content. What I was actually doing was getting the story out of someone’s head, which is the part nobody can hand off.
Mustafa was there too. We left because AI was about to take the floor out of the model. Once a language model can produce the deliverable, an agency that sells deliverables has a problem, and the value moves to whoever owns the method.
09 Draper 2025–
In late 2025 I came back to tech. Draper is me, Mustafa and Aaquib turning founders into industry authorities, with content treated as what it actually is now: part of the product.
I’d been writing the thesis in public for two years without naming the company. Building in public is part of the product. Storytelling is the most valuable skill of the AI era. Content compounds alongside the product or the product stays unknown. Now we build the machine that does it properly.
The competition is a founder paying $1m salaries to learn the space, and a man whose last exit was $780m. Then there is me and my two bootstrapped boi cofounders.
We’ll win iA.