Chapters
The story so far.
01 Dieppe
I was born in Dieppe, a small seaside town in northern France with barely a halal takeaway in it. Dad opened the only Indian restaurant in town, and it felt like we were the only Asian family for miles. On Saturdays he sold Dragon Ball Z toys off a market stall and I’d sit behind it watching him sell. The highlight of my childhood was the drive to Paris to see my uncle, because Paris meant a grec sandwich from the kebab shops. I’ve 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. Mum spent months perfecting a halal tiramisu for it, the first one in London, and my main contribution was eating it. By sixteen I was waiting tables there.
I got 6A* and 5As at GCSE, then BBDD at A-level. Nobody has mentioned the GCSEs since, and I still hear about the A-levels. Goldman Sachs took me anyway.
02 The wrong team five years
They’d just launched a technology apprenticeship, first cohort ever, three days at work and two at uni. I was eighteen and meant to go into a normal software engineering role. Instead they put me on something called the voice engineering team, where the second youngest person was at least double my age and nobody had a plan for me.
So I just started showing up to things. That’s how I ended up in rooms watching Amazon and Cisco pitch Goldman on replacing the hoots and the turrets. The hoots are the broadcast intercoms, and the turrets are the massive phone setups bolted to every trader’s desk. Multimillion pound decisions, and me in the corner acting like I belonged. I watched pitches fall apart, and projects get greenlit and then quietly die six months later, and worked out that the interesting stuff was everything around the engineering. Nobody was checking on me, and nobody would have noticed if I’d just sat at my desk and coasted. I moved into a proper engineering role eventually and stayed five years.
In my first week I asked where I could pray, and they found a Muslim on the floor to walk me down to the prayer room. He pointed at the door, said “don’t stay too long in this place,” and left. It took me years to work out what he meant.
03 MiniDeed 2018–2021
Mehti prayed next to me in that prayer room every day. One afternoon on the way out I asked how he was doing, just being polite, and he heard it as a question about his startup and told me everything. He’d coded it himself and it barely worked. The idea was that every like turns into a penny for charity, so anyone could fundraise just by posting. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I asked if I could work on it.
The company was two co-founders, one engineer and me. I did users and support, worked out what we should build next, and posted about all of it on Twitter because that felt like the obvious thing to do. We got into an accelerator called Fast Forward in Stratford, and I started skipping the uni days to go there instead.
Donations went from £37 a month to £2.7k a month. Then one tweet went viral and Ramadan did the rest, 800,000 taps across twenty-five countries and £26k raised through likes. All of it went to charity and none of it to us, and we never worked out how to make money from it.
The part I didn’t see coming was what people did with the place once they were in it. Someone would post something a bit off, within the rules and outside the spirit of the thing, and other users would step in before we’d even seen it. Nobody asked them to. They’d bought in hard enough to guard it themselves, and that was also the ceiling, because we’d quietly built a room that only fit one kind of person. I see the same trap every week now, on calls with founders trying to build something for everyone.
We also took follower counts away because they felt toxic, and a lot of people left over it. Donations still trickle through the app daily, years later. He never did tell me how he was doing.
04 Twenty-five hours 2019
the three parts, as I posted them
In January 2019 I flew to New York with my friend Arefin. I was interrogated and held at JFK for twenty-five hours and then refused entry, with no reason given. I kept it to myself for two years, then wrote it up in three parts.
It wasn’t the last time either. In 2025 I spent eight hours in an interrogation room trying to cross into the West Bank. Both are a big part of why I build.
05 The Tiramisu Response Unit 2020
In March 2020 my parents got on a flight to Bangladesh and lockdown was announced while they were in the air. Dad was high risk and stuck there for months, the restaurant had no customers, and the rent didn’t care about pandemics. Me and my brother took it over within the week and started delivering Mum’s tiramisu across London in full trays of 24 slices, with the two of us doing everything. I called it the Tiramisu Response Unit, and through the worst months it brought in 40% of our revenue. It’s still the best brand name I’ve ever come up with, and I’ve had a few since.
Alongside it we ran Help Our Heroes and delivered thousands of pizza slices to hospitals across London, and MiniDeed’s Ramadan campaign broke its own records the same month. It was the busiest time of my life. When we started thinking about selling, a buyer came in and told my dad we were bleeding out, then made an offer so insulting that Dad slammed the table and walked out. They just smirked and lit cigarettes outside. We kept the kitchen.
06 140 days 2021
In 2021 I’d just finished five years at Goldman and was leaving for Egypt in a few months to study. So I gave myself 140 days, in public, to launch a food business before I left. The plan was to launch three and see which one lived.
The first was a vegan burger brand. Vegan was everywhere in east London that year and it genuinely got traction, just with a completely different audience to the one I had. The second was Grec, proper French grec sandwiches, and that was the one I had conviction on. I tested the name with Twitter polls and voice notes and built it in public. It died on the supply chain. We couldn’t get the meat into the country and it never fed a single person.
The third was my brother’s idea, and Dad didn’t want to do it. He’d spent decades building a proper Italian restaurant and burgers felt like a step down. He came round when we showed him the numbers. By day 140 it wasn’t close. Simply Smashed had far outrun the other two.
07 Simply Smashed 2021–2026
My brother spent £100 on a grill and started making burgers in the corner of Dad’s restaurant. We pushed the tables away and rented the front out to a flower shop, so people walked through flowers to pick up their burgers. We had no money to do it properly, so we just told people what we were building and let them watch us figure it out. My sister-in-law came up with half the recipes we still serve.
Then I went to Egypt to study for nine months while my brother and Dad kept it running. When I came back my brother gave me one rule. Your job is to grow it. There were long stretches where I couldn’t tell if any of it was working, and I’d catch myself wondering if I should have stayed in tech. One of the front of house guys found out about Goldman mid-shift and just went “you left Goldman Sachs for this?” He wasn’t taking the piss either. He actually felt sorry for me.
By 2025 it was London’s highest rated burger joint on Google, 4.9 stars across 3,000 reviews, and we never spent a pound on paid marketing. We’d got order times down from 50 minutes to 8 by then too. The bits I remember are smaller. I once hired a Boris bike to take a missing chicken burger to a customer five minutes away, and he took the bag and shut the door without a word. We also had to ask people to keep their socks on, because it had turned into a communal living room.
We made a lot of decisions that looked stupid on paper. We closed for the first week of Ramadan, which cost us 30% of the month’s revenue, and built a prayer space where more tables could have gone. We walked away from a site because the landlord wanted us to sell beer. When we got review bombed for supporting Palestine, the community showed up for us.
I left in January 2026. My brother runs it now, and runs it better. In August IFG made a documentary about us that was as much about Dad as the burgers. It’s the best telling of our story so far.
08 Peruvian Street Kitchen 2025–
There was a Peruvian place near the office in my Goldman days, with senior bankers in Savile Row suits queuing outside it for chicken. One day I went to see what the fuss was about and the green sauce hit me like a truck. I threw away my Tesco meal deal routine that same day, and five years later I still couldn’t get the taste out of my head.
Version one was a disaster, burnt chicken and a perfect sauce. Two months of marinades and custom potato buns later, version sixteen clicked, and the first customer to try it looked at me and asked how we’d even made it. It went on the Simply Smashed menu as the Peruvian Thigh and sold out in three hours, then it grew into its own thing. Simply Smashed meant walking into a market with smashed burgers on every corner and trying to rise above them. PSK was the opposite, because most people here had never tried anything like it.
We ran a stealth test before opening properly. Someone spent £100 trying to sabotage it, which I found hilarious, and a dad tried to buy from us five times in one week and we were shut every single time. Running burgers and rice boxes out of one kitchen was absolute chaos. My brother runs this one now too.
09 What the burgers paid for 2022–2024
Around the burgers there was a run of smaller bets. Two are worth telling.
When I was seventeen I did a summer internship at Jack and Jones in Bangladesh and designed a few t-shirts that actually got printed. Eight years later I went back to make a hoodie with my uncle, a senior graphic designer in the clothing industry, and that became SIMPLYCLO. The Liberation Hoodie sold out in three hours, with all profits going to Gaza, and raised £15k for Palestine. Then I closed it. Bootstrapping clothing meant a production delay at every step, and I’d rather end something cleanly than let it rot.
Simply Foundation is a madrasah and boarding school our family had been quietly running for a couple of years before we said anything about it. Children from underprivileged villages live there while they work towards their hifz, and we cover their tuition, meals and accommodation. In 2024 we made it official and tied it to the shop, so the burgers pay for the school. Four huffadh so far.
10 Thoughtleadr 2024–2025
I was running the highest rated burger joint in London when I took a part-time job at someone else’s agency. It was a junior role. Simply Smashed had grown on storytelling and I had no idea why it worked, I was doing it on instinct. Then my brother introduced me to someone doing the same job for a living, for founders backed by YC and a16z. That was Mustafa. So I asked for a job, part time obviously, because I still had a kitchen to run.
Nobody at the restaurant knew. From a corner of the shop, with noise-cancelling headphones on, I was taking calls with founders who had just raised, then going back out to the pass. The things I learned in that building don’t exist on Google and they aren’t in ChatGPT, like how a founder actually decides what to say, and which stories are ready and which need another month living in someone’s head. Before long they had me training the other writers, which still makes me laugh given how I got in the door. I was Head of Training by the time Mustafa and I left to build our own thing.
11 Draper 2025–
In late 2025 I came back to tech. Draper is me, Mustafa and Aaquib, and we run LinkedIn for founders and their teams.
I’d been writing the thesis in public for two years without naming the company. Content is product and product is content. Builders should be building, and AI should be documenting you cooking.
The problem underneath all of it is older than AI. The best thinkers I know don’t post. Their best ideas come out loud, in the ten minutes after a meeting, to one person, and then stay in the room. Every writing tool I’ve used sits at the wrong end of that, an empty box that makes something up from nothing. The one worth building is a witness, something that sits in the room when you say the thing and writes down what you meant, in your voice. I wrote that up properly as The Corridor.
Nine months ago people called me crazy for these ideas, and now the industry has names for them, forward deployed content engineers and AI native services firms. So far that’s a hundred-odd founders and north of £20M in pipeline for them. The competition is well funded. One is a founder paying $1m salaries to learn the space, another is a man whose last exit was $780m, and then there’s me and my two bootstrapped boi cofounders.
We’ll win iA.
12 Bilal 2024–
In October 2024 I posted a question. In Muslim countries you hear the athan from the minaret and you get up and go to the masjid. On your phone it’s one more notification you swipe away. If you heard it out loud at your masjid’s jama’ah time, would it get you through the door? Two weeks later I was testing it on the TV in my front room.
It stayed there for the best part of two years while I collected and checked the jama’ah times of over 2,500 masajid, and somewhere in that it started getting me to jama’ah I’d have missed, at mosques two minutes away that I never knew were there.
It launched properly on 11 September 2026, an athan that tells you when to leave for jama’ah at your masjid, not when the prayer starts. It runs on your phone, your Mac and the TV in your kitchen, there’s no sign up, and it’s free and stays free. Before I’d announced anything it was already going round WhatsApp groups, and it had 1,400 people on it in a couple of days. An iPhone app is coming soon, and Android after that, iA.
The logo is a masjid arch, left open for you. Before you knew the way, someone took you to the masjid, and somewhere along the way most of us got lost again. There’s still a place for you in the jama’ah.