https://sakib.lol/ Everything I post, in one place. en-gb https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_i-was-18-and-got-placed-on-the-wrong-team-activity-7493580626013384704-G1Px https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_i-was-18-and-got-placed-on-the-wrong-team-activity-7493580626013384704-G1Px Mon, 13 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0000 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 person was at least double my age. So I just started showing up to things. That's how I ended up sat 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 these massive phone setups bolted to every trader's desk. Multimillion pound infrastructure decisions and I'm there acting like I belong. I'm watching pitches fall apart, watching projects get greenlit and then quietly die six months later, and I'm realising the interesting stuff isn't just the engineering it's everything around it. I moved into a proper engineering role eventually. But I think about that stretch a lot because nobody was checking on me, no one would've noticed if I'd just sat at my desk and coasted through it. It would've been the easiest thing in the world to do nothing. I just kept walking into rooms I had no business being in because I wanted to know what was going on. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_i-got-6-as-and-5-as-at-gcse-then-i-got-activity-7493645701491429376-rjC_ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_i-got-6-as-and-5-as-at-gcse-then-i-got-activity-7493645701491429376-rjC_ Mon, 13 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0000 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 moment the system stops rewarding you for being quick and starts asking if you can actually sit down and do the work. I could not sit down and do the work. BBDD hit and everyone knew. That's the thing about public failure when you've been publicly impressive, people do the maths for you. But I think about it now and that was the first time I learned anything useful. Everything I've built since, the restaurant, the agency career, Draper, came from a version of me that got humbled at 17 and finally figured out that showing up when it's boring is the entire game. It's results day today. If your numbers aren't what you expected I'm not going to give you the rejection is redirection speech. I'll just say BBDD was probably the best thing that happened to me tbh. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_the-best-thing-i-did-at-goldman-sachs-was-activity-7492856855313027073-HON1 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_the-best-thing-i-did-at-goldman-sachs-was-activity-7492856855313027073-HON1 Mon, 11 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0000 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 coded it himself and it barely worked. The idea was that every like turns into a penny for charity, so content creators could fundraise just by posting. I couldn't stop thinking about it. So I asked if I could work on it. I was 19. The whole company was two co-founders, one engineer, and me. We got into an accelerator called Fast Forward in Stratford. My Goldman apprenticeship was three days work, two days uni, so I started skipping the uni days and going to the programme instead. I didn't have a growth strategy. I just started posting about what we were building on Twitter because it felt like the obvious thing to do. Then I found a hook that made people finally get what MiniDeed was, and one tweet went viral. That turned into a funnel into a Telegram community, and it kept growing on its own. Then Ramadan hit. High profile Muslim creators started reaching out, New Arab, Islam Channel. We ran a campaign and the numbers got kind of mad. 26,000 donations, 800,000 taps, 47,000 posts across 26 countries. oh btw - he never did tell me how he was doing. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_a-hacker-posted-crypto-slop-from-brian-cheskys-activity-7491044414526619649-qEfD https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_a-hacker-posted-crypto-slop-from-brian-cheskys-activity-7491044414526619649-qEfD Mon, 06 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0000 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 actually write this" before anyone even gets to the idea. The founders I work with who never get that question, their thinking is just so obviously theirs that nobody asks. Nobody reads a post about your chaiwalla in Birmingham or your laptop wedged next to a fryer and wonders if a chatbot came up with it. Chesky's response was perfect btw, "to my new crypto followers: I'm going to be a very disappointing follow." P.S: the hacker didn't even sell anything, just dropped some AI slop and left. could've done that on LinkedIn for free. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_italy-has-a-machine-that-churns-espresso-activity-7490319636543127552-zwok https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_italy-has-a-machine-that-churns-espresso-activity-7490319636543127552-zwok Mon, 04 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0000 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 justice. I've done six countries this summer, espressomaxxing the whole way through. Arsenal won the league, the sun hasn't stopped, and the business ran fine because it lives on a laptop now. P.S: if anyone knows where to get a proper crema di caffè in London, tell me. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_i-keep-entering-domains-the-slow-way-in-the-activity-7488533620626841600-Kbye https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_i-keep-entering-domains-the-slow-way-in-the-activity-7488533620626841600-Kbye Mon, 30 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 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 that. So why would you go into a domain you haven't earned? Go into the one where you've put the most reps in. That's your edge now. We grew Simply Smashed to the highest rated burger in London organically and that whole experience pulled me into writing for founders at agencies. I did that for a year, which led to Draper. With Vibenasheeds same thing. Grew a YouTube channel first, figured out what hit and what didn't, then started building. It reminds me of something Abdel once said to me... AI gets you 60% of the way there, it's on you to fill the gap. That 60% is everything that's ever been publicly scraped. The other 40% doesn't exist in any dataset. You learn it in the arena. P.S: If you want a break from the arena Kotor (it's like a less busy lake como) is one of the most underrated places in Europe, definitely recommend :) . https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_i-live-tweeted-an-entire-demo-day-last-month-activity-7487783178884198400-xJc3 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_i-live-tweeted-an-entire-demo-day-last-month-activity-7487783178884198400-xJc3 Mon, 28 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 I live tweeted an entire demo day last month without typing a single word. Last year I had ChatGPT open in a tab, a volunteer next to me snapping photos, and I was trying to live tweet Deen Developers demo day between pitches while half-listening to the next one. It was a mess but it kind of worked. This year Draper just did it. Listened to every pitch, grabbed the photos as they came in, paired them with tweets and posted autonomously. I was sat there watching it happen and I'm not gonna lie I was gassed. But the thing that actually got me is these founders have been building for weeks. And if nobody's covering it in real time, nobody outside the room ever knows. Just some of the batch: Amr → solo founder, one year old kid, built Lunchflow to £58k ARR and 20% monthly growth Tarikh → Google Earth but for Islamic history Stork → medical device compliance, £50k-£200k contracts six weeks in All of that just gets missed if no one's there to put a spotlight on it. Draper picked that up on its own and I'm glad because otherwise it would've been another demo day where amazing people build amazing things and nobody gets to celebrate it. Over 15k impressions across the thread. The batch members actually got visibility from their work. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_ive-got-a-chaiwalla-10-minutes-from-my-house-activity-7485997658634006529-hD4K https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_ive-got-a-chaiwalla-10-minutes-from-my-house-activity-7485997658634006529-hD4K Mon, 23 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 I've got a chaiwalla 10 minutes from my house. But last week I took a 3 hour train to sit in one in Birmingham instead. Mustafa was leaving for Madinah in a few days so we just decided the night before to go up. We just sat there for hours, laptops closed for most of it. We've got people in Leicester, Birmingham, Oxford, East London. I'm the one without a kid so I make the trek up. Still trying to convince them to move to London... not working. We're remote right now because we have to be and most days it's fine. But some conversations just don't work on Google Meet → product direction, where the company's going. I came back with more clarity than I've had in weeks tbh. I should've done it sooner. We're still figuring out the remote thing. If you're building distributed I'm curious how you make it work. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_this-is-a-photo-i-posted-of-me-in-2015-i-activity-7485242190986719232-II7P https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_this-is-a-photo-i-posted-of-me-in-2015-i-activity-7485242190986719232-II7P Mon, 21 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 This is a photo I posted of me in 2015. I filtered so hard it looked like the inside of a nightclub. And I need you to understand I was genuinely proud of it. When Instagram dropped we all collectively lost our minds. Valencia, X-Pro II, whatever that one was that turned everything into a 1970s postcard. I looked at this photo and thought yeah... this is it. Posted it with full confidence. Everyone was doing the same thing and nobody could tell because everyone's photos looked equally ridiculous. Then one day the delusion just broke. Everyone quietly dialled it back and pretended they never went through that phase. AI writing is in its Valencia era right now. People are posting stuff that reads like Joey when he found the thesaurus. Full-sized aortic pumps instead of hearts, that kind of energy. And they genuinely cannot tell. When you're inside the filter you don't see the filter. You just think everything sounds cleaner and sharper and more professional. Everyone else can smell it immediately. The correction is already happening at a much faster rate than instagram filters. It's because people don't stop using the tools, they just develop taste. And taste always wins eventually. I had to embarrass myself by posting this old picture to make my point land, so I hope it actually did! https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_england-crashed-out-of-the-world-cup-semis-activity-7483434266916376576-WsRE https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_england-crashed-out-of-the-world-cup-semis-activity-7483434266916376576-WsRE Mon, 16 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 England crashed out of the World Cup semis yesterday and somehow I was the happiest person in the room. You know that scene in Avengers where Red Skull says "I guide others to a treasure I cannot possess," that's basically been my experience owning a restaurant for two years. We built Simply Smashed to be this communal living room where people come to watch games and hang out, and I've watched hundreds of people have that exact experience but I've never actually had it myself because I'm always behind the counter or thinking about what's broken or what needs ordering. Yesterday Sifat was running everything so I could just... sit. I had a strawberry cheesecake milkshake and the aircon was on and the whole room was going through it together as England went out and it was genuinely one of my favourite days at the shop. I still heard an Uber order get cancelled from across the room and it set off alarm bells in my head so it's never going to be the same as walking in fresh. But it was close, and that was enough. P.S: Spain it's all on you now, this is Mikel Merino's World Cup 😉 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_one-of-my-closest-friends-got-married-in-activity-7483099057557577729-2K66 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_one-of-my-closest-friends-got-married-in-activity-7483099057557577729-2K66 Mon, 15 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 One of my closest friends got married in the Spanish mountains a couple weeks ago. I came home and built an AI because of it. The ambience was unreal. He had a playlist that was perfect for the mountains. It felt so elegant and classy, perfectly suiting the event. And I kept thinking about how hard it is to get that feeling when you're trying to keep it halal. Vibenasheeds.com is this small hobby side project I've been building that composes music and then strips the instruments out of itself so you're left with pure vocals and daf. Every track runs through a halal verification gate, a neural net scoring across 527 sound classes looking for anything that shouldn't be there. I put it out there and within a week: - 110 minutes of original beats generated - 65,000+ instrument checks run - 6 times the AI tried to sneak an instrument in, caught every one I've had signups from content agencies, startups, a Muslim crowdfunding platform, creators from the UK, Denmark, the Netherlands. People I've never met making halal nasheeds because a wedding in Spain hit me a certain way. I'll cherish that one for a long time. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_i-was-on-a-call-with-a-founder-whos-got-activity-7482720574369255424-0YvW https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_i-was-on-a-call-with-a-founder-whos-got-activity-7482720574369255424-0YvW Mon, 14 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 I was on a call with a founder who's got one of the wildest stories I've heard. I had no idea until he told me because his LinkedIn doesn't show any of it. He lost millions trying to build the next Reddit and then built a community events business from nothing. He runs monthly events where other founders get on stage and share their biggest failures. But he won't share his own. His feed is him spotlighting everyone else's stories and his own is sitting in his about section doing nothing. And I get it because no one likes talking about themselves. I'm the same, I think it's the British in us. But reach and trust are completely different games and most founders don't realise they picked the wrong one. Reach → people like your post Trust → someone DMs you saying "I feel like I know you" and they've never met you One gets you engagement from other content creators and the other gets you customers. I run a content company btw so the irony is not lost on me. But that's exactly why it bugs me. I sit across from founders with unbelievable stories and half of them are hiding behind safe content because safe content gets likes. Resist the lure of the dopamine rush, optimise for trust instead. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_i-used-to-get-proper-san-francisco-fomo-activity-7481285860827541504-yg38 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_i-used-to-get-proper-san-francisco-fomo-activity-7481285860827541504-yg38 Mon, 10 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 I used to get proper San Francisco fomo. Every founder on my timeline at hackathons, builder dinners, demo days, tweeting from the same three coffee shops. Nowadays sometimes I'm building from a dark kitchen in East London and sometimes a terrace somewhere in Italy. I don't get FOMO anymore; the grass is green where I am, not where Twitter tells you. And honestly with these views, I think I'm right where I'm supposed to be. SF sounds cool but can you expressomax in the italian countryside? https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_i-was-building-an-ai-company-between-burger-activity-7480531155583356928-xSag https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_i-was-building-an-ai-company-between-burger-activity-7480531155583356928-xSag Mon, 08 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 I was building an AI company between burger orders and honestly I miss it. I keep looking at this photo and it's kinda crazy. Simply Smashed was on its second location. Peruvian Street Kitchen was on its first. And somewhere in between both of those I decided this was also where I'd start building an AI content company on Replit. I had my laptop wedged into whatever corner I could find, squinting at code I barely understood while delivery drivers walked in and out. I'd be mid-prompt and someone would shout that orders were backing up so I'd get stuck in packing rice boxes and saucing them up. Then come back to my laptop trying to remember what I was even building. If the rush got too much the laptop just got closed and that was that. I'd been training writers at a ghostwriting agency and I could see so clearly that the whole industry was about to flip. Like I could literally feel it. And I had this thing in my head going if I don't start building this right now, from this kitchen, on this dying laptop, someone else is going to do it and I'll be watching from behind a fryer. It wasn't a plan btw. I didn't sit down and map anything out. Two food brands running, a kitchen that's too small for any of this, and my brain just going "yeah but what if we also built a tech company from here." I physically couldn't not do it. That was a couple of months ago. Draper is now past ramen profitable and growing every month. Peruvian Street Kitchen is opening its second physical location soon iA. Everything is better now. Better setup, better tools, actual laptops that work. But I keep coming back to this photo because something about building from that kitchen felt different and I can't fully explain why. P.S: I'm a firm believer that being in the trenches means delaying your trim, you have to earn it as a reward. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_side-project-of-the-week-i-built-an-ai-that-activity-7479821505351102464-wIWY https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_side-project-of-the-week-i-built-an-ai-that-activity-7479821505351102464-wIWY Mon, 06 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Side project of the week: I built an AI that composes music and then removes the music from itself. vibenasheeds: the claude for making vocal nasheed beats. Some of you might remember the lofi Muslim YouTube channel I posted about last year. I was making nasheed beats after 12-hour shifts at Simply Smashed because I could not find halal background music. Every nasheed pack was either £30+ per beat or so rinsed that you'd hear the same track in three different Muslim creators' videos on the same day. That whole channel was a test run... I've been cooking this up quietly between everything else. vibenasheeds is the actual thing. You prompt the vibe you want for your scene and AI generates a full track from scratch. Then what I'm calling the halal engine kicks in and separates the stems and strips the instruments out of the file, gone. What's left is vocals and daf. It composes with instruments first because that's how you get something that actually sounds good, then removes them... sounds like a weird extra step but the output is better (and I spent an embarrassing amount of time looking). The thing about the nasheed scene right now is the creators in it are incredible. I grew up watching them figure out an entire genre from scratch with basically nothing. You ever watch Chris Howett cycling through the mountains of Switzerland on an electric scooter? Half of why that youtube content hits the way it does is the audio. Muslim creators have been locked out of that entire dimension, you're either using the same 50 beats as everyone else or you're working in silence and hoping the visuals carry it. I want to describe what I'm hearing in my head for a specific moment and have it exist. Link in comments to try it out! https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_i-built-the-highest-rated-burger-joint-in-activity-7478722973818929152-FIiI https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_i-built-the-highest-rated-burger-joint-in-activity-7478722973818929152-FIiI Mon, 03 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 I built the highest rated burger joint in London. Last month I walked into one that made me take notes. I had a stopover in Sweden, hadn't slept, needed a meal. Searched for halal options and this place popped up. Highest rated burger joint in Gothenburg. Smash burgers. I couldn't not go. The owner was North African, Algerian I think. The food was properly good. But the thing I'm still thinking about weeks later isn't the burger. Next to the counter they had coffee and these homemade North African biscuits laid out. Free. Take as many as you want. You could tell someone had made them that morning. People remember experiences. The burger was great but it's the coffee and the biscuits I keep coming back to. It's never the main thing. It's the thing next to the main thing that nobody asked for. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_the-founders-with-the-most-interesting-things-activity-7478360595118047232-P6qu https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_the-founders-with-the-most-interesting-things-activity-7478360595118047232-P6qu Mon, 02 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 The founders with the most interesting things to say are the ones who never have time to post. Everyone knows volume matters. That's not controversial. Most founders fail at content because they're not posting enough and they know it. AI has made the volume problem basically solvable. You can generate a post about anything in seconds. But volume without quality is just noise. And quality is the bit that's actually hard to scale because it comes from somewhere specific. It comes from context. The thing you said on a call when you were explaining your vision to a new hire. A rant about why your industry does something backwards. The moment on a podcast where the cogs start turning and you forget anyone's listening. That's what we've been building at Draper. We call it excavation. We plug into the places founders are already being brilliant and mine for the stuff that's actually worth posting. Their calls, their meetings, the moments where they go deep and the real thinking comes out. AI collapses everything around that. The editing, the structuring, all the manual stuff that used to make content a full time job. (we're an AI content startup saying this btw, take from that what you will) But as producing content gets easier, the thing that's actually going to be competitive is the angles. The excavation. The stuff that already lives in the best founders' heads. We just need to figure out how to get it out of you. That's the problem we're trying to solve honestly. We're still cracking it but it's getting sharper every week. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_my-clients-uncle-showed-up-on-eid-and-knew-activity-7465688334175240192-IHBO https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_my-clients-uncle-showed-up-on-eid-and-knew-activity-7465688334175240192-IHBO Mon, 28 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000 My client's uncle showed up on Eid and knew more about a pre-seed startup than most VCs do. "I've been following your co-founder online. What's he building?" He's not in tech. He doesn't use LinkedIn. He found one post, got curious, read another, then another. Each one added a layer. By Eid he'd pieced together what the company does, who the founders are, and where it's heading. The thing is, this wasn't even the *first* time. The client mentioned it casually, almost as a throwaway. "This is a completely new one, not the ones I've told you about." Other uncles had already been following. One post doesn't do that. A sequence does. Post three set something up that post seven paid off. Post twelve made post three more interesting in retrospect. There was a thread running through all of them that made you want to see what came next. Everyone treats content like a task. Post it and move on. Nobody's asking whether their posts compound on each other. That's the difference between content as a task and content as infrastructure. When someone figures that out, people don't just engage with one piece. They go back and read everything. Sorry if your eid turned into a conversation about b2b saas over rashmalai btw. but we're building the infrastructure to make that repeatable. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_content-is-product-product-is-content-activity-7462777944768299008-7IVS https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_content-is-product-product-is-content-activity-7462777944768299008-7IVS Mon, 20 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Content is product. Product is content. I've said it maybe 200 times now. Most founders nod and then go do the opposite anyway. We ran Simply Smashed with zero paid marketing. Literally zero. We were just documenting the messiness of building a burger joint from the back of a flower shop and posting it, and that was doing the job a £5k/month ad budget would've done. We became the highest-rated burger spot in London and never boosted a single post. Then MiniDeed happened. The product was good and the impact was real and nobody knew it existed. The thing about having no distribution is it doesn't matter how good your product is. Nobody sees it. Completely opposite outcomes that somehow taught me the exact same thing. The founders who get this are building content into the product from day one. The GTM isn't a department you bolt on in month six, it's the whole thing. If you just raised and you're trying to decide whether to invest in content or put it off, the thing you're actually deferring is distribution. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_what-happens-when-you-post-a-real-monet-and-activity-7462053159746572289-3ebE https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_what-happens-when-you-post-a-real-monet-and-activity-7462053159746572289-3ebE Mon, 18 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000 What happens when you post a real Monet and say it's AI? The coolest art social experiment I've seen in a while. Someone posted a painting online and told people it was AI-generated. Asked them what made it inferior to the original. "Looks like sh*t." "Not as vibrant as Monet's typical palette." "Achieving maybe 20% of the real thing." People went in. It was a real Monet. The actual painting. And honestly the interesting thing here isn't the framing lesson everyone's pulling from this. It's what it tells you about where AI sentiment is right now. People looked at a masterpiece and called it garbage because someone told them a machine made it. They weren't evaluating the painting at all. The word "AI" just did all the work before their eyes even caught up. We run an AI native agency. The founders we work with are producing stuff that's good. Really good. But I know that if you slapped "AI-generated" on some of these posts, the same people who are engaging with them right now would suddenly call it slop. Same post, same words. You just changed what people think wrote it. One of the founders we work with said something about this that stuck with me. If a human writes something mediocre, people think everyone has an off day. If AI writes something mediocre, people think zero effort. That's the Monet experiment in one sentence. I don't think the gap between what AI can actually do and what people think it can do is closing anytime soon. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_i-once-hired-a-boris-bike-to-deliver-a-missing-activity-7460241218858450946-01ps https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_i-once-hired-a-boris-bike-to-deliver-a-missing-activity-7460241218858450946-01ps Mon, 13 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000 I once hired a Boris bike to deliver a missing chicken burger to a customer's front door. He grabbed the bag, and shut the door without a word. We were mid-rush at Simply Smashed, maybe a Friday night, orders stacking up on the UberEats tablet. I checked a bag going out and realised we'd missed an item. Chicken burger, already paid for, already on its way to someone's house minus the thing they actually wanted. So I called the customer. Got the address. It was like a 5 minute cycle away. I ran outside, tapped a Boris bike, put the bag in the basket and just started pedalling through Whitechapel. Got there, knocked on the door, slightly out of breath. The guy opens it, looks at the bag, takes it, and closes the door. No thank you, no eye contact, nothing. I stood there for a second like... cool. Then I cycled back to the shop and got on with service. The thing is, I'm not telling this story because the guy was rude. He probably didn't even clock what just happened. He ordered food, food arrived, life continued. That's honestly fair enough. I'm telling it because that's what the early days of building anything actually feel like. You sprint to solve a problem nobody asked you to sprint for. You over-deliver by a stupid amount. And the response is silence. The guy didn't leave a review. He definitely didn't sign up for a loyalty program. I'm fairly sure he didn't even realise the founder just personally cycled a chicken burger to his door. Just a closed door and a Boris bike to return. And you go back and do it again the next night because that's the job. The gap between what you put in and what you get back is enormous when you're starting out. You have to be okay with that gap or you won't survive it. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_fear-of-gods-essentials-hoodie-retails-at-activity-7459516431576166400-lNSK https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_fear-of-gods-essentials-hoodie-retails-at-activity-7459516431576166400-lNSK Mon, 11 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Fear of God's Essentials hoodie retails at £180. I built one that beat their fabric specs for £60. It sold out in 3 hours. The product isn't why it sold out though. The storytelling is. So here's how that even happened. I went to Bangladesh and spent time studying how the supply chains behind brands like Fear of God actually work on the ground. I started building SIMPLYCLO from there. Our hoodie came in at 364 GSM, Fear of God's Essentials sits at 347. We were using the same factories in the same country with better fabric weight at a third of the price. None of that honestly matters if nobody knows you exist. So I documented the whole thing. I posted the factory visits, the fabric sourcing, ran brand name polls on Twitter, made TikToks from Bangladesh showing the entire process. Every single decision was made in public. Someone in Selfridges recognised the hoodie on me five weeks after we conceived the brand and said they'd already heard of it. We hadn't spent anything on ads or PR, it was all just content. It sold out in 3 hours. People had watched the whole story unfold in real time and by the time the hoodie dropped they felt like they were part of it. That's what actually moved units, not the GSM. SIMPLYCLO was a passion project and honestly one of the most fun things I've ever built. I ended up closing it down, but the thesis stuck with me. Content was the entire go-to-market. I just documented the build and let people in instead of spending anything on ads or PR. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_we-raised-26000-for-charity-through-an-activity-7458429289093365780-8AKt https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_we-raised-26000-for-charity-through-an-activity-7458429289093365780-8AKt Mon, 08 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000 We raised £26,000 for charity through an app where every like was worth 1p. We made exactly £0 in revenue. I was 18. First year of my degree apprenticeship at Goldman Sachs. I met the co-founder in the basement prayer room. We'd just finished praying and I asked him how he was doing, just being polite, and he mistook it as me asking how the app was doing. This man was probably mid-thirties, been at Goldman for years, and he just started telling me about this social media platform where every like triggered a micro-donation to charity. I had no idea what he was talking about. But I was in. That's how MiniDeed started for me. 1p, 2p, 5p. Tiny amounts that added up across 25 countries over two years. We onboarded Islamic Relief, Human Relief Foundation, a bunch of smaller orgs. We got featured in The New Arab. And somehow built a community where people were opening up about mental health because the whole vibe was just different. Users told us it was the only app where they felt safe doing that. Honestly watching the live donation ticker go up was more addictive than any MRR dashboard I've looked at since (and I say that as someone who now stares at dashboards for a living). We never figured out how to make money from it. Donations still trickle through the app daily, years later. But it was my first real taste of building something and I think about it all the time. 18 years old, sitting in Goldman Sachs by day, shipping a charity app by night. It led me to build the highest-rated burger joint in London. And now Draper. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_everyone-on-the-internet-is-funny-in-the-activity-7453040583792697345-4bgP https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_everyone-on-the-internet-is-funny-in-the-activity-7453040583792697345-4bgP Mon, 23 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Everyone on the internet is funny in the exact same way and I think I know why. Twitter started auto-translating tweets recently and I've been slightly obsessed with it. I was reading these translated tweets and they were all the same jokes. Same memes, same formats I've been seeing in English for months. Someone in São Paulo making the exact same joke as someone in London. The thing about humour is it's supposed to be the hardest thing to translate. Cultural context, timing, sarcasm, all of it is deeply local. If anything was going to survive translation it should have been news or data, not jokes. Which means the algorithm did something translation never could. It unified taste across borders. Auto-translate didn't break down a wall, it just showed us the wall had been gone for years. Language was the last cosmetic layer on top of it. If the algorithm did all of that without anyone even noticing, I don't think it was ever just showing us what we already liked. I think it's been generating the culture this whole time. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_we-2xd-our-deep-work-without-adding-a-single-activity-7450819103004450818-gXOm https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_we-2xd-our-deep-work-without-adding-a-single-activity-7450819103004450818-gXOm Mon, 17 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000 We 2x'd our deep work without adding a single hour to the week. it's the best thing we've done for Draper and it cost us literally nothing. Mustafa brought this from his old agency. When he first suggested it I remember thinking it was a bit rigid but we tried it anyway and honestly it changed how we work completely. → Monday and Wednesday: all client calls, stacked back to back → Tuesday, Thursday, Friday: just building That's it. (revolutionary stuff I know) The thing is most founders think they have a time problem. They don't. They have a transition problem. That Gen Z meme where someone books two hours before a meeting to stress about it and one hour after to recover is funny because it's basically true. The actual work takes 15 minutes but the mental commute between tasks eats the rest of your day. A 15 minute task that felt impossible at 3pm just flows on a quiet Tuesday morning. So we stopped trying to manage it and just stacked everything. six months in and honestly I don't think we could go back. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_i-built-the-highest-rated-burger-joint-in-activity-7450094337012416513-w-sh https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_i-built-the-highest-rated-burger-joint-in-activity-7450094337012416513-w-sh Mon, 15 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000 I built the highest rated burger joint in London. 4.9 stars, 3000+ reviews. Those two years taught me more about building than any MBA ever could. The thing about the food industry is nothing is theoretical. From day one you're making decisions with real money on razor thin margins. One bad weekend and you feel it in your bank account by Friday, not next quarter. → We got burgled → I dealt with literal fires → One supplier issue and the whole menu changes overnight → I had staff not show up while I was two hours away with no way to get back → You learn to read people very quickly because you genuinely don't have time not to Simply Smashed started from a kitchen we were already using and maybe £100 on a new grill. That was the entire business plan. When every pound counts you develop this instinct for what's worth spending on and what isn't. That instinct doesn't go away when you move into tech. It just gets applied differently. Every decision I make building Draper now, whether it's hiring, spending, prioritising, I can trace back to something I learned in that kitchen. That's not from a textbook, it's from a Friday night that went sideways. And honestly I'd take someone who's survived a Friday night service with half their staff missing over someone who's only ever seen pressure in a case study. It's the most expensive MBA that I never paid for tbh https://x.com/mertesakib/status/2044125359235342341 https://x.com/mertesakib/status/2044125359235342341 Mon, 14 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Tinkering with something… https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_i-stole-a-water-bottle-and-lost-a-blackrock-activity-7449369590096179201-RJWv https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_i-stole-a-water-bottle-and-lost-a-blackrock-activity-7449369590096179201-RJWv Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000 I stole a water bottle and lost a BlackRock internship. I need to explain this properly because this is a pretty funny story. We were on a law firm insight day in sixth form and some kids decided to nick one of those fancy glass water bottles on the way out. And they were doing it so badly. Like embarrassingly badly. I basically went just give it to me and took over the whole operation myself. I was seventeen and it was a nice water bottle tbh I don't know what else to tell you. Now my head teacher was an ex-lawyer. So he didn't just tell us off like a normal person. He launched a full investigation. Students pulled in one by one. "But Sakib said you took it." By the end of it everyone hated everyone. I respect it looking back honestly the man missed his calling at MI5. I got internally excluded for two weeks. Fair enough tbh I did help steal a water bottle. They called me water bottle Sakib for the rest of sixth form. But then he went and called BlackRock. Personally. An internship I'd earned on my own and he killed it over a water bottle. His reasoning was I needed to "learn to appreciate the opportunities that come." So I went and applied through SEO Scholars entirely on my own. I didn't tell the school, didn't ask for a reference. Did the whole thing on my own. Got placed at a private equity firm where I didn't know a single person. That internship is what led me to Goldman Sachs. One of the youngest on their degree apprenticeship, first cohort they ever ran. Turns out he was right. I did need to learn to appreciate opportunity. And the best way was to find my own. The thing is years later Goldman Sachs did a profile on me. My head teacher shared it proudly. I wanted to thank him but to this day he still has me blocked on Twitter. https://x.com/mertesakib/status/2043798635838615563 https://x.com/mertesakib/status/2043798635838615563 Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000 It’s no longer a race to the best product It’s race to build the most sophisticated gtm engines and figure out what to build after https://x.com/mertesakib/status/2042738095099916555 https://x.com/mertesakib/status/2042738095099916555 Mon, 10 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000 finally managed to get my calendar synced to my local mosque jama'ah times which stays synced throughout the year 🥳 https://x.com/mertesakib/status/2042703209458700599 https://x.com/mertesakib/status/2042703209458700599 Mon, 10 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000 if i was 16 rn i would: > download video editing software and go around local businesses offering to shoot ads for cheap to learn > start learning how to edit with this + ai vid gen models > record the behind the scenes to put on tiktok and document me mastering that craft https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_ive-never-done-a-proper-introduction-on-activity-7447951256372973568-q8vW https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_ive-never-done-a-proper-introduction-on-activity-7447951256372973568-q8vW Mon, 09 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000 got married for under £2,000 but somehow convinced me to start a company with him. the man is dangerous https://x.com/mertesakib/status/2041267231649305007 https://x.com/mertesakib/status/2041267231649305007 Mon, 06 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000 what i'm building is fairly new so i have 2 competitors - a founder hiring people to understand the domain im in for 1m$ take home salaries - a 2x exited founder who exited for 780m last time v me and my 2 bootstrapped boi cofounders we'll win iA https://x.com/mertesakib/status/2041191236631961810 https://x.com/mertesakib/status/2041191236631961810 Mon, 06 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Londonmaxxing. https://x.com/mertesakib/status/2040859154902905068 https://x.com/mertesakib/status/2040859154902905068 Mon, 05 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000 We know we’ve reached AGI when self driving cars can safely operate in tower hamlets https://x.com/mertesakib/status/2040777387198071278 https://x.com/mertesakib/status/2040777387198071278 Mon, 05 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000 If ELM ever builds a private underground car park they’d never need to fundraise ever again https://x.com/mertesakib/status/2040573482518401084 https://x.com/mertesakib/status/2040573482518401084 Mon, 04 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Peruvian Street Kitchen Stepney has launched on UberEats Our second @PSK_UKI branch now live! People are loving it already الحمد لله https://x.com/mertesakib/status/2039710323872092224 https://x.com/mertesakib/status/2039710323872092224 Mon, 02 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000 birmingham with sunshine... I take back my brum slander over the years https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_anthropics-been-getting-absolutely-cooked-activity-7444322616485515264-w-vY https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sakib-ahmed1_anthropics-been-getting-absolutely-cooked-activity-7444322616485515264-w-vY Mon, 30 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Anthropic's been getting absolutely cooked last week. And then an OpenAI employee made it worse with two words. Let me explain. So Thariq, (Team Claude), announced they're tightening session limits during peak hours. People were already frustrated. But then it gets worse. People started suspecting Anthropic quietly dropped the baseline limits and ran a temporary 2x promo so the reduced limit feels normal. Promo ends, you're stuck at a lower baseline than before, and you don't even notice because the 2x absorbed the drop. Sneaky if true and Anthropic denied the whole thing but the timeline is genuinely a mess. And right in the middle of all this, Daniel Steigman, (Team Codex) just replies to the thread. "thank you." As in thank you for fumbling this so hard that your users are coming to us. And the thing is it's not even a marketing play. OpenAI didn't run a campaign, they didn't post a comparison chart. One guy just typed "thank you" on a competitor's worst thread and walked away. That's just someone in the arena having fun and it ends up doing more for the brand than any campaign would. This is what the AI race actually looks like now. It's not brand accounts posting press releases, it's employees with zero filter commenting like it's sports punditry. Researchers trash-talking each other and competitors lurking in each other's replies. And the customers see ALL of it. Every interaction, every jab, every "thank you" is how brand perception actually forms now. Through the people, not the company page. it's something we talk about a lot at Draper actually. the future isn't one logo posting. it's your people being themselves online. multiple voices, not one channel. the ai labs worked this out before everyone else. the rest of the market's catching up. https://x.com/mertesakib/status/2038739557038850421 https://x.com/mertesakib/status/2038739557038850421 Mon, 30 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0000 amjad masad about to get another billion