If it’s your first time opening a Dispatch email, the goal with this series is to keep the people who care about this ecosystem close to the work, even when they’re not in San Francisco.

Let’s get into it.

Should you move to SF?

People ask me some version of this every week, so I wrote down my answer: Do you really need to move to San Francisco?

The short version is that the limit of what you can build is what you believe is possible, and belief in the early days is borrowed, not earned.

It transmits in physical, low-key ways — like watching someone close a round at a valuation you would not have asked for, sitting at dinner with a founder whose revenue goal is five times yours, or witnessing a 15-minute decision that would have taken you a week.

None of these moments are captured through podcasts or Twitter.

Pre-traction, you should probably be in SF.
Post-traction, the same experiences that raised your ceiling will start eating the time you need to actually build toward it.

Most founders are stuck in the wrong mode for where they are.

Alif Sessions Cohort 2 kicked off on Sunday

Sessions is our 6-week remote cohort for builders going from idea to product to first customer.

Cohort 2’s mentors are founders who have actually shipped at scale: Haroon Mokhtarzada (Rocket Money), Yasser Elsaid (Chatbase, ~$9M ARR bootstrapped), Blake Anderson (Cal AI, acquired by MyFitnessPal), Kenan Saleh (a16z, Investment Partner), Nader Khalil (Brev.dev, acquired by NVIDIA), and a deep bench of operators alongside them.

We went from roughly 40 founders in Cohort 1 to over 150 accepted into Cohort 2.

If you didn’t apply this round, Cohort 3 is already in the works.

Sessions →

Startup Majlis

We started a new series where we bring some of the most talented founders to our HQ.

Last week, Haroon Mokhtarzada (Rocket Money) ran office hours at HQ.

His core message: you cannot ignore signal when you get it, but most founders do. They ask for feedback, customers tell them the truth, and then they ignore it because it doesn’t fit their vision.

Watch a clip on Instagram →

This week, we brought in Aly Orady, founder of Tonal.

His core message: culture has to have teeth, but most founders treat it like decoration. They write values on the wall, hire people who don't live them, and then wonder why the organization breaks down the moment it tries to scale.

More on this series soon.

Imran hit 90 days

Imran founded Kayyo, an MMA training app, and he was one of the first angel investments I made about four years ago.

In 90 days he has shipped our internal AI Chief of Staff (which we covered last week), launched Alif Sessions, and been a central force in turning HQ into a place where founders actually want to be.

I’m excited to have him on board.

Read his 90 day reflection →

Who came through HQ this week

A couple of the people who stopped by:

• Yousef Abdelfattah (aka FaZe Apex) — co-founder of FaZe Clan. He closed his chapter at FaZe at the end of last year and started TryNearby, influencer marketing on autopilot for restaurants.

• Magomed Kurbaitaev — Winner of Replit’s Race to Revenue and the founder of Gameplan. He was in Khabib’s camp for years on the business side, and now is turning his learnings into an app for athletes to connect with their fans.

Want to swing by HQ? Let us know →

That’s the last two weeks. Reply if there’s something we should cover next time, or if you want to visit our HQ.

~ Omar from Alif

I told him it was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard.

Then I went home, opened Quora, and wrote for four hours straight.

I did the same thing the next night. And the night after that. Every evening I came home from school and wrote on Quora instead of doing my homework. I wasn’t really telling anyone what I was doing because I couldn’t explain it to myself.

I’d never kept a journal. I’d never been the kid who wrote short stories or stayed after class to talk to an English teacher. But I’d refresh the page at 1am to see if the view count had moved. I’d write an answer, hate it, delete it, rewrite it from scratch. I’d read what the top writers on the platform were doing and feel something close to envy.

There was this other teenaged writer from Australia that I met who was getting hundreds of thousands of views on every answer, and I wanted to beat him more than anything.

You can’t tell yourself you’re good at something. Other people have to tell you that.

That’s what Quora gave me: real-time signal on whether my ideas were landing. I’d post some throwaway answer on parental advice and watch it climb to 50k views in a week. I’d post one I thought was better and watch it die at 200. I had no idea why, at first. Then slowly I started to see the pattern — what made people stop scrolling, what made them share, what made them leave.

I was fourteen, writing from my bedroom, competing with adults who’d spent decades getting paid to write. In less than a year I was one of the most-viewed writers on the platform. My answers were reaching millions of people.

Looking back, every piece of marketing instinct I have today traces to those nights. Writing launch campaigns for a $2B stablecoin protocol. Building the brand at Founders Inc. Now founding Alif. None of it would exist without a fourteen-year-old skipping his homework to chase view counts on a Q&A site.

None of it felt strategic at the time. I just couldn’t stop.

The obsession came before the plan.

~ Omar

The limit of what you can build is what you believe is possible.

In the earliest days, belief is borrowed.
Inherited from the people you spend time around.
You cannot inherit it through a screen.

This is why I believe everyone who’s able should live in San Francisco at some point in their journey.

How it actually transmits

The transmission of belief happens in physical, lowkey ways that compound over months. For example:

• Watching someone close a round at a valuation you would not have asked for. It rewires what you define as a reasonable ask.

• Sitting at dinner with another founder describing a revenue goal five times yours. Your bars shifts without you realizing.

• Seeing someone make a decision in 15 minutes that would have taken you a week. It rewires what counts as a reasonable cadence.

This information is dense. It doesn’t transfer through newsletters or podcasts. It gets metabolized by being adjacent to it long enough that you stop noticing it’s happening.

Henrik Karlsson wrote about scenes as technologies for transmitting taste. Ambition works the same way. Paul Graham made the same argument in Cities and Ambition.

The variance inside the scene is small.
The variance between the scene and everywhere else is enormous.

You can be the most ambitious founder in your city and still be below the median in SF. You won’t know it until you’re inside the room.

I see this in myself

I see this most clearly in the parts of my own work where I have a lopsided sense of the ceiling.

In the areas I’ve spent years close to people doing “the thing” well, I have a sharp picture of what good looks like. A permanent dissatisfaction in my own work, because I know the gap between my abilities and theirs.

In the areas where I had to figure out the ceiling on my own, I’m more easily impressed by my own progress. I’m almost always underestimating what’s possible.

Wherever I feel calmly proud, the ceiling is probably lower than it should be.

Wherever I feel restless, the ceiling is closer to reality.

The map is not the territory.

It’s hard to be great if you don’t know what great looks like.

The actual advice

It splits cleanly depending on where you are:

• Pre-traction, before your first believer and/or borrowed credibility: Come to SF. Increase your surface area until something compounds. The whole point of being here is to absorb what's possible by sitting next to people doing it.

• Post-traction, with a real company doing real things: Pull back. “Networking” is a massive waste of time. The same dinners that built your sense of the ceiling will start eating the time you need to actually build toward it. The game shifts from raising the ceiling to executing within it.

Most founders either stay home and wonder why their ambition feels small. Or they keep going to dinners long after the marginal dinner stopped paying for itself.

It’s important to know which mode you’re in.

Does it have to be IRL?

There are serious efforts, ours included, to build scenes that do some of this work without requiring everyone to relocate.

Alif Sessions, for example, is a remote program. I believe in it. But I’d be lying if I said we’ve fully closed the gap with SF.

So the honest answer to the question in the title is uncomfortable but clear.

You do not need to be in San Francisco to build a company. You probably do need to be there, at least for a stretch, if you want your sense of what’s possible to match the people setting the frontier.

Those are two different goals, though.

The ceiling you’re building under was set by the room you’re standing in.

If you want a higher one, sometimes you have to change the room.

~ Omar

From here on out, you’ll get the occasional short read from me on what’s happening at Alif: who came through HQ, what our founders shipped, what we published, and everything else we’re up to.

The goal is to keep the people who care about this ecosystem close to the work, even when you’re not in San Francisco.

Let’s get into it.

Imran went on Greg Isenberg’s show

Imran from Alif sat down with Greg Isenberg for a 37-minute tutorial on Hermes Agent, walking through how to build a personal AI chief of staff. It’s the cleanest explanation we’ve seen of what an agent can look like when someone uses it daily.

Hermes ships with built-in memory, 40+ tools, and pre-installed skills. Imran walks through how he installs it on a Mac or even an Android phone, why he runs OpenRouter to keep his token spend roughly 90% lower than what he was paying before, and the meta-prompts he runs nightly to keep the agent useful: “what am I procrastinating, what should I automate, what tool can you build me tonight?”

If you’re trying to get an AI agent to actually work for you, this is the episode to watch.

Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

A founder dinner with Rho

We hosted a small, off-the-record founder dinner with Rho this week — the first in what we’re calling the Sofra Series, named after the Persian and Urdu word for the cloth laid out for a shared meal.

The vision is simple: a curated table where founders are matched by stage and the problems they’re working through, so the conversations actually turn into the kind of connections you want to keep. One long table, hand-picked founders, and late-night conversations.

We’re going to be doing more of these. If you’re a founder building something serious and want to be in the room next time, hit up haroon@alif.build.

Alif Sessions: Cohort 2 applications are closing soon

Sessions is our 6-week remote cohort for builders going from idea to product to first customer. It’s fully remote, designed for people with full schedules, and built around weekly live guidance from founders who have actually shipped: Haroon Mokhtarzada ($1B+ acq.), Yasser Elsaid (Chatbase, ~$9M ARR bootstrapped), Blake Anderson (Cal AI, $50M ARR bootstrapped), Kenan Saleh (a16z, Investment Partner), Nader Khalil (Brev founder, acq. by NVIDIA), and others.

You come in with an idea and leave with a real product, real users, and a community that lives on after the program ends.

Applications for Cohort 2 close May 5th. If you’re sitting on something you’ve been meaning to build, this is the forcing function.

Apply now →

Who came through HQ this week

A few of the folks who stopped by in the past week:

• Haroon & Idris Mokhtarzada — co-founders of Rocket Money.

• Mujtaba Wani — Founder of Nonfiction Capital.

• Imam Khalid Latif — founding director of the Islamic Center at NYU, and now founder of ICNYC.

• Mamoon Hamid — Managing Partner at Kleiner Perkins, early backer of Slack, Figma, Rippling, and a long list of others.

HQ is becoming a hub for the mix of operators, investors, and faith leaders who make up our ecosystem. If you haven’t stopped by yet, pull up.

From the Press: Words Your Team Lives By

I wrote a piece this week on something I’ve been working through as Alif has scaled past the garage stage: great founders repeat themselves so often that their teams internalize their logic.

Three principles we keep coming back to at Alif: people don’t know what you know, who matters more than what, and one big thing at a time.

The post walks through how each one shows up in our work, and why I think the founder’s actual job is to make these principles explicit and then say them so often that they stop sounding like opinions and start sounding like the way things work around here.

Read the full post →

• Jumuah continues every Friday in San Francisco. Details.

• Founders applying to work with us: alif.build/apply.

• Want to work from Alif HQ? cowork.alif.build

• Apply to Alif Sessions (~18 seats available): alif.build/sessions

Until next week,

Omar from Alif

But as I’ve come to learn, they are also known by their teams through their words.

The greatest founders of all time are so repetitive in their words and thought processes that their teams could guess what would come out of their mouths before they even said it.

It sounds cult-like, but it’s effective.

Recently, our company has outgrown my natural style of productivity.

When there were 3 of us in my garage in South San Francisco, and then in our small office right off Market Street, “project management” was straightforward: we would meet once on Monday to align for the week, and then verbally declare tasks as they were done throughout the week.

If someone needed help, we could literally just turn our monitors around without getting up from our seats.

That is no longer the case.

So I went into research mode. I read about org design, standups, project tracking,

whether anyone actually uses Notion.

And the thing that stuck out was simpler than any of that: the best founders repeat themselves constantly, and their people internalize it so deeply that the founder’s logic becomes the team’s default logic.

I’ve noticed this happening at Alif.

We have a few principles that everyone really sticks to if they’ve been around for more than a year.

Here’s what they are:

1. people don’t know what you know.

This one applies to everything.

Context is important and easily lost.

When you’re making a video - remember that people are probably hearing about that idea for the first time. And if they’re not, they already forgot anyway.

If a piece of content doesn’t seem like it’s worth a standalone post, remind yourself that most people consuming that content have not lived through the life experiences that seem trivial to you. And if they have, they’re happy to hear a reminder. Or they aren’t, and they’ll swipe off, and that’s okay. Post it.

When you’re asking someone for help with a task, explain what the goal of the overall project is before asking for help designing something in Figma. It’s easy to Slack someone, “Hey, can you make this graphic look nice?” It’s harder to share what your visual inspiration is, whether you’re using it as a Partiful cover or a LinkedIn post, and when it needs to be done so that there’s enough time to share it around.

When you’re frustrated because someone isn’t moving fast enough, do they know what pace they’re expected to work at?

When someone isn’t doing something that seems like common sense, remember that lots of everyday things you do at a job may seem nonobvious to someone who has never held one before.

2. who matters more than what.

This applies to life, but especially to hiring and project management.

Most of our team crossed paths with me years before I ever considered them for Alif.

Mustafa was a housemate and teammate when we were both at Founders Inc. Maz was also a housemate, friend through Buildspace, and participant in Alif Batch 0. Imran and I met through social media 8 years ago, and he was the first angel investment I made, ~4 years ago. I knew Afra through the SF Muslim scene, and she participated in Alif Batch 0. Hassaan, through the masjid we both grew up at.

Ideas always change, but people rarely do.

So, who you work with is far more important than the project you actually build with them.

The same goes for projects: there are lots of things we could theoretically build at Alif. We prioritize what we build based on who we can pull in from our orbit to run them.

Alif Summit wouldn’t have existed without Afra. Alif Sessions wouldn’t have existed without Imran. Alif’s story wouldn’t have been viral without Yacouba.

3. one big thing (OBT) at a time.

In my first months at Founders Inc., I got some advice from Furqan, the founder, on how to effectively build a company, quickly.

“Building a company is just a sequence of pushing boulders up a hill.”

Every week, you find the heaviest boulder you can move, and you push it up the hill until it reaches the top, and starts rolling downhill by itself.

Then you move on to the next boulder, and the next one.

Until you look up and you’ve built something real.

We treat our own projects at Alif the same way - at our weekly all-hands, we share the OBT we’re working on for the week. At our daily standup for project leaders, we each share the OBT for the day.

None of these principles are complicated, but I’m learning that they must be repeated.

The hard part of company culture is saying them so often that they stop sounding like an opinion and start sounding like the way things work around here.

You can’t assume that smart people will arrive at the same conclusions you have just because they’re smart.

They haven’t lived through the same decisions, they don’t carry the same context, and they’re busy solving their own problems.

The founder’s job is to make the principles explicit, and then to repeat them until the team can think in them without being prompted.

It’s all about the words you repeat.

~ Omar

h/t to Jihad Esmail for edits and pushing me to get this post across the finish line.

This week’s list is about a telling Founders Fund investment, and some reflections on my nightly 11pm-6am Claude Code sprints.

Cowgorithms

A company that makes solar-powered collars for cows just hit a $2 billion valuation.

Halter.

They make AI-powered collars that let farmers herd cattle remotely through an app.

Virtual fencing, health monitoring, “grazing optimization.”

Last year, they raised $100M at a billion-dollar valuation. This month, Founders Fund led the next round, doubling it.

The same fund that backed SpaceX, Palantir, and Anduril is now backing cattle tech.

What does that mean?

For the last fifteen years, the highest-leverage thing you could do was build software. The margins were insane, the distribution could be free, and a small team could reach millions of people from a laptop.

The edge is going away.

When AI can write code and spin up products in hours, software and “distribution” stops being the moat.

Case in point: OpenClaw getting bought by OAI, and replicated by Claude 2 weeks later.

The value goes back to the hard stuff. Atoms. Supply chains. Food systems. Energy. The things that are genuinely difficult to build and difficult to compete with once you figure them out.

And if you’ve been paying any attention to the world right now, US-Israel v. Iran is actively breaking these systems in real time.

Supply chains are fracturing. Energy markets are volatile. Food security is becoming a real concern. I just paid $6.97 for gas in San Francisco.

This is not temporary noise - it will be the new baseline.

The people building infrastructure to make food systems more resilient, energy more distributed, and supply chains more adaptable are no longer solving nice-to-have problems.

They’re solving existential ones.

A cow collar sounds funny until you realize it’s a wedge into the entire livestock industry.

One device on one animal that generates data no one else has. That’s not a gadget. That’s a platform.

The most interesting companies of the next decade are probably going to be built in industries most people in tech wouldn’t touch.

Follow the smart money.

The Claude Trap

During Ramadan, I found myself working until 6am every single night.

My schedule was the following:

IRL meetings and phone calls, back-to-back from ~12pm to 7pm.
Break between 7pm and 11pm.
Deep work from 11pm to 6am.

Deep work meant this:

Four to five panes of Claude Code running at the same time.

Agents spinning. It felt like I was operating at 5x capacity.

Looking back at that work, some of it turned out very useful.

But a lot of it had to be redone.

Decisions I made at 3 AM that didn’t hold up in the morning. Things I shipped that missed the point entirely.

I had fallen into the same trap I told all the founders in our portfolio to be cautious of.

I wasn’t being productive.
I was doing things to feel productive.

AI tools significantly heightened this.

You can spin up four agents and watch them all work in parallel and it feels incredible.

They’ll then generate a huge summary of the work that was done - fully shareable in Slack.

But if you’re sleep-deprived and making bad decisions about what to build, you’re just creating more work for yourself faster.

In the earliest years, hours matter. Every rep counts.

But at some point, the game changes.

The quality of your decisions starts to matter more than the quantity of your hours.

A bad hire costs six months.
A wrong company direction costs a quarter.
A poorly structured deal costs millions of dollars.

No amount of late nights will compensate for bad judgment.

And no amount of “feeling productive” will compensate for just doing the work.

Interesting Links

White collar goes blue
A working theory on the rights and reshaping of the professional laptop class.

Situational Awareness: The 25 year old taking on Wall St
A deep dive into Leopold Aschenbrenner’s L/S Equity Portfolio.

$10,000 Invested in Sheep: The 5-Year Profit Breakdown
Well.

Every so often, I come on here and compile the most important things that I’ve recently shared with my founders/team.

This week’s list is for anyone thinking about starting something this year - or already in the thick of it.

“Head of Storytelling”

Vanta pays their head of storytelling $274k. a16z launched an entire New Media team. Fortune 100 CEOs are going on TBPN as part of their earnings calls.

Here’s why.

Engineers build incredible products, but they can’t make people care about them.

They explain features and make technical demos.

But a founder with a taped-together product and great storytelling can raise $10M+ and get millions of downloads in their first year.

A few years ago, traditional media would have handled this for companies. TechCrunch would write about you and make it interesting. But that hardly works anymore.

Now, companies have to tell their own stories. And most founders have no idea how.

The best ones are figuring it out in public.

They’re hiring storytellers as early employees. They’re learning to tweet. They’re incentivizing team members to post on LinkedIn.

It doesn’t matter if you have the best product in the world if you can’t make anyone care about it - that’s why it’s called “best-selling” author, not “best-writing” author.

The conviction gap

One of the questions I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: how much does a company’s valuation impact my conviction in backing them? How big is the gap between a company raising at $5M vs at $12M?

On paper, the earlier deal is better. We get more ownership for less capital. The math is simple.

But the reality is messier.

At $5M, we’re betting on the founder (and the market they chose). At $12M, we’re betting on something that should be working - real customers, real momentum, a real founding team.

The problem is that by the time we have that conviction, we paid for it in valuation.

The best investors I know figured out how to have conviction before the proof. They see the founder, understand the market deeply enough to trust the direction, and write the check before the metrics catch up.

This is the gap most people never close. They wait for certainty, then wonder why they’re always paying up.

Interesting miscellaneous links:

Alif Tournament Grand Finale (1/18)
A pitch competition we’re hosting after the Alif x Replit Tournament.

Chat is the interface that will stick around
Reflections on the future of how we interact with AI

Claude Code for Everything
Claude Code 101 (and why you need it) - shared with Heads of Marketing

How to change your entire life in 1 day
An X article on goal setting by Dan Koe

Every so often, I come on here and compile the most important things that I’ve recently shared with my founders/team.

This week’s list is about recruiting and culture - the two highest leverage things you can think about as a founder.

Recruit your friends

Some of the best hires/partnerships I’ve made were friends from past lives - people who weren’t even thinking about the industry I brought them into.

When I went to Rayyan with the early idea for Founders Arm, he was running programs & ops at a nonprofit — away from startup-land entirely.

Our entire advertising agency (we worked with Cluely, Friend.com, Zeteo, and Whop in our first 4 months) came from D2C ecommerce brand-building and supplements - not software & media.

Even Afra, who now runs much of the day-to-day ops at Alif, came from an event-planning startup and community background - not venture capital.

By the time someone is popular on X.com or known as “the guy/girl” for something, it’s too late. Even if you can afford them, your chances of retaining them are incredibly low.

Which is why the best recruiting strategy I’ve found is to find people who are exceptional at something, even if barely tangentially related, and bring them in.

Hire for slope, not status.

996 Culture

I’ve talked to some founders recently who yap on the internet about working 996 (9am-9pm, 6 days a week).

But it’s also what seemingly every successful founder did in the early days.

This is what the 996 crowd doesn’t understand. They post their suffering like medals. Screenshot their commits. Count their hours. They’re performing intensity to avoid asking if they even care.

~ Nikunj, 996 Is Not Your Competition

Before you have your own network or leverage, you just have 24 hours in a day to outwork everyone else.

From talking to some founders in SF, it seems that the ones who are the loudest about working 996 just go out for dinner together every night since they don’t have families, and then kick it at the office with their teammates (who are also their best friends) until 9pm.

They’re optimizing for the feeling of work, not actual output.

Over the long term, this isn’t effective. The founders I know who actually built something meaningful learned to identify the 3-4 things that directly moved the needle every week, and ruthlessly cut everything else.

I spoke to a close friend about this recently - he exited his most recent consumer-facing company for $1B+, and sold another for 9-figures right before, all in the same decade. He told me he almost never worked 996 because being home at a reasonable time to tuck his kids into bed was more important than the marginal increase in productivity.

And yet, he’s still had better career outcomes than 99% of people ever will.

Doing productive things > doing things to feel productive.

Interesting miscellaneous links:

How to build and run a massive billboard campaign
A look behind the Delve billboards we see across SF.

Naval on only hiring geniuses
Shared with a founder who’s just started the hunt for founding engineers.

Colossus piece on Ramtin Naimi
(incredible read for breaking into VC - longer post coming soon)

OpenAI ends vesting cliff for new employees
Interesting to see what companies are willing to do to win the talent war.

Messaging is a Moat, not a Business by Chris Paik
A timely read as antitrust cases like Poke vs. Meta start to pick up steam.

I've watched some of my closest friends make their first million dollars this past year.

There's one striking thing that they all have in common.

They all live and breathe their companies.

And it's not because they're on some insane grind mentality, or working an unhealthy amount.

Actually, most of them have full lives outside of work and/or large family responsibilities.

But they all genuinely believe that they are improving the world by working on their specific idea.

So much so that it became part of their identity.

You can't look to a VC market map to tell you what matters to you.

It hurt them when their product didn't work perfectly. Not because customers churned or whatever, but because they saw themselves as "the type of person who cares about quality."

They couldn't ignore customer service tickets because they were "the type of person who actually cares about users."

You can’t force excellence, it comes from care.

And you can’t fake care.

Building anything worthwhile is certainly hard.

No one can prepare you for the personal sacrifices that come with trying to build something big.

But if it feels like you're constantly forcing yourself to do things you hate, it’s worth taking a step back -

no amount of optimization ever beat real obsession.

If you missed it, it's a recruiting pipeline where we place builders from our ecosystem at fast growing startups like Replit, Exa, Browserbase and Pam.

Working on that launch had me reflecting on something: what's the character arc from builder to founder?

And that brought me back to how my own career really started.

I was always "tinkering."

If you talked to any of my friends growing up, they'd say I was more interested in starting a new thing than actually growing the current thing.

Random agencies, app ideas, small businesses, an algorithmic stablecoin protocol (lol).

But the experience that changed everything for me was building Founders Inc under Furqan.

At that point, I wasn't trying to become a founder.

I was just trying to make different numbers on a graph go up.

But looking back, that's where everything started.

Working closely alongside someone who had already built successful ventures and watching him build Founders Inc – being in those all hands meetings when real decisions got made, seeing how problems actually got solved in real-time, even learning how to learn.

That's where I was subconsciously picking up skills that later directly translated to building Alif.

Skills like product thinking. Seeing what it means to work fast. Learning how to work with limited resources or how to hire someone when your company infrastructure is breaking because things are moving so fast.

My story isn't unique either.

If you look around, you'll see the builder-to-founder arc everywhere.

Take Amjad Masad, who was the founding engineer at Codecademy before starting Replit.

Or Jawed Karim, who was a founding engineer at PayPal before starting YouTube.

Most of them didn't just wake up one day with a great idea and then know how to build a successful company.

They built their way there.

So when I'm looking at the ecosystem today, and I see all this incredible talent – I started to see an opportunity.

We're sitting in this interesting spot at Alif, where we have direct (and early) access to some of the most talented people in the space.

And simultaneously, we have the coolest startups in our ecosystem constantly hitting us up, asking if we know any great engineers, designers, operators.

Alif Network felt like the obvious thing to do.

Candidly, I hope people don't just look at this as a job board or a recruiting firm spinoff.

But rather as a long-term bet on the builders of today, who we believe will go on to start the category-defining companies of tomorrow.

Our thesis is simple: when these people go on to start their own companies in a few years, we want to be the first ones backing them.

How I see it, investing in the next generation of Muslim founders doesn't just mean writing a check.

It can also mean putting them in rooms where they can learn from people who are already building at the highest level.

Or giving them a place at a company where they'll learn how to build, scale, and ship things people want.