Dispatch №2 — A week at Alif
The case for moving to SF, Sessions kicking off Sunday, Haroon at HQ, and more
A lot has been moving in the last two weeks. Sessions kicked off on Sunday, Imran hit 90 days at Alif, Haroon Mokhtarzada and Aly Orady ran office hours, and some more cool people came through HQ.
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.
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.
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.
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