Introducing Alif Dispatch | 5.1.26
Imran on Greg Isenberg, Dinner with Rho, and Words To Live By
This is the first edition of Alif Dispatch.
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.
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.
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