Born and raised in the UAE, I'm half British, half Lebanese, and grew up in various countries across the Middle East, Africa and Europe. I'm now based in London. I love terrible jokes, beautifully crafted sandwiches and looking at designer houses I will never live in. I like to occasionally torment my sons with my piano playing and spend more time than is probably reasonable making lists of things, à la High Fidelity.
Get in touch if you ever want to chat all things scaling when it comes to startups! Just stick hello in front of this site.
Generic Exec Person @ PostHog
- Running a well-oiled sales, marketing, ops, finance, and people machine
- Came up with weird things like isgoogleanalyticsillegal.com and dictatorortechbro.com
- Wrote large chunks of our public handbook
Marketing
- Developer marketing for early-stage startups - what I've learned - hit #1 on Hacker News
- Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned - hit #1 on Hacker News
- How we spend our marketing budget at PostHog (with actual $ figures)
Sales
- How software salespeople will try to screw you (and how to fight back)
- How to buy software in an enterprise company
Hiring
- Obvious and non-obvious ways to write great job ads
- Hiring (and managing) cracked engineers
- What startup recruiters actually see when you apply for a job
- Making your first startup ops hire - what founders should look for
- Myths (and truths) I've learned from 10 years of startup hiring
- Startups, stop treating engineers like a different species
Ops & Finance
- The ops toolkit for early-stage startups
- How to run finance at your startup without hiring a finance person
- Don’t bother securing your trademarks in the beginning
partner @ hedgehog.vc
- Created a VC fund from scratch during a 48-hour hackathon, focused on early-stage open source investing
- Now hibernating
COO @ Vitl
- Looked after ops, product, R&D, CS, and legal
- Restructured and ran tech team as interim CTO
- Ran process on 2 major licensing deals to giant pharma companies
Various @ ROLI
- Held several roles - Director of Product, Chief of Staff to the Founder, Head of Program Management, and more
- Grew the business from 15 to 150+ people
- Raised $70m+ through Series A and B (and then spent it)
- University of Cambridge - BA Hons, Law
- School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London - MSc, Public Policy & Management
- Imperial College, London - MBA
I learned nothing about startups at any of these places
I use Storygraph and always appreciate a recommendation