I first visited San Francisco in 2022. Back then, I never thought I could move here because of how evil everyone felt. I met people at house parties who talked about getting rich by launching memecoins, without thinking about the working-class people losing money on the other side. Maybe some of them would be millionaires, but I didn’t think many of them would be my friends.

I’ve lived here for three years now. The biggest reason I moved was because I met Subhash (a.k.a. Subby1).

Subby and I were both part of Buildspace, an alternative school for people to work on what they’re passionate about. That summer, he made an AI livestream of me that people could control by sending donations, eventually getting a million views on TikTok before getting banned.

Then he turned that into a website where you could make an AI celebrity say anything you wanted, like getting Lebron James to give a post-game interview about diarrhea. I thought it was funny but probably wouldn’t go anywhere. Two weeks later, he showed me an analytics page with 10,000 users and $1,000 in monthly subscription revenue.

Subby has a habit of making something incredibly technically difficult that barely anyone else can do, and jamming it into a silly product that pays his rent. He paid for college by making an AI music tagger and licensed it to a record company for $15k a month. He called it Galiboo, because it’s “something a kid would laugh at”, and casually made a full time software engineer’s annual salary as a side project.

Using the data from Galiboo, he made Maroofy: a music search and recommendation engine. Before he shut it down, it had over a million searches and won him a $25,000 grant from Buildspace. He still gets emails from users two years later asking why he took it down, and emails from AI researchers asking for his dataset.

After Buildspace, he made a site called Comfy Workflows to share interesting ways to use Comfy UI; a niche AI image generation software. In two months, he and his cofounder Dylan had 10,000 passionate users in a Discord server paying $1,000/month for their site and $75,000 in investment. Again, for something I couldn’t understand why people would use let alone pay for.2

He took two jobs over the past two years, but at his core, Subby wants to be the man in the marina arena. So a few months after getting his green card, he quit to start his own company. Subby’s favourite movie is Iron Man, so just like how Tony Stark made J.A.R.V.I.S, Subby Tech made Figment. Right now it’s an AI personal assistant that sets reminders, fills out forms, and watches the TikToks you send it, but Subby thinks it could be his life’s work.

“I could only ever see myself working on helpful AI or something in medicine, like biotech. But biotech would take too long to ramp up, and right now the models are already good enough to help you without even asking.”

The way I see it, executive assistants used to be for the richest people in the world. Then startups let slightly less wealthy (but still rich!) people hire talent from developing countries to do the job almost as well for $2,000 a month instead of $10,000. Just like how people who never took taxis take Ubers now, I can see a world where millions of regular people would want a personal assistant if it costs only $20/month.

Love your problems

It sounds so simple when I replay his story, but I’ve seen the insane amount of effort he puts into his work. We’ve been roommates for two years and often work out of the same office together, so I know 90% of his days involve the same three things: spending 12 hours in front of his laptop, playing Super Smash Bros and playing basketball. If I ever see him break that routine, I know something’s wrong and I’m on the hunt for whoever hurt him.

I’ve never heard him say “996” even though he’s been doing it for at least the past three years. I’m actually jealous watching him work so much because he seems so satisfied by it. There’s no bragging or complaining. He’ll often forget to eat because he’s so obsessed with whatever he’s working on that he can’t think about anything else3.

He reminds me of what Justin Kan said about Kyle Vogt at Twitch, “He’d just, like, lock himself in a room for three days and code away and then emerge with something that worked.”4 When Subby’s working on a problem, I won’t see him for a while because he’ll be home after I’m asleep and will wake up after I’ve left. Even if I do see him physically, his eyes are glazed over because mentally, he’s inside his computer.

He’s always been like this, even before we met. He grew up in Fremont but his family went back to India when he was in high school because of immigration issues. In India, the schools wanted to pull him back two years to catch up because America is too soft, so he went to online high school in California instead. “My schedule was: wake up at 2 pm, work on my projects from 4 pm to 11 pm, then I’d sometimes attend classes online from midnight onwards,” he told me.

By doing the same thing each day, Subby’s great at everything he’s good at.

“I learned to code just by trying to make something then Googling my errors. I couldn’t sit through any coding tutorials. I opened an HTML book once when I was 13, then was like ‘nope’ after the first page.”

“You never got tired or annoyed coding every day for so long? Or lonely?” I asked him.

“No man! I love problems. Not like that, but you know. Debugging is fun. It’s like solving puzzles, or mysteries. Like maybe it’s hard in the moment, but the dopamine rush from solving some hard problems just always kept me going.”

The things most people would overthink and worry about don’t bother Subby at all. When he got into an American college, the tuition was $60,000 per year. His family had just enough money to pay for his first year.

“Why did you go to UCSD knowing you couldn’t pay for it?” I asked.

He quickly responded, “I don’t know actually, come to think of it. I knew I had to get back into America somehow because of our house and I had to bring my family over. I just thought I’d figure it out, y’know?”

A few seconds later, he added, “Yeah… why did I do that actually…”

By trying to make J.A.R.V.I.S in high school, he realized he was interested in this thing called AI. In college, he kept a very similar schedule of going to classes during the day and spending his nights and weekends working on AI projects.

“Somehow I got into AI music analysis. Just thought it was cool. And there was this guy who wrote a paper, implying he had the OneMillionSongs dataset with the original audio, which later got removed because music companies are really protective of their tracks being on the internet. And so I emailed him, and this guy spent half a day helping me debug simple errors, then transferred me this dataset on Google Cloud. I still have it.”

“Eventually I posted my project on Hacker News, but it didn’t get much love. Then this moderator named ‘dang’ emails me like, “yo, sometimes we repost content on the front page that’s really high quality, we’re going to do that for your post tomorrow sometime in the next 24-48 hours.” After that, I got a lot of messages from music companies. One company paid $5k for this music tagging thing I made that could classify instruments and genres, but never ended up renewing. Then this other company asked if I could train my model on their data, and then they paid me 15k per month for a license.”5

It may sound like Subby’s just a tech guy, only focused on living in an engineer’s paradise. But he just has an incredibly high learning rate, and mostly chooses to apply it to tech. When he needs to, he’ll constantly update his weights and biases to focus on the most important thing.

“I used to get all my dopamine from debugging, but a switch flipped after my first project in college started making money. Now it’s more like ‘debugging people’ if that makes sense. Like looking at a product and figuring out, ‘why aren’t people paying for this and what can we change to fix that?’”

When he decided he wanted to bring his family over to the US, he got a job at UCSD’s supercomputing lab partially because academic institutions are cap exempt for skilled worker visas. He knows more about the US immigration system than some lawyers I’ve spoken to. If he’s building a product and no one’s using it, he’ll focus on making TikTok carousels if he thinks that’ll move the needle. He’ll ask his former boss to be his cofounder with no shame if he thinks that’s how he can make the best company possible6.

He quit his job with only three months of rent in the bank because he wanted to go back to working on his own thing. He pays for an apartment in San Diego for his mom and sister while living in San Francisco because he knows this is where he has the best chance of making a huge consumer AI company. Just like when he moved from India, somehow he’s never worried about the money. He just knows the only way is through, so why worry?

Never switch up on your day ones

There’s just something different about religious engineers. Every morning, Subby kneels and bows in front of a Ganesh statue in our living room. He’s the most humble and low ego person I know, even after three years in a city driven by chips on shoulders.

He doesn’t kill bugs7, eat beef, or do drugs. He doesn’t even drink coffee or soda. His body is a machine that ingests rice and outputs beautiful software.

Subby’s also very close with his family, especially his mom. Two years ago, I asked him why he calls her every day.

He flipped the question on me. “When was the last time you saw your mom?”

“I visited Toronto maybe three months ago,” I replied.

“I haven’t seen my mom in seven years. You never know how badly you can miss your family until you can’t see them, even if you wanted.”

Ever since that conversation, I call my mom every day. I’ve seen a hundred young people in Silicon Valley give up everything to come here and chase their dreams. I’m one of them. My plan was to work hard in my 20s, “make it”, then help all the people that helped me. Except I’d never hang out with my friends or call my mom because I was “too busy”. I didn’t realize my mom didn’t care if I got rich in 10 years and bought her a car. She just wanted to spend time with me.

Subby took me off a path where I’d be lonely at the top even if I did make it, and talking to my mom every day reminds me who I am and what’s important. It brings me comfort knowing people like him exist in the world, working hard while staying grounded through his family and faith. I never have to worry about him having a hidden agenda because I can’t imagine not trusting someone who talks to their mom and gods so much.

I ask him why he does all this, why he cares about coding and startups, and why he’s been doing it all for 14 years.

“Well one was to make enough money to bring my family over of course. But when I realized that was going to happen, it was more so that I could have enough money to invest in stuff to help the world. Like charity but you know, private.”

“I think you and I both agree that innovation is the way to solve the world’s problems, and innovation is best done by the private sector, hence investment is better than charity to create change, right?” Subby nodded, “Yeah exactly.”

Everyone’s always trying to help Subby. In the three years he’s been in San Francisco, Subby’s never had to pay for office space. He always has two or three friends that want him to come to theirs just to hang out. He’s been able to work out of Founders Inc., a venture capital studio in Marina, that invested in Comfy Workflows even though he wasn’t building a company for 2 years.Because he’s the type of guy you want to keep around.

He’ll ask you what you’re working on out of genuine curiosity, not to size you up or to try to hire you. He’ll help fix a startup’s technical issues and refuse payment when offered. When he got a car, he referred to it as “our car” even though we don’t split the lease and I don’t even have a license. And every night, he’ll spend half an hour driving friends or even relative strangers home from the office.

It’s the reason he can close a $20k angel investment in 20 minutes. Our friend Patrick recently sold the app he’s been working on for a year, and now invests in startups on the side. While he was still in the early days, Subby let him crash on our couch. Subby doesn’t calculate out “oh this guy’s going to be rich one day let me help him so he’ll owe me later”, it’s just part of his character to help people in need. So when Subby sent me this text, I knew it was Karma for all the good things he’s ever done:

Later that night, he added, “Patrick’s a true angel, like sent from God type shi-. Right when I needed it.”

Earnestness is a competitive advantage

Paul Graham talks about “how consistently successful startup founders turn out to be good people, and how consistently bad people fail as startup founders.” When someone’s doing something for the right reasons, the world aligns towards making them succeed. Potential hires feel good about working with them, VCs want to invest because they won’t settle for a small exit along the way, and customers won’t feel the ick of being ripped off or having their data harvested.

Most things about running a business are learnable, but it’s almost impossible to fake morals if anyone’s looking closely. It’s also incredibly hard to fake effort when you go to an office for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for three years. At that point, you just have to assume Subby loves what he does. That, combined with the way he inhales machine learning papers and explains them to me, and how he casually got a Master’s in AI while he was stuck at UCSD in the pandemic, makes it feel like he has all the qualities of a great entrepreneur.

When we met, I’d just gotten laid off and started making Youtube videos on a whim. Every day, I’d look myself in the mirror and wonder what the hell I was doing giving up a six-figure tech salary to make videos barely anyone would watch. And every day, when I was ready to stay home in bed because I was so down on myself, I’d get a text from Subby, ‘yo! you coming in today?’ and I’d go in. Even now when he works out of a friend’s office, and I’m at home procrastinating, I’ll get the call asking, “whatcha doing today? want me to pick you up?”

That consistent kindness makes me want to move mountains to make sure things go his way. He’s the only person whose happiness and success I want more than my own.

He’s talented enough to be making millions at OpenAI right now if he wanted, but I can’t actually see that for him, because I know how much he wants to help people and work on his own vision. It’s the same reason I could never see him retiring, because when he’s working on his own stuff, he glows like he’s never worked a day in his life.

The day after he quit his job and started working on Figment, his first time working on his own thing in two years, he told me:

“It felt like there was a fire in my heart that was put in a box and tucked away deep inside. And I knew it wasn’t lost, but for a while, I forgot what it felt like. And I’m just so happy now, because everything finally feels like play again.”

You can find Subby here. DM him and tell him I sent you.

Rohan’s job title is “Vice President of Content Strategy” at Night Media. In the streets, though, they call him “the Rick Rubin of brainrot”.

His day is split between scrolling Instagram reels in conversations, teaching marketing execs what “clipping” is, then looking at their content to see if the vibes are off. He’s a master and a scholar of the game, because his brain is so rotted I couldn’t talk to him for more than 30 seconds at a time. Most of the time he’d get bored, pull out his phone, respond to some texts, then scroll reels for two minutes before moving onto something else.

I asked Lenny, his coworker and friend since middle school, if Rohan pisses people off. “Only when he’s on his phone,” he responded. And Rohan did piss me off, but it’s hard to argue with the methods if you look at his results.

He was behind the viral stunt with Ramp where they put Kevin from the Office in a glass box for 24 hours to manually process business expense receipts. Over 100 million people saw it on all platforms and they’re now the poster child for making enterprise software cool again. He joined MrBeast as the 30th employee to work on short-form videos back when their TikTok only had a million followers, then grew it to over 100 million during his four years there. Most of their viral shorts1 still follow formats made by Rohan and his team.

Everyone we met asked him how to grow their social media. We’d run into microcelebrities and each chat ended with “yo, we gotta shoot soon!” He tweeted about leaving MrBeast last year and had his DMs flooded with crypto companies offering multimillion-dollar contracts, but he just didn’t want to work with them. Being ex-MrBeast in media is like being ex-Jane Street or ex-OpenAI in tech. Everyone wants to work with you, and no matter what you charge, the company hiring you is getting a good deal.

Mandated MrBeast military service

I met Rohan on the bus to an investment firm’s retreat for the chronically online. He mentioned he was on four hours of sleep. I thought he still seemed energetic. “You know that special gene Donald Trump has where he can sleep five hours a night and still function? I just pretend I have that.”

He probably picked up that gene working at MrBeast. 120-hour weeks seemed like the expectation for anyone close to Jimmy, the CEO. He told a client, “It’s the most boring place in the world, so all you do is work. But you get to work on the coolest things ever.”

He met Jimmy through Colin and Samir, two guys who advise some of the world’s biggest YouTubers. Rohan originally wanted to model his career after Samir, since “he was another brown guy consulting brands on media” and interned for them throughout college. “They basically paid me $500 a month to scroll naturally and write down trends I was seeing. I was like their GenZ consultant.”

He had a contract in front of him to join full-time, but Samir had just met Jimmy and thought Rohan would learn more by working at Beast. So Rohan flew to Greenville, North Carolina for the interview during peak Covid, then had to quarantine for a week until Jimmy called him up.

“We talk for a bit then he asks me what I want to do. And I’m kind of thinking, “wait, you called me here. What do you need done?” But I realized he wanted an answer, so I basically told him his TikTok presence was shit. This was before people knew Tiktok would be big, like it was still kind of cringe at this point.”

“It’s funny I’m like the only person in this business who’s never been a creator. I just proposed a couple of ideas, said why I thought they would work, we shot and filmed some of them, then posted that week. They did alright and then he hired me.”

It was a little more complicated than that, but Rohan chronically undersells everything. Even when working with clients, he’ll never promise results. He’ll always say: “this is what we’re gonna do, this is why we think it’ll work, and it’ll do as well as it can.” I heard his colleague criticize another agency for promising someone 500k followers in six months. “You can’t guarantee stuff like that. It’s all up to the algo gods.”

Sometimes, Rohan describes his time at Beast like he was in the army: very structured and regimented, travelling the world yet never really getting to enjoy it, and his boss could blow up at any time. There was always the stress of, “why aren’t we growing faster? Why did we only get 1 million followers last month? Why wasn’t it 10 million?”

But it did open doors. I could see the dollar signs flash in his clients’ eyes when Rohan casually drops that he worked at Beast for four years. They instantly understand he’s one of the top 500 people in the world at getting people’s attention. If he can get someone to fly to Paris for a baguette and get 1.7 billion views on it, any brand stunt is doable.

Ask for what you want

Rohan’s always sliding into someone’s DMs. At Beast, they’d come up with video ideas by putting together rooms of college students and random people off the street to brainstorm for $20/hour. To network in college, he’d message at least ten people a day. One of his Instagram followers recognized him when we were at Erewhon.

A new-grad employee at Night Media asked him how he got to know so many people. Later he told me:

“I hate questions like that. Like, if you want to know more people, go talk to more people. Anything you want you can ask for it.”

A week earlier, Rohan saw a viral tweet (which I happened to tweet but he didn’t realize) for a tinned fish party:

Rohan was working on producing his own party the week I was there. I’d only ever thrown a party before; this was the first time I’d seen one produced. It felt similar to the work he did for clients, except he was the brand this time.

He had his chef friends making side dishes and sauces. He had his producer friends securing tableware and decor. He posted about it every day even though the guest list was already full and for friends only. Then he messaged 30 brands on Instagram with a Notion doc of what he was doing while namedropping which influencers would be attending. One brand gave him $500 and a bunch of free fish, another gave him a few bottles of wine, and a third gave him wholesale pricing on their caviar.

“Closed mouths don’t get fed!” Rohan yelled while filming a video about the sponsorship.

It looks like so much of Rohan’s success comes from just asking for it. I never thought I could just ask companies to pay me to throw a party with my friends. Maybe it’s only because Rohan’s friends are influencers and the party was in a mansion, but I don’t know that for sure. I don’t know what would happen if I tried the same thing, because I’ve never tried.

You gotta know a guy

Most of Rohan’s work is based off knowing a guy. I peeked at his screen once and saw 15 people named Sam2 in his contacts. We counted 107 people on his Find My Friends and 84 in his iMessage that day. Watching him hop on calls, check the status of what his producers were doing, then giving next steps, I got the same feeling as watching an engineer in San Francisco delegating work to AI agents.

I kept suggesting he could use AI for research and outreach, but he said he’d rather just hire someone to use AI for him. His job revolves around knowing the right people and making them want to help him. It’s not like he has any particular technical skills in media; he could barely focus while editing a TikTok for 20 minutes. But he seemed to effortlessly get along with everyone we met. He didn’t study consumer trends in college, but by scrolling memes for 10 years, he has a reference for every client campaign.

Rohan understands that everyone has an invisible sign on their back that says “make me feel special” and moves through the world accordingly. Understanding that a friend was burnt out from pre-med and would enjoy being in video production isn’t something you can figure out with a few prompts, but that’s how Rohan hired his Production Assistant. He’ll get a chef friend to cater his party for free and have the chef thank him for it, because to them, it was a chance to practice running the operation instead of being a line cook.

“I’m both really good at knowing lots of people and also keeping people around for a long time. I’ve been working with AZ and Lenny for five years now.”

“I feel like people follow me because I’m really good at understanding the flow of money in the world so no one else has to worry about it.”

I got the feeling that Rohan maintained a lot of transactional relationships. I even wondered if he agreed to this profile just to have a “writer friend” in his pocket, or test-drive what it’d be like to have a personal assistant. But I don’t think he frames his relationships as transactional or non-transactional, they just are.

In fact, I don’t think he reflects on his life at all. Whenever I tried to dig at the deeper reason he was doing everything like money or fame, he’d get bored of the conversation and start scrolling. All I got out of him was, “If I don’t do stuff for a while I get bored. I love JRPGs. I quit Beast last year and played Fire Emblem for a month. Everything’s a video game, and I just like playing the game.”

Rohan has no hidden objective. He’s completely straight up about everything. If he’s not giving you his full attention, you can see it because he’s on his phone. When he’s talking with brands, he’ll pitch a budget that’s honest about how much it’ll cost, maybe with a 10-15% padding, then tell them straight up “the most expensive part of this is working with me” because he knows what to do and knows all the right people to do it. It’s less of a negotiation than it is “take it or leave it”. He has a million other things to do if that one deal falls through.

It makes me think of Marc Andreessen talking about how all great men of history didn’t sit around all day thinking about themselves.

“You don’t have any levels of introspection?”

Marc: Yes, zero. As little as possible.

“Why?”

Marc: Move forward. Go!

Even though he’s busy all the time, he’s the only person I know who calls their parents every day. Even though he knows everyone in LA, he still spends most nights hanging out with his best friend Max3. He feels pretty grounded in a city full of people with their head in the clouds, probably because he always makes time for the people close to him.

He’s not lacking depth in his relationships because he’s not even thinking about it like that. He’s just hanging out with people he likes. If he wants something or they want something, they can just ask. He’s not trying to force anyone to stick around, but he’s good to the people that do.

I mentioned wanting to grow SF Alexandria’s Instagram presence, and Rohan’s been sending me reels for inspiration ever since. The fact that he cares enough to help me unprompted4, it makes me want to stick around.

Make what’s reel

On the flight back, I thought a lot about the future of this blog. I’m aiming to have more readers than the New York Times one day, but right now it’s just me writing these profiles. I see fully AI-written Substack publications with thousands of subscribers and can’t help but feel jealous. I do this for art rather than the algorithm, and I’m kind of shy about promoting it, but after the week with Rohan I’ve realized there’s no inherent quality in obscurity. People have to see something on social media, and I think I make good stuff, so why shouldn’t they see my work?

“At Beast the goal was simple. Just make videos that get the most views possible,” Rohan told me.

“Not the best?” I replied.

“I mean, is most viewed the best? I think about that all the time,” he reflected for a half second while texting someone.

Spending a week in the content factory made me realize all social media will eventually be either really good or really shitty. It’ll be either expensive and well produced cinema or an iPhone video with no script filmed by some farmer in Missouri that’ll get the most views.

Rohan would mention over and over that, “it’s about getting the right people in the right rooms and creating a situation for good content to happen.” Ronaldo walking by on a live stream would be planted just like painting someone into a wall to scare a streamer or rigging a desk to break so it could be clipped and reshared later on short-form.

Seeing how hard the entertainment industry works to get people addicted to their phones made me a little depressed. Some days I feel like I’m fooling myself putting my heart and soul into this blog. After all, no one reads anymore. Maybe I should start making TikToks or work for OpenAI.

Driving to the airport, Rohan pointed at a billboard. “I like the Lyft ads. Probably my favourite ad campaign recently. I feel like I actually check Lyft more now.”

“What do you like about it?” I asked him.

“They did something honest. They know they’re not the leader and they called it out. They’re meeting people where they’re at.”

Something about that is really motivating to me. If honest media stands out to someone whose job it is to understand content, maybe I should keep making it. Maybe it’s not fundamentally impossible to get people to read my work, maybe I just haven’t tried hard enough yet.

You can find Rohan here. DM him and tell him I sent you.

I was 18 when the pandemic started. Each day, I locked myself in my room playing League of Legends and reading about startups, occasionally coming out for meals and to take a piss. No one at my high school seemed to have ambitions beyond getting into a good university and securing a decent 9-5, so I alienated myself from them.

In March I made a Twitter account, hoping for a place to meet other people interested in tech and startups. That’s where I first learned of Farza.

He’s best known for starting Buildspace, an alternative school to help people make their dreams a reality. Anyone who’s passed through their program knows that’s not just a marketing line.

Someone joined with only $18,000 to their name. Another was driving Uber to support himself. Both of them met at Buildspace, decided to start a company together, and now have millions in revenue.

Two of my friends started dating during Buildspace and are now engaged. Someone posted their first video during the program and now has over half a million followers on Instagram. Software engineers discovered their passion for music and put out full albums. Accountants became industrial designers selling over $100,000 in novelty bookmarks. Event producers became hardware manufacturers. Everyone who was successful was celebrated, anyone who was down was supported, and there was no jealousy in sight.

Farza crafted a Mecca for makers where nothing felt impossible. We’d spend 12 hours a day in the office and none of it felt like work.

Buildspace shut down in 2024. They didn’t run out of money, nor did the market reject them. They had 100,000 people using an AI product they built and a fanbase so loyal that even today, I can’t hang out with him in public without someone coming up to us and asking, “yo, are you Farza from Buildspace?” Farza himself admitted that he decided to shut it down at its peak. He just didn’t want to work on it anymore.

I spent a week watching him start a second company from scratch. He walks around a lot, stares out of the window, then doesn’t move from his desk for six hours straight trying to make a demo for an idea he came up with while walking. I got the feeling this must’ve been what it was like seeing Jobs in his garage while starting Apple.

I doubt his current project will turn into a company, but I’m sure he’ll uncover something interesting beneath it. I also get the sense he’ll be a billionaire someday, even though he doesn’t care about money at all. He just wants to make stuff until he’s old and gray, and help others do the same.

Make what you like

At 13, Farza got a job offer to be a sign spinner at a gym. When he came home, his dad wouldn’t let him do it. “You could do so much more,” he told Farza.

So Farza took some clothes his dad was going to donate and started selling them on eBay. Eventually he monopolized the market for a very specific type of blank CD for people to burn movies and songs onto. Over the next four years, he grew that into a business bringing in over $100k/year in revenue.

He went to college as a filmmaking major since he spent most of his teen years making skits on YouTube. After realizing that they didn’t get to make films until second year, he switched to computer science. He learned to code there, and made a website that gave you a playlist personalized to each character in League of Legends, the world’s most popular game back then. He posted about it on Reddit and woke up to over 10,000 users.

“It was so shitty that to keep it alive, I stayed up all night for a 48-hour Twitch stream. On the stream I put, ‘If you want this website to stay alive, please donate or I’ll shut it down.’ By the end of the stream I had $10,000 in donations.”

Throughout his early years, he just built things inspired by what he liked. He liked gaming, so he made a bunch more gaming projects. That led to him working for TSM, a major esports team, doing data analysis, and later Visor GG, making an AI Overwatch coach. He never applied for a job. People just found him after he posted about projects he made for fun.

“When I was doing Buildspace, pretty much every time we came up with something, it’d just start with ‘wouldn’t it be cool if...?’”

“Before Nights and Weekends, we made courses teaching people about AI and crypto. But we thought, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if people who started with a course could keep working on their ideas after the course is done?’ After seeing everyone in Nights and Weekends make stuff on Discord, we thought, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if they came to San Francisco and met each other?’ For the school, it was like, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if they worked on their ideas full time?’”

He recently posted a demo on Twitter for a little AI friend called Clicky. It follows your mouse cursor around, points at stuff and you can ask it to help you with whatever’s on screen. People loved it, it went viral, then he shipped another demo the same week for a site that stores all of his information in a way that makes it easy for AI to use called Farzapedia. People loved that one too and paid him thousands of dollars to try it, yet he’s shelved it for now because it’s not interesting enough.

Creativity often feels like an abstract art. I hear people complain about not feeling inspired whenever they try to make something good. Like they’re waiting for lightning to strike but it’s just not hitting them. Farza’s somehow been able to come up with products and ideas that millions of people love, and watching him work, it feels anything but random. He’ll reference the moment in the Beatles documentary where Paul McCartney composes ‘Get Back’ in four minutes while waiting for John Lennon to come to the studio.

“People will look at that and say he had a sudden stroke of inspiration. But they won’t see the previous three months of him coming to the studio every day and coming up with nothing.”

Chase excellence, not money

For some reason, Farza seems allergic to charging his users. Before Buildspace, he ran a company called ZipSchool that offered a better way to homeschool your kids. It got really big within mommy Facebook groups, and one day he sent out an email asking users to pay $40/month to continue using their services. Hundreds of people paid.

Two days later, they got another email: Your Zipschool subscription has been refunded.

In it, Farza explained he was just gauging if people liked his product enough to pay for it, but he had no plans to charge them for the foreseeable future. He ran online classes for kids entirely for free. When he shut that down and pivoted into the first version of Buildspace, a not-boring course platform for AI and blockchain developers, he kept the courses free by getting companies to sponsor them.

After $2.5 million in revenue, he cancelled those sponsorship contracts and pivoted the company to focus on Nights and Weekends, a free online program to teach over 200,000 people how to bring their idea to life1. When they created Buildspace “school”, they secured a contract with the Dubai government to build a campus there to attract tech talent. Once again, it was free for attendees since the government footed the bill.

When your target audience is kids in Nigeria recording songs in a sound booth made of a bedsheet and clothespins2 trying to make it as a music artist, why siphon from people like them trying to create value?

“I think it’s ridiculous that everyone building AI software right now is catering to the same 500,000 people on tech Twitter. Like, I don’t care what some 20-something software engineer thinks of my product. What does the Nigerian woman think? What does a kid in Pakistan think? What does my mom think?”

Even though he’s not focused on the money, somehow he gets funded immediately every time he starts something new. He raised two million dollars for Zipschool from a16z, a top venture capital fund, after calling himself a “noob” in the email. He ignored everyone’s advice and sent them weekly updates for three months instead of operating in secrecy and pitting investors against each other like people typically do when raising money.

Farza drives a type of FOMO that makes you feel like he’s going to be successful with or without you, so you might as well join him for the ride. He recently joined Y Combinator (YC), the best startup accelerator in the world, without an idea or even applying. “They said ‘please join, we’ll fund anything you do. We know you’re going to be a billionaire someday, just come.’” Farza told me, imitating a YC partner.

Seeing Farza move through the startup world with so much nonchalance reminds me of my favourite movie: 3 Idiots. It follows Rancho, an engineering student with a genuine passion for learning, as he attends the best technical college in India. The movie contrasts his curiosity with his peers who only focus on rote memorization and getting good test scores, driven by fear of not getting a good job. In the end, Rancho’s a world- famous inventor who spends most of his time teaching children how to build machines.

Throughout the movie, his motto is “Chase excellence, not money. If you love what you do, the money will follow.” Whenever I think of 3 Idiots, I can’t help but hear that line in Farza’s voice.

Lonely but not alone

In one of his weekly updates, Farza mentioned, “70% of the time, I do feel like I’m the GOAT, and I have a lot of confidence. But then 30%, I’m like dude… I’m shit! I have no talent! I’ve been at my house for the last year and I still have not been able to do anything worthwhile.”

I fully believe Farza can do anything he sets his mind to, but he can’t do it alone. When we chat about the old days, he’ll look off into the distance like he has PTSD. He’ll mention waking up with panic attacks most mornings and sleeping eight hours yet never feeling rested while running Buildspace. “It’s just a lot. However hard anyone thinks it is being a solo founder, it’s harder.”

At Buildspace, people hung out 12 hours a day for 12 weeks. A friend mentioned that because of those three months, he found people he knows will be his groomsmen someday. Everyone who passed through was a misfit, but we all fit with each other. The only notable exclusion was the guy who put it all together.

I once asked Farza if he was friends with the Buildspace team.

“I mean, I love everyone on the team, but you kinda gotta maintain some separation when you’re in charge. Like sometimes I gotta fire people, y’know?”

Farza mentioned how it was tough for him to make friends growing up. The same was true for me until I joined Buildspace, where I felt belonging unlike ever before. Buildspace taught me how to love myself, and every time I felt like absolute shit, I had a friend to pick me up. Sometimes I wish Farza got to experience that too. “No one ever checked up on me, or asked how I was doing. Except maybe one or two guys”, he told me while staring off into the distance.

Throughout the five years of Zipschool and Buildspace, Farza had no co-founder. Shutting down Buildspace was a unilateral decision, like a bomb blowing up our walled garden of hackers and painters. He didn’t consult anyone on the team beforehand. There wasn’t anyone he could talk to as an equal. He wrote a few letters explaining the decision, but to anyone watching closely, it was obvious he was burnt out and needed to reset.

I was devastated when I found out but wished him the best, then asked how he was feeling. He responded, “Honestly bro, I can’t wait ‘til my flight out.”

I didn’t know if he’d ever come back. He mentioned he might give up startups for good, and maybe start making a movie or an anime. Maybe he’d start a goat farm in Oklahoma like he mentioned on his Hinge profile. He joked about getting an arranged marriage in Pakistan.

Five months later, I saw a picture of the San Francisco airport on his Instagram.

When I asked him why he came back so soon, he said “San Francisco is the only place that feels real to me. It’s been a nice break, but it’s time to get back to it.”

“Back to what?” I asked.

“Same old. Building the world’s greatest company.”

In the same weekly update, Farza elaborated on his loneliness as a solo founder:

“When you’re working with someone and things go well, you usually have someone to high five or pat you on the back. But when you’re solo, you have to dig deep for personal validation, which is hard for anyone. Loneliness is the one emotion I’m really prone to.”

I always wondered what changed on the trip for Farza to come back so quickly. For the past year, he’s mostly been creating his ideas alone just like before. What did he see in the mountains of Czechia and villages of Pakistan that made him want to stare at a laptop for 12 hours a day again?

It became clear when I learned that over those four months, he met a girl.

Some of the Buildspace group chats were still active even after the company shut down. Someone sent a message looking for an app developer in Dubai. Farza connected her to someone she didn’t end up working with, but they kept chatting and eventually met up while Farza was travelling.

I got this funny warm feeling inside when I learned they got together. Buildspace was responsible for thousands of relationships, partnerships and friendships over the years. In the end, I’m glad the Laws of Karma ended up materializing belonging for the guy who deserves it the most.

“I really couldn’t do it without her. In fact, I don’t even know if I want to try really starting something again until she’s beside me here.”

It’s cool to care

In our third week at Buildspace, Farza gave us a warning:

“In San Francisco, you got all these dark players whispering in your ear telling you to raise money or make this company or whatever. I’d be really careful when anyone here seems like they want something from you.”

Silicon Valley sometimes feels like everyone wants to own you. Instead of asking “how are you?”, people ask “what are you building?”. Deep down, everyone’s sizing each other up to see who can be useful to them, either as a potential hire, investor, or introduction to someone relevant. When I first visited, it was exhausting trying to figure out who was a friend and who was just disguised as one. I never thought I’d move here because it felt like a city of sharks.

What draws people to Farza is that he’s a kid trapped in an adult body with no filter. He’ll say what’s on his mind, even to people who could potentially give him millions of dollars. He reschedules calls with AI company CEOs last minute if he doesn’t feel like it, but he’s absolutely beaming when talking to kids from India3 about how to make their cricket betting app scale to a million users.

He loves what he loves even if it’s considered childish or cringe, and imbues it into all his work. Buildspace campus was heavily inspired by Japan and anime art. He’d be unbothered if Elon walked into the room but would break down crying if it was Porter Robinson. He taught himself to meditate by imagining himself as Naruto in sage mode and has the Naruto hidden leaf tattooed on his wrist.

In a city full of stuffy adults who can’t talk about anything other than agent frameworks and what’s going viral on Twitter, he makes me feel like it’s cool to be who I am and like what I like. Even if it isn’t raising a billion dollars to build B2B SaaS agents for cryptocurrency trading.

During a Buildspace lecture, he talked about how important it is for us to stick together even after the three-month program was over.

“When I moved to SF, one thing I hated was how much people would judge you for what you were working on. They’d be your friends one day, then if you stopped working on your idea or your company was struggling, suddenly you weren’t cool enough to hang out with. Like, that’s so ridiculous. I don’t want that to happen to any of you. Subby, if Aadil stopped making videos, would you just stop being his friend? No, right?”

Subby is my roommate and still my best friend to this day. He’s seen me through bouts of unemployment, spontaneous travel to find myself, and lying on the couch for days on end while only getting up to eat and sleep. I’m no stranger to judgement from people I thought were my friends and people at SF parties, but I’ve never felt an ounce of that from anyone at Buildspace. Farza made sure of it.

He’s nearly immune to pressure from other people, partially because he puts so much pressure on himself. He’s so himself that all the social climbers get confused when talking to him. He’ll often start a conversation, look off into the distance halfway through, point out something happening on the street, then return to the main conversation like nothing even happened. I can’t tell if he has intense ADHD or is just trying to throw people off. But it makes it so that he’s almost never playing anyone’s game but his own.

He once took a job as the Chief Marketing Officer at a large AI company for two days before quitting with no follow-up plan.

“I didn’t want to be an appendage. I don’t think they actually cared about media nearly as much as they did making coding models, so I’d rather do the main thing, but even then, I don’t really care about coding models.”

After no further prompting, he added:

“[Company] probably doesn’t care that much about helping people in Pakistan build a business or upskill themselves. Like they probably think it’s nice, but that’s not their core aim.”

He can’t get jazzed about anything he can’t really see the impact of or doesn’t have some sort of improvement in the world he wants to see. He’s cursed with only doing things he cares about. He says he could just make a billion dollars building an AI SaaS if he wanted to, but I don’t think he can, because he would never want to. Our friend Samraaj remarked, “Yeah, you can tell that guy has to impact people’s lives. That’s why he couldn’t get a job most places.”

Somehow everything has to be personal. Every single idea seems to tie back to his mom or “some kid in Pakistan” which is where his family is from.

At Buildspace, he coined an acronym: GTFOL, or Get the f*ck off localhost, which means to get your idea to a state where other people can use it as fast as possible rather than just on your own computer. He can’t just sit with an idea on the shelf, he has to put it out there and see how people interact with it and how it helps make their lives better. The bureaucracy of a big company would strangle him.

In one of his final lectures, Farza talked to us about pivoting.

“Whatever you do, try not to hard pivot. The more time you have working on your idea, the more you can see into the future on how it’ll play out. Calibrate, bing-bong, whatever you have to do, but try to avoid hard pivoting.”

“There were a million times I wanted to shut down Buildspace. Even at ZipSchool, I tried a million little pivots before turning it into Buildspace, but I still stayed in the education space so all those learnings stacked up. Whenever I was upset, my mom would ask me over and over if I was ready to shut it all down and come home.”

“And I’d tell her, ‘No mama, I’m not done yet.’”

He’s been making stuff for 15 years, and has inspired countless others to do the same. When I started my journey making stuff online in my parents house six years ago, I got to read Farza’s progress updates on Zipschool every week. Since then, I’ve founded and exited a startup, was an early employee at two startups on a Forbes list, started a few small businesses, and now I’m trying to make it as a writer with the Alexandria blog, doing it scared but still doing it.

Without him, I would’ve given up 100 times by now.

Watching him sit at his desk again, trying to hire a team, scribbling ideas in his notebook and lighting up on user calls after 15 years of anxiety, loneliness and self-doubt, I can’t help but smile.

I can’t help but think:

“If this guy can give his ideas a shot, why can’t I?”

You can find Farza here. DM him and tell him I sent you.

Silicon Valley is obsessed with storytelling right now. Founders are dropping six figures on launch videos pre-product. A16z new media is hiring the best twitter posters to help their PortCos with comms. AI can write code ten times better than it can a blog post. Building things is cheap, so software engineers are getting laid off, but attention is all you need so LA and NYC creatives are being imported in droves. A filmmaker friend joked that “San Francisco is a patch of grass and I’m a lawn mower.”

In this era where attention is currency, there’s no one who thrives more than Donald.

He’s an engineer turned filmmaker who’s worked with Cursor, Physical Intelligence and Meter. But he’s been behind the scenes for around 20 other startups over the years, influencing their creative direction, brand or launch videos in some way. There’s no point in building the future if you don’t tell anyone about it, so his goal is to decipher the weird yet incredible world of Silicon Valley and spread its stories to the masses.

I spent a week with him to tell the storyteller’s story. Somehow, he got me to talk most of the time even though I was the one writing about him, and saw him do the same to everyone else. He pulled dialogue out of a camera-shy roboticist with ease and prompted an AI researcher to excitedly rant about why now is the best time to move to San Francisco. He’s really damn good at getting people to talk, but somewhat quiet himself. I couldn’t help but think he was subtly influencing my narrative as I was trying to form it.

Donald grew up far away from anything tech or film related in The Middle of Nowhere1, Canada. In a town of 5000 people, his grandpa started the first store that sold cameras. Donald got his hands on one and started making short stop motion films. His first documentary came from a sudden call to adventure in university where he cold called 40 fishermen and biked 300 miles to interview them about how their town changed after a national park was built there.

After stealing L’Étranger from the library at 12 years old, Donald developed an interest in existential philosophy and an on/off relationship with nihilism. “I think any kid who grows up in a small town and doesn’t fit neatly into one of its groups starts to look for things beyond it,” he said. He got over it in college through therapy, gratitude, psychedelics, and realizing “being happy is a skill issue”.

Halfway through college, he worked as a founding engineer at his cousin’s biz dev startup selling to biopharma execs. After they sold that company, he felt called to make films again. An Uber driver once mentioned if Donald ever visited Morocco, he should stay with his dad on their mint farm. Donald was there a week later to make a documentary and catch a vibe. His following films were stories of squads. After living in Vancouver for years and meeting a bunch of cool people who had never talked to each other, he hosted a tech demo night to bring them all together. As a love letter to the city and all his friends in it, he put together a behind-the-scenes documentary. Months later, he was in Waterloo pulling three all-nighters to do the same for a 2,000 person demo night his friends hosted.

Finding stories worth telling

Watching Donald work feels like seeing a puppeteer in action. He’s a meticulous planner that no one sees, but everyone who works with him can feel his impact. The Waves launch video was the epitome of that.

Waves was a startup making camera glasses for streamers. They’d have all-day battery life and an optional indicator light, which pissed a lot of people off because recording without consent is illegal in most states.

At the time, iShowSpeed and Kai Cenat were blowing up. Friend.com’s always-on AI recording device billboards were designed to be graffitied. Cluely had “cheat on everything”, Waves had “record in stealth”. No one knows what it means, but it’s provocative.

Algorithms reward engagement above all, and people are more likely to comment on what they hate rather than what they like. (That’s what the like button is for.) Controversy means views, views mean dollars. It gets the people going.

As an experiment, Donald decided to make them a (pre-product, pre-revenue) launch video to see how much he could blow up a startup from zero. He and everyone he worked with engineered it to be a banger.

He knew that they’d have to build up a mystique around the Waves founder beforehand, so he wrote a Twitter campaign for him centered around his CTO disappearing to Shenzhen. He called on a friend who’s studied every Mr. Beast podcast to help write the script. They sorted through hundreds of actors and ABG extras before landing on their cast. He rewatched City of God and Casino Royale to analyze how they were shot, then borrowed the camera2 used to shoot Skyfall.

The video blew up. Tech Twitter talked about it for a week. They ended up with 33 million views, thousands of preorders, scoldings from Zuck and Casey Neistat, and meetings with every VC in the valley.

A year later, Donald still gets weekly inbound from startups trying to hire him because of the Waves video. He never expected it to get more than one or two million views, and doesn’t really think about it anymore. For him, pursuing virality isn’t the point.

“My favourite part is that moment everything comes together in the edit. When the story becomes clear. I think you understand this as a writer,” he said.

“Yeah. You have nothing until you have everything,” I responded.

These days, he’s called towards documenting the absurd and wonderful parts of Silicon Valley. That starts with telling the story of Jmail, where a ragtag group of hackers got together to make the Epstein emails accessible to the world.

When I asked what part of their story he’s drawn to, he responded, “I think Jmail is interesting because none of the people are regular, even if they describe themselves as such. You have eclectic top talent that all came together and decided this was worthwhile prioritizing over their startups / research. It’s fun because everyone is playing their own game, together.”

Even though Donald could make enough money from startups to fund his own movie, he’s retired from doing launch videos. He wants to tell the stories he’s drawn to without having to do client revisions.

“I miss the days where 200 likes was a banger. Looking back at my old videos there’s so many things that are technically awful, but have way more soul than much of what I see.”

Engineering virality is like the Midas touch; as much of a gift as it is a curse. His videos today are beautifully shot and edited. “Another banger from the GOAT” is what I’ll comment under anything he makes and keep scrolling. But I watch his old videos and I can’t stop smiling. They feel like something I’d find scrolling YouTube at 2 am with only 56 views, but each of those 56 people felt like the video was made just for them.

Being a Tier 1 Emotional Investor

For the Waves shoot, the crew he assembled felt like uncut gems. At his core, Donald wants to give his friends what his cousin gave him: nepotism.

He got his friend James, a former biologist, to help direct and rewrite the script. James pivoted into making launch videos for founders after working with Donald. Andrew, a 19-year-old software engineer, was Donald’s right-hand man from the beginning. Waves was Andrew’s first time producing a film, and now he makes YouTube videos full-time. His friend Scott helped secure a mansion for the Waves shoot. They also lived together for a few months in another mansion Scott put together. Donald helped Scott get his first job out of college at an AI company in San Francisco.

Maybe another filmmaker would’ve hired a crew with more experience, but Donald sees people’s potential more clearly than they can themselves.

It’s not just Waves. When he was running the Vancouver demo night, he made his friend Clo in charge of designing the commemorative zine for 200 people. Clo was a forensic science student who had never designed anything before. I asked him why he gave her that responsibility. “She just really wanted to do it. She said ‘Trust me, I got this.’” Clo now works as a full-time product designer.

Donald also has a habit of getting people to take him under their wing. He got into philosophy through his friend’s dad who’s one of the top philosophy professors in Canada. In his first year of university, he took an anatomical painting course and ended up getting private lessons from his professor. Barry Michels, a celebrity therapist, offered him one-on-one sessions after Donald snuck into one of his seminars. He chose computer science as his major because his cousin, a video game programmer, convinced him coding would be more useful than philosophy or architecture. That same cousin gave him his first software engineering job out of college.

Seeing Donald, you just always want to help him out. It’s probably due to two qualities:

1. Donald is the best listener I know. Anything you say gets his full attention.

2. He pushes past his limits, or rather, doesn’t think of himself as having any. I’ve never heard him express even a little self-doubt or self-rejection.

When I asked him how he’s such a good listener, he responded simply, “I only pay attention when I’m interested. Isn’t everyone like that? Like, you should see me in a boring meeting. I can’t stand using my time poorly.”

The seeming lack of limits probably comes from what Donald calls “tapping into source”3. The way he describes it sounds like taking the Limitless pill. “I just know what to do and how to do it. I can see all the steps in front of me. Everything falls into place and I just have to execute.” He offered no further explanation and said that I probably do it too without realizing. I’m not sure that’s true.

Donald has been meditating for seven years now. At his peak, he spent three years staring at an imaginary blue dot every day. He also got some coaching on “integrating the shadow”— a cognitive behavioural therapy technique that’s supposed to radically increase self-acceptance. As a result, he feels so present and open that one of his friends told me “his stare is so intense, it feels like if you look into his eyes, all your problems are solved.”

Living between two extremes

“Anything good I’ve made was on a bender. I’ll pull two or three all-nighters every time I have to edit a launch video.”

“I once survived for two weeks off coffee, limeade, and brie.”

Donald seems to have energy without sleeping, and almost gets more creative juice the less sleep he has. I don’t know how he does it. Part of it is sprinting and borrowing time from other days for recovery when he really needs to finish something. I’m sure another part is caffeine. Maybe he’s gained strength from all the time he’s spent seeking out coaches and overcoming nihilism. If everything is meaningless, so is the pain. There’s no limits because even if he feels one within himself, what he’s trying to accomplish is possible in the universe. He just has to tap into that energy. The pain is temporary and will be over once he’s finished the current adventure.

On our first day together Donald showed me this meme:

If you inspect it closely it makes no sense. I felt bad that everything I liked fell into the zone of danger. I still don’t understand why a matching cake pop is “pure indulgence”. But throughout the week, I noticed Donald intentionally lives his life by bouncing between the two ends of the horseshoe.

It’s not enough for him to be a regular friend. He’ll conspire for your success if you’re close to him. He’ll give you his full attention every conversation. He’ll teach you everything he knows and encourage you to develop your nascent talents. He’ll basically adopt you and nudge you into a better person.

It’s not effective for him to have a regular sleep schedule. Great creative work is done through depravity and indulgence, so it’s only ever five or eight hours4 of sleep a night. Nor a regular diet. I never saw him finish any of the slop bowls we ordered for lunch, but I did see him drink limeade straight from the jug every day. He made me incredible eggs on toast with fruit for breakfast, and also had me try alligator from a greasy (delicious) Cajun place for dinner.

He snuck into Half Dome at midnight and got stalked by a mountain lion. He’s an accomplished triathlete who averaged less than 5000 steps per day the week I was with him. He’s the most alive when he either treats his body like a temple, or an amusement park.

His taste for great stories is just an extension of his yearning for an interesting life. A house party planned by AI. Bedroom nuclear fusion. Blimps that control the weather. The stories that compel him are the ones so insane that they could only happen in Silicon Valley; the same place that inspired a documentary disguised as a sitcom.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig5 says:

You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.

The way Donald makes interesting films is easy. He lives an interesting life and captures what calls to him. It’s all his movie. We’re just living in it.

You can find Donald here. DM him and tell him I sent you.

You can tell a lot about how someone approaches life by watching them play pickup basketball.

Playing with Declan is like having a golden retriever on your team. He jumps for every rebound. Sprints to save the ball any time it’s going out of bounds. Shoots the ugliest jump shot and having faith it’ll go in. Always asking for tips to improve. Always smiling. He’s given me a black eye and sprained ankle during our runs, but it’s impossible to get mad at him because he’s always so positive.

Declan’s a quiet force of nature. He owns an antique Porsche but daily drives his Tesla. He lives in a 2b2b apartment with no roommates that I could only describe as a real estate agent’s wet dream. He’s run multi-million dollar businesses with no outside investment, and currently runs his own company called SLAM. He’s also only 22.

You’ll never hear him brag about any of it, nor is he a niche internet micro-celebrity, because he’s too busy making what he wishes existed in the world: a studio that churns out awesome physical products made by people doing what they love.

Declan spent the last two years training for a hundred mile ultramarathon. So far he’s run every day this year, and runs at least a marathon every weekend. He’s targeting a race in November so, to get in his headspace, I joined him on a three mile run at 8 am.

I hate running. I’ve never even finished a 5K without stopping or walking. For 70% of our run, it felt like someone had shot me in my right abdomen. During the last mile, I pointed at every bench and told Declan I was going to sit down once we got there. Every time, he’d respond with:

“You could do that. Or you could finish.”

I ended up finishing. It was a suggestion, not a command, that I could do it rather than I had to. I’d failed each time before, so I’d never considered that I could finish, but Declan was certain.

“It’s always fun running with people who don’t run. Some of them are silent and you can see them suffering. Some of them talk a lot to distract themselves… like you.”

*Declan laughs*

“But all of them can always run more than they think they can.”

We got coffee and what felt like the best croissant of my life as a reward. I had a good time, but I’m still far from becoming a runner, or wanting to run ever again. I asked Declan how he got into it.

“I was in first year and read the David Goggins book. The next morning I went to the track and just started running.”

“Why’d you keep going? Like, I know you read Goggins and were inspired, but most people who know him don’t keep up with it for this long.”

Declan shrugged. “After running for a while, you just start feeling really bad if you don’t.” He paused, then added:

“I think running every day is showing up for yourself.”

“Like, after running for a while, all of a sudden I started doing all the other things I wanted to do. I had all these ideas, but only started working on them after I started running.”

Take an unreasonable amount of shots

The first idea was a social alarm clock app where your friends could record a video of themselves yelling to wake you up. With his cofounder Derrick1, they got up to 10,000 users by using guerilla marketing tactics at UC Berkeley like throwing a massive St. Paddy’s party and having people download the app to enter, but no one really used it after a while.

They kept working on startup ideas, partially because they had a little chip on their shoulders after not getting summer internships2, so they felt like they had to make something work.

After trying to find a problem and validate the market niche like conventional startup advice suggests, they committed to growing one of their side projects. JotBot was an AI writing app they made for themselves to help with assignments. They put it out and forgot about it for a while, then came back to see they’d made $200 and actually had other students actively using it.

As coders who didn’t know anything about marketing, Declan had a simple plan.

“I knew that I could make 3 videos a day, and so could Derrick. Then we got 1 more guy to do the same, and posted them to Tiktok, Instagram Reels, and Youtube shorts. 3 of us making 3 videos on 3 platforms, that’s 27 shots a day. And if that didn’t work after 3 months, we’d figure something else out.”

After two months, Declan was sitting on the toilet and had an idea for a video. The opening hook was. “I made a website called i have an essay due at midnight that i really dont want to do . com.” Derrick made and posted the TikTok by the time Declan got out of the bathroom, and it blew up3. That gave them enough cash and conviction to keep going, and eventually scale JotBot to over a million users, all out of Declan’s studio apartment.

Part of the JotBot saga was hiring Phillip. Declan joined Minolee’s creator Discord and posted about hiring someone to help scale their content. Phillip responded, they chatted, and he flew out the next morning to meet up with them in SF.

When they first started working together, Phillip blew $70k of their marketing budget on basically nothing. He kept looking for silver bullets like ads or billboards instead of just scaling content they knew worked. I asked Declan why they didn’t fire him.

“He just had a really good energy. Like yeah, he was bouncing around the room and breaking lots of stuff, but eventually you bounce off something and go VCHOOOM!” *Declan motions like a rocket taking off *

In time, Phillip did end up scaling their creator program. After JotBot went triple-platinum, they travelled the world for a bit, spent their adult money, and eventually ended up back in San Francisco looking for their next thing.

“We still wanted to make a real lasting business. JotBot had a lot of churn since most of our customers were college students. Like everyone, at one point we got obsessed with building software for creators since we knew that was becoming a big thing. But after talking to lots of creators, we realized the best opportunity was taking people who had no existing following, training them to make good videos, and then getting them to market products.”

“So you invented UGC from scratch in 2024?”

“Yeah I guess so. But we didn’t really want them to market other people’s products because we could make our own. One really high converting feature from JotBot was AI lecture notes. This was before AI notetakers were really a thing, so we spun it out into its own product. “

That became Minutes AI, another independent profitable business they worked on for a while. Declan and Derrick moved on to start SLAM, and Phillip still runs that company today.

Sprint like a marathon

“So out of everything, what’d you like working on most?”

“Probably this. SLAM.”

Declan’s had a life of making stuff. His dad’s a tinkerer, so when little Declan said he wanted to fly, his dad built him a ramp for his bike and strapped model airplane wings and fireworks on him. One of them hit him in the head.

As a kid, he made his own dremel with a motor and saw blade, a swamp AC, and welded plastic sculptures in his room with a blowtorch.

“How did your parents react to all this? Like they didn’t stop you?”

“I think they told me to open a window. My mom was definitely worried, but I think they realized that once they stopped watching, I was going to keep doing what I wanted.”

I don’t think it’s ever occurred to Declan that he can’t build something he wants to. He led a sneaker botting group4 in high school on Discord and charged a membership fee of $25/month. It got so big that someone from GQ joined and wrote an article about it. He used that money to pay for college and fund all his projects.

There were times where he’d make an insane bet like spending his whole business bank account on a marketing deal that didn’t drive any sales, or go into way too much credit card debt, but he made it through. Again, it didn’t occur to him that he might not. In his mind, everything always works out, because it has to.

SLAM is the culmination of everything Declan’s passionate about. It’s about spreading the same confidence he has in himself to everyone else.

“I just have this way of living I think is better. And I want everyone else to experience it too.”

It’s just better to believe you can do it if you try hard enough. That’s what SLAM espouses. SLAM stands for “Sprint Like A Marathon”. They run an eight week sprint for ten people working on making a business out of something they’re passionate about.

They have a massive studio space where each of the three floors is designed like a space you might work for yourself in. A poster that says “What if it all works out?” greets you every time you enter. There’s a library, cafe, and dorm room littered with plants and the favourite albums of past sprinters; other people who gave their dreams a shot. The entire space seems to say, “If they did it, so can you.”

But they’re not anyone’s boss or mentor, at least not directly. They work on their own ideas in the trenches of the idea maze alongside everyone else. It’s monkey-see monkey-do but for working on your dreams.

“So what’s your dream? What do you really want to work on?”

“I want to make awesome physical products. I really like Craighill if you’ve seen them. Like that but for special stuff I’d use. The only blog post I’ve ever written is about that.”

I tried out Declan’s Craighill scissors, and ended up ordering my own pair. I then checked out his blog.

——

The number one question everyone asks them is:

“How do you make money?”

The business model they’ve landed on is making great physical products that someone taking the alternative life path would want. Declan’s day to day involves brainstorming, building, and making videos about these products. If someone in the studio’s making something they like, they’ll offer to add it to the SLAM store as well, though that’s not a factor in adding someone to the sprint5.

So far, they’ve burned through a quarter million dollars.

“Bro. How are you so happy all the time?”

“Why wouldn’t I be? The sun’s shining. Great day to work on stuff. Aren’t you?”

Around Declan, it’s impossible not to be. As an outsider, it’s easy to say a company in massive debt with little revenue is going to fail. After all, if you predict a startup’s going to fail, 99% of the time you’ll be right. But spend a week inside SLAM, and it’s obvious that something special is going on. There’s a big ball of energy bouncing around the room, waiting to hit something then take off.

There’s always a gap between the time something is good and the time it makes money and is recognized by the masses. Facebook famously delayed monetization while trying to preserve what was cool about the site. The Homebrew Computer Club was probably an electric group to be in and considered delusional outside its walls. Name one visionary appreciated in their time. I can’t.

A mentor once told me that people think companies die when they run out of money, but they actually die 6-12 months earlier when the founder gives up. Declan has the same mentor6.

Declan attempted an ultramarathon last year without finishing it. This year he’s back at it. I bet he’s already made enough money to retire early, but has too much he wants to give the world to ever retire.

“I really believe in long periods of rest between big projects, and just letting yourself gravitate naturally towards something.”

Sprint, then rest, then sprint again. Declan never looks tired. Not just because he loves what he does, but because he’s not looking to arrive anywhere. Just like Goggins, he’s still at it, because he’s never finished. He’s already come so far, and still has a long way to go.

For Declan, life is a marathon, and a sprint. Pace yourself accordingly.

You can find Declan here. DM him and tell him I sent you.

Jasmine is an independent journalist covering Silicon Valley tech and culture. That’s the tight one-liner she’ll tell you if you ever meet her and ask what she does. What she won’t tell you is the million other lives she lives that seem to all perfectly culminate into that one liner.

There’s writer Jasmine, who spends 2-4 days buried in a post until it’s published.

“It’s going to be really boring following me around. I’m really just at my laptop all day.”

In the words of a close friend:

“Most people would like encouragement or a pat on the back, but Jasmine usually just needs 2-4 days to lock in. And that’s actually what makes her feel better. She finishes the piece and then comes back to life.”

Then there’s Jasmine the capital J Journalist. She goes to social events anthropologically. She’s measured in her tone and hyper-aware of how she comes off. She code-switches based on how long she’s known the person she’s talking to, how old they are, how close they are, which coast they’re from, and whether or not they might be an editor at the Times one day. The AI researchers respect her because she’s almost as knowledgeable about the industry than them, but still acts like she’s a beginner and peppers them with questions.

There’s also my friend Jasmine. The one who throws parties celebrating her friends quitting their jobs. Who has friends begging her to charge way more for her Substack because her writing is so good. The one who, every time I meet one of her friends, tells me to follow them around for a week and do a profile on them. The one who offered to edit my pieces and help me pitch major publications even though she works 80 hours a week because she believes in nurturing a young writer. She has everyone rooting for her, because how could you not? You want her on your team, because you know she’ll do everything to win.

I asked what motivates her to work so hard.

“I can’t tell you that. You need to figure that out yourself.”

I couldn’t for a while. Most of the time, it didn’t seem like she was having fun at all. Perched at her desk in front of a big bay window, she’ll stare at her laptop the entire day. She reassured me that she does in fact eat, just that she wasn’t hungry when I was. Sitting there, she radiates an aura that if anyone interrupts her, there might be a poison pill in their next meal.

She calls this “being in the hole”. Long-time friends know she’s not going to text back or be free to hang out until they see an email from her Substack in their inbox. When I was around, she was working on a piece titled claude code psychosis, which ironically is what it seems like Jasmine has when she’s deep in writing mode.

The world twists to the point where the piece she’s working on is all she can think or talk about. She’s obsessive with her research to the point where she got so wrapped up vibe coding that she didn’t have time to write. Her post was delayed for a week because every minor life problem was approached with “How can I use Claude Code to fix this?”

Even when she’s mentally occupied, she still makes a huge effort to hang out with people, and a close friend will be able to pull her out of the hole for a bit. She keeps a pretty good balance compared to 996 bros that use locking in as an excuse to avoid social anxiety.

J: “I have three events tonight but I’m probably going to skip two because I don’t really know them and really want to finish this [post]. But A is my friend and I told him I’d be there so I’m going to his.”

And she did. And she didn’t seem like a zombie who was so locked up in the piece she was writing that she couldn’t maintain a conversation about anything else. We’d have coffee and dinner with her friends of varying closeness and have a great hang each time. Jasmine seemed pretty fine, far from being in the hole. Though I always sensed the worry sitting in the back of her mind; that social time will break her concentration, and the piece won’t be as good.

She often talked about the time she shadowed one of her mentors. He took her to all of his meetings, even the ones with people who are pretty high up in the world, and treated her with a high level of seriousness when she was getting started as a solo writer. After each meeting, they’d debrief about how he came off. Jasmine asked me the same, and I’d give her my analysis.

—

Aadil: “I noticed you talked more slowly at first with the person we just met and sped up the longer the conversation went on.”

Jasmine: “Yeah, I normally talk really fast but slow it down for new people so they don’t get spooked.”

—

A: “I liked this friend the best. The other people seemed a little weird.”

J: “Oh yeah those other people aren’t my main friends. You’ll meet the main friends later this week. Do you mostly hang out with people you know well?”

A: “Yeah I guess. I already feel like I don’t get enough time around my close friends with everyone working so much.”

J: “I definitely prefer hanging out with my close friends but I like having a mix of interesting people around always.”

—

A: “Isn’t it odd having me analyze you?”

J: “No, I like it, it’s really helpful. Tell me my tics.”

A: “Well I don’t think you take compliments very well. Every time someone compliments you, you respond with ‘that’s cute’. And sometimes, when it’s crunch time, you cut off the ends of your words like someone speaking Cantonese.”

*Jasmine laughs*

Jasmine started out wanting me to only shadow her for two days but ended up settling for five. Initially it seemed like she thought of it as a distraction, and joked about how she would fire me if I was annoying1. But there’s a deep part of her that genuinely wants everyone around her to win. She has high standards for competence, so she’s constantly giving me feedback on asking better questions, grilling her friends, and talking about how I can’t just be writing ‘puff pieces’.

I’m far from her first mentee. Her younger sister also recently started a career in product management, though Jasmine will deny having any influence. Her sister’s friends at Stanford often call her for advice, so much that Jasmine says she’ll only talk to the friends her sister really likes. She’ll act annoyed, like helping others is a distraction, but you can tell she enjoys being a positive influence on people.

She got into creative writing at nine years old via an after school program run by former writers that compiled every kid’s stories into a book. With her best friend, she later started Reboot and got people who aren’t typically writers to produce creative works and published them all in a magazine that’s spanned five volumes over the past five years. She didn’t see the link until I pointed it out, but believing in people early and nurturing them seems core to her character. As she pushes me and everyone around her, I can’t help but wonder how much she must push herself.

It’s a mystery how Jasmine isn’t tired all the time. She’d write one day, do meetings on another, write in between the meetings, have a packed social calendar even on the weekdays, and schedule an 8am run after sleeping at 1am the night before. She did an article on Chinese peptides for the New York Times so I thought that’s what she was on, but nope. Just caffeine and vibes2.

For Jasmine, writing is a game. Talk to people, write something, post it, and enjoy the discourse you’ve caused. That’s what she told me, so I assumed the fun part of her job was finally being able to post.

She doesn’t like being attention-jacked for the whole day, stuck refreshing the stats page and constantly checking for comments and emails. And I get it. For someone who’s doing everything, the worst form of torture is a day where you don’t do anything.

So if writing days mean being stuck in a hole, social days are kind of nice but take away from writing, and posting days mean she can’t get anything else done, where’s the fun?

Jasmine is a tryhard. After 4 years of working at Substack, she quit to become a full time writer3. An independent capital J Journalist. That’s been her dream ever since she started writing. She spent middle school debating, reading millennial blogs and Reddit, and being a featured writer on Medium.

If you ask her, she’ll tell you all of it’s fun, even though she’s not laughing and smiling whenever you see her. She’s living the dream every day, because nothing compares to seeing something you’ve put your entire soul into come to life in a way that teaches other people, inspires them to put out their own work, or otherwise touches them so much that they just have to talk about it.

“I wouldn’t write if I couldn’t publish. Maybe little notes here and there, but definitely not long form essay writing, and especially not research pieces.”

It’s all of it, but take away any individual part and it’s not worth it.

Paul Graham talks about how doing great work requires choosing something you have a natural aptitude for, a deep interest in, and offers broad scope. Jasmine gets bored easily so what keeps it fun for her is being able to hop around topics. She’s as rooted in researching Chinese peptides as she is AI as she is tech policy. Infinite scope, for a skill she’s been practicing since she was a kid, about topics like AI, China, and policy that she’s been interested in since middle school. Everything is inherently enjoyable if you’re producing great work.

I asked one of her friends to describe her, and the word he used was ‘presidential’.

Aadil: “What do you mean by that?”

Jasmine’s friend: “Like she’s aware of and manages multiple constituencies. It’s the former debater in her. She plays the status games, super aware of how she comes off, good at debating and getting to the root of things.”

A: “Maybe she’s diplomatic?”

JF: “Yeah but she’s too slick to be diplomatic. But slick isn’t the right word because she’s not sleazy, she’s actually very sincere. But she’s cool too, diplomats are a little lame. Presidential, trust me.”

Jasmine rolls her eyes throughout this whole conversation as we’re laughing. I could see it so clearly. I always got the feeling watching her that even though she’s an incredible writer and reporter, she could do anything.

Her first article in the NYT was the cover of the Sunday edition, the most coveted slot in the Times’ weekly publishing cycle. And it was no accident. It took over 100 pages of research notes, 50 interviews to quote just 4 people, 7 different drafts, and hundreds of back and forth emails with editors. Each of the 2000 words in that article was hand-placed to produce a single banger.

She was a product manager at Substack and claims she’s not a good growth PM but they smashed every single metric while she led the team because there was so much market pull. She told her bosses this, that she wasn’t actually responsible and it was just market forces, and later got to work on much better projects because obviously they didn’t believe her. I don’t even believe her. She’s modest to the point where you can’t trust her to talk about herself accurately.

Even as I follow her around to write a profile, I get the feeling she could do my job better than me. I ask her friends how they would describe Jasmine in three words and she immediately says “that’s a bad question”, then gives me a better one4.

What Jasmine does now fits her perfectly, but I could easily see her being a successful founder or AI researcher making a few million dollars and escaping the permanent underclass. Yet, for better or for worse, Jasmine was indoctrinated into thinking about policy and ethics from high school debate, which means she’s cursed with the ambition of leaving the world better than she found it.

One of Jasmine’s favourite quotes is:

“If you do everything, you’ll win.”

J: “That’s the nature of this job. You have to do everything. And you have to love doing everything or you will fail.”

That original quote is from Lyndon B. Johnson, America’s 36th president. I have no idea where Jasmine will go from here, but that’s where she sets her ambitions at. If she’s already doing everything today, imagine how big she’ll win ten years from now.

You can find Jasmine here. DM her and tell her I sent you.

Riley describes himself simply as a guy who likes to do things he finds fun. But to the New York Times, he’s known as “The Tech Jester Who Pranks San Francisco“. He’s responsible for projects like:

• Find My Parking Cops: Find My Friends but it tracks San Francisco parking cops and all the tickets they give out

• LooksMapping: Ranking restaurants based on how hot their customers are

• Fast Food Index: Showing price disparities of fast food across the country to determine an area’s cost of living1

• Bop Spotter: A play on ShotSpotter, which helps the police listen for gunshots; this is a box on a telephone pole that Shazams music 24/7

• Maybe 50+ others that make me think “How does he come up with this sh*t?”

But before any of his projects went mega viral, before he started getting massive Twitter payouts and job offers from the top AI companies in San Francisco, before he had an army of reporters pleading to write about anything he does — he was just a kid dreaming of building B2B SaaS apps.

I met him five years ago. My first impression of him, after he showed me his fake Twitter profile that got a blue checkmark by exploiting their verification system’s leniency for political candidates, was “Wow, this guy’s weird. I like him.”

Years later, when he showed me a fake street sign he put up outside the Louis Vuitton store, my impression was “Wow, this guy’s probably going to jail someday.”

From an early age, he was focused on two things: securing the bag and stirring the pot.

At 13, he almost took an NPR radio show off air by getting access to their admin dashboard over an unsecured WiFi network. At 15, he got his first job as a dishwasher and parlayed his salary into becoming an online loan shark for desperate redditors. At 19, he antagonized a foreign government by noticing the domain for the website in Qatar’s Twitter bio had expired, so he bought it himself and redirected it to an anti-Qatar tweet. This forced their federal government to revoke the domain entirely (since they control the .qa TLD).

His first internet money came at age 16 when he made Routeshuffle - a site that generates random running routes. All of his software is pretty personal, and he’s been running every day since high school, so he built this to solve a problem he had and other people ended up liking it too. His first internship was at MSCHF, a company that runs internet pranks at scale. They don’t normally hire interns, but he got a permit from city hall to put a plastic newspaper box on the sidewalk in front of their office with his resume inside. They emailed him back pretty quickly after that.

Riley’s not much of a job-haver at heart though. He’s a guy that has 50+ ideas on his wall in backlog at any given point, so even when he’s working, there’s always some stuff happening on the side. It was inevitable he’d end up doing his own thing professionally at some point, and in 2023, he moved from NYC to San Francisco with his best friend to start an AI for spreadsheets company. With just two people, they made a product that generated over a million dollars per year. After that year of hard work, they decided to stop working towards growing the startup and used the proceeds to just cover their living expenses while they focused on other things.

Let that sink in. He has so much going on that starting a million-dollar company in a year wasn’t compelling enough for him to keep working on it. Nowadays, he scrapes data for AI companies for a living and learned everything he needed from all the fun data projects he’s been doing over the years. No college degree and no relevant work experience, yet he followed his curiosity and now the money follows him.

All ideas are good ideas

Riley’s biggest inspiration is this guy who makes $200k/year writing music that you’ve probably never heard of: Matt Farley. Matt’s been making about 50 songs a day for the past 12 years, but most of those songs barely get any streams. He’s written a book, produced short films, all of which have been seen by maybe a few hundred people total. But when you add up the impressions of his entire 20,000-song body of work, it starts to make sense why he makes that much money.

When asked about how he makes so much stuff, he said:

“If you reject your own ideas, then the part of the brain that comes up with ideas is going to stop. You just do it and do it and do it, and you sort it out later.”

Riley owns 4 copies of his book, and he gave me one in response to my frequent complaints about my own creative process. We had a conversation the other day:

Riley: “Writing must be hard. I heard this quote that said, ‘The only time you’re happy as a writer is when you’re finished.’”

Aadil: “So true. I feel like everything I write is bad all the way through until it’s finally published. But I guess everything is like that. You probably feel the same way for all your projects too.”

R: “Hmm. Not really. I’m pretty happy all the way through.”

A: “Huh? How’s that possible?”

R: “I’m not sure how it could be anything else. I only work on things I think are fun.”

A: “But what if you attempt something you’re not skilled enough to do yet? Or you finish something but you don’t think it’s good enough?”

R: “I kind of just think everything I work on is good. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything I’m not good enough to do because I get good at the thing while doing it. Looking back now, I think maybe there’s things I could have done better. But I never really think about going back to a project past a few weeks because there’s so much other stuff I want to make.”

After years of doing stuff and sorting it out later, it’s clear that Riley’s ideas are just better. He’s a huge data nerd at heart, so usually when I ask him how he came up with something, he’ll say something like, “well, I just happened to be scraping [insert highly protected obscure company or government data here].”

At one point when he was telling me about everything he wants to work on next, I decided to play a game with myself. Every time he told me about whatever data source he scraped, I’d make a guess as to what project he would be making with it. Every single idea Riley explained to me was 10 times better than any of my guesses.

The thing is, it’s not like I couldn’t have come up with any of those good ideas myself. They’re fairly obvious after Riley mentions them. Same goes for the data scraping. It sounds hard for the average person, but one of the many skilled software engineers in SF can probably do what Riley does from a technical standpoint without too much trouble2.

Ideas are all around. The problem is, most people don’t act on them. If you always reject your own ideas for not being good enough, or being impractical, or think you’re not good enough to make them, or that you don’t have enough time, or any other reason, it’s like skipping brain day at the gym. You have to get what’s in your brain out of it. Making your ideas a reality again and again is the only way to generate better ones over time.

No such thing as an impossible idea

Riley has this odd sort of gravity around him that makes you want to help with whatever he’s doing any way you can. He’s a borderline local SF celebrity at this point, but carries himself as anything but. You look at him and you think, “If he can do it, so can I. But doing it alone is hard so I’ll just go along with him.” I suspect it’s that people just like being part of things and supporting the underdog, so Riley’s serial thing-do-ing with no ulterior motive and no ego is magnetic.

One of his most elaborate pranks was Mehran’s Steakhouse. It initially started as a joke when his old roommate Danielle listed their group house as a steakhouse on Google Maps. The joke grew, getting over 100 detailed 5-star reviews from other friends pretending they’d eaten there. Being the only perfect 5-star steakhouse in NYC gave them a lot of attention, and after shooing away visitors from a restaurant that didn’t exist for two years, they thought “Wouldn’t it be funny if it actually did?”

That’s how a lot of Riley’s ideas start. “Wouldn’t it be funny to piss off the Qatari government? Or make a Gmail clone called Jmail with all the Epstein emails in it? Or Find My Friends but it tracks parking cops?”

When his friend Mehran started worrying about a project going wrong, he quickly interjected:

“But doesn’t everything always just work out? Like sure, it might suck in the moment, but everything’s always fine. Somehow every moment in life always magically works out in the long run. I don’t think I could name one time where everything went completely wrong, because if it did I wouldn’t be here right now.”

There’s a million ways Mehran’s Steakhouse could have gone wrong.

It was near impossible to find a venue in their budget, but one of their friends connected them to a billionaire who gave them a warehouse for free. They had to serve wine but New York City requires liquor to be purchased only through authorized distributors, even if you get a license. Riley was about to break the law by buying 40 bottles from Costco when his friend said he knew a guy then called up one of the biggest distributors in the city and they took care of it. There wasn’t enough stove space to cook for everyone so they bought a bunch of toaster ovens to make the appetizers. They found their steak supplier off of Reddit and didn’t get a chance to try it before buying 100 pounds for incredibly cheap, and everything ended up tasting fine. They had no staff but 60 of their friends came through to help. They flew across the country to help cook, wait tables, usher guests, stand in the rain with signs that made it look like Drake was inside, fake a marriage proposal, put out fires, and everything else that goes into running a restaurant.

To everyone that helped out, it felt like play. People were grateful they could be a part of it. When asked why she did it, our friend Anson said, “People are terminally online and constantly watching other people live lives. When people, like Riley and Mehran, are high-agency, it attracts people like moths.”

Riley’s never tried to be a leader or an inspiration, and is fairly soft-spoken when you meet him. He’s probably the exact opposite of Donald Trump, yet still always seems to have people willing to follow him into battle. It probably helps that the battles he picks are fairly silly and spread a lot of joy and confusion, but it’s undeniable the pull he and his ideas have on people. I sometimes wonder if he’ll secretly start a cult some day, because he probably has the gravitas to do so.

The closest he’s ever gotten is with the Pursuit Scavenger Hunt, which got thousands of people in San Francisco to do basically whatever Riley and his friends wanted all in the name of fun little adventures. No one even knew or questioned who was behind it for a while. All people saw was a figurehead being a character called “Percy” that Riley and Danielle made up, and everyone would use fake names when interacting with hunters.

It was taken a bit too far, and now has a cult-like following that still chats every other day in a fan-made Discord. Again, it took months of work from him and about 20 of his friends to design clues, convince local businesses to let them put ‘art installations’ everywhere, and run a finale event for hundreds of people3.

After the first Pursuit, the second one was mainly organized by his friends Danielle and Athena. Almost everyone who made a clue for the first one came back to do a second one, including me. I did things I never thought I could do or had time for, like convincing 4 local businesses to let me put silly items in their stores for thousands of people to flood and install hidden cameras so I could watch them.

I had a full-time job, yet I made a custom board game, designed fake posters, 3D printed a piggy bank and filled it with hundreds of gold coins, all for absolutely zero ROI other than the fact that I thought it was fun.

He’s the most persuasive person I’ve met who doesn’t try to persuade anyone. I don’t even think he expects anyone to ever help him, it’s just the ideas he chooses to do are so interesting that no one ever thinks to question if he can actually make them real. He just looks like he’s having so much fun that you have to join him. You don’t even care about credit, but after making it happen, you suddenly leave with the urge to make more things happen.

It’s only after being part of one of his schemes or doing your own that you realize why Riley does it, even though he tells you exactly why when you first meet him, and that you can do it too.

“I dunno. I thought it would be funny.”

You can find Riley here. DM him and tell him I sent you.

Photos by Karina Bao

My friend Brian has a very interesting take on money. In that, it always feels like he doesn’t have any, even though he probably should. He’s an incredibly talented engineer who worked on Uber self-driving when he was 19, and has raised millions, yet is three months behind on his rent1.

When I visited his apartment in Waterloo, every corner was filled with hardware parts and 3D printers.

I asked: “Why do you need four 3D printers?”

“So when I design new parts, I can make 4x as many iterations.”

Brian’s philosophy is that if he spends all the money he can on learning, he’ll make all of it back after that learning compounds. If buying four 3D printers means he can print a new part with four little tweaks and learn four times as fast, it’s a no-brainer.

After graduating, he moved to San Francisco and started renting out a factory to make robots full-time. It’s pretty much the same as his apartment, but scaled to 5000 sqft.

“Look at this thing! Do you know all the stuff I’m going to learn after taking this apart?” he says, excitedly holding a Unitree robot dog in his hands.

“Because I don’t! But I’m sure it’ll be a lot!”

He’s building a $1000 modular robot for people who are mildly technical. He calls it “like Replit for robots”. I call it “Adult LEGO Mindstorms”.

Today he explained to me how he wanted to replace the foam on the robot with a 3D printed rubber casing so people could print their own attachments for the bot. He then handed me a 3D print that somehow felt soft, made with a rubber that foams at high temperatures.

I later learned how he came up with it when he randomly said:

“Who would have thought that by buying these 3D printed shoes, I would learn to 3D print part of the robot?”

Inspiration is everywhere

Brian is kind of a material girl when it comes to consumer hardware. He’ll buy anything he thinks he might be able to learn from, even if he can’t see an immediate use for it. He bought every retractable USB cable from Amazon for inspiration on how to design a robot arm that can freely move up and down. He also has the highest monthly Cursor bill I’ve ever seen, and $200/month subscriptions for both Claude and ChatGPT. Even though $200 may sound like a lot for SaaS, considering ChatGPT costs billions of dollars to train and serve, with Brian’s level of usage, he’s actually the one profiting here.

At any point, Brian will be multitasking three things with three different AI agent platforms. I walked into the office one day and he was prototyping an idea board in Replit. He mentioned he’d spent a few hundred dollars in credits on just that app.

I asked, “Why do you even need this?”

“Because if I can connect ideas even ten percent faster, think about what kind of productivity gains that’ll lead to in the future. Everyone studies compound interest. I’m compounding ideas.”

Brian is probably the person that’s changed my mind the most in the shortest amount of time. Initially, I thought a lot of what he did was pretty stupid. When I first met him I thought, “Why the hell does anyone need an Apple II in their office? Or $100k worth of Jetson Nanos if they’re not going to be shipping orders for the next few months? Do you really need to roll your own Roam Research? Why waste so much time and money all in the name of inspiration?”

“We are literally building the Apple II of robotics right now. Look at this thing: it doesn’t do anything. Seriously. Try doing something on it right now.”

“But why the Apple II? That was 40 years ago. Surely you’d rather be making the MacBook of robotics,” I told Brian.

“Because that was made with two people,” he said, gesturing to the 40-year-old hunk of junk. “We’re just two people who need to understand how to make the Apple II, so one day we’ll have the knowledge to make the MacBook down the line. In fact, no one can make the MacBook of robotics today. Most robots don’t actually do anything useful. To the right people back then, the Apple II changed everything. But even the right people can’t actually program any of the fancy looking robots today to do what they want. Even Tesla Optimus can’t do anything.”

“Hold up. Surely the Tesla Bot can do something.”

“Have you seen it do anything in the real world?”

“No... but I’m not a robotics expert and they just haven’t launched yet and their demos are cool and—”

Brian cuts me off. “They’ve been working on that project for years and they still can’t get it out. I know because I literally built the charger that the bot walks backwards onto. Elon literally has infinite money, infinite manpower from anyone at Tesla, SpaceX or Neuralink, and basically infinite resources yet he still can’t make a useful general purpose robot that people can use today. No one can. Not because there’s not enough people working on it, but making novel creative advances requires building something and seeing how it feels. I have a pretty good idea of how something will work before I design it, but I can never know for sure until I see it in real life. You have to iterate into it. You have to have a team that knows how to build the Apple II and carries that knowledge down to making an M4 MacBook.”

After spending a week in the factory, I started questioning why everyone else doesn’t do what Brian does.

“If Bracket Bot can be worth $100 billion dollars, then thousands of dollars of inspiration to get that billion dollar mindset is nothing”

The way Brian sees it, great ideas are everywhere. He just needs to surround himself with enough of them that one day, after absorbing everything, he’ll start having great ideas of his own. If people spent millions of hours and dollars themselves making incredible things, and he can use them for 1/1000th of the cost to make his product ten percent better each week, it’s a steal.

Too passionate to fail

I came back to the office a few days later and Brian had a six-foot-wide poster of “The Bitter Lesson” by Rich Sutton on his wall, along with a Fisher Price children’s play buggy with a Bracket Bot sitting in the seat. My parting thought the day before was: “If he wins, they’ll make documentaries about him2. But startups are hard, especially at the early stage, so he’s probably equally likely to fail and fade into obscurity forever.” My friend Donald, a documentary filmmaker, was sitting beside me and said, “I need to get my clips now before they’re potentially worth millions in a few years.”

The way Brian sees it, there’s no way he can fail.

“A company being too early doesn’t exist. Just work on your thing longer until the world is ready for it.”

If things look like they’re going to go to zero, I think he would take it in stride and make the right changes to stay default alive. For all he spends on AI agents, antique computers and children’s toys, all of that is a blip in the grand scheme of things. If he had to, he’d cut all that out and focus up in an instant if he thought that was the best way forward. It just isn’t right now. Whimsy, creativity, and invention are all needed to push general purpose DIY robotics forward, and so is grit. After taking Mandarin 101 in college, Brian was so inspired by the Chinese way of working3 that he’s been pulling 14-hour days and sleeping on his factory floor for months.

The reason I wouldn’t bet against Brian is that he has an incredibly high learning rate and loves this sh*t so much. He built a CNC machine for his high school robotics team at 16. He’s worked on Uber’s self driving cars, Google X robots, Tesla Optimus, and designed his own high-speed motor powered wheelies. He had a previous startup called Globe Engineer that was like a better Perplexity (à la his domain perplexity.sucks). He had a viral launch and was getting millions of monthly users then shut it down because “[he] couldn’t convince people to work on something [he himself] couldn’t get excited about.” He doesn’t have that same problem with Bracket Bot.

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t make mistakes. Yesterday, he told me that he spent the last few months making the Bot in parts so he could ship it in a small box and people could assemble it at home. This took a lot of time and effort without improving the Bot at all, but they thought shipping a tall and long box would be way too expensive.

Except... it’s not.

Brian saw that his Flexispot desk had free shipping and was roughly the same size as a Bracket Bot, which led him to check how much shipping would be for a box with similar dimensions, and it was fairly cheap. So rather than check the cost of shipping a bigger box, Brian spent months modifying his designs on a false assumption.

I’ve met CEOs with big egos before. People who would ignore a mistake they’ve known about for months, assume their product is better than it is rather than focus on fixing it, or people who make performative progress just to get them to the next funding round. I think it would cause Brian physical pain to live with something he knows can be improved, even if it looked fine to everyone else. He’s someone who peels back the furniture cabinet, looks at the finishing, and thinks about how to change and improve it. That compounded over the past decade of learning is exactly why he’s able to make such an impressive product today with just a team of two.

Build something you (and devs) want

Years ago, when Palmer Luckey was making Oculus, all the VR headsets on the market were either super expensive or weren’t very developer friendly. You couldn’t really do anything with them, because no one wanted to or could afford to make apps for them.

While the Oculus Rift initially released for consumers at $600, four years prior Luckey released developer kits for $300 each with SDKs better than anything else on the market. The combination of a good-enough headset that made it easy for developers to write apps is what led to its success on release, because people could actually see what VR was capable of.

This is exactly what’s so exciting about Bracket Bot. There is no low-cost developer friendly general purpose robot on the market. 1X Neo is incredible but also a $20k closed source teleop’d dishwasher. I’m sure it’ll be incredibly useful for lots of people - in fact I actually pre-ordered one. But as a coder, I’m much more excited about Bracket Bot. I want to make my bot do things the creators never even thought about rather than selecting from their list of options.

The only way to make massive progress in any field is by opening it up to smart and creative people. Apple made the iPhone but my mom would never use it without Youtube or Whatsapp. Dishwashing is cool but my mom really has trouble with cleaning the bathtub. We have no idea what the killer use case for humanoid-esque robots is, and we won’t until developers can build something and see how it feels on their at-home robot then show it to other people.

Brian knows this. So while everyone is focused on anatomically precise finger movements, he’s focused on making depth perception work on a $15 camera rather than the industry-standard $400 ones. He wants to give the same feeling of seeing something in front of him and unlocking some hidden creativity deep away to everyone who’s ever been even mildly interested in robotics. Something clicked in my brain when I spent 10 minutes messing around in Cursor with the Bracket Bot SDK loaded in context and was able to get it to follow me around, identify my face, and say “Yo!” whenever it saw me.

Brian said this to me on day one:

“You don’t hire people to do creative things. You put creative people in a room and let them do what they want.”

Then, at the end of the week, he said: “I was always confused at how every product looked so neat on the outside and you had no idea what was going on when you opened it up. I learned CAD, MechE, EE, and how to code so I could make stuff that I wanted. Things that look neat on the outside that you can actually do stuff with but if you want to go a level deeper and change them, you can.”

After spending the week with him, I really believe no one else can do what he’s doing, and probably won’t. An electrical engineer can build a robot with better chip design than Brian can but would likely compromise on the software experience. A software engineer could write cleaner code but wouldn’t understand how the hardware components work well enough to make the SDKs useful. A team with complementary skills could get together and all do what they’re good at, but switching costs and loss of context across members would eventually catch up to them.

Only someone like Brian who’s been doing this for the past 12 years can understand what needs to go into a low-cost, easy to program general purpose robot. He doesn’t care about money or time spent. He’s making it for himself, a creative kid with infinite ideas stuck in a grown man’s body, and won’t stop until he’s satisfied. The rest of us just happen to be allowed to buy it when he’s done.

You can find Brian here. DM and tell him I sent you.