Based in London, I'm British-Lebanese and grew up in various countries across the Middle East, Africa and Europe. I love terrible jokes, beautifully crafted sandwiches and looking at designer houses I will never live in. I like to torment my children with my piano playing and spend more time than is reasonable making lists of things, à la High Fidelity.
Get in touch if you ever want to chat all things scaling when it comes to startups! Just stick hello in front of this site.
Generic Exec Person @ PostHog
- $0 -> $XXm ARR, 10 people -> 180, $14m raised -> $194m
- Scaling the sales, marketing, and support machine, from zero to many
- First non-product hire, founding ops, finance, and people person
- Writing large chunks of our public handbook
- Coming up with weird things like unhinged billboards, isgoogleanalyticsillegal.com and dictatorortechbro.com
- How I actually get good advice
- Collaboration sucks - hit #1 on Hacker News
- 32 things we’ve learned about building a startup that scales
- How software salespeople will try to screw you (and how to fight back)
- How to buy software in an enterprise company
- Developer marketing for early-stage startups - what I've learned - hit #1 on Hacker News
- Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned - hit #1 on Hacker News
- 43 things we've learned about hiring at PostHog
- Obvious and non-obvious ways to write great job ads
- Hiring (and managing) cracked engineers
- What startup recruiters actually see when you apply for a job
- Making your first startup ops hire - what founders should look for
founder @ hedgehog.vc
- Created a VC fund from scratch during a 48-hour hackathon, focused on early-stage open source investing, made one investment and they got into YC
- Now retired after making one investment (phew)
COO @ Vitl
- Looked after ops, product, R&D, CS, and legal
- Was interim CTO for a lot longer than was sensible
- Ran process for 2 big licensing deals to giant pharma companies
Various @ ROLI
- $0 -> $XXm ARR, 15 people -> 150, $4m raised -> $70m
- Did basically every non-engineering role (all ops flavours, product, Chief of Staff, program management, etc.)
- Met Stevie Wonder
- University of Cambridge - BA Hons, Law
- SOAS, University of London - MSc, Public Policy & Management
- Imperial College, London - MBA
I learned nothing about startups at any of these places
I use Storygraph and always appreciate a recommendation
I keep a separate study list of things I find interesting here