me and skrillex at the club crying to scatman drinking lychee tea

I decided to join Y Combinator, again.

I decided to join Y Combinator, again.

This would be my second time.

Not fully sure what I’m working on yet. I honestly don’t have a clear direction right now. But, I’m sure I’ll figure it out in time! I’m a little scared to do the whole build a company thing again ngl, but mostly excited. There’s never been a better time to work on the ideas in my head. The batch started this week, it’s been cool so far.

Starting a company at 23 vs now starting a company at 30 feels so different. At 23 (when I did YC in 2020), naivety was there. At 30 I guess I know how difficult it all is. After my last co, I never thought I’d start anything again in my life haha. It was all so tough. So, it’s surprising to be doing this now. The last 2-years have been very healing. I’ve worked on myself a ton. And I feel like I’ll never be “ready” so just gotta go for it. Yolo baby.

It’s not surprising to me that most people in YC are aged 19-24. Still, I feel like I have the naivety of a 19 year-old, but, with the mental of a guy who’s been through a lot and learned a lot. So, I’m bullish >:)

Let’s see what happens. You’ll probably see me launching a lot of random stuff over the next few weeks especially.

Also, I am blown away by the number of founders in the batch walking up to me telling me they credit being at YC to buildspace. This one kid showed me a selfie of me and him at 15 at a past buildspace event.

And now he’s 18 and in the same batch as me!

Along with many others.

It’s so wonderful, and warms my heart. I often struggle to stop and understand the value of my past work because I’m so interested in the future. So, this was nice. It’s funny, many saw me irl and freaked out thinking I was joining as a YC partner and were very very surprised to hear I was joining as a founder back in the dirt alongside them haha.

I guess most founders do end up turning into VCs or getting a high-tier job at a big company. I do not blame them. And honestly, that would be the easier more secure path for me especially as I begin thinking about family.

But, idk. Maybe I’m crazy, stupid, full of myself, or all of the above. I feel like my ideas are important. And even though I don’t have a specific “This is the idea I’m excited about” it’s more a feeling of “I should explore my ideas...I would regret it if I didn’t”. Especially in 2026, at the epicenter of one of the greatest inventions of my lifetime.

I am not against the idea of getting a job. But, every time I think about getting a job (of which I’ve been offered many great ones) that voice in my head comes back and says to give my visions a shot.

So, gonna try!!! We must be brave!

Maybe I flop, maybe I don’t, only one way to find out.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time documenting. Will mostly be focused on building.

But, I’ll be dropping one weekly update on YouTube if you’re interested. This has been more fun for me lately than writing on Substack. I put one out last week that talks more in depth about how this YC stuff randomly happened, why I’m doing this again, my imposter syndrome, how I think about it, and other stuff.

Lets see what happens!! See y’all.

theres a snowstorm in nyc and im really thirsty can i eat snow from the sidewalk asking for a friend

Last week, me and Julian helped 35 people come up with an idea, make something, and make their first $. All in 3-days.

(Longer post today! We go in depth on a project I made with my buddy).

Last week, me and Julian helped 35 people come up with an idea, make something, and make their first $. All in 3-days.

It was awesome.

I wanted to write about it, because we did something a bit different + fresh.

It’s been over a decade of me helping people build things.

When I was 19 I begged people who worked at placed like Facebook and Google and convinced them to join this thing I made called “TeamMood” where I would match 1 mentor to 5 other students who wanted to make their first project over 8-weeks.

We had 37 people join and 5 mentors for the first group :).

I assigned each person a repo for their project with their name on it on a shared GitHub organization (it still exists!)

Each participant had to work publicly on their repo. This way, everyone else in the program could see who was pushing code and making progress. It was awesome.

By the end of the 8-weeks, 10 people started their first projects :).

Then, around 20 I started making YouTube tutorials, blog posts, guides, doing talks at my university, everything you can imagine.

From there I got to help thousands of children explore their ideas by founding zipschool. I got to learn so much about kids, and how pure of heart they are.

One student in particular, a 6 year-old named Sanjay, inspires me to this day. His curiosity and excitement to create was infectious.

As we grow up in the adult world we dream less and we grow more cynical. And, I always remember that we were all once kids like Sanjay with a belief we could do anything and be anything. But often, many of us lose that along the way.

Then, we got to directly help thousands and inspire millions of adults to work on their ideas through buildspace. I’m sure many of you are already familiar with it :).

I love seeing people work on stuff they love.

But, what I also love is when people make these amazing personal breakthroughs where they crush their limiting beliefs or triumph over lifelong fears holding them back. Pursuing something difficult (but worthwhile) is a wonderful way to grow. This is the meta game of “making stuff”.

So.

Why don’t more people make things and work on the things they love?

Everyone from my Dad, to my buddies, to my cousins have these wonderful ideas. Making YouTube videos, starting a cafe, building apps.

Yet so few actually…go for them.

I don’t believe it’s a lack of money, or a lack of knowledge, or a lack of motivation. While these things are important, I wouldn’t say they are the main barrier.

The main barrier people have is they don’t understand their own psychology. They have hundreds of mental blockers on why they “can’t” do something or aren’t “ready” to do something that stop them from pursuing whatever thing they wanna pursue.

Small example:

I was hanging out with my cousin the other day at a ping pong bar.

One of her friends heard I make content sometimes and she asked me, “Hey, so how do I become a content creator, I wanna tell slice of life type stories about my time living in NYC”.

I say:

“Well. It’s interesting. In reality, you already know how to become a content creator. You have an IG already. You have a camera on your phone. So, to become a content creator we should pull out your phone right now, make a 15s video about this slice of life scene in front of us where we are playing ping with friends in NYC, and post that on IG Reels via your account. Then you are officially a content creator. So, lets do it right now. Pull your phone out.”

She immediately got nervous and said she wouldn’t do that.

The fear of judgement if she posted some crappy Reel scared her.

It scared her so much apparently, that, she wouldn’t even start on her dream.

And so she remained blocked.

In fact I think a majority of you reading this would definitely hesitate if I told you to stop reading this, pull out your phone, record a 15s video talking about some idea you have, and post that to Reels on your IG account.

You’ll tell yourself hundreds of stories of why its a bad idea instead of just doing it.

This is where 90% of people are. They have all the ability and intelligence in the world. But they shoot themselves in the foot before they even begin.

It’s all psychological.

There are hundreds of limiting beliefs and mental barriers in the way.

So…how can we unlock more people to believe in themselves, teach them the skills they need to win, and just have them go for it. To me, if you were to productize that it’d be one of the most important initiatives ever.

All this and more is what me and my buddy Julian were casually discussing last week while drinking some chai at a Yemeni coffee shop in NYC.

I’ve had this thought for a while that these models must be used to push humans.

Thats where I find these models most useful.

Both me and Julian talked about how we use personally use Claude Opus to talk through a lot of our own mental barriers and how Opus in many ways is a fantastic outside observer of our actions and beliefs.

I also talked about buildspace a lot with Julian and, how I deeply wished I could have a one-on-one 1.5 hour session with every participant in Nights & Weekends. I feel like we lost thousands of people because of the stories they told themselves that stopped them from just going after their ideas:

“I’m not smart enough to do this idea yet”
”If I make something, and it isn’t perfect, and it fails, what then”.
”All my ideas are small and useless compared to everyone else”
”It’s not the right time, I’m busy with school right now”
”If I do this, talk about it everywhere, and it doesn’t work its going to be fucking embarrassing”
”This idea will never make money”

Hopping on a call with each person from N&W would have been impossible (S5 had over 120,000 people) and, connecting them to a human mentor would also be near impossible. The supply would be tiny, and the demand would be huge.

Lets say I could talk to each of the 120,000. What would I have done?

Well, I’ve gotten the chance to help quite a few people over casual 1-1 coffee chats. These conversation often start as “Here’s what I’m working on, wyt?” and these convos almost always turn into unofficial therapy sessions.

Ex. Let’s say we’re talking about your work and you you say “I can’t post this yet, it’s not good enough”. I won’t argue with you. I’m open to believing you.

I’d rather question your core belief as see if I agree: “Why do you believe something must be good to post it? How can you know what good or bad is if you’ve never even posted anything? Who are you trying to impress?”

And through that convo the person might see that they’re actually just suffering from fear of failing, rejection, or some other limiter.

So, me and Julian thought:

“Well, hey. We can’t talk to everyone 1-1. What if everyone spoke to Claude Opus to guide them as they went through the process of working on their ideas? Opus could maybe help people see some of their limiting beliefs and blockers. After all that’s what we ourselves do a lot of the time. We can share that practice with others and it might be transformative”. Spoiler: it was!

We time boxed ourselves to 5-days of working on this. At first we thought it’d be a mobile app. But, we felt like if it was just a standalone app or website we’d never really use it.

If I said:

“Hey use my AI chat bot to help you work through your mental barriers as you build things”

Meh.

Nah.

Lame.

Maybe people would use it once or twice. But, we didn’t see ourselves coming back to it. And I strictly believe to only put stuff that I myself would convert on or use.

So, we did something different. I made this post on LinkedIn:

Instead, we sold a simple 3-day program.

Something easy, and simple to understand.
Something that a person who’s been delaying their ideas would be sure to convert on!

And in a few hours bam we made over $1,400 and had our first set of folks to work with.

We charged money because Julian really wanted to see Fred Again in NYC and tickets were expensive. (he got the tickets!)

We had some awesome people:

A teacher interested in making worksheets for other teachers.
A 65 year-old journalist who wanted to work on AI for reporters.
A photographer who wanted to help other people become photographers.

Was a fun group! Most has no clear ideas though.

Also, you may notice we didn’t mention the AI thing anywhere on purpose.

No one wakes up and wants to use AI for mental breakthroughs. So, why sell it when people don’t even know they want it? I rather package it differently.

The structure of the program was honestly stupid simple. 3 sessions, 1.5 hours each, all on Zoom, 70% me and Julian talking and lecturing about the topic.

But the other 30% is where they would talk to our bot.

Our thought was that if we made the AI piece something everyone did together, it could feel a lot more magical. And, we could also prime people on how to properly have a conversation with our bot / how to have an effective convo with it.

With bots, the quality of the conversation is the product. So anything that can make that feel better will make everything feel better.

On Sunday night we made the LinkedIn post.

On Monday we made the product.

On Tuesday it was showtime.

Like I said, 70% of the call was me and Julian lecturing like this:

The knowledge was good!

But, then we wanted for them to do some solo work in the product. So once we were done lecturing, we’d put on some music and tell them to use the product all together.

The product was stupid simple.

1. Click the day we’re on.

2. The user writes freely for 15-minutes during the session about the topic.

3. User has 15-minute convo with a chatbot we built with a special prompt that would take their writing entry and dig deeper. Maybe about the idea itself, maybe about their mental, etc.

Julian whipped this all up in a few hours. Shoutout to him!!!

All the participants were told we’d read all their messages + notes. But, we still told them to write openly.

Day 1 we were mind blown.

People were writing their hearts out, and chatting their hearts out with our bot.

Here’s an anonymous snippet from a person’s Day 1 free write entry. You can read the first few sentences and get a sense of how deep people would get. Maybe you see yourself in some of this person’s words:

There is a lot going on here. Way more than just “I wanna make a project”.

Almost everyone had an entry that was as deep as this.

It was obvious from the start to both me and Julian that these people didn’t need motivation, knowledge, or another startup school…they needed to work through their mental. And this was just further proof.

Once the users wrote their entry they were pushed to chat with the bot. Seeing the conversations people had with the bot was insane.

Here’s one anonymous snippet from a person’s chat with our bot.

It’s not perfect but holy shit man here we are on a Zoom call in a 3-day session about basically starting a business. And here people are talking about their deep fears of judgement and how their relationship with their elder brother is blocking them from building their ideas.

And tbh that was exactly what me and Julian wanted to see.

Making stuff is very deep.

It is an activity that requires you to put yourself out there. It’s scary.

Again, back at buildspace I felt like it was the mental stuff like this holding people back…but back then in 2024, we had really no way to help them figure their shit out. The models weren’t as good. And so we pushed people best we could, some would make breakthroughs, some wouldn’t.

But now, the models are really good :).

Lets look back at the schedule of me + Julian’s program:

Day 1: Come up with an idea.
Day 2: Make a small version + show someone.
Day 3: Make your first $.

Simple enough! At the end of the day, this is a great way to get your ideas out there! Come up with it, launch, make money! Easy! This is a mantra we’ve heard thousands of times.

But, it isn’t that easy!

Me and Julian understand humans aren’t bots.

They have emotions. They won’t just do what you tell them to.

We could yap to them all fucking day but they must believe in not only the content, but their ability to execute upon the content.

Think back to the conversation I had with the person at the ping pong place who wants to make content. She obviously knew the “how”, but, just feels blocked to actually start. Plainly: she was afraid of putting out shit.

And, giving her a bunch of new knowledge isn’t gonna change that.

So, naturally each day brought up new mental barriers for each person.

And we saw each person work through a lot of stuff with our bot.

Day 3 (the making money day) revealed the deepest limiting beliefs.

Most people are really blocked by the idea of charging money. And many in the group wouldn’t charge because they felt whatever they had wasn’t good enough to charge. And that in itself showed their limiting beliefs! Why does something have to be “good” to charge? Why do you believe that? Are you more afraid of people saying no, or rejecting you outright? Why do you care so much?

We didn’t talk to any of the 35 participants 1-on-1.

But, this 30-minutes of deep, AI assisted introspection led many of the participants to have breakthroughs or at least reframe many of their limiting beliefs.

I had Claude Code actually read everyones chats with our bot and I had it tell me some of the “breakthrough moments” people had and use direct quotes from what users told the bot.

I thought you all would find a few of them interesting:

Its beautiful to see man.

These are fucking fantastic breakthroughs. And they are quite complex.

And, when I do 1-on-1 sessions with people IRL I love when I see them have these moments. But…all of a sudden, an AI can guide people to these breakthroughs.

Isn’t that interesting?

Now of course there’s a lot more here. And it isn’t perfect.

This is just a 4-day project after all.

But, the results were amazing.

To see people go from “idk what I’m doing” all the way to their first paying customers in 3-days is no small feat.

As me and Julian munched on some Indian food after the final session, we reflected on the last 3-days. Whats the takeaway?

Still processing.

A few thoughts:

• If this was a standalone app would it have been this effective? Likely not. It was the live content combined with the product that made it feel so fun. Live remains extremely under explored in tech.

• No one wants to use AI to introspect. But put them in a room with others, give them a prompt, play some music, and suddenly they’re writing things they’ve never said out loud.

• No one signs up for “builder therapy.” But tell them the goal is their first dollar in 3 days and they’ll work through whatever’s in the way. The pursuit is what makes the introspection feel worth it.

• 30 minutes of the right questions > 30 hours of tutorials.

Overall, fun project.

Not sure where it goes but, the learnings were fantastic and will be sure to bring them into whatever I do next.

I love building stages where people give themselves permission to try. And, it was a lot of fun working with Julian on this one. Give Julian a follow!

Also, ty to the folks who joined the 3-days. Love u ❤️.

Lastly, here’s a screenshot from my IG that sums up some of my thoughts:

ate a lactose free cake for my bday but i just drank milk this morning i am dummy

Today I am 30.

So, how do I feel?

To be honest I’m extremely surprised that I’m only 30.

Like, you’re telling me this was only 10-years ago?

Feels like decades ago. I feel so much…older.

I feel like I’m 40. And I don’t say that in a bad way at all! Mentally, I feel like the same old kid. But, at the same time I just feel like I’ve lived a lot of life. My 20s were unique. I pushed myself like crazy every single day.

As of today, I’m 30 and I feel:

- Mentally I am doing amazing. I have my bad days like anyone, but, I truly feel happy and full of life on a near daily basis. I’m confident in my direction in life, but, also calm when there is no direction at all.

- Physically I am at my life-time peak. I’ve put on 40 pounds of muscle going from 175lb to 205lb. I train 6-days a week. My diet has been a very clean 2700 calories, 180g of protein daily. I cook daily. I sleep at 9:30, and wake at 6:30 daily. This has been kept up for over a year. I feel like a champion.

- My internal fire to create and do things is at it’s peak. I truly feel like I can be the greatest of all time. And, I just wanna keep doing wonderful things. I plan to keep pushing myself.

This is all insane for me considering just 1.5 years ago I was the opposite.

I don’t want to go into my mental lows, and rather keep specifics private…

But, let’s just say 2024 was the hardest year of my entire life.

Closing a company I loved (buildspace) due to my own personal flaws sucked. Most companies close and no one cares. This was the opposite. It was very public, millions saw it. The entire process ended up having tons of consequences to my mental and physical health I never thought I’d have to endure.

I felt extremely alone, and felt like my world was over.

But, over a year later I am extremely happy and proud of myself for being able to rebuild myself the way I have.

I feel like I took all the ambition, discipline, and creativity I have when it comes to working on stuff and I just applied 100% of my energies towards working on myself instead of working on a company.

I want to thanks those closest to me for helping me through it all.

So.

30…

I am very, very, very excited.

Like, you’re telling me I get to do more stuff.

Not only that, I get to take all my learnings from the last decade and use that in my next decade? Like a video game where my stats keep increasing? Awesome.

2025 feels like the year I got back up and tried a lotta stuff.

2026 feels like the year I’m gonna really put myself to the test once again, and push myself hard towards a dream I might fail at — but, will try at anyways!

I’m just getting started :).

Ty to everyone who still reads these, and supports me in my antics.

I truly, dearly appreciate you.

Let’s keep going >:)

eating a pesto pasta salad in dubai but how can you grow salad in a desert wow

Hey all :).

I know this newsletter is usually dedicated to me doing stuff / talking about stuff I actually ship vs me theory crafting.

But hey, just this once, lets theory craft.

I’m thinking a lot about AI + education these days.

When we think AI + education today the main things that come to mind are companies that make software that help students study (ex. upload a PDF get flashcards generated, upload a lecture get notes generated, etc).

Not much else comes to my mind at least.

There’s other stuff too. Like AI for teachers building lessons, or AI for people learning a new language, or AI tutors on top of existing video courses.

But, idk, all these just feel like…nothing that fresh.

AI is being used in the most wild, creative ways in 2025 — robotics, self-driving cars, solving cancer, drones, writing code. Every industry is being completely revolutionized in front of our eyes from manufacturing to software engineering to how we make memes.

Yet, when it comes to education we’re still making stuff that…

…helps students pass exams?

This is odd to me.

And it feels like we just aren’t thinking outside the box.

Learning, education, upskilling, studying — these words, they only describe the “act” versus the outcome. Very few people learn to just learn. They learn for an outcome often.

A person learns sales so they can close their first deal. They learn video editing so they can start a YouTube channel. They learn design so they can go freelance and quit their job.

But I feel like we’re stuck in this loop with the education sector where education companies don’t understand how important they are. And they are stuck building products that can get a person to pull out their wallet, and can be okay businesses, but, don’t lead the person to any real outcomes.

This leads to stuff like:

Language apps that give you a 500-day streak but you still can’t speak any real Spanish. Platforms with thousands of hours of content no one watches because its just boring. Certifications that look good on LinkedIn but don’t actually change what you’re capable of doing. AI tools that summarize lectures, generate quizzes, and help you cram for an exam you’ll forget in a week.

None of this is bad. But, it’s all optimized for the act of learning vs outcomes.

And, you can only monetize straight up “learning” so much.

How long or how much will someone really pay for something that just helps them learn? Answer: not that much, and not that long.

This makes the market seems like an endless ocean of students that don’t wanna pay, jobless people without much to spend, or just random consumers who pay for a few years because they’re “lifelong learners”.

This leads education companies to seem “small”.

And, so investors don’t invest.

And, so founders don’t start education companies.

And, so we move on to other more lucrative things.

But, take a step back.

In reality, education companies are some of the most important companies to exist. They literally take a person, improve them, and create a version of them that is more capable.

In reality…

These aren’t even education companies. They are companies that build new human capital.

An education company that does it’s job literally creates new human capital in the form of inventors, designers, musicians, engineers, doctors, founders.

These are the people that change our reality.

When I look at Stanford, I don’t see a university.

I see a machine. You feed it an 18-year-old who’s a 3/10 in their ability to impact the world + pursue their goals, and four years later, a 6/10 on average walks out.

That’s pretty good.

That person who’s a 6/10 is now much more capable in doing things in which they can contribute back to the world.

And to me, we should be building more of these “machines” that build new human capital. Machines where a person who is a 2/10 in their ability to impact the world + pursue their goals in some domain walks in, and can walk out at least a 6/10.

Coursera, Udacity, or any of the course sites are interesting. Most people buy a course or two on there, never finish, and maybe go from a 2/10 to 3/10. Not terrible. But, meh. Not the best machines. (But, pretty okay businesses!).

YC is one of these machines for later stage folks.

Most people walk in to YC as a 5 or 6/10 already, and walk out a 8/10 on average. Most YC founders would agree that the things that YC provides (money, mentorship, and customers) accelerates them in impacting the world + pursuing their goals.

But in my opinion those that are at a 5/10 or above when it comes to their ability to pursue their goals eventually figure it out themselves. And, you can accelerate them! That’s why accelerators and venture capital exists. But, I think machines that focus on people who are at a 3/10 or below are the folks we need to focus on. Because there are 100X more of them in the population.

We thought about buildspace as a machine as well.

I figured if we create a machine where someone enters as a 2/10 and exits a 6/10 on average in their ability to start a business, reach their financial goals, and contribute to the world by working on their own ideas — then that system would be very valuable.

(And it ended up being quite valuable. 1.5 years after the company closed, I still get messages near daily about how someone from a past season raised a round, got their dream job, or started a side hustle).

(You can’t guarantee outcomes. Ex. “do this and you’ll make $100,000” or “do this and get a job at Google”. But, you can improve someones chances to reach certain outcomes)

So.

What am I getting at.

Well.

I think the biggest opportunity in AI + education isn’t in helping people study or learn random skills with AI.

It’s in building better end-to-end machines that output human capital.

Machines that can take a person in random country at a 2/10 and actually get them to a 6/10 in their ability to pursue some goal with success.

A person who wants to become a YouTuber.
A person who wants to be an author.
A person who wants to learn to code and get a job.
A person who wants to get into sales.
A person who wants to become a filmmaker.

It’s going to be education companies that democratize the ability for people to actually become something. And with AI, people have the tools to become anything. But, tools on their own won’t lead to mass change.

Think about what actually transforms people.

It’s not content. You can find content anywhere.

It’s offering the right balance of learning, accountability, and structure. All while properly maintaining your motivation.

The best human mentors do this naturally. They check in. They push. They know when you need encouragement vs. a kick. They care about whether you actually become the thing, not just whether you learned the thing.

This has always been expensive and scarce.

That’s why the best “machines” — YC, top bootcamps, top universities, elite apprenticeships — are so hard to get into. They require humans. And humans don’t scale.

But for the first time ever, AI can change that.

I was in Pakistan a year ago — and I helped a 21 year-old there learn how to make a Shopify store, source clothes locally, and sell them on Facebook Marketplace. I had two check-in meetings a week with him. And, we got him to making $250 a month (which in Pakistan is not bad!).

When I look back at those meetings, I can’t help but feel like I may as well have been an AI model he was talking to.

Of course, the human motivation element can’t be ignored, but, a lot of the stuff like: how I taught him Shopify, how I set his goals, how we adjusted the plan when things changed, how I helped him build a basic brand…all that stuff seems like these models can totally be generalized for to help other people with other goals (ex. starting a YT channel, getting a job as a marketer, etc).

We’re not there yet but we’re getting there! And we need really smart people to work on it. The companies that figure this out won’t be “education companies.”

They’ll be human capital factories.

And they’ll be some of the most important, most valuable companies ever built.

Because at the end of the day, everything we care about — the startups, the cures, the art, the inventions — all of it comes from people. And the more capable people we create, the better our world gets.

P.S: I’m looking for a co-founder, if this is something that seems like something you’d wanna work on lmk or send it to someone that’d be interested.

went to buy a bag of fresh air at the store but got rejected because i didn't have an iphone air wow unbelievable

Hey all.

Here’s me and my buddy Julian. He took me to see this pianist named Ludovico live. it was amazing. I also found out after the show that he’s the most famous pianist in the world :o.

10/10.

We had to wear blazers bc it was f a n c y:

It’s been about 5-weeks since my last update where me + Sharif decided to move on from Tidbit. I wanted to write a short post about how my days are going + how I’m doing.

TLDR: 5-weeks later I haven’t really found a new thread of thought that I feel like I want to keep going down. And, I still don’t have an answer to “what are you building”. But, I’ve made a lot of stuff.

I’m definitely feeling like I’m hitting a wall in these last few weeks. I’m feeling a lil lost, and I think that’s okay. Sounds so basic but I do believe that sometimes you gotta be a bit lost to be found.

It’s also interesting.

Emotionally, I’m actually doing really, really good.

I’m happy and healthy.

I don’t feel that crushing anxiety and doom I used to feel 2018 to 2023.

These days my work can feel completely aimless and confusing — but, it doesn’t get to me emotionally like it used to.

If I was 24 and I didn’t have direction with what I was building, it’d eat at me 24/7. I would constantly have the thought of how I don’t have it figured out, and how I need to figure it out immediately, and that would just loop.

Today?

Like any normal person — 29 year-old me today for sure will get frustrated some days if I feel like I’m not developing some direction during my explorations.

But, it doesn’t “get” to me.

It won’t fill my chest with doom like it used to.

It won’t make me feel like my life is falling apart.

I just go to bed, wake up, chill, and give it a try again.

And honestly that’s been amazing.

It’s very hard to describe to you guys and it’s something I rarely talk about even with even close friends — but in my last decade of building stuff I put my brain and my mental through so many extreme lows, and I guess all the years of crippling anxiety taught me a valuable lesson:

That it perhaps isn’t the best idea to have your mind in a doom loop when you’re attempting to make something really great over a very long period of time.

It just isn’t productive.

And it just isn’t a good way to live a happy, fulfilling life.

It’s easy for an anxious person to just play into their anxiety and use that as fuel. The game of “building stuff” actually favors anxious behavior.

But, man. It just isn’t a healthy fuel source.

Though, I think anxiety can be healthily redirected.

This video helped me better understand that last year.

Maybe I’ll talk more about anxiety and my journey with it one day.

I believe for me personally I wanted to invest a lot in rebuilding my mental in the last 12-months. I felt like that would be what would take me to the next level. Not working harder. Not anxiously aping back into startups/making stuff.

And, so far so good :)!

ANYWAYS.

Even though there is no “big success” that’s happened in the last 5-weeks I want to talk about, I still want to describe my days and what I’m up to.

Almost everyday I will make something.

It can be a really small thing that takes 5m, or something that takes the whole day.

Doesn’t matter.

I just have to force myself to make something.

Write a script to a content piece.
Build a demo for an idea I had.
Record a video for fun.

And then, I have to show what I made to at least 1 person.

The Beatles were famous for having mindset of making progress each day.

They would go into the studio daily and even if all they did was look at each other and play random strings, they still showed up.

There’s a famous video of Paul McCartney writing “Get Back” in like 2-minutes here. What you don’t see is the 100+ hours he put in on the idea before he magically got it here.

I am not Paul McCartney.

Not even close.

But, I think all creatives are the same.

To make big progress, you gotta sometimes sit in the chair, open the file, and do something—anything— for as many hours as you can until something clicks.

To me, this is the core loop I have to force myself through to get new interesting thoughts.

I wanted to talk about this little cursor idea I built that went viral.

Because, I feel like the path to finding this idea perfectly describes the crazy bat shit process of how I come up with stuff.

When I came up with the idea it was Oct. 8 and it was just another day in front of my laptop attempting to come up with an idea. I was having a terribly unfruitful day.

Around 7PM I was listening to this glitchy piano song.

And man….

I listened to song, closed my eyes, and something about the song made me feel really comforted, and it made me imagine a friendly, bubbly AI living on my computer that would support me as I worked towards my goals.

I got really excited.

So, I drew it:

This is very common for me.

As I listen to a song or watch a movie I will see an “image” in my head of some product flow, or of a marketing video, or of a landing page, or just something small.

And that will be the “grounding image” for the entire idea.

That “image” becomes my life raft I hold on to as I work on the idea. If I don’t have this image it becomes really hard for me to understand the idea.

(I stole this concept from the Miyazaki documentary where he won’t start a movie until he has one frame from the movie he feels really good about. Below is that frame for his film Ponyo).

For this cursor idea, my image was the image of this cute blue cursor popping in from the right side of my Mac’s screen, and saying hi. And the background music would be this song I had when I came up with the idea.

And I wanted it to feel like Figma’s cursor:

Once I had the idea of the cute cursor + a grounding image I built it immediately with Claude Code and Swift. For Mac apps I never like using Electron, Swift just gives you more control. And I knew stuff like permissions would be a bitch. So I went for Swift.

I don’t know Swift at all, but, hey in Claude we trust.

This was roughly the prompt:

This is how it looked:

I thought it was shit.

But, the day was ending and my rule is to show at least one person what I made.

And I’m so happy I have that rule.

99% of the time I think it’s shit, someone else see’s something cool.

That’s what happened here.

I immediately showed it to my wonderful girlfriend who quickly found it to be pretty cool. I saw her smile as she saw the lil cursor moving around the screen. And she really liked how the AI spoke in the cursor, it felt different to her.

Her support made me feel better about it so I decided to work on it the next day.

On Day 2, I started brainstorming use-cases. Aesthetically the cursor was cool, but, why would anyone be curious about it?

So, before I built anything further I drafted hella tweets.

Each tweet tries to angle the cursor idea in a new way:

Doing this helps me not only think of a use-case, but, also how I would talk about the use-case. If it doesn’t sound exciting in a tweet, then it probably won’t be exciting in general.

Also, I don’t write this to “go viral”.

I’m purely writing these to get my self excited and clear about the idea.

I actually really like the 2nd tweet originally:

The idea I had was you could have this companion cursor on your computer that could “see” your screen. And, this companion cursor could “talk” to you and teach you stuff.

I started building this, but, I was having trouble getting the cursor buddy to actually click stuff for you. And it was already 5PM by this point and I promised myself I’d post something today.

So, I pivoted to the angle where this cursor was more like a buddy that lived alongside you and recommended you stuff.

And bam, that’s what I made and posted.

A lot of ppl liked it!

The idea ended up getting hella views on Twitter, LinkedIn, and got reposted to a bunch of AI newsletters.

But, I’m not working on this idea anymore.

After the demo there wasn’t really any place I wanted to further take it. I still think its a good idea though, and I may go back to it. I preferred to just keep making other stuff in my mind.

For example, I shipped this YT video trying out a new video style.

I shipped this Reel trying out a new vlog style.

I’m getting curious about non-profits and planned a visit to a girls orphanage in Pakistan:

I visited this new up and coming school called “Alpha School” to get a sense of how they were solving education and after that went home and designed a new school for kids focused around entrepreneurship.

I built a super simple prototype that would help people go from “how much do i need to be financially free” to “here are a bunch of ideas for you to build to hit that number”.

I went to YC and showed some friends there an idea I was designing around an AI that would keep you accountable as you built stuff.

I’m even shipping stuff as small as color tests lol:

There are like 30 other things I’m not even showing you that I’m working on/made in the last 5-weeks haha.

I think from the outside this can all look insanely directionless.

And shit, maybe it is.

I’m not following any playbook or past framework.

Maybe you’re reading this and thinking — “yikes”.

But man…I really feel like I’m getting closer to something big everyday. Most importantly I just feel really strong creatively and full of energy and very positive. As long as that’s there, I’m sure things will figure themselves out.

So, I’m just gonna keep showing up.

And I’m just gonna keep pushing forward and following what I love.

See you another week!

P.S: shoutout to my boy Nilesh for making me banger Indian food.