Writing

Essays on AI, operations, culture, and building things in Dubai.

• The First Order Was Mine: Week One of GUTSY

  GUTSY went live in the UAE on Sunday 1 November. The first customer was me, the next three were friends, and nobody is buying just one flavour to try.

  Nov 2026Career

• Seven Ingredients and Nothing Else: What’s Actually in GUTSY

  A line-by-line walk through the label of GUTSY, a hydrolysed vegan protein from the UAE: what each of the seven ingredients is doing there, and everything we left out.

  Nov 2026Culture

• Bloating Is Not a Personality Trait

  Whey gave me painful acne and plant protein left me bloated, so I spent a year finding out why, and ended up building a hydrolysed vegan protein in Dubai.

  Oct 2026Culture

• Two Launches, Two People: Building Oula and GUTSY

  Launching Oula, a UAE fashion app, and GUTSY, a Dubai gut health brand, in the same month, and the husband behind all 47 kitchen experiments.

  Oct 2026Career

• The Graduation Nobody Saw

  On building in private, the AI gender gap, and what it means to finally stop waiting for readiness to arrive.

  May 2026Tech

• The Longest March

  A month of booms, recalibrated plans, and the specific exhaustion of living through something that has no clean ending.

  Mar 2026Culture

• The Sounds Above

  On waiting, the failure of information, and the people who keep the city moving.

  Mar 2026Culture

• Hard Days, Solid Ground

  A case for chosen difficulty in a world of high-end beige-ness.

  Feb 2026Culture

• Being Hot Is Infrastructure, Not Identity

  The Biological Tax: A founder’s journey through the high cost of maintenance and the currency of "pretty."

  Feb 2026Culture

• Fuck Around and Find Out (F.A.F.O)

  Real competence requires a high tolerance for looking like a total fucking idiot.

  Feb 2026Culture

• Advice is the Consolation Prize

  Why Good Mentors Don't Always Make Good Leaders

  Feb 2026Career

• Gratitude Is Performance. Appreciation Is Private.

  Why I stopped keeping score of my blessings

  Jan 2026Culture

• The Democratisation of the Build: Reflections from a Non-Technical Founder

  The wall between "technical" and "creative" has crumbled. Now we have to decide if we are building solutions or just adding to the noise.

  Jan 2026Tech

• AI Didn't Kill Authenticity, It Just Made It Scalable

  AI made content free to create. Platforms made it expensive to distribute. Now we're all performing.

  Dec 2025Tech

• Everyone Under 30 Is Lying About Their Life

  The economic cost of mistaking exposure for expertise

  Dec 2025Career

• I GASLIGHT MYSELF FOR A LIVING

  A love letter to irrational persistence

  Dec 2025Culture

• This Is Where It Gets Interesting

  On being a beginner when you're supposed to be an expert

  Dec 2025Career

• What I Learned Spending Eight Months Building a Gut Health Product

  Eight months formulating. Two months in regulatory hell. Here's what I couldn't unsee.

  Dec 2025Culture

• Should I Be Making TikToks or Building the Business?

  What content culture gets wrong about building

  Dec 2025Tech

• The Brain Rot Isn’t What You Think It Is (Part 2)

  How to rebuild what's been dismantled

  Dec 2025Tech

• The Brain Rot Isn’t What You Think It Is (Part 1)

  The cost isn't your attention. It's your ability to think something true.

  Dec 2025Tech

• What It Means to Be Smart Now

  I’ve been thinking about intelligence lately.

  Dec 2025Career