Founder & General Partner @alifdotbuild + hosting profiles.fm
San Francisco
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- Following 2,845
- Followers 16,283
- Likes 14,733
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Conversation with @FarzaTV, Founder and CEO of HeyClicky.
00:00 S5 IRL and closing Buildspace
05:47 Why not sell Buildspace
09:46 Buildspace legacy and reputation
12:10 Six months of traveling
15:46 Relearning personal happiness
22:46 Impact versus happiness
26:00 Rebuilding creative confidence
31:12 Collaboration and dream teams
36:01 Experimenting with AI projects
41:44 Hiring and team building
46:17 Democratizing AI models
52:33 Y Combinator and Clicky
1:00:11 Fundraising $12 million
1:03:52 Future success and inspiration
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Yasser Elsaid grew up in Egypt, moved to Toronto at 19, and bootstrapped Chatbase to $10M ARR, a milestone it crossed this past May. He thinks that’s not a coincidence.
“A lot of the greatest founders have this situation where they’re insiders enough, but they’re also outsiders. Steve Jobs was from a Syrian background, but he grew up in Silicon Valley. Napoleon was not raised in France, but he ended up becoming the emperor of France.”
His theory: embrace the new way of thinking, keep what your upbringing taught you, and combine the good traits of both. “It’s very hard to lose then. You have all the advantages of being in a place like SF, but you also know this is a bubble, and not everyone in the world thinks this way.”
That perspective is why people who move to SF keep doing great things there.
Full conversation with Yasser Elsaid on YouTube and Spotify.
Conversation with @yasser_elsaid_, Founder of Chatbase
00:00 Origins of Chatbase & ChatGPT for Your Data
03:03 Getting First Revenue & Creative Early Marketing
06:11 Dealing with AI Fatigue & Shifting to Enterprise Sales
09:25 Growing Pains of Combining PLG and Enterprise Motions
10:33 Philosophy on Bootstrapping vs. Raising VC
13:27 Scaling Capital Constraints vs. Reinvesting Revenue
14:05 Evolution as a CEO: From Doing Everything to Managing Culture
17:10 Operating Cadence & Company Rants
17:44 SF vs. NY: Geographic Ambition & The AI Bubble
21:51 Background & Perspective: The Insider/Outsider Advantage
23:44 Self-Reliance, Swimming, and Archery
26:01 Running a Company as a Smart Dictatorship
29:02 Attracting Smart Talent as a Solo Founder
32:33 Rethinking Co-Founders & Co-Founder Breakups
34:19 Riding the Next Wave of Personal & Business AI Agents
36:24 The Founder Persona: $0 to $10M vs. $10M to $100M ARR
37:41 Moving Goalposts & What Drives Ambition Beyond Money
40:33 Exploring Large Capital Raises for Hypergrowth
41:23 Goals for Next Year: Multi-City Offices & Becoming the Default AI Agent Offices & Becoming the Default AI Agent
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He built 10 side projects looking for one that could become a company. The eleventh was Chatbase, now at $10M ARR with no investors and no co-founders.
It started in his last semester of school, right after ChatGPT launched. Yasser Elsaid saw the gap: “ChatGPT was just a chat interface... you couldn’t add any specific data about you, about a book, about a website.” So he built ChatGPT for your data and launched it to “my not so many followers on Twitter.”
He even knew OpenAI would probably build the same thing eventually. He launched anyway: “I just needed to see where the market takes me.”
A year later it was an AI customer service agent. Today it’s a general customer-facing AI agent for businesses.
Full conversation with @yasser_elsaid_ on YouTube and Spotify.
Conversation with @yasser_elsaid_, Founder of Chatbase
00:00 Origins of Chatbase & ChatGPT for Your Data
03:03 Getting First Revenue & Creative Early Marketing
06:11 Dealing with AI Fatigue & Shifting to Enterprise Sales
09:25 Growing Pains of Combining PLG and Enterprise Motions
10:33 Philosophy on Bootstrapping vs. Raising VC
13:27 Scaling Capital Constraints vs. Reinvesting Revenue
14:05 Evolution as a CEO: From Doing Everything to Managing Culture
17:10 Operating Cadence & Company Rants
17:44 SF vs. NY: Geographic Ambition & The AI Bubble
21:51 Background & Perspective: The Insider/Outsider Advantage
23:44 Self-Reliance, Swimming, and Archery
26:01 Running a Company as a Smart Dictatorship
29:02 Attracting Smart Talent as a Solo Founder
32:33 Rethinking Co-Founders & Co-Founder Breakups
34:19 Riding the Next Wave of Personal & Business AI Agents
36:24 The Founder Persona: $0 to $10M vs. $10M to $100M ARR
37:41 Moving Goalposts & What Drives Ambition Beyond Money
40:33 Exploring Large Capital Raises for Hypergrowth
41:23 Goals for Next Year: Multi-City Offices & Becoming the Default AI Agent Offices & Becoming the Default AI Agent
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Conversation with @yasser_elsaid_, Founder of Chatbase
00:00 Origins of Chatbase & ChatGPT for Your Data
03:03 Getting First Revenue & Creative Early Marketing
06:11 Dealing with AI Fatigue & Shifting to Enterprise Sales
09:25 Growing Pains of Combining PLG and Enterprise Motions
10:33 Philosophy on Bootstrapping vs. Raising VC
13:27 Scaling Capital Constraints vs. Reinvesting Revenue
14:05 Evolution as a CEO: From Doing Everything to Managing Culture
17:10 Operating Cadence & Company Rants
17:44 SF vs. NY: Geographic Ambition & The AI Bubble
21:51 Background & Perspective: The Insider/Outsider Advantage
23:44 Self-Reliance, Swimming, and Archery
26:01 Running a Company as a Smart Dictatorship
29:02 Attracting Smart Talent as a Solo Founder
32:33 Rethinking Co-Founders & Co-Founder Breakups
34:19 Riding the Next Wave of Personal & Business AI Agents
36:24 The Founder Persona: $0 to $10M vs. $10M to $100M ARR
37:41 Moving Goalposts & What Drives Ambition Beyond Money
40:33 Exploring Large Capital Raises for Hypergrowth
41:23 Goals for Next Year: Multi-City Offices & Becoming the Default AI Agent Offices & Becoming the Default AI Agent
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He built a $10M ARR software company in 3 years with no co-founder and no investors.
This is Yasser Elsaid, founder of Chatbase, the platform businesses use to build AI support agents on their own data.
He interned at Tesla and Meta, then skipped his final classes to build what became Chatbase instead. That was after 10 other side projects.
Solo bootstrapping came with a cost. In his words, “you’re pressing the brakes a lot more... because you’re just scared that... you might run out of money.” And when something breaks, “everything is your fault.”
He’d still choose it: “Dictatorships is how you build a good company, a great company.”
Full episode releasing Thursday on YouTube and Spotify.
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Hit up Rayyan if you’re in LA!
I'm moving to Los Angeles 🌴
I started my company in early 2024 after dropping out of college with no idea on how to build or run a company.
5 months later, I moved to San Francisco knowing I had to go all in if I wanted this to work. I lived with @omarwasm and @miralizain, who are some of my closest friends to date.
For 1 year straight, I turned up everyday not knowing if this would become a real company or not.
I went broke, caught COVID, spent many days eating grilled cheeses from in-n-out for dinner, and spent 6am mornings thinking about what more I could do.
However, after my lease ended in 2025, I walked out with some of the fastest growing startups as clients, having a work ethic for the first time in my life, and hiring people that are still on the team today.
The only problem now was that I was very lost on what I wanted from life.
I had a bootstrapped money making money, and for the first time in my life, I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted.
So I travelled the world, explored 8+ countries, got engaged, made stupid purchases, and honestly, took it easy for the last 9 months.
Travelling the world is something I'd recommend everyone to do atleast once in their life, but I knew deep down it was time to take my life more seriously if I wanted to grow my company to what it has the potential to be.
Since coming back to the US, I spent time debating between LA, San Diego, Miami, and New york.
I'm not going to lie, I don't know why I've picked LA. I've always been someone who just goes with their intuition and figures it out along the way.
Long term, I have no clue if Los Angeles is going to be the place for me either, but I'd rather turn up and see what life has in store for me.
Because when I look back on my life, I want every decision to be on my terms, where I left as little unexplored as possible.
Really excited for this next chapter :)
If you're living in LA, would love to meet people in the startup/creative space!!!
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I asked a $1.3B founder for one piece of advice for day one, and one for the day after you sell.
Haroon Mokhtarzada built Rocket Money, the app millions use to catch forgotten subscriptions, lower their bills, and manage their money. He has lived both of these days, and his two answers could not be more different.
For day one: “getting really good visibility and… having your metrics regularly in your face is really important.”
For the day after the sale: “It’s very normal to feel disoriented after an exit. Most people get depressed after an exit, actually.” His advice there had nothing to do with money. “…just make sure, like, you don’t judge yourself for that. It’s normal. It’s part of the process.”
The first answer is about numbers. The second one stuck with me more.
Full conversation with @haroon on YouTube and Spotify.
Conversation with @Haroon, Founder of Rocket Money (ex. Truebill).
00:00 Intro & Entrepreneurship
01:15 Childhood & First Business
02:33 Founding & Scaling Webs
05:42 "The Floundery" Brainstorming
07:02 Team Strategy & Brotherhood
12:18 True Bill Subscription Pivot
16:01 Performance Marketing Math
19:18 Minimizing Team Dependencies
20:19 App Attribution & TV Ads
24:47 Talent & Leadership Philosophy
29:35 Workplace Culture & Feedback
33:01 Stepping Down as CEO
35:17 Post-Acquisition Reality
38:30 Wealth, Faith & Happiness
46:39 Figuring Out What's Next
50:44 Advice for Founders
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A 21 year old $50M founder told me why a $124B company writes everything down.
Even the engineers. Blog posts, product specs, internal memos.
Dhravya Shah founded SuperMemory after working at Cloudflare, where “if there is no blog post done, then the work is not done.” The org is so distributed that writing is how information moves.
Now he runs his own company, and the culture is harder to copy. “I have also been trying to get my engineers to write things and it’s very hard.”
Full conversation with @DhravyaShah on YouTube and Spotify.
Conversation with @DhravyaShah, Founder of SuperMemory
00:00 Cloudflare Culture & Working Under CTO
01:36 Autonomy, Writing Culture & Product Flywheel
02:45 Product Life Cycle: Idea to Launch
04:28 Demo Days & Engineering Writing Culture
06:32 Origins of Supermemory
08:00 Acquiring the Domain
08:59 Going Viral on GitHub & VC Interest
10:03 Turning Down Early Investment Deals
13:38 Early Investors & Susa Ventures
17:08 Shifting from Product to Infrastructure
18:49 The Market Street Epiphany & Shutting Down Products
22:04 Focusing on AI Memory & Continuous Learning
24:47 Inbound Go-to-Market Strategy
27:28 Testing Memory via AI Companions
28:11 AI Companion Dynamics & Psychosis Risks
30:31 Embracing Iteration Velocity
31:31 Lessons from Company Brain
33:25 Defining Good Memory Systems
34:32 Rethinking Memory Retrieval & Injection
36:45 Supermemory Architecture & Local Models
39:00 Memory for Continual Improvement
41:33 Agent-to-Agent Security Risks
43:32 Public Identity & Personal Growth
46:12 Productivity Philosophy
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A VC told an 18 year old he could raise $2M for his side project.
He didn’t know that was possible. “I was like, this person must be kidding me. Like, there’s no way.”
He was still working at Cloudflare. The side project had just become one of the fastest growing repos on GitHub in 2024. VCs kept asking if he was raising. He kept saying no.
So he asked his boss, the CTO of Cloudflare. The answer: bootstrap, or raise from tier one. Never the middle.
Today that side project is Supermemory, a $50M AI memory startup.
Full conversation with @DhravyaShah on YouTube & Spotify.
Conversation with @DhravyaShah, Founder of SuperMemory
00:00 Cloudflare Culture & Working Under CTO
01:36 Autonomy, Writing Culture & Product Flywheel
02:45 Product Life Cycle: Idea to Launch
04:28 Demo Days & Engineering Writing Culture
06:32 Origins of Supermemory
08:00 Acquiring the Domain
08:59 Going Viral on GitHub & VC Interest
10:03 Turning Down Early Investment Deals
13:38 Early Investors & Susa Ventures
17:08 Shifting from Product to Infrastructure
18:49 The Market Street Epiphany & Shutting Down Products
22:04 Focusing on AI Memory & Continuous Learning
24:47 Inbound Go-to-Market Strategy
27:28 Testing Memory via AI Companions
28:11 AI Companion Dynamics & Psychosis Risks
30:31 Embracing Iteration Velocity
31:31 Lessons from Company Brain
33:25 Defining Good Memory Systems
34:32 Rethinking Memory Retrieval & Injection
36:45 Supermemory Architecture & Local Models
39:00 Memory for Continual Improvement
41:33 Agent-to-Agent Security Risks
43:32 Public Identity & Personal Growth
46:12 Productivity Philosophy
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Conversation with @DhravyaShah, Founder of SuperMemory
00:00 Cloudflare Culture & Working Under CTO
01:36 Autonomy, Writing Culture & Product Flywheel
02:45 Product Life Cycle: Idea to Launch
04:28 Demo Days & Engineering Writing Culture
06:32 Origins of Supermemory
08:00 Acquiring the Domain
08:59 Going Viral on GitHub & VC Interest
10:03 Turning Down Early Investment Deals
13:38 Early Investors & Susa Ventures
17:08 Shifting from Product to Infrastructure
18:49 The Market Street Epiphany & Shutting Down Products
22:04 Focusing on AI Memory & Continuous Learning
24:47 Inbound Go-to-Market Strategy
27:28 Testing Memory via AI Companions
28:11 AI Companion Dynamics & Psychosis Risks
30:31 Embracing Iteration Velocity
31:31 Lessons from Company Brain
33:25 Defining Good Memory Systems
34:32 Rethinking Memory Retrieval & Injection
36:45 Supermemory Architecture & Local Models
39:00 Memory for Continual Improvement
41:33 Agent-to-Agent Security Risks
43:32 Public Identity & Personal Growth
46:12 Productivity Philosophy
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The Alif effect:
The real perk of working from @alifdotbuild in SF?
i'm asking @imraneye how Gameplan shows up in SEO and LLM search. he doesn't explain anything, just points at the @wespreadjam guys sitting right next to us
1 hour later: full GEO audit of Gameplan
Agent got the audit, fixed everything
just move to San Francisco?
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He’s 20, running a $50M AI memory startup backed by Google’s AI chief, Cloudflare’s CTO, and execs from OpenAI and Meta. A month ago he shut down half his products on purpose.
This is Dhravya Shah, founder of Supermemory: the infrastructure that gives AI apps and agents long-term memory, so they actually remember you between conversations.
The company was making a few million a year, but the AI frontier would never use what he was selling and to him, a company that just makes money is a company that gets forgotten. So he went to his investors’ houses, told them he was killing a few million dollars in revenue, refunded every affected customer, and bet the company on building the memory that frontier AI will actually run on.
The internship was two years ago. The $50M startup is now. If you're building, the episode is the playbook.
Full episode releasing Wednesday on YouTube and Spotify.
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