Based in London, I’m British-Lebanese and grew up in various countries across the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. I love terrible jokes, looking at designer houses I will never live in, and tormenting my wife and children with my piano playing.

Get in touch if you ever want to chat all things scaling when it comes to startups! Just stick hello in front of this URL.

This site is also a playground for me to mess around with PostHog stuff - check out CharlesBall and AskCharles.

What I’m doing now

Operator @ PostHog

• $0 -> $70m ARR, 10 people -> 220, $14m raised -> $194m
• Leading marketing, content, & demand gen
• Scaled the sales, CS & support machine, from zero to many
• Started and scales ops, finance, & people
• Writing large chunks of our public handbook
• Keeping the culture weird with things like unhinged billboards, isgoogleanalyticsillegal.com and dictatorortechbro.com

Things I’ve written about

Scaling

• Collaboration sucks - hit #1 on Hacker News
• 32 things we’ve learned about building a startup that scales
• How I actually get good advice
• Why attacking competitors is dumb
• How startup secondaries actually work

GTM

• How we’re spending our marketing budget in 2026 (with actual $ figures)
• The stuff nobody tells you about startup marketing - 5 years of lessons
• Startup marketing for noobs
• 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
• How software salespeople will try to screw you (and how to fight back)
• How to buy software in an enterprise company

Hiring

• 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

What I’ve done before

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 dormant

COO @ Vitl

• Led ops, product, R&D, CS, and legal
• Filled in as interim CTO
• Ran process for 2 big licensing deals to giant pharma companies

Chief of Staff @ ROLI

• $0 -> $XXm ARR, 15 people -> 150, $4m raised -> $70m
• Did basically every non-engineering role at some point
• Met Stevie Wonder

Where I’ve studied

• University of Cambridge - BA Hons, Law
• SOAS, University of London - MSc, Public Policy & Management
• Imperial College, London - MBA

Books I’m reading

I use Storygraph and always appreciate a recommendation

I keep a separate study list of things I find interesting here