Waqas Ali

founder, Nama • storytelling & product launches, the way a co-founder would • co-founded Atoms, Markhor • YCS15 • i make art, chai, and products slowly

[Waqas Ali @waqasali]

Introducing Nama – a storytelling studio for startups

Dear friends, i’m excited to share that I’m launching Nama, a storytelling studio that helps founders launch and tell compelling stories.

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[Waqas Ali @waqasali]

@nikunj good advice!

curious about your thoughts on; founders who are still figuring out who the ceo should be, and might change after the round. and equity split among 3-4 cofounders.

[sari azout @sariazout]

I did a talk at @FWBtweets last week about what becomes scarce when intelligence is abundant. I’m just a gal so what do I know but the fact that we’ve pretty much passed the turing test and everything feels too normal feels like a pretty major wake-up call on the limits of left-brainism that not enough ppl in tech are talking about.

Here’s a sneak peek. sharing the full pres next week in the sublime newsletterrrr

[Waqas Ali @waqasali]

@hamburger 👌🏽👌🏽👌🏽

[ellis 🍔 @hamburger]

Meet Butter: the first video editor you can build on.

Such a joy to help bring this one to the world!

🧈🍔🤝 https://t.co/uuoSPgGwQ6

[Waqas Ali @waqasali]

— javed akhtar

[Paul Millerd @p_millerd]

Sorry about never spending time with you. I love being your dad. But I had to build generational wealth instead.

[Michael Grinich @grinich]

@benln These companies are already successful. Working at them won't teach you how to make a startup successful.

[Errolson Hugh @erlsn]

People complaining about Chinese manufacture. I am Chinese. Why are you buying my work at all?

[Stewart Brand @stewartbrand]

I love seeing poet Anne Herbert quoted.

"The sky starts at your feet. Think how brave you are to walk around."

[Waqas Ali @waqasali]

@signulll “so slow, in fact, that the process is easy to overlook if you’re observing it in real time. Only in hindsight is it obvious just how remarkable Apple’s platform development process is.”

https://t.co/q0OhAA1sdh

[Waqas Ali @waqasali]

this still true for all things commerce!

tldr; shopify practices simplicity, and @tobi is the ceo

[Waqas Ali @waqasali]

I owe it to all the founders, starting an eCommerce business with limited resources/time.

Use @Shopify.
Even if you think you might be ‘a rare case’ (like we did). USE SHOPIFY

It’d save you time, complexity, $$$, eng headache, and the genuinely helps you succeed.

[Waqas Ali @waqasali]

One way to go deep in life is by doing the seemingly small things that most people don’t or don’t expect you to do.

E.g., being kind and patient almost all the time. Or sharing what you learned with others so that they can avoid your mistakes.

[Waqas Ali @waqasali]

“Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment.”

—Tom Stoppard (The Coast of Utopia)

[Waqas Ali @waqasali]

@NirZicherman 😂

[Josh Elman @joshelman]

It has never been easier to get first draft quality work. Almost no effort.

This means that taste and final polish will matter more than ever to rise above the slop.

We will see this in every category.

[Claude @claudeai]

Introducing Claude Opus 5.

It's a thoughtful and proactive model that comes close to the frontier intelligence of Fable 5 at half the price.

[Qasar Younis @qasar]

For 9+ years we’ve been building simulators, data engines, data pipelines, scenario editors, RL environments, what's now world models... and dozens of other products.

Now we’ve connected them all under one agentic layer.

It is not just another harness but also the broader system to safely design, develop, and deploy Physical AI.

I continue to believe a modern, AI-first development environment is one of the biggest bottlenecks to putting intelligence on a billion machines.

Unsurprisingly, we’ve been using it internally for a while now and the impact has been profound in almost every measurable way.

As you might know, our old office was on the corner of Pioneer and Dana – and calling it Pioneer would be too cliche. Introducing Dana :)

https://t.co/DgaQFLyrKC

[Waqas Ali @waqasali]

@zavaindar congrats zavain!

[Zavain Dar @zavaindar]

Today we're unveiling Dimension III: a $800M fund to partner with the leading entrepreneurs across the frontiers of compute (silicon through infrastructure) & science (biotech through physics).

To our founders, past, present, and future: now is your time. LFG!