Salam guys,
Just a quick announcement:
I’m going to pivot my content here to tech and business-related topics going forward.
If you still want to follow self-help content, you can follow me on Threads.
(naqibfaiq95) 🤣
We are pleased to officially announce Sapience Institute’s formal relationship with the International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), one of the world’s leading Islamic universities.
As part of this growing collaboration, Dr. Hamza Andreas Tzortzis, CEO of Sapience Institute, will be travelling to Malaysia this June to deliver lectures, seminars and training on Qur’an, science, Islamic thought and contemporary ideas.
See details and itinerary at https://t.co/qiMFG93eaj
We ask Allah to place barakah in this relationship and make it a means of benefit for Islam and the Ummah.
Andrej Karpathy's advice for beginners getting into AI:
"Put in 10,000 hours of work."
He's right.
But most builders waste the first 1,000 hours on the wrong things.
They write code before understanding context windows.
They build agents before understanding token limits.
They ship products before understanding what models can't do.
The builders who compound fastest aren't the ones who code the most.
They're the ones who understood the fundamentals before touching a single line.
These are the 10 concepts that make the first 1,000 hours count ↓
Bookmark this before you start.
Can you be wildly AMBITIOUS and deeply MUSLIM at the same time?
Most people in the community think you have to choose. That's exactly why we're falling behind.
The most ambitious people in Muslim history weren't choosing between their faith and their work. For them, building something that mattered was the point.
We just forgot that was ever our standard.
Is ambition a problem, or did we absorb the wrong definition of it?
Comment "AMBITION" if you want resources on the topic
These days are almost over, so do not let what remains pass like ordinary time. Fill them with fasting, dhikr, Qur’an, dua, repentance, charity, and every good deed that brings you closer to Allah.
In 2002 a payments company sold to eBay for one and a half billion dollars. Most of its employees got modest exits and went home.
Thirty eight of them did not.
They went on to found Tesla. SpaceX. LinkedIn. YouTube. Palantir. Yelp. Yammer. Affirm. Founders Fund. Trillions of dollars in market cap. Two decades of Silicon Valley reshaped by one company's alumni network.
Here is the part nobody talks about. They did not all get rich at the same time. Three exited first. Those three funded the next five. Those eight pulled up the next seven. By 2010 you could not raise a Series A in Silicon Valley without somehow being in their orbit.
That is what a "mafia" actually is. It isn't corruption. It's concentrated trust. Thirty eight people who decided helping each other was the default, not the exception, compounded into the most valuable network in tech history.
Every winning group in Silicon Valley runs this play. The Indians did it from inside FAANG. The Israelis did it through unit 8200. The Stanford and YC alumni built the most explicit versions.
Muslims have not done it yet.
We have the talent. We have the capital. We have founders quietly exiting for nine figures whose own communities do not know their names. We just never built the room where the early mafia forms.
Friday HQ is that room.
3,000+ Muslim founders, operators, and investors. 3,700+ angels reviewing real deals. The early Muslim mafia is forming right now and most people have not noticed.
In ten years there will be a Muslim equivalent of the PayPal mafia. The only real question is whether you were in the room when it started.
fridayhq dot co
“Whoever is concerned about the Hereafter, Allah will place richness in his heart, bring his affairs together, and the world will inevitably come to him.
Whoever is concerned about the world, Allah will place poverty between his eyes, disorder his affairs, and he will get nothing of the world but what is decreed for him.” Prophet Muhammad ﷺ
Be a wealthy Muslim. Retire your parents. Fund someone’s Umrah trip. Build Masajid. Sponsor orphans. Fund Dawah. Wealth isn’t evil. Wealth is what will move the ummah forward.
WhatsApp co-founder donates $200M to Israeli hospital
Jan Koum, the billionaire co-founder of WhatsApp, has made the single largest private donation ever to an Israeli hospital, gifting $200 million to Jerusalem's Shaare Zedek Medical Centre.
The donation will be used to expand and upgrade the medical facility
Koum was born in Ukraine to a Jewish family who later migrated to the United States when he was 16.
EKONOMI MALAYSIA DIJANGKA MULA TERUK BERMULA JUN KERANA PERANG US IRAN
Penasihat Ekonomi Pejabat Perdana Menteri, Nurhisham Hussein memberitahu Podcast The Breakfast Grill BFM Radio bahawa Ekonomi Malaysia dijangka mula teruk bermula Jun kerana Perang US Iran dan Penutupan Selat Hormuz
Situasi teruk ini akan berlangsung dalam 3 Gelombang.
Gelombang Pertama- Bekalan Minyak Malaysia akan mulai habis. Di mana 3/4 Pengeluaran minyak di Timur Tengah ditutup. Pengeluaran minyak sepenuhnya memakan masa 6 Bulan daripada tarikh perang tamat. Ia bukan seperti tutup paip. Antaranya ialah Telaga Minyak itu disimen dan proses membuka semula telaga itu memakan masa 3 bulan. Proses untuk membersihkan trafik di Selat Hormuz juga dijangka 2-3 bulan. Malaysia import 70 peratus minyak dari Selat Hormuz
Gelombang Kedua - Bekalan Petrokimia mulai terjejas. Rakyat Malaysia memerlukan bahan ini untuk produk kebersihan diri, tuala wanita, lampin bayi, komestik, berus gigi dan sebagainya. 70 peratus kereta dibuat dari plastik.
Gelombang Ketiga- Masalah bekalan mentah. Banyak syarikat hanya ada simpanan bahan mentah untuk hasilkan produk mereka selama 2 bulan sahaja. Hanya 10 ke 15 peratus SME Malaysia mempunyai simpanan bahan mentah selama seminggu atau dua minggu.
Kesan gelombang ini akan menyebabkan produk pengeluaran berkurangan, pekerja tak dapat kerja OT, pengurangan syif pekerja dan ini jejaskan rakyat Malaysia secara perlahan-lahan
As Muslims, we already have all the guidance and tools needed to succeed in this life.
Yet we leave Islam on the prayer mat
and chase dunya through a purely materialistic worldview.
Secularism at its peak.
Studying Islam gives you an edge in business.
Most Muslim working professionals and business executives assume they have too much on their plate to dedicate time to seeking knowledge.
On the contrary, I've found that it's actually helped me become a better startup founder:
1. Learning new knowledge
As a student of knowledge, you're tasked to learn. Fast. And you have to efficiently retain it as well. You constantly sharpen skills like breaking down complex info, memorizing, and diagraming that most people stop practicing methodically once they leave school.
As an entrepreneur, you constantly have to learn things you've never done before.
2. Conveying information
When teaching the ʿulūm, you have to break down complex subjects into simpler principles. With different audiences and students, you have to frame the same issue in completely different ways.
Being a founder is all about framing the same information in many different ways: to different team members, different customers, different investors, etc.
3. Breadth AND depth of knowledge
One thing you learn being a student of knowledge is you need massive breadth and depth. You must master the basics of at least a dozen different kinds of knowledge from hadith, fiqh, and usul to grammer and rhetoric.
School doesn't teach you this. It teaches you to specialize.
But good business founders need to be a sort of jack of all trades. They don't need to be the best, but they need to be very good at a dozen skills from marketing, coding and sales to ops, managing finances etc.
4. The Barakah
As someone once said, when you dedicate your time and efforts for the sake of Allah, it no longer becomes an issue of fitting it all on your plate.
Instead, Allah blesses you with a bigger plate.
Fitbit Air is official, $99 and no subscription required.
The Fitbit App is being rebranded to Google Health on May 19.
Google Health will aggregate data from Apple Health and other apps and devices. Allowing it and Fitbit Air to work on iOS and Android.