I'm Zaid (okzaid)

I've been building since I was a kid. At 15 I was writing brute-force scripts to break into things, mostly to find out if I could. Around the same time I hit the global top 200 in Clash of Clans, out of a hundred million players. I get obsessive about whatever I'm into, and I usually push it further than is reasonable.

At 17 I moved to Bangalore to study computer science.

At 20 I started my first company, Bloom, an apprenticeship platform for African markets. It reached 1,200 users and never found product-market fit, so I quit.

At 21 I joined IG, the world's No.1 retail CFD provider, generating £1.1B+ in revenue, and spent a year on its core trading services.

At 22 I joined Absinthe, a Web3 growth and data platform, and owned its core product end to end. The platform had 10M+ users.

The whole time I kept shipping side projects and experiments, around 40 in the last few years, mostly out of curiosity. A few made money.

A few months ago I started Orqys, an AI phone workforce for car dealerships. It now answers calls for the world's largest Hyundai dealer group. It also taught me a little sales. The projects worth seeing are on the projects page.

Outside work: I was skinny and under-confident for a long time, so I started training, and now I have the athletic build I wanted. I play football. I play guitar. And I like meeting new people, mostly to understand how they see the world.

I write too, usually starting from something personal and digging until I find what's actually going on underneath. It lives in the brain, an LLM-maintained wiki of my own head, and the longer pieces are on the blog. I'm also very active on X.