the failure company_

i was born on november 27, 1997. my parents told me once that i wasn't expected, which is pretty funny. that was also the year my father retired from his job as ubl's new york branch manager with a golden handshake. i found myself in a rented house in karachi, but as far as i can remember, it was a happy home. my mother used to work too while my siblings were studying.

shortly after, my father decided to move to kpk and build a one-kanal house from scratch. he used to love the process. i remember him traveling back and forth from karachi to watch it being built, and eventually we moved there. he built a garden with a ride in it for me. i spent afternoons playing with my toys, drawing spider-man, and talking to my bear, batman, and superman figures. my mother tells me i kept talking to them because i didn't have friends.

i started in nursery class. my classmates spoke a language i couldn't understand, so i felt a little alienated. but i was exceptionally good at studying. my sister taught me at home, and i remember consistently coming first in class. my best friend usually came second. he was the principal's son, and funny enough, the school was named after him. furqan public school. i remember his mother encouraging him to sit with me. i don't know why.

the best memory from that house was the day my father and elder brother went out to buy our first computer. i remember waiting helplessly for them to return. time just wouldn't pass. eventually, somewhere near the night, they brought home a brand-new pentium 3. i looked at it and it felt like a dream. my elder brother taught me how to use it. i still remember how excited i was.

i played a hell of a lot of tomb raider. something about figuring out those difficult puzzles gave little me an incredible feeling. there were other games, msn messenger, dial-up internet, and whatnot. i also watched a lot of wwe and movies with my father and brothers. that computer opened up an entirely different world to me, and i wanted to explore every bit of it.

my brothers introduced me to music too. linkin park, led zeppelin, audioslave, korn, slipknot, disturbed, godsmack, rage against the machine, pearl jam, foo fighters, ac/dc, black sabbath, queen, the doors, the rolling stones, aerosmith, bon jovi, and god knows how many others. eventually came eminem and 50 cent, and i started discovering hip-hop too. almost twenty-eight years later, i'm still listening to some of the same music.

my father had also built three shops and gotten into business. i remember asking my mother to make me something i could sell to the kids in front of the school. i think she used to make boiled chickpeas, and i'd sell them for fun. i also remember my father being let down by people who owed him money. i remember arguments at home. i remember circumstances changing before i was old enough to understand everything behind them. around 2006 or 2007, with the business losing money and my siblings feeling out of place in that city, we rented the house to a family friend and returned to karachi.

only this time, home was a small two-bedroom rented house on the outskirts of green town, shah faisal colony. but i loved my starting days there because the environment felt familiar again. i joined green public high school in class four, made friends, and continued taking top positions in class. my sister still tutored me. my elder brothers started working too, the eldest at a courier company and another in banking. things seemed okay for a while.

however, things at home started becoming scary. my elder brother developed schizophrenia. he used to break things, become aggressive, and behave in ways i couldn't understand. experiencing that at a young age frightened me. i remember one day when a fight broke out, i walked out of the house, sat on the footpath, and started crying. i didn't know what was happening or why. i just wanted things to be okay again.

we moved to another rented home. i continued my education while living with the situation at home, trying to outperform everything the world threw at me outside while battling what was happening inside. my brother was receiving treatment. i remember him staying in psychiatric hospitals for weeks, and sometimes they needed to restrain him. difficult would be an understatement. i was watching someone who'd taught me so much struggle with something none of us seemed able to fix.

this continued for years. and then june 7, 2014 arrived. i woke up looking forward to a good saturday, like most teenagers do. i wanted to hang out with friends and prepare for my university entrance examination. i was sixteen. i woke up on the carpet of our home and found my elder brother looking directly into my eyes. he was looking back at me.

i got up and went to take a shower. i was trying to figure out how to get the water running when i heard a loud thump. shortly afterward, my mother started banging on the bathroom door and crying. i came out to find that my brother had jumped face first from the third floor of our home. there was blood everywhere, the kind of blood you see after a sacrifice. i still remember that image clearly.

my father and another brother carried him to the hospital. i remember seeing my mother crying and cursing god. that was the first and last time i ever saw her do that in my entire life. i didn't know how to process any of it. i was sixteen. a few hours later, my father returned home to break the news that my elder brother was no more.

the first memory that came to me was of him teaching me how to ride a bicycle. you know that moment when someone you trust is holding the bicycle, running behind you, and eventually lets go? your instincts kick in and suddenly you learn to ride on your own. i remembered him letting go of the bicycle. it was hard to take that the person who first let me go to teach me how to ride was now gone, and i had to figure out how to keep going without him. i remember whenever i used to cry as a child, he would pick me up and comfort me. every time. now i was crying for him.

the house got quiet. no more fighting. no more arguments. no more things breaking. it felt like he'd left an empty place. sixteen-year-old me didn't know whether to call it peace or a haunted house. i missed him. i missed someone whose illness had also frightened me. i didn't know what to do with those feelings. i just used to cry. for twelve years, i barely spoke about my brother. i couldn't talk about what happened. i didn't know how to put it into words, so i kept it to myself. twelve years later, here i am, trying to tell you about him.

even sitting at the computer felt a little different. my brother used to allot me specific times when i could use it. now i no longer needed permission. i could sit there for as long as i wanted. i remember noticing that. such a small thing to notice after losing someone, but i noticed. the computer was still there. everything he'd taught me was still there. he wasn't.

i passed my university entrance examination and got myself into computer science at bahria university. that pentium 3 had stayed with me all those years. however, slowly i recognized that what they were teaching was way behind what i'd already learned on my own. i felt staying there would cost me the career i wanted. i wanted to find out what i was capable of. build things. earn enough to take care of my family. give my parents a life where money didn't keep finding its way into every argument. i wanted to bring back some of the happiness i remembered from when i was little.

i remember being five minutes late for an examination, and the invigilator wouldn't let me take it. he told me to speak to the principal. i went and asked if something could be done. he said no, nothing could be done. so i said goodbye and continued teaching myself emerging technologies. that was around 2015–2016. i had no degree, no established career, and no guarantee that my decision would work.

then, when an opportunity presented itself, i joined a startup as its fifth hire. an intern, with an utter determination to do extraordinary things. i used to borrow my brother's old motorcycle to travel to work and back. i was eighteen years old. i didn't have much money, but i had years of curiosity, technical knowledge, and an almost unreasonable desire to see what i was capable of.

meanwhile, my father had decided to sell the one-kanal house back in kpk to build another house from scratch. this time in shah latif town, karachi. he wanted to put practically everything he had into it. i remember questioning him about spending so much money on that house, especially after everything we'd been through financially. but he was determined. just like the house he'd built in kpk when i was little, he used to go there again and again, watching the construction and seeing it slowly come together. he loved that process.

outperform. outperform. outperform. that was all i wanted to do. looking back, it felt like work gave me an opportunity to escape my trauma. or perhaps i used that trauma to become exceptional at everything i did. i still don't know exactly how to explain it. but i remember being obsessed with learning, solving problems, taking responsibility, and outperforming everyone around me. work gave me problems i could actually solve.

i remember saving my first three months of internship salary to buy an air conditioner. because good sleep meant good work. that was my reasoning at eighteen. i wanted to become better at what i did, earn more, and build something meaningful. i remembered what it felt like growing up in a happy home, when my parents were taking care of everything. i wanted to give them that feeling again.

eventually, i was appointed to kickstart a brand's sales engine, leveraging the technical, sales, and marketing skills i'd developed. and i outperformed. then i helped build another brand from zero. then another. i worked my ass off. some days were twenty-four-hour days, weekends included. i was bringing in sales, starting brands, training teams, managing customers, building systems, and brainstorming ideas. there was always something new to figure out.

my best friend reminded me of those years recently. he said i'd practically disappeared from the face of the earth. whenever anyone asked about me, i was found at work. always working. always building something. always trying to outperform. i was becoming good at what i did, and i wanted to see how far i could take it. or maybe work gave me a reason to stay out of my own head. i remember putting my headphones on and disappearing into it.

i wanted to bring my family out of the circumstances they'd eventually found themselves in. i wanted to build the kind of life they'd given me when i was born. a happy home. somewhere my parents wouldn't have to worry about bills, expenses, or the things that had caused so many arguments when i was growing up. and slowly, i did. i think part of me hoped that giving them some peace might ease a little of what losing their son had left behind.

over the following decade, i went from intern to team lead, business development executive, business development manager, brand manager, senior brand manager, assistant vice president, and vice president. i helped build multiple businesses from scratch and generate millions of dollars in revenue across those brands. i managed teams and advertising budgets, taught people, and helped serve thousands of customers. i was doing things the eighteen-year-old version of me could barely have imagined. and i was proud of it.

i took on the household responsibilities. bills, expenses, everything that needed sorting out. i approached those responsibilities with the same obsession i brought to work. eventually, we were living in a villa in a gated society. there was air conditioning in my parents' home, a car, financial stability, and the comfort we'd been missing for years. my parents could enjoy their days without worrying about the things that had once kept them up at night.

my father eventually finished building that house in shah latif town. the same house i'd questioned him about spending so much money on. it was the second home i'd watched him build from scratch in my lifetime. i still remember how often he went there to see it being built. even after everything our family had been through, he never seemed to lose his love for building homes.

i remember thinking about the one-kanal house my father had built when i was little. the garden. the toys. the computer. the happiness i remembered from those years. i had spent so much of my adult life trying to bring that feeling back to my family. and i had managed to do it. after everything we'd been through, that meant more to me than any title i'd earned.

then, in 2024, my father was diagnosed with advanced cancer. on june 21, 2024, he was lying in a hospital bed with stage-four cancer, a tumor measuring around ten centimeters, and roughly ninety days to live. and there he was, singing his favorite songs.

i remember looking at him. the same man who'd built that house from scratch. who used to travel back and forth because he loved watching it come together. who built a garden for me. who went out with my brother to buy our first computer. who had carried my brother to the hospital ten years earlier. i'd spent years working to give him a comfortable life. and now he was lying there, singing his favorite songs.

i took him to some of the best hospitals in the city. i consulted doctors in the united states, the united kingdom, ireland, saudi arabia, and dubai. i just wanted to save him. i kept asking what could be done. i asked them to give me a number, a price, something i could work toward. i would find a way to pay it. but they kept telling me they couldn't save him. after losing my brother, i couldn't bear the thought of losing my father too.

i had never spent much time in hospitals before. all my life, i'd understood that doctors were the people who fixed things. hearing them say there was nothing they could do was an experience i wasn't ready for. those three months felt like years. every morning, i woke up knowing my father's time was running out.

in september 2024, i woke up to a world my father was no longer alive in. that was the first time i felt like i had really failed in life. i couldn't save him. i had tried everything i knew to try, and i still couldn't save him.

for years, i'd approached difficult things by learning more, working harder, earning more, finding another way. i had built a life around being able to figure things out. sitting across from those doctors, i kept looking for something i could do. some problem i could solve. some amount i could earn. there was no answer i could work my way toward.

after losing my father, i started thinking differently about the things i kept leaving for later.

i had spent years learning what i was capable of. building businesses. leading people. taking care of my family. there were still things i wanted to attempt, and i could no longer take for granted that i would always have time.

i thought about my father building those houses. how often he went back to watch them take shape. i'd questioned what he was putting into them. now i found myself wanting to understand that feeling of committing to something you wanted to see exist. his love of building stayed with me.

i was proud of the career i'd built and the people i'd worked with. i had experience, skills, and responsibilities i took seriously. i also had ideas i wanted to give a real chance. i didn't want to keep leaving them for some future version of my life.

somewhere along the way, i started dreaming about silicon valley. finding my way into the san francisco ecosystem, working alongside misfits who'd spent their lives taking ideas seriously that everyone else thought were ridiculous. i wanted to sit in those rooms. bring what i'd learned. find people i could build something ambitious with. i still do.

so i left the people i'd worked alongside for ten years. packed my bags and my ideas, and came far away from home to give myself some space to think. eventually, i found myself in thailand. the people i've met here have been kind, respectful, and encouraging. i'm giving those ideas the time and attention i'd kept promising them.

my father loved building things. my brother taught me how to use a computer. both of them helped make this part of my life possible. now i'm sitting in front of a computer again. i wish i could show them what i'm working on.

i also started thinking about how many people never get to find out what they're capable of.

people with ideas they keep to themselves. people who need someone to teach them. people who have spent so long taking care of everyone else that their own ambitions have barely had a chance.

i know something about being that person. and after ten years of learning, building, and helping people grow, i have something i can pass on.

that's the ambition behind the failure company. i want to build a place where people can take their ambitions seriously. where they can share what they've lived through, be proud of what they've accomplished, and find people willing to help them take the next step.

we'll celebrate what people build and recognize what it took to get there. we'll talk honestly about what doesn't work. we'll share what we've learned, teach each other, and give people opportunities to put their abilities to work.

i'll be building in public, documenting the work, the mistakes, and the progress. i'm starting with eighteen free places for people who want help finding their direction. real projects. honest feedback. a chance to put what they're learning into something they can be proud of.

because somewhere, someone is standing where i stood at eighteen, wondering whether they're capable of more. i want to help them find out. then help them go further than they thought they could. and when they get there, i want them to turn around and give someone else that same chance.