The Fourth Option: Alif and Silicon Valley’s Muslim Counterculture
Inside Alif, the accelerator crafting a new vocabulary of agency for Muslims in tech.
The Alif Jumu’ah: You Can Just Do Things
Alif, an accelerator at the frontier of a new subculture in Silicon Valley, is inextricably linked to the Jumu’ah prayer. After announcing its pilot cohort, Batch 0, in the summer of 2024, Alif began hosting a Jumu’ah in Fort Mason Park. The Alif Jumu’ah quickly took off, becoming an unexpected mainstay for San Francisco’s Muslims, natives, nomads and transplants alike — with some driving 45 minutes to attend. “There was no mosque near us to go pray together at,” Alif’s founder, Omar Waseem, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. So, with a partiful link and some tarps weighed down by backpacks, “we started one.”
The photos of the Jumu’ah, shared on social media by Alif with a mix of quippy in-group references (“touched grass, JM”) and earnest captions (“a testament to our community’s commitment to faith and mutual support”), are compositionally striking. Rows of worshippers dot neon blue tarps centred on a seemingly endless expanse of green, framed by palm trees and the San Francisco skyline, and surrounded by the bright blue sky.
The perspective and scale of the photos, between an iPhone and a drone, are both intimate and immense. The photos exude a sense of cinematic cool that reflects the ethos animating Alif’s spirit: you can just do things. You can just start a company. You can just start an accelerator. You can just lay down some tarp and pray, every Friday, with your coworkers, friends and family in the middle of Fort Mason Park.
The Alif Story
With roots in Furqan Rydhan’s Founders Inc. — Waseem worked at Founders Inc., and Rydhan was one of Alif’s first backers — Alif was born out of a dual urgency.
First, there is the urgency of our historical moment. Introducing Alif on X last spring, Waseem wrote, “With what we’ve seen from AI in the last two years”, there is a “window of opportunity that’s never existed at this magnitude in history”. He elaborates on this urgency on his YouTube channel — a well-produced, tightly edited channel that remixes the Mr. Beast school of YouTube with the tone and content of a thoughtful podcast, consolidating the bootstrapped ups and downs of young founders. Referring to AI, he says, “There is a generational opportunity that has never existed before, and that will probably never exist again in the same exact capacity to build things that create real impact.” Alif intends to take advantage of that.
Underlying Alif’s responsibility to the historical moment is an even deeper urgency: To create the kind of space Waseem wished existed when he first began his career. This goal, to build the community, infrastructure and cultural presence he had once searched for, but couldn’t find, is in active conversation with Silicon Valley 1.0 and 2.0. Alif is, in that sense, a space of the generational consolidation and transfer of knowledge and capital. “We’re building a space now where people who have done the thing can help bring up the people that are doing the thing for the first time”, Waseem says in a vlog, “And that has never existed in the Muslim community in the startup space”.
Over the past year, Alif has emerged as a gravitational centre for Muslim builders. One of Alif’s most notable milestones was its one-day Summit, held on February 1 at the City View Metreon in downtown San Francisco. Its slate of speakers, a mix of Muslim internet royalty and Silicon Valley heavyweights, was buzzy. The biggest draw was Replit-founder Amjad Masad, the Paul Graham darling whose influence touches both Gen Z builders and the alt-curious edges of tech Twitter.
The Summit drew over 600 attendees, most of whom flew into San Francisco for the event. It generated, conservatively, well over a quarter of a million dollars for a city much in need of the revenue. Tickets, averaging at $290, sold double and triple their value in the days and hours leading up to the event. Screenshots of Waseem’s personalised email confirmation to ticket buyers were shared on Twitter and Instagram. An unofficial WhatsApp group chat for Summit attendees was circulated on Twitter and ballooned to hundreds of members before the event. The Summit was, in short, a hype-fueled viral event that attracted not just the self-stylised “Muslim builder,” but also attracted any curious, ambitious and driven Muslim seeking a community of other curious, ambitious and driven Muslims.
The Summit also marked a new chapter in Alif’s journey, one that launched it into the public Muslim imagination. Its moment in the spotlight offered an inside look into a venture that is well on its way to a blueprint for the next generation of Muslim founders.
The Fourth Option
The Summit trailer, released two months before the event, begins with Waseem, sitting in the middle of a dimly lit workspace — something between an artist’s studio, a content creator’s set and a maker’s lab. Into a microphone, he recites, with bored lilt, the familiar diaspora refrain: “Doctor. Lawyer. Engineer.” Then, with a tilt forward, a glint, and perfectly measured beat, he asks, “But what if there was a fourth option?”
Despite talking robots and driverless cars, “we,” Waseem says, are still “stuck” at boring desk jobs. Yet, “now more than ever,” the trailer continues, “there is a new generation of Muslim builders that is being created in real time in front of us.” As he says this, a collage of Muslim founders pops up behind him. In addition to Rydhan, the collage features Haroon Mokhtarzada, an entrepreneur who sold Truebill, now RocketMoney, for $1.4 billion; Mamoon Hamid, a venture capitalist who co-founded Social Capital with Chamath Palipapitiya; and Jawed Karim, the mysterious co-founder of YouTube whose video “me at the zoo,” the first ever YouTube video, changed the world and who, since then, co-founded YVentures with Kevin Hartz and Keith Rabois.
As the Muslim founders’ collage fades, the trailer’s tone shifts. “History has shown us”, Waseem says, “that you can’t build big things alone”. With this line, the “builders” Waseem had just spoken about are not just aspirations collected in a collage, they’re us — they are the viewer, they are you. “So, for the first time ever”, Waseem pauses, “we are hosting a summit.”
By repositioning the viewer into an active participant in the success of the past generation of Muslim founders, the trailer collapses the distance between aspiration and identification. The trailer says, it’s not just that these Muslim builders exist, it’s that you too might be one of them. You just need to show up at the Summit.
I start with the Summit trailer because it captures, in under a minute, the core of what made the Alif Summit so compelling, and ultimately, so successful. The trailer is a skilful heir to the Don Draper school of advertising. It sells both a product and a vision, and in addition to giving people what they want, it teaches them what to want. The trailer’s power lies in its legitimisation and mainstreaming of a new vocabulary, specifically, the idea of the “builder.”
Delivering its message with a sleek authority, the word “builder” — a fluid, historically loaded term in and out of Silicon Valley — is presented without definition, and without irony. It is presented as if it has always belonged in the same canon as doctor, lawyer, and engineer. The trailer scripts a cultural shift, one that positions “builder” as self-evident, both an identity and an aspiration.
I was an outsider at the Summit: a lawyer observing the rituals and vocabulary of a community I am not part of. As an outsider, I recognise I might miss the cultural layers that insiders navigate unconsciously — Clifford Geertz’s “thick description,” and Pierre Bourdieu's habitus. Yet, a disposition of nearness and remoteness offers a distinct opportunity to examine assumptions the ecosystem takes for granted, while recognising the sincere ambitions and tensions at play.
At the Summit
The energy at the City View Metreon on that rainy San Francisco morning was electric, charged with the kind of breathless, youthful anticipation of move-in day at college. Upon the painlessly seamless check-in, each attendee was given a choice of three colored stickers for their badge to indicate their role: Founder, investor, or student.
I couldn’t resist a cheeky quip, “What if I am none of those things?”, confusing the smiling volunteer who hesitated with a puzzled smile before cheerfully suggesting I pick whatever felt closest. I picked “student.” Still, flippancy aside, the stickers were a smart visual system that eliminated the worst parts of networking (the opening questions), while enhancing its best parts (finding your people). Once checked in, I placed the sticker on the back of my badge.
Inside, the attention to detail reflected a commitment to excellence rarely seen among Muslims who, out of necessity, often accept middling production quality in exchange for community. The space was thoughtfully choreographed with fireside chats, an exhibition space, and a coffee cart. The polish and production value conveyed a seriousness, setting the tone that this Summit was different.
Despite the polish, I went in with scepticism. Aside from Rydhan, Masad and Mokhtarzada, the speaker lineup felt familiar, just another conference where modest achievements are repackaged as groundbreaking innovation, where representation is confused with power, and virility with influence.
But as each speaker took the stage, my cynicism softened.
Rhydan, who has built across multiple Silicon Valley cycles, delivered the day’s most foundational message: You can just do things. Conversational rather than polished, there was an almost weathered, perennial wisdom to his delivery, less guru, more guide — a secure older brother who wants to give away the playbook. Rhydan gave an audience conditioned to seek permission, the permission to blow up their frameworks, and just start.
Masad, whose company Replit is valued at $1.2 billion, resonated with an audience hungry to see itself reflected in tech’s upper echelons. Although the interview format felt constraining, forcing Masad to provide brief answers to predictable questions that barely scratched the surface of what he had to offer, his presence alone seemed to expand the room’s sense of possibility.
Rayouf Alhumedhi, who designed the hijab emoji that now appears on billions of phones, delivered what was unexpectedly one of the more compelling presentations. The hijab-emoji had always struck me as a well-intentioned but ultimately hollow gesture that flattened identity into iconography, even accelerating the displacement of the self into the hyperreal where representation is considered a necessary substitute for reality. Yet, Alhumedhi’s path from a teenager designing the hijab emoji in Berlin to a sophisticated career as a designer and curator in the venture capital world complicated my own reductive reading by revealing someone who was working at the intersections, and therefore, with discomfort and friction.
Amir Al-Khatahtbeh, the founder and CEO of Muslim, one of the “largest Muslim media networks” in the world, was almost hesitant on stage, as if uncertain he belonged among the speakers. Al-Khatahtbeh’s media company, @Muslim, is an Instagram account with over 6 million followers that describes itself as the ‘#1 Source for All Muslim News & Content”, and is a feed of aggregated photography, news, and religious content that averages well over 100,000 likes per post. In his talk, Al-Khatahtbeh compared @Muslim to Muhammad Speaks, the Nation of Islam newspaper that had reached 2 million readers in the 1960s. He compared Angela Davis giving Muhammad Speaks an exclusive interview after she was released from jail in the early 1970s, to @Muslim’s crucial work in keeping Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza online. Although the comparison was admittedly strained — @Muslim is largely an aggregator of news, while Muhammad Speaks was a generator of original movement journalism and political thought — the underlying point about Muslim-controlled media infrastructure was compelling. In today’s digital media landscape, it is easy to see why a built-in virality machine like @Muslim is valuable.
Tasneem Atik Sabri, Vela co-founder, was a curious but welcome addition. As a company, Vela has so fundamentally transformed the hijab industry that its hijabs are memed — everyone knows about the difficulty of securing the watercolour Velas. It was hard not to squirm a little at the corporate polish of “We don’t just sell scarves. We sell confidence, identity and pride,” especially as images of stylish, Instagram-ready, Vela-clad women flashed across the screen to a majority male audience. Still, behind the marketing is a complex e-commerce empire that employs over 25 people and has developed a custom supply chain. As the gold standard of hijabs – the Nike of hijabs, as Sabri put it – Vela had built something undeniably impressive: A fashion brand that is also a functional piece of Muslim-owned infrastructure. For an audience learning to think in terms of capital, ownership, and long-term civilisational presence, a company that is actively shaping the hijab market is inspiring.
Mokhtarzada gave the day’s last talk, and although it was reportedly and by his own admission nearly identical to the talk he gave at Muslim Tech Week, his talk offered something the audience was hungry for: A practical roadmap for building a billion-dollar company without compromising Islamic values. His story, from nearly fifty investors' rejections to closing one of his biggest deals via DocuSign while in Medina, offered a kind of gritty happily ever after that is universally appealing. Although the Summit was expressly a tech conference, Mokhtarzada was a unique distillation of the Summit’s premise that Muslim excellence and tech ambition are seamlessly integrated, that spiritual grounding does not preclude material ambition.
As the day wore on, I was left with the wistful glow of a proud older sibling, and a protective wonder at the self-possession that, while not always relatable to me, clearly resonated with an audience hungry for a vocabulary of agency.
The vocabulary of agency essentially came down to one word: “builder.” Each speaker offered a distinct answer to the same question: What does it mean to be a “builder”? The collective answer was that a builder is someone curious and obsessive. Although a simple definition, it is expansive, it authorises action. If you are sincerely curious about a problem and obsessive about solving it, you’re a builder.
A Vocabulary of Possibility
Strolling after Maghreb prayer — of which there were several rounds to accommodate both the crowds and the travellers — I stopped by a black wall near the venue entrance covered with hundreds of sticky notes and printed cards. It was a wall of ideas, wishes and dreams of the Summit’s attendees. The result was a sprawling insight into a community learning what it means to dream at scale.
The ideas ranged from the practical to the fantastical. AI Quran tutors with tajweed correction sat beside rocket-powered skis. Muslim social networks next to an Iron Man suit and a real-life Jarvis. Mental health AI assistants next to platforms for elder care. Bitcoin and “halal economy,” next to retirement homes for elderly Muslims, water desalination plants next to a dental office that looks and feels like a spa and AI fashion for men. Someone wrote “A rocket ship?” complete with a question mark, an admission of uncertainty, but going for it anyway.
As I walked along the wall, tensions that revealed an ambitious community struggling to develop a coherent vocabulary of possibility that marries collective dreams with practical building became apparent.
First, there was the scale mismatch. Individual entries like “Muslim social network,” and “AI Quran tutor” (one of dozens of AI-enabled technology ideas) sat alongside civilisational ideals, like “an app that eliminates food and housing insecurity,” or “global sustainable energy infrastructure,” and even “a time machine to go visit ancient cities.” Many of these ideas require national resources, decades of development and for some, scientific breakthroughs. The tension lay in the mismatch between the scale of the dreams and the tools available to realise them. Building an AI app is one thing. Building a sovereign cultural, financial and scientific infrastructure is another. How does one go from prototyping to scaffolding?
Palestine also featured on the wall — as it had throughout the entire event. With attendees wearing kuffiyehs, cheering loudly anytime a speaker brought up Palestine, and showing off Palestine stickers on laptops, it was clear Palestine had become the community’s reference point, if not its anchor. Palestine revealed the scale mismatch most starkly. A note about a “tech hub in Gaza,” next to simple, and at times, basic, platform ideas exposed the gap between solidarity and capability. Building the infrastructure we need to help, and better yet, prevent a Gaza from ever happening again, requires the kind of sovereign systems thinking that seemed muted, if not missing.
Then there was the representation question. Many of the ideas on the wall seemed to be what Waseem expressly and explicitly wanted Alif to move beyond: “Muslim marketplace app”, “Entirely Muslim-friendly investment platform”, “A marketplace for halal economy investments”, “Islamic Ed-Tech”, “Muslim social network”. In his Ansari podcast interview, Waseem stated Alif’s goal: “It isn’t that we need to be the best Muslim podcast, or the best Muslim cafe, or the best Muslim founder. We just want to be Muslim, and then be the best to ever do it, in our category.” Yet, the wall still showed traces of “halalification” — the impulse to imitate what exists by adding a lazy “Muslim” or “Islamic” prefix to it.
Despite its tensions, the wall was instructive, revealing an ambitious community for whom the future is full of possibility. Revealing, in short, a community that is learning how to think like, and be, builders. In its own clumsy way, it underscored one of the functions of a place like Alif and the Summit, which was attempting to scale a new vocabulary and become a funnel for ambition.
A Blueprint
A dawning realisation in our generation is that what passes for ‘Muslim cultural expectations’ isn’t working; the divide between the mosque and the workplace, or anything else in life, is neither satisfying nor logical. The fourth option – to be a “builder” instead of a lawyer, doctor, or engineer – is as much a declaration of rebellion against quotidian cultural mores within the Muslim community as it is a counterculture within Silicon Valley.
Rather than passively consume the world, the younger generation of Muslims now wants to act on it with agency, shaping it in their image. To be a builder is not just a set of skills but a disposition towards the world. It is a disposition that Kasurian is attempting to create the vocabulary to describe.
In a time of AI slop, hallucinated truths, deep fakes and increasingly urgent ethical questions, Alif, as a company informed by Islam, seems to possess the core intuition that there is a missing gap for a new vocabulary and form of legitimacy necessary towards the cultivation of a new generation of Muslim “founders” in tech, who understand the importance of ihsan as a means to success. For Muslims, the question of “but should we?” is already and always embedded in “can we?” In the current moment, there is a virtue in building while publicly wrestling with the ethical stakes as part of the design process itself. At the same time, as Waseem put it in his Ansari interview, Muslims are too often too afraid of money — and he’s right. With Alif, ethical seriousness does not preclude power and sovereignty.
For all its sincerity and both its civilisational and practical world-building, the Summit was an exceptionally executed marketing spectacle. In that way, it was truly of its “content is king” era. Content is king is risky, because representation can’t be more important than the reality it represents. But, as Mad Men argued, even the most cynical packaging — advertising — is built atop the most sincere of human desires: the search for meaning.
Although at times it appeared to still be operating within the margins of the 2010s tech culture (founder worship, frictionless scaling, the cult of the new), ultimately, the Summit revealed a community hungry to scale and funnel its imagination, skills, and money towards new frameworks. It also showed that the means to build with both audacity and accountability are possible.
Alif, as Waseem has noted, is building people who build systems. That’s what makes “you can just do things” more than a slogan, but a call to action at the scale of civilisation.
Author: Mariam Mahmoud is a lawyer in California. She can be found on Twitter/X at @mariammahmoudns.
Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.
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