I’m a nerdy ex-athlete with a love for technology and creative fields: sports, gaming, writing, coding.
I generally enjoy my time the most when I am making stuff at the intersection of math & art – ( code+ music, data + sports)
I was born in Cairo but raised on the Internet – my ethos are heavily influenced by writers such as @sivers, @visakanv, @paulgraham, @simonsarris & many more
I can be found at @alifakharany on twitter. Twitter is my only real active social media and the best way to reach me.
(I have a Substack where I write about sports!)
Work
At work, I’m good at building products that people buy and that help businesses grow, as well as building the teams that build the products.
My skillset is not very specialized, I started out as an investment banker, spent a year at a venture capital firm , and then have spent the better part of the last decade building, selling, then building multiple companies that have turned into @StatsBomb, one of the leading data sports data companies in the world.
Along the way, I’ve developed a diverse skill set, from managing teams to collaborating closely with engineers, designers, and data scientists, as well as honing my own data science skills and experience with large datasets.
The StatsBomb story is a unique one – and it’s hard to fully understand who I am without learning more about it, so I’d recommend reading the full story here.
The condensed StatsBomb story:
> Started a consulting business helping soccer teams in Egypt use data to perform better
> Realized data availability, quality and design was the bottleneck, built a data generation factory in Cairo
> Met StatsBomb founders on Twitter + cold-emails, realized they were having the same problem with data quality and design, merged both companies (ArqamFC + StatsBomb)
> Scaled product and data generation from 10 people and 2 clients to 1000+ data collectors and 300+ global clients
> Sold StatsBomb to Hudl, the industry leader in sports analytics
Future
I’ve spent all of my life obsessing over how to identify and make better athletes, and as a result I think I’d be quite good as a Sporting Director or General Manager of any sports team. That role combines human performance, entertainment, data science, finance and decision-making in ways that fit my skillset uniquely!
I have lots of (half-baked) future ideas for companies I want to build / areas of interest that I want to explore deeper.
- A data-driven tennis academy to help develop elite tennis players (See: DrivelineBaseball)
- Apprenticeship focused learning to help people find more jobs (Bloomtech, LaunchSchool)
- Tools that make coding/design easier (Replit, Zapier)
- Content creation + tools
I think some themes of my interests are:
Making money on the internet is easier and more accessible than most people think.
Skill development is the bottleneck for more people who are great at their jobs + skill development is stuck in 19th century.
Too much of the Internet’s life-changing content is made for broadest audience (English-speaking, common tastes, etc). (Scott Belsky tweet)
Personal
I was born and raised in Cairo, lived there most of my adult life and a lot of life has felt like finding increasingly weird ways not to leave.
Balancing being close to family & friends, the great weather, the community vibes, with the increasingly depressing economic and political situation has been one of the main challenges of my life so far. I don’t have many answers to this dilemma. I think the thing that has worked the most for me here is just trying (and often failing) to shape the world around me into what I want it to be, so I will just leave you with quotes I come back to a lot:
“The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think.”
pmarca
The Most Precious Resource is Agency
@simonsarris
focus your time and energy on what you want to see more of
@visakanv
I love board and card games, and spend a lot of time thinking about how to hack them, improve at them and how build them to be more like video games with difficulty levels
I’m weirdly into fantasy sports, and spend way too much time building models and tools to help me beat my friends. I joke that finishing top 5k in Fantasy Premier League globally should be on my resume, so writing it here will have to do. (One of projects on my endless to do list is going to be fplreview but for basketball?)
Fikha's Blog 