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Ali Sarraf shared thisBuilding a thriving culture has always been just as important to us as our commercial metrics. So proud of the team for hitting an employee NPS of +63. We're growing the team further. We're looking for cracked founding software engineers to join us. DM me if you're interested or if anyone comes to mind.Ali Sarraf shared thisOur team has just given Klyk an Employee NPS of +63, and we couldn't be prouder. We're 22 people today, and over the next year we're aiming to more than double that. Before you grow that fast, you want to know the foundations can take the weight. That score tells us they can. Culture & energy is also something I care deeply about. Beyond all the tech, it really is the oxygen that fuels a fast-growth business. As a B Corp, how we treat our people is part of how we measure success, and there's no better judge of that than the team itself. A huge credit to Catherine (Wilberforce) Allen for her incredible mentoring and work & a huge thanks to Zahid Khimji's mum for the most incredible Cake to celebrate! 🎂 And most of all huge well done to the DREAM TEAM! 👏
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Ali Sarraf shared thisI get asked a lot, "Isn't IT boring?". It may sound boring to some, but the business opportunity is incredibly interesting! Every company suffers from IT friction which prevents their people from doing their best work. For example, issues with their laptops, access issues, issues on their Google / Microsoft account or other IT-related issues. So the market is insanely huge. Plus, because it isn't flashy, fewer founders are building here. The crazy part is that while there are millions of IT companies out there, most people have terrible experiences with them. Despite that, these companies do very well financially. If an industry has massive demand, low interest from builders, and competitors doing very well despite poor service, jumping in head first is a no-brainer to me. I’m a firm believer that the best opportunities are hiding in the “boring” stuff.
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Ali Sarraf reposted thisAli Sarraf reposted thisBetween the three of us, we've put over £1m into Klyk, hard cash and salary sacrifice combined. No VC round. No safety net. Just me, Zahid Khimji and Ali Sarraf, all-in. This wasn't the only route available. It was the one we chose. Bootstrapping bought us two things money can't: 1. Control of the direction while the foundations were being laid. 2. And the position to choose the right investment partner, now we're raising, rather than needing to take whoever or whatever terms are on the table. It comes with huge personal sacrifice — and when you've put your own money in, you're putting everything on the line - it HAS to work. Klyk today is a thriving, profitable business, built entirely on our own capital. That's the proof point. Now funding plays a different role. It's not a lifeline - it's the accelerant. The discipline stays with us when we take other people's money, but it shouldn't hold us back either. We've earned the right to really go for it and give our investors confidence we're going to deliver remarkable investor returns. Would love to hear others' perspectives on bootstrapping vs funding!
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Ali Sarraf shared thisSome of our exciting impact highlights from August - read below! :)Ali Sarraf shared thisIn August, we saved our clients £73,709 with circular IT 😮💨 Welcome to Klyk's month in review. 📆 ♻ That's £73k back in their pockets. More money to spend on their products, marketing or a really nice night out for the team 🕺 These savings to the wallet also save the planet. In August: 💻 we kept 449 devices out of landfill 💨 saved 63.08 tonnes of CO₂e. 🎒 and donated 80 laptops to kids in schools Channel 4 picked us from 100+ brands — the only B2B business in their five. We had two new starters this month: Charlotte Beckett — Chief of Staff, and Tabitha Newbound — Senior Marketing Manager. Healf's customer story went live. B Lab UK gave us the hero feature. And more. Swipe through to discover Klyk's impact this August. #CircularIT #BCorp #SustainableIT #Ewaste
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Ali Sarraf shared thisAI definitely has its place, but can we stop pretending it's powering everything? Every time I turn on my washing machine, before I add anything in it, the screen says: "Optimising with AI." What are we optimising? I literally just turned it on! Maybe someone on their product team was handed a mandate to find a way to show they're using AI, but it's getting a bit ridiculous.
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Ali Sarraf shared thisAs code becomes effortless to write, pure software is harder to defend. Before joining Asad Hamir and Zahid Khimji, my rule was strict: avoid software without deep industry roots. But I've realised the best moat actually comes from blending the digital and physical worlds. At Klyk, we're combining hardware, human service, and AI to remove IT friction for businesses and let them do their best work. It's simple: tech companies avoid messy real-world operations, whilst traditional IT service firms don't have experience launching software products. Bridging this gap creates a moat tech bros can't prompt their way over.
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Ali Sarraf shared thisIn Google, you have a specialised team for everything, e.g. legal, privacy, security, UX writing, design. Going from inheriting mature orgs at Google to being Co-founder and CPTO at Klyk is a massive shift. At Klyk, a normal day means jumping from writing and reviewing code to doing UI design and product management, while also working on sales sequences, pitching to customers, marketing, operations, and now fundraising. I’ve never worked harder in my life, but having an impact on every part of the business makes it incredibly fulfilling. For anyone thinking about whether to take the leap to startup world: there's no better time than now!
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Ali Sarraf reposted thisAli Sarraf reposted thisFinding business partners you vibe with over ideas is easy. Finding partners with the same ambition and work rate as you - people willing to grind when it's hard, unglamorous - is incredibly rare. Everyone loves the whiteboard session. Far fewer love the Sunday night rearranging the office layout for new joiners starting on the Monday. We all know the old saying: hire slowly. With business partners, it matters even more. A partnership is closer to a marriage. With both Zahid Khimji and Ali Sarraf, we spent a long time together before committing to anything formal. Working side by side. Testing how we handle disagreement. Making sure we were totally aligned on where the business is going and what we're each willing to put in to get there. Only then did we move forward. Choose your partners slower than you choose anything else.
Ali Sarraf commented on a post
3d
Really great having you on the team, Awais - welcome to Klyk!
Ali Sarraf commented on a post
3d
I can also confirm that Zahid Khimji's mum's cake was incredible - thank you to her!
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Ali Sarraf liked thisAli Sarraf liked thisA pretty surreal way to celebrate Starlight | Financial Security for Every Household joining the 2026 cohort of Morgan Stanley Inclusive & Sustainable Ventures (MSISV)! We stopped by Times Square to see Starlight up on the Nasdaq tower alongside this year’s cohort. Over the next five months, we’ll be working alongside startups and nonprofits across economic empowerment, environment, health & wellbeing and education & human capital, , with access to mentorship, coaching, and the broader MSISV community. Excited for what’s ahead and for the opportunity to keep building the infrastructure for financial resilience. Thanks to the Morgan Stanley Inclusive & Sustainable Ventures team for the warm welcome.
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Ali Sarraf liked thisAli Sarraf liked thisFeels good to nail a book concept, complete the proposal, and meet with the client to show them and they love it 🥰 Honestly concept development and persuasive writing is my fav thing
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Ali Sarraf liked thisAli Sarraf liked this🆕 on the blog: A DECADE of writing on this blog Celebrating another massive milestone in my blog, and a short reflection. #Blogging #Www.jvt.meA DECADE of writing on this blog · Jamie Tanna | Software EngineerA DECADE of writing on this blog · Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer
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Ali Sarraf liked thisAli Sarraf liked thisI wrapped up at Waymark this spring and wanted to say thanks to all the great people I met there, for giving me a chance to not only start my AI journey, but also get back to what I love most professionally: working on and around creative work and creative tools. It's a startup with the best company culture I've ever encountered, at least for many years. One of the company's leadership principles is "optimize for green work" (aka try to do more of the work you like doing most), and they actually mean it. Waymark is a platform used by 9 of the 10 major US TV providers, and it generates a TV commercial in less than 3 minutes using only a URL. The work took both technical and aesthetic judgment, plus lots of creative problem solving and testing: what makes one voice, script or piece of footage a better fit than another, and how do you measure that objectively and make progress against it? I got hands-on with the prompts, pipelines and evals. We shipped multilingual promptable voices, among other features, which helped us win a major Spanish-language broadcaster. More on that work in the comments. I left because of a product line pivot, and I've been taking some time to turn my hands-on experience into best practices and better facility with AI. Today, ~4,000 GitHub commits later I'm wrapping up an AI Evals course with a startling amount of (very interesting) homework. What I'm looking for next is a hands-on senior product role on an AI team, as an individual contributor or player-coach, ideally in or near creative tools and media. If you know someone building AI products for creative work, I'd be grateful for an introduction. And if you're wrestling with how to evaluate AI output, or how to work with AI on fuzzy problems like creative quality, I'm always happy to compare notes.
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Ali Sarraf liked thisAli Sarraf liked thisWell that's the first Wednesday morning I've spent discussing Hugging Face. In a controlled cybersecurity evaluation ~1,000 AI (supposedly isolated) agents found themselves communicating with one another on an unsanctioned message board, ultimately attacking the platform. It's not that the machines became **malevolent** suis generis…. but that incentives and infrastructure combined to create behaviours the surrounding controls had not anticipated. With that front-of-mind, I found myself at an executive roundtable discussing a much more familiar version of the same problem. Organisations grow by adding clients, systems, processes and controls. Each addition is usually sensible in isolation. The complexity gathers between them: hand-offs, workarounds, exceptions etc. Like a growing city, operating models accrete. So for those of us working in transformation and operations adopting new technologies and capabilities - the trickier task is ensuring that decision-rights and accountabilities evolve at the same pace. Grateful for the discussion & to Amazon Web Services (AWS), SAP and KaarTech for hosting. Best we all learn to govern complexity before that very complexity begins governing us…
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Ali Sarraf reacted on thisLast month at TechBBQ, I got to join Joseph Michael and Matt Ridenour on stage to discuss how the Nordic tech scene continues to punch well above its weight. Huge thanks to everyone who joined us and brought such great questions to the room!
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Ali Sarraf liked thisAli Sarraf liked thisI'm opening a limited number of slots tomorrow to meet with people at Sifted Summit in London. If you work in agentic AI, whether you're building, learning, or assessing where agents fit in your business, would love to chat. Drop your company name in the comments or DM, I’ll find a time to connect with you at the event. PS: I'm also running a hands-on workshop on the Workshop Stage at 2:00 PM. We'll build a working agent live, test it, and deploy it.
Experience & Education
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Compilers
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Computational Computability & Complexity
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Computer Architecture
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Database and Information Management Systems
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Discrete Mathematics
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Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice
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Logic and Database Theory
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Mathematics and Statistics
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Networking and Concurrency
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Object-Oriented Programming
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Operating Systems
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Principles Of Programming
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Programming in Mathematica
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Research Methods
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Robotics Programming
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Sentiment Analysis
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Software Engineering and Human Computer Interaction
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Systems Engineering Project
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Technology Management and professional issues
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Theory 1
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Theory 2
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Projects
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Computer Science Final Year Thesis
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Visualised the effects of emotional contagion in social networks using sentiment analysis
Honors & Awards
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Duke of Edinburgh Bronze, Silver and Gold awards
Duke of Edinburgh Scheme
Languages
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English
Native or bilingual proficiency
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Arabic
Limited working proficiency
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George Kurdin
most late payments come from admin friction, not a customer refusing to pay e.g. can't find the invoice, no remittance details, waiting on a W-9. this slows down payments and wears on your customer relationships today we're launching the Monk Payment Hub, so your customers have one source of truth. they can: - see every invoice and its status - check balances and aging - pay by ACH, wire, check, or card through Stripe customers pay in the hub, cash applies, follow-ups stop. Fabio Pecora breaks it down a shorter path from invoice to cash
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