i'm just a guy that loves creating things for others.
i started my first company at 13 when i sold dragon ball z tenkaichi budokai 2 in 2009 on ebay.
selling stuff online turned into my high school obsession and i grew that company to $100K in revenue per year by expanding to products like these and these.
been making stuff ever since.
most recently, i was the founder of buildspace — it was the largest school in the world for people working on their own ideas from youtube videos to edm music to companies.
during the company we scaled nights & weekends online to over 100,000 students, raised from a16z/yc, constructed a physical campus in sf for those that wanted to go full-time on their ideas, and built a product to help people find others like themselves trying to build stuff.
worked on the co for five years. but, i ended up closing it down. here's a letter i wrote about it.
buildspace was special. really special.
the outcomes for alumni were really diverse. some got their first users, subscribers, listeners. some wrote the first words of their novel. some made their first $1 on the internet. some went viral. some signed record deals. some got into top accelerators and raised millions.
did a bunch of stuff before.
founded an online elementary school called zipschool focused on homeschoolers and grew it to 150,000 kiddos, trained a real time cv model that would coach you in overwatch named visor (we got really big actually, then, blizzard banned us oops), was cto at kanga, trained my own open-source deep learning models for esports analytics, built random products for league of legends that got to 1m+ users, built a dumb ar menu app that got no where, and built a bunch of other random stupid shit that was meaningless but fun (lol).
some stuff above worked out.
most of it didn't.
but, i learned a lot.
sometimes i write about my fuck ups building stuff or of when things went really right! if you want me to hyu when i write. drop your email below.
p.s: if you wanna contact me ping farza@buildspace.so, i generally respond to every single email under 300 characters with a clear ask.