wrapping up dubai w/ ai + frnds ft. farza

writing this on my 14 hour flight to toronto, i’ve slept a good 8 hours (magically), watched a movie and am all fresh to write

i’ve spent 4 months in dubai and couldn’t have asked for a better ending.

i organized the biggest ai agent edu event with Farza (who i really look up to) at my high school that inspired many many people to make their first thing with ai

a little backstory:

farza started this company called buildspace - an online program to help people turn projects into legit businesses. almost like an alt path to school

didn’t matter how big or small the project is or “credible” you were as a founder, you’d join it and work on anything - from a song to a vertical farm factory

i joined in the summer of 2024 and fell in love with the company. all they stood for was caring about the little guy, and helping them at no cost

at the core of everything i do, i feel the same inclination. to help + inspire others. i get that from my mother, who’s always done things for the goodness of others and expected nothing in return

Farza’s very much like that. that’s why i look up to him

—

so i was in dubai for 4 months, working on the cold email hall of fame. i thought it would be cool to run a cold email hackathon

a friendly competition where people come together to send life changing cold emails. after all, a lot of successes in my life have come from cold emails. so i wanted others to get those opportunities too

but i had to prove this works. so i gave myself the same deadline - a week before hosting the hackathon to cold email my way to partners, sponsors and A tier judges.

I ended up partnering with a sam-altman backed company, got sponsored by a founder’s fund and even got Farza and Jay Yang to be judges. all through cold email

then i taught this art of cold email to 300+ people. the outcomes they had were WILD

you can see them here: coldemails.world/hackathon 

—

ai+frnds

so farza agreed to judge the cold emails from the hackathon. and it turned out, he was in dubai too!

i’d literally cold emailed him, sent him DMs on whatsapp, X and IG. and luckily he messaged me asking if i wanted to meet

of course i said yes. and we sat down at a cafe and did this zoom call going over the cold emails

then he’d told me he wanted to host a builder meetup in dubai and asked me if i wanted to do it together

i was so excited i literally went around universities the same day looking for spots. then i had this thought - why not do it at my high school. after all they have a huge theatre with $500k screens

so we met up with the principal and luckily she let us use the auditorium.

for the next 6 days me + farza worked together to make this event as cool and fun as possible.

which turned this “builder meetup” into something much more.

we thought ‘what if farza showed me how to make my first thing with ai, but we did it live on stage. in front of an audience’

that would be sick!

now it was about getting people to care.

so we sat down together to come up with the copy of the event. we started by drafting tweets

if you can put an idea into a tweet and make it sound interesting then chances are others will too!

here’s the tweet draft we chose: “i show my friend how to build his first ai app -- live on stage in dubai”

then i started posting reels and tiktoks. very targeted and focused on people in dubai. we didn’t overthink it.

or actually i did but farza showed me how to keep things simple and just focus on shipping 

over 6 days, somehow we got over 600 people to sign up. replit and rork sponsored free credits. 2 people were even flying in just for this event

i couldn’t believe this - how did we get 600 ppl to sign to an in person event? it didn’t feel like we did anything special. so i asked farza what did we do differently?

his response was that we were super honest. from the headline to the reel to the emails we sent out. everything was authentic to our why for doing the event. which was that i genuinely wanted to make my first app with ai and show others how to do it

and farza genuinely wanted to just share the knowledge. that’s it. so simple.

even this skit we made. super authentic.

we had some really cool people help out. nokhez took over the registration, ish became our bouncer for guests haha, mariam and riri were guiding people to the auditorium. manav killed it with the stickers, and the logo for our event

here’s all of us:

and the best of all, the one who i’d give the man of the match award. was the tech guy - subith sir. who was on holiday but still came to help us and set up everything so smoothly. god bless him.

and the event?
oh, it was magical

especially seeing seeing how inspired people were afterwards.

farza’s a really good teacher. and i’m a really good student (because i ask a lot of dumb questions)

my brother’s friends were forced to come by my mom and dad but at the end of it they were genuinely so inspired to make their first apps with ai. they were talking about all the different ideas they had on the car ride back

the energy was just something else, and we realized we need to bring this to more people around the world.

an event where we show friends how to make their first thing with ai live on stage in front of an audience

that’s ai + frnds.

and our next event location is vancouver 🇨🇦 

going to be posting the event updates and recordings here: aiplusfriends.com

idk if this will become a huge company or not. regardless we want to have fun doing these events and make this access to knowledge free. always.

we trust the rest to work itself out and maybe we just inspire a couple of people along the way

see ya in van!

— Sid