About

I was born and raised in Cairo. It's the kind of city that forms you whether you want it to or not — the noise, the pace, the particular way things get done here. I grew up around Life Style Furniture, the family business my father started in 2003. Factory floors and showrooms were familiar ground before I understood what they meant.

When I was fourteen, I got hit by a car. It was serious — I shouldn't be writing this, statistically speaking. But I am, clearly. The recovery took time, and it left me with a specific relationship to urgency: a quiet awareness that time isn't guaranteed, and that waiting around for the "right moment" is mostly a waste of it.

At seventeen, I left for United World College of Changshu China. UWC is a strange and formative institution — students from eighty-plus countries, selected not for academics alone but for something harder to define. Values, potential, the capacity to hold complexity. Changshu itself wasn't Beijing or Shanghai; it was a smaller city, genuinely immersive, far from any expat bubble. Two years there rewired how I think about culture, difference, and what it means to be from somewhere.

Then COVID hit. January 2020, I was eighteen, in one of the most internationally diverse environments imaginable — and within weeks, I was back in my childhood bedroom in Cairo. The whiplash was total. I started college online (St. Olaf, in Minnesota), trained at the gym until I'd gone from 58kg to 70kg, and sat with the strange stillness of a world on pause.

When borders reopened, I moved to Northfield, Minnesota. St. Olaf is a small liberal arts college in a town of 20,000 people — winters that hit negative thirty, summers that feel impossibly green. I studied Computer Science and Mathematics, not because I planned to be a developer but because I wanted to understand how systems work. Four years of depth and quiet after years of constant movement.

After graduation, I drove from Minnesota to San Francisco — through South Dakota, Wyoming, across the Rockies into California. I worked in AI infrastructure: language model training pipelines, the machinery behind the tools everyone was starting to use. It was interesting work in an interesting moment. But San Francisco's worldview — its assumptions about what matters, what success looks like, where the future gets built — started to feel increasingly disconnected from what I actually cared about.

I made the decision to move back on election night, November 2024. Not as a political reaction — that would be too simple — but as a crystallizing moment. The feeling had been forming for months: the Bay Area wasn't where I wanted to build a life. That night, the feeling became a plan.

I returned to Cairo in May 2025. Joined LSF immediately, in a business development role — building on the foundation my father laid rather than starting from scratch. In January 2026, I added a role at VIE Communities, a premium real estate brand in Cairo. I'm new to real estate sales and comfortable saying so. The overlap with LSF is real: same developers, same market intelligence, different applications.

The bet is simple: that someone who left, saw how things work elsewhere, and chose to come back brings a particular kind of value. That Cairo is in a moment — real demand for quality, growing discernment, supply still catching up. That the combination of international exposure and deep local roots is worth something.

I'm twenty-four. I've done some things, I have a lot to learn, and I'm building.