Tech demos are the theater of Silicon Valley. Within the Valley, there’s only a limited amount of attention — and time — to parse through the hundreds of product launches every week. On X, the stage, founders fight for virality. Few manage to get attention, fewer outlive the initial wave of hype, and even fewer sustain attention week after week.
Not so for Farza.
Over the last few months, the founder of an AI company that’s not yet a household name has become something of a recurring character on X. When he posts, he appears center stage with a laptop in seemingly impromptu demos, speaking with conversational casualness, accompanied by game-play music.
In one such demo posted on X in April 2026, Farza introduced an AI companion, HeyClicky. The companion, a small blue triangle resembling a play button, lives right next to his on-screen cursor and teaches him how to use DaVinci Resolve, video-editing software, by taking full hands-free control of his Mac, and talking him through it; it walks him through color-grading, advising on which data file to employ for coloring based on the type of raw file the video uses. “I don’t wanna watch a one hour YouTube video about it [video editing], I wanna learn by doing,” Farza explains. The post hit almost 3,000,000 views, with 5,000 people signing up for access to HeyClicky. This was unexpected for Farza, who had just been playing around with what he thought was a “dumb idea.”
In other demos, Farza summons HeyClicky (by saying “Hey, Clicky”) with the instruction to help learn the Pythagorean theorem. HeyClicky — with access to his entire screen — draws precise polygons, points with pixel-perfect accuracy at specific UI elements, and walks him through complex steps in real software, instructing as it goes. In another, he asks HeyClicky to turn on some music, the AI opens Farza’s Spotify app, plays the requested song, only for Farza to ask to lower the volume — which it obliges. All of these posts consistently reach millions of organic viewers in a matter of hours.
Farza is the internet nom-de-plume of Farzain Majeed. He’s a software engineer, entrepreneur and educator. More importantly, Farza is doing something that every technology founder aspires to: convincing ordinary people that AI is magical, and showing them how. For the average American, the capabilities of AI have felt limited since the late 2022 launch of ChatGPT. Casual users might ask ChatGPT to write an email, come up with a recipe, summarize a document, or plan a vacation. Most Americans remain cautious. We have been told, repeatedly, that AI is going to change everything, but “everything” is difficult to picture; the distance between what AI companies promise their technology can do and what people actually experience still feels enormous. Farza is showcasing an unusual talent for closing that distance.
Much of what HeyClicky demonstrates — screen comprehension, voice agents, narrative guidance, drawing and pointing — has been discussed, promised, or demoed elsewhere. The underlying capabilities were developed by some of the world’s most valuable technology companies: HeyClicky assembles reasoning from Claude, text-to-speech from ElevenLabs, and voice transcription from AssemblyAI into a single experience.
What Farza seems to understand is this: the most powerful technology in the world is not, on its own, enough to compel people.
Farza became an entrepreneur because there was no other option. His parents told him that he wasn’t allowed to get a job. Born in Lahore, Pakistan, Farza moved to Pembroke Pines, a suburb in south Florida, aged five. “My dad got a job making pizzas, and then he got a job selling cars at Nissan,” he says of his family’s arrival in 2001. “My mom took care of us three boys all the time. I’m the oldest.”
Farza received his first computer when he was nine, an Acer AST180, which was his introduction to the internet and to multiplayer online games like Club Penguin. He received his first job offers when he was 13 — a grocery bagger, and then a sign spinner outside a gym. “It was $15 an hour, which is huge in 2008 or 2009.” But his father forbade it: “you must do something yourself.” So Farza started an eBay business, first selling a copy of Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2. The business grew into selling his family’s cast-off clothes, then Sony Blu-ray discs and printable dual-layer DVDs, generating more than $100,000 in annual revenue and making Farza a top seller on the platform.
Farza recalls that his father “would always quiz me at dinner every day about what I did, why I did it, how much did I make last week? How much did I make this week? Why is it less?” Farza then walks me through a long personal history of being “unemployable.”
Having become a successful entrepreneur at 13, Farza’s only goal upon graduating high school was to just go to New York City. The addition of an iMac to the family home had piqued his interest in making movies, and with the money he had made from his eBay business, he set himself up a YouTube Channel. “I was already making pretty good money. I wasn’t supposed to go to college, but Pakistani parents, you know…” They expected him to get a degree, and so he enrolled at the University of Central Florida to study filmmaking — with the remaining profits from the eBay business footing the bill.
“I got to the school, and I found that they wouldn’t let you actually make movies or rent out the cameras until your second year,” he says. He was disillusioned: “I got really mad and thought this is nonsense and bullshit. I should be able to make movies from day one if I want to.” So he visited every class he could, looking for people who were “actually doing stuff.” He found that the business classes were “fake,” medicine took 10 years, law was boring. “But in computer science classes people had their laptops out day one — and they were making stuff.” Already deep into gaming, he decided to pursue computer science.
During his time at UCF, Farza studied under Professor Niels Lobo, helping him train models of self-driving cars. “I was number one in this class with the best test scores, and the professor was like, ‘I want you to train AI models at my lab.’”
This was in 2016, years before ChatGPT or Claude, when AI was far away from its present-day ubiquity, and Tesla had just released its Model 3, with Elon Musk predicting that true autonomy was only a few years away. “I ended up being around some really smart people by accident,” he explains that the school’s computer vision program grew into being its most renowned offering.
He spent two years at Lobo’s lab before deciding against a PhD, owing to the fact that it would keep him away from ‘the real world’ for too long. Instead, he released an open-source tool for League of Legends that let users analyze their own gameplay (and anyone else’s). Farza’s project went viral and was soon picked up by professional League teams. “Everyone started offering me a job, everybody you can imagine, from the Googles to the Facebooks — everybody. And I was like, no, I don’t want to do any of this. I want to do my own thing.”
One company that did catch his eye: Mayhem, which was building an AI gaming coach. “This is 2018, I spent months there training their models. It was a lot of fun. The product ended up getting banned by Blizzard.” Blizzard – the California developer behind Warcraft and Overwatch — felt that the software Farza built at Mayhem amounted to cheating, and banned it. The software watched live Overwatch gameplay and detected when opponents had spent their most powerful abilities, sensing specific character movements to reveal a player’s vulnerability. Farza defends the product on the basis of its technological accomplishment: “Even now, I look back and I think, that’s nice. I had a vision model that was running live — this is all before all the LLM stuff. So it’s all manual models trained on that one task.”
Back then, software engineers built from the foundation up: collecting millions of data points, manually labelling them by hand, designing models for narrow tasks, tuning them to run reliably. There was no shortcut, no taking a broadly capable model and teaching it a new skill with a few prompts.
Farza lasted six months at Mayhem before the urge to work for himself returned. “I get hit up by this other company in New York, and they were looking for a cofounder/CTO.” It was another computer-vision video game venture, and Farza, now in his 20s, was worried. He described himself as “broke, with no Ws under my belt, all my friends are slowly starting to succeed.” So he took the job, hoping for a win. He helped build the product and team — and, again, lasted only six months. He just didn’t feel it anymore.
“I went back to my parents’ house. 24 now. Everyone’s confused. What happened to this guy?” Farza reminisces about his abrupt return to Pembroke Pines; “I was the guy in my neighborhood that was supposed to make it, do something, and leave.”
He was sure now, as he had always been, that he wanted to found his own startup, that he wanted to make things “until my brain broke,” but nothing felt right. His cousin Sameer dropped by once a week to learn how to make Minecraft servers. “It was the most fun I had in a given week,” so Farza decided to become a full time coding tutor. He started with the neighborhood kids, distributed pamphlets, and talked to parents, but no one bit. Then Sameer, 12 at the time, said to Farza, “I wish I didn’t have to go to school.”
“I had a terrible social experience going to school,” Farza says. “Brown kid in a South Florida school after 9/11. For 10 years, that’s all I ever heard about. Also, I was fat. I was like 260 pounds.” So he took Sameer’s plea seriously. “I looked it up. Turns out there’s something called homeschooling.” According to Farza, homeschooling at the time — before Covid-era school closures forced a generation of children online – was a “weird thing” only parents “who didn’t want their kids learning about evolution” did. Few parents and educators took it seriously, many weren’t even aware that it was an option; the legal process of becoming homeschooled was, across much of the country, quite convoluted.
Farza suspected homeschooling had the potential to escape from the fringe. “When I was 13, I wanted to not go to school. I wanted to work on my company” — his first one, reselling on eBay — “because it was fun. There must be more kids like me. Turns out, there were.” He started ZipSchool, a service to simplify the legal process of homeschooling. The software collected parents’ information and documents; Farza handled the paperwork himself — contacting school districts, filing, completing the steps to withdraw a child from school. Every state had different homeschooling laws, and he figured that if he made the process easier, more parents would take it up. ZipSchool reached 50 customers in its first three months, mostly made up of parents who “felt their kids were very, very smart, and they felt that school was moving too slow. Parents who felt like the school was just not enough for their kid.” Farza told me about a few of the students, including a nine-year-old named Sanjay, a “genius” — who would have had to spend his days at school waiting for the class to catch up, but could move at his own quick pace at home.
The company quickly became more than just administrative and legal work. “The parents kept asking for more and more,” so Farza learned how to make worksheets for Singapore math, a teaching method developed by the government of Singapore in the 1980s known for its emphasis on conceptual mastery, in high demand by the parents. “I would always ask them: what are your other problems? All of a sudden, I’m running one of the biggest worksheet download systems in the world. And people love my worksheets because I have a great small team of contractors making them.” Then the parents wanted Zip to teach their kids, so Farza recruited 70 teachers for live online classes. “They would stream themselves to kids — music, space, everything that wasn’t math or reading was my thing. We had thousands of kids in a class, the average age being seven. It became huge: Twitch, but for teachers.”
At the time, ZipSchool was only charging parents for the initial services, making $500 a month in recurring revenue. The success of the project so far convinced Y Combinator to include him in the Covid-era online batch, complete with funding — then $125,000. His daily updates to his 500 followers on Twitter also caught the attention of an investor at a16z; the firm then put in $2 million.
When Farza finally introduced a paid plan for online classes at ZipSchool, the business exploded from close to $500 to $30,000 in MRR in a single day, “I had these weird feelings around charging people back then.”
Then, convinced the product wasn’t the right long-term bet for him, he refunded every customer and pivoted. “At demo day, I was with my YC partner. He’s like, “why the fuck did you refund everybody?” I’m like, ‘I don’t know.’” ZipSchool experimented with small-group online classes, a virtual classroom platform, even a math-learning game, before concluding the real problem wasn’t the product, but the nature of the niche: in children’s education, the user and the customer are different people. That realization led Farza to abandon K-12 altogether. “Let me go to where the customer controls their destiny. Because the child cannot control their destiny. ZipSchool, but for adults. What if an adult could join a system where they could essentially pursue their dreams? What would that look like?”
