I was seventeen years old, standing on a rooftop in Hay Mohammadi, watching the sun drop behind the Atlas mountains. My phone had 3% battery. I'd just gotten my Bac results — 17.29 average, 19 out of 20 in math — and instead of feeling proud, I felt this sharp, specific fear: that this was as good as it gets.
Marrakech is a city that will make you comfortable if you let it. The food is good. The weather is good. The people are warm. And if you score 17 on your Bac, there's a clear path waiting for you — Maroc Telecom, a bank job, maybe medicine if you're ambitious enough. A life that is, by any objective measure, fine.
I didn't want fine.
During my gap year, I worked at Tawjeeh Consulting. We helped students apply to universities abroad — France, Canada, Germany. I was managing lead flow across nine offices, running social media, handling client communication. I was seventeen doing the job of a twenty-five-year-old. And the whole time, I kept thinking: this is practice. This is not the thing.
I saw what happened to kids who stayed. Not that staying is wrong — I'm not making a moral argument. But I noticed that the ceiling in Morocco, for the kind of builder I wanted to be, was very specific. The market is smaller. The infrastructure is thinner. Capital is harder to access. Mentorship in tech and product is rare.
I also saw something more uncomfortable: I was the smartest person in most rooms I entered. That sounds arrogant. It's not a flex — it's a red flag. When you're always the sharpest person in the room, you stop growing.
China came from a scholarship. HITSZ — Harbin Institute of Technology's Shenzhen campus. Top-tier CS program. Fully funded. I submitted the application almost on a dare to myself, not expecting to get in.
I got in.
The first three months were brutal in a way I didn't expect. Not the language. Not the food. Not being far from home. It was the quality of competition. I ranked 12th out of 176 students in my first semester. That means there were 164 people in one classroom who were better than me, or close. In Marrakech, I was exceptional. In Shenzhen, I was average.
That recalibration is the most valuable thing that has ever happened to me.
The question I get most from Moroccan kids is: was it worth leaving?
I don't know how to answer that cleanly, because it depends what you're optimizing for. If you want stability, warmth, family close, Moroccan culture — stay. Build there. It's harder, but the need is real and the impact per person is higher because fewer people are doing it.
If you want to compete at a global level, if you want to be in a room where you're forced to be better — you might need to leave for a while. Not forever. Temporarily. To be shaped by pressure you can't access at home.
I left Morocco to get good enough to come back useful.
That's still the plan.
One thing I didn't expect: the loneliness makes you honest. When you're away from everyone who knows you, who loves you without condition, you can't perform your way through life. You either figure out who you actually are, or you spiral.
I figured out that I'm a builder. I like taking nothing and making something real. That clarity — that specific knowledge of what I am — I don't think I could have gotten it without going somewhere that stripped everything familiar away.
The Story System came out of that. Not from a business strategy session. From sitting in a dorm room in Shenzhen at midnight, missing home, and writing down what I wish someone had told me when I was fifteen with a phone and a dream and no idea how stories actually work.
That's why I left. That's what I'm building.