about

We live in an age of extraordinary connection and extraordinary isolation. Our phones have made us reachable everywhere and present nowhere. We have more friends than ever and fewer people we trust to raise our children as their own. We optimize our calendars, curate our feeds, engineer our networks. And yet something is missing. We feel it in the fatigue that sets in after another day of video calls, in the restlessness that no productivity system seems to cure, in the strange loneliness of being constantly in touch.

The Muslim Tennis Club was founded on a simple conviction: that the best things in life still happen in person. There is something irreplaceable about sharing physical space with other people. The body is not just a vehicle for carrying the brain to meetings, but an instrument that needs to move, compete, and sweat. Real community is built not through group chats and social media, but through showing up, again and again, to the same place, with the same people, for the same purpose.

We chose tennis because tennis is honest. The sport strips away the abstractions we hide behind in our professional lives. There is no delegating on the court. No leveraging your network. No optimizing for optics. It is just you, your opponent, and the ball. Tennis reveals character in ways that few other arenas do. How you handle a bad call. Whether you tank a set when things get hard. How you treat someone who is beating you. How you treat someone you are beating. The court is a mirror, and not everyone likes what they see.

This is more than a tennis club. We are Muslims, and we wanted to build something rooted in the principles that our faith teaches as a foundation for how we operate. We see them as instructions for living with excellence and intention, applicable to every domain of life, from the boardroom to the court to the dinner table.

These principles guide everything we do.

Excellence. The Arabic concept of ihsan is often translated as excellence. A better translation is that ihsan is a combination of both being the best and doing the best. It is about bringing your full attention and care to whatever you are doing, whether anyone is watching or not. On the court, this means refining your technique, warming up, playing each point like it is the last. Off the court, it means being the kind of person who does not cut corners, who obsesses over the details, to whom every endeavor is an opportunity to practice mastery. How you do anything is how you do everything. We are grounded in this principle.

Service. None of us built our careers alone. We had parents who sacrificed, teachers who believed in us, mentors who opened doors, colleagues who took chances on us. We have been given much, and much is expected in return. Service, to us, is a moral obligation. The Muslim Tennis Club exists to bring successful people together to use our collective resources to help others. This may manifest as mentorship, introductions, or the exchange of knowledge. The point of building a network is to create value through it.

Integrity. In tennis, you call your own lines. There is no referee standing over you for most matches. When a ball lands close, only you know whether it was in or out. What you do in that moment says everything about who you are. Integrity means being the same person when no one is watching. It means keeping your word even when it costs you. It means being honest about your limitations and accountable for your mistakes. Your reputation is not a brand you have constructed but a compounding reflection over time of how you have behaved both in public and in private. We are building a community where a handshake means everything, where people do what they say they will do, and where trust is the default because it has been earned.

We are not naive about technology. Many of us build the tools that are reshaping how people live and work. We understand the power of software to scale impact and the leverage that comes from building in the digital world.

We also see the costs. We see how easy it is to mistake Twitter followers for friends, LinkedIn connections for relationships, Slack messages for communication. We see colleagues who have optimized every hour of their day and still feel empty. We see an industry that talks constantly about community while building products that atomize us into isolated consumers. The Muslim Tennis Club is our small protest against this drift. We are building something that cannot be virtualized, gamified, or scaled. We are building something that only works if people show up in the flesh.

The club is deliberately small. We are not trying to maximize membership. We are not optimizing for growth. We do not want to become a brand or a platform or a movement. We want to play tennis and create good in the world when we do. We create the conditions for real friendship which cannot be manufactured through networking events and community building initiatives.

Many of us came to the Bay Area to build companies, to work at the frontier of technology, and to be around others who are trying to do hard things. (The weather is also a great plus.) We are here to build a community grounded in principles we believe are true and good, to do things that are truly good. We welcome anyone who shares these values, regardless of their background. We are unapologetic about who we are and what we believe.

If this resonates with you, perhaps we will meet on the court one day.