Shahbaz Magsi — Founder of Carigar
About
hi! i'm shahbaz magsi, founder of carigar, an effort to empower small and medium businesses across america.
Mission
i started carigar because the gap is hard to ignore. small businesses make up 44% of u.s. gdp and employ nearly half the private-sector workforce, yet they've adopted AI far slower than large enterprises. the tools and interfaces rarely fit how small businesses actually work, so most of the time their use stalls at the chat window. carigar exists to close that distance.
this matters to me for reasons that go beyond the market. i believe companies are ultimately measured by what they give back and the net impact they leave over the long run, but i also believe you should build what you love, and for me those two happen to meet here. i've spent much of my life working part-time inside smbs as a cashier, a back-office hand, and more, so turning those skills into something that helps them run better and more autonomously feels less like a business and more like paying a debt forward. for those of you wondering, carigar is a classical persian word for artisan or craftsman.
What's next
carigar is where my focus is now, but it isn't the end of the list. down the line i also want to work on consumer hardware, filmmaking, real-life simulation games, and whatever else life opens up.
that instinct to just build things is what got me here in the first place.
before carigar, i:
Before Carigar
- graduated community college, then dropped out of university
- open-sourced the world's largest gameplay dataset, 2M+ frames paired with input-action data
- collected the largest spanish emotion-rich and arabic code-switching voice dataset in the industry
- built protect app, a community safety app that hit ~100k daily active users in under two weeks with $0 in ad spend — apple store top charts #7 (just behind x & citizen)
- was interviewed by a hispanic news channel and fielded acquisition interest from an ngo
- shipped side projects: zuron (ai security robot), lisa (ai executive assistant), coursex (ai groupme)
- placed first in the youth chinese test at age 13 and earned a scholarship to china
there's so much to build and so little time to build it!