Meet the founder

Charbel A. Zeaiter

Thirty years building businesses, and changed by every one of them.

“This is me. I've built my own ventures, taught thousands of students and helped shape countless companies. My dream is for the entire world to live a happy, meaningful and abundant life. Always learning, always growing, and always curious.”Charbel A. Zeaiter

A life of founding.

Charbel A. Zeaiter has spent over thirty years building businesses and exploring ideas. He builds, learns what the building teaches, and starts again.

Glebe A deli that became a Sydney destination.
Redfern A cafe that grew into one of TimeOut's Top 5 in Sydney.
Streetwear A subversive label that landed in Vice Australia's first edition.
Crowdfunding An environmental FMCG food and education venture.
Academy Xi Australia's first school for practical UX, service design and digital skills. Founded in 2013, exited in 2019. Charbel famously stood his ground when General Assembly came after him with a cease and desist from New York.

Today he runs Faster Zebra, home to The Innovators, Brand Mavericks, Young Founders, Be You, Psychonauts, XD 4.0 and Los Originales, as well as Velvet Onion, a human-centred product innovation studio in Sydney.

Why Faster Zebra.

Faster Zebra is the distillation of his life's work. It exists because building a business is one of the most creative acts available to a person, and because the one who does the building is changed by it. The through-line of his path is range, many disciplines held as one, and that is the maker Faster Zebra hands forward.

The zebra is the deliberate answer to the unicorn: profitable, sustainable, purpose-led, and entirely real. Charbel built the Kits, the Playbooks and the Workbooks he wished he'd had when he was starting out, for the next generation of builders, and for anyone willing to do the uncomfortable, specific, hard-to-fake work that most processes are designed to avoid.

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