Meet the Founder

Meet the founder

Charbel A. Zeaiter

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

Photo: Charbel, candid, mid-work

A life of building.

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 education venture that raised half a million.
  • Academy Xi Australia's first school for practical UX, service design and digital skills. Founded in 2013, exited in 2019. It famously stood its ground when General Assembly sent a cease and desist from New York.

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

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 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.

Also writes

Stories and provocations.

Beyond Faster Zebra, Charbel writes fiction under Febble Flim & Family, and non-fiction under The Unfuckery.

Good things come to those who make.

Start with a Kit, or step into the room.

See the Kits The community