The weight of knowing
A long time ago, when words travelled slower than swords, there lived three men bound by knowledge.
Hassan Sabbah, who discovered that power could live inside a story.
Nizam al-Mulk, who believed order could be built through it.
And Omar Khayyam, caught between them. A poet, a scientist, a friend to both, standing at the fragile center of truth.
Hassan used news as a weapon. Whispers became fear, fear became obedience.
Nizam tried to bring structure, systems, control. But even wisdom can’t outrun rumour.
And Khayyam, the observer, wrote instead. He understood what both men forgot: that people don’t fear lies. They fear not knowing what to believe.
A thousand years later, not much has changed. The networks are faster, the noise louder, but the same question remains: Who do you trust to tell you what’s true?
That question shaped Bundle, the first product I ever designed that reached millions of people each day.
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I’ve always been fascinated by how people choose what to believe.
Not the extremes, but the everyday moments. The small scrolls, the quiet mornings when you open your phone and decide what matters to you.
Back in the early 2010s, news apps were built like conveyor belts. One endless feed of stories, designed to keep you scrolling instead of thinking. Headlines screamed for attention, but meaning was lost in repetition. It didn’t feel like journalism anymore, just noise in motion.
Bundle was born from that fatigue. We wanted to give people a way to read that felt personal again. A space where news didn’t compete for you, it belonged to you. Readers could build their own feed from the sources and topics they trusted, switching between cards, grids and lists as they liked.
It wasn’t about algorithms. It was about respect. About slowing things down just enough for people to feel like they were choosing again, not being fed.
The design had to feel invisible. Something that didn’t try to editorialise or impress, but stayed humble in the background. It let words take the stage, while the system quietly learned from what readers valued most.
We weren’t thinking about reach at all. Our only goal was to make news feel human again. Then, unexpectedly, millions of people began using Bundle. Watching something we’d built on a few small screens become part of people’s morning rituals was surreal.
Even after a decade, Bundle still feels personal to me. Not because of what it achieved, but because it was the first time I saw design turn into ritual. A small, daily habit that made the world a little quieter, a little clearer.
