Steady gaze, black turtleneck, no slides. The look of someone who taught himself calculus and then taught the internet.
He failed math in school. Then he wrote the book on it - literally - and the internet bought half a million copies of his curiosity.
CO-FOUNDER & CEO, NEWFORM // NEW YORK CITY
Walk into a NewForm pitch and you meet a CEO who talks about ad creative the way other people talk about prime numbers - as a puzzle with a hidden structure waiting to be found. Hamza Alsamraee runs a New York performance marketing company built around short-form video and artificial intelligence. His clients have included Western Union, Acorns, Perplexity and Binance. The company crossed three million dollars in annual recurring revenue without taking the usual road, and it did it with a small team and a stubborn belief that distribution is a solvable equation.
That framing is not an affectation. Before NewForm, before Stanford, before he could legally sign a contract, Alsamraee was a teenager in over his head with mathematics - and losing. He has been open that he once struggled with the subject in school. The turnaround came not from a tutor but from an obsession. He started reading past the syllabus, chasing the strange corners of calculus and number theory that textbooks rush by.
At sixteen, he did the thing most people only threaten to do: he wrote the book. Advanced Calculus Explored, self-published, complete with applications in physics and chemistry, climbed to number one in its category on Amazon. The kid who couldn't pass a test had written a reference that other students now study from.
The book was only the loudest signal. Quieter and bigger was Daily Math, the Instagram account he grew into one of the largest math communities on the platform - hundreds of thousands of followers and, across his creator work, north of three hundred million views. He was not explaining math to people who already loved it. He was making people who feared it lean closer.
In 2020 the National Museum of Mathematics gave him its Steven H. Strogatz Prize for Math Communication, recognizing exactly that talent for pulling strangers into a subject they'd written off. A year later, still a teenager, he published a second book, Paradoxes. Somewhere in there, an Iraqi television crew arrived to document the story of the boy from Baghdad and his books, and hung a nickname on him that he never asked for: Iraq's Einstein.
Stanford accepted him to study mathematics and management science and engineering. He went. Then he left - a gap year that quietly became a permanent one. The detour ran through Faves, a Lightspeed-backed startup where he was co-founder and head of growth, learning the unglamorous mechanics of getting software in front of people who want it.
NewForm is where the two halves of Alsamraee finally rhyme. The mathematician who loved finding pattern in noise, and the creator who learned what makes a feed stop scrolling, now sell that instinct as a service. The company has leaned into AI, describing a performance marketing agent that reads creative and media performance in real time - an attempt to make the dark art of distribution behave a little more like an equation, the way he always suspected it could.
He made math go viral first. Now he's trying to make marketing think for itself.
Hamza E. Alsamraee • written at 16
Subtitled With Applications in Physics, Chemistry, and Beyond. A self-published deep dive that became a #1 Amazon bestseller and turned a struggling student into a reference author.
#1 AMAZON BESTSELLERHamza E. Alsamraee • written at 18
His follow-up, leaning into the counterintuitive ideas that hooked him on math in the first place - the puzzles that feel wrong until you understand why they're right.
SECOND BOOKThe bestselling calculus author began as a student who couldn't pass the subject. The obsession came after the struggle, not before it.
NewForm crossed $3M+ in ARR without the usual venture playbook - a small team, real clients, and revenue first.
The Strogatz Prize honored his growth as a communicator - proof that the reach wasn't luck but craft.
He built a global math following from Iraq with a phone and a feed, long before any office in Manhattan.
Explaining calculus and engineering ad creative are, to him, the same move: find the hidden structure, make a stranger care.
A Stanford gap year that never ended - the rare case where the dropout line is a feature of the story, not a gap in it.
Alsamraee sat down with CEO.com to trace the line from a self-published math book to a performance marketing company - how a teenager's curiosity became a sales pitch for the future of content.
NewForm's bet is that short-form content plus AI can make distribution measurable - giving brands creative and media analysis in real time instead of guesswork. It's the mathematician's revenge on the dark art of marketing.