About
Pierre Sabbagh
I'm a founder, writer, and builder. I co-founded a technology company over a decade ago, and I write about ambition, identity, independence, and the cost of trying to build a life around work.
A place I carry.
Some of my clearest childhood memories are summer memories. Long days away from Beirut. The smell of greenery after the heat. Dust on the roads. Adults talking nearby. Kids disappearing and reappearing. The sound of tarab (طرب) drifting through a place that did not need to explain itself.
Many of those summers were in Andaket (عندقت), a village in Akkar, in northern Lebanon. It was never just scenery to me. It was childhood with fewer layers on it. A place where life felt simpler before I had the language to understand what simple meant. The road toward Oudin (عودين). The hills. Mana'ish (مناقيش) from the tannour. Not landmarks, exactly. More like coordinates inside memory.
I do not return to Andaket often now. I went back a couple of years ago after many, many years away. Standing there with my father, I felt how much of a place can stay inside you even when your life has moved somewhere else. The longing is not only for the village. It is for proximity. To my parents. To the people. To old friendships, stories, campfires, smells, voices, and a version of life I can still feel but no longer live inside.
That distance shaped me more than I understood at the time. Leaving Lebanon did not erase where I came from. It made belonging more complicated, and more central. Much of my life since has been spent between places, languages, identities, and ambitions, trying to build something of my own without losing the parts of me that came before it.
I was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and I now live in Montreal. I moved here in my late twenties with no real map for what came next, only the sense that the life available to me was too narrow and that I had to find out what else was possible.
I am the co-founder and CEO of Roof AI, a bootstrapped technology company I started in 2015. We build AI software for real estate brokerages. The business is a large part of my story, but this site is not a company bio. I am more interested in what building does to a person than in the performance of being a founder.
The writing here comes from that place. It circles ambition, identity, independence, belonging, work, and the cost of making a life around what you build. Some of it comes from entrepreneurship. Some of it comes from immigration. Some of it comes from family, memory, distance, and the strange work of trying to become yourself without cutting yourself off from where you began.