I was born in 1992 in Tehran, Iran. Shortly afterwards, my family and I moved to Vancouver, Canada where I spent my formative years on the beautiful west side of the city. In the summers, we would often spend time between Iran, Switzerland and Germany as my father caught up on his projects abroad. I went on to attend the University of British Columbia where I graduated with a dual degree honours in political science and philosophy. That was a nice balance because in political science you have to pretend to know everything and in philosophy it's much better to pretend to know nothing.
I studied political science with the broad, but optimistic goal of being able to work on policies that would improve the day to day quality of life for people. Though I received an offer to my preferred grad school to pursue that goal through an MPA, I ended up taking a different path instead. In 2015, I accepted an offer to join a then pre-IPO Square to help build the future of accessible commerce. My bet was that public policy would ultimately always move faster in response to genuine innovation.
As the third employee in the Canadian market, I worked on multiple facets of the business ranging from marketing, product analytics, and design research – all the way to my latest role as as a Global Business Development lead for our Platform & Product Partnerships team. Our mandate was to predict future business tooling trends then accordingly, find, develop, and launch those solutions through integrated product partnerships with leading technology providers. My work primarily centred around the scoping and negotiation of platform integration commercial agreements, API-driven product development, and go-to-market strategy. You can think of the role as a blend of S&O, PMM, and enterprise sales.
Finding interest in accelerating the growth of financial inclusion globally, I left Square to work with my friends to solve two problems: 1/ how to properly bank the billions of unbanked and underbanked people in the world, and 2/ how to create a truly borderless banking platform from a technical and compliance perspective to give people the financial freedoms that may be unavailable to them in their own countries.
In my spare time, I enjoy writing narrative, philosophy essays, and locked away in a drawer somewhere never to see daylight, poetry.