My Story

At the age of 4, my family and I fled Iran for a better life in Canada. Growing up in several smaller cities across Canada where I was often the only Person of Color (never mind Middle Eastern or Persian) was extremely tough... but ultimately helped me become tougher, more adaptable, and more understanding.

My main coping mechanism during childhood was building things, especially Lego! Arguably one of the first "platform products", Lego helped me find a place where things made sense, and I was in control of my experience... for years I'd spend days on end creating random things that where not defined on the box.

This eventually led me to electrical engineering as a profession, as I had a knack for understanding how things worked and enjoyed creating things. However, after establishing myself in this field - I felt unsatisfied.. I didn't have the impact on society that I wanted and I felt constrained by rules and norms.

So at 25, I did something crazy... I traded my established life with family, friends, a safe & decent career and my new home savings - to pursue my dream to found a tech startup around one of my many crazy creations - a fire radiation sensor. It was overly optimistic to think any idea, nevermind one such as this had a good chance of making it, but I didn't mind. I knew that even failure would lead me down a different path that was more aligned with my values and interests.

This mission took me to Massachusetts, USA, which is the heart of the fire safety industry. I decided to do a master's thesis in this sensor technology so I could commercialize it in the most reputable and safe way possible.. and was lucky enough to find a supervisor who entertained my crazy ideas and had similar interests, and we went to academic conferences, patented tech & licensed it, won competitive government grants, and persisted to co-found Global Fire Products with a successful serial entrepreneur, who taught me a "street-MBA".

From there my mentor & I went into the SmartHome IoT space, developing a B2B SHaaS product line from the ground up at AMPL ENERGY. In partnership with software platform company Embue, I contributed across the entire lifecycle and breadth of this new ecosystem, from extensive customer interactions to designing, building and shipping thousands of products (and growing!) across the US. As this business became established, I started to pursue personal projects.

This led me to one of my proudest creations, "Aloom"; a Synesthesia technology sitting at the intersection of music, AR, AI, & IoT - with a deeply personal mission to help people feel more connected during isolating times. Although the pandemic was a low point, my immigrant upbringing often felt very isolating and I realized that music was how I navigated culture and identity throughout my entire life. So I bootstrapped the company for 3 years, to create a fundamental mapping of sensory data to human emotions, to visualize the universal nature of music, as a perception amplifier. With the help of a small team - I led $500k worth of tech dev for $50k, & were months away from a production launch of our SHaaS product before COVID forced us to pause operations (for now).

As the dust settled, I decided to move back to western Canada to be close to my family and turn a new chapter in my life. I moved onto lead product strategy in one of Canada's leading Technology companies, TELUS. The significant resources and vantage point of an telecom leader helped me fill out my holistic understanding of the technology ecosystem and develop an appreciation for what it takes to run a large corporation.

Nowadays, I am very passionate about Generative AI. I believe it is our best chance as a society to address the numerous mounting challenges we face, from climate change to labor market issues - I am working on various practical & responsible implementations of AI.

Feel free to reach out if you see overlap