I admire innovators—people with an entrepreneurial streak, fearless leaders that envision their problems as opportunities and have a sense of urgency to do something about them. Those are my people.

I love fighting alongside an underdog.

My aim is to unfold the potential of human beings in encountering the massive shifts and changes happening in our era and help invent new ways of earning a livelihood and rebuilding our society.

My deepest passion is to help entrepreneurs, changemakers, and leaders realize their full potential by learning skills and sensibilities for navigating life and building better worlds.

To this purpose, I declare myself available as a coach and mentor to all changemakers — entrepreneurs, startup founders, corporate workers, executives, engineers, artists, and anyone else who wants to deal with serious breakdowns and maximize the potential of their professional and personal lives. How I came to do this work is a very interesting story.

Growing up in Pakistan, I took a keen interest in computer hardware design and participated in robotics competitions and student politics at a young age. I became terribly interested in learning how the world worked, how power moved, and what role computers may play in it. It was the early days, but I had a sense that computers were going to be important to our future.

Pursuing my instincts, at 20, I saw my father for the last time at Lahore airport and left for the US. I landed in Oklahoma City, learned to speak English, went from state to state studying at various schools, and eventually graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Minnesota State University at Mankato while interning at IBM in Rochester.

Six months before I graduated, Microsoft hired me as a software engineer. Within three years, I was trusted to manage important accounts and projects in education, healthcare, and financial verticals. My last job at Microsoft was to oversee the legal compliance of an over $1 billion product line. However, more repeatedly, I began to feel an invisible glass ceiling, and no matter what I did, I could not break it. I wanted to experience a greater expression of myself and contribute to society directly with my work.

After seven+ years at Microsoft, I left to found my own company and set on a wild journey. I became obsessed with the process of building new realities with technological inventions.

Over the next seven years, I co-founded an eco-friendly real estate investment firm (SY Ventures), a digital payment systems company (Metafos), a college campus classifieds network (inCampus), and then opened a startup accelerator (Conceivian) to help bring good ideas to life. I enjoyed many successes and endured many failures. I was brave, and I was naive, and I made mistakes.

I found entrepreneurship to be a very daring, very risky, but very rewarding way of life. Later, working closely with so many other entrepreneurs at Conceivian, I developed a deep affinity and a radical hope that our world would be changed by such people who commit themselves to learning and excelling.

While helping hundreds of entrepreneurs build their identities and businesses, I became obsessed with the inquiry of what makes human beings successful or failures and what skills and abilities may be required for action and results.

In 2013, I closed Conceivian with an ambition to reopen later and vigorously researched and pursued the question of “what contributes to people’s successes and failures.” I investigated philosophical studies in human potential, teamwork, innovation, entrepreneurship, and power.

Over the next seven years, I burned the proverbial midnight oil on hundreds of books by critically acclaimed authors on the said topics. I pursued masters and learned skills for coaching and provoking excellence in myself and others. I was fortunate enough to meet several leading American philosophers and business thinkers and studied with them.

The three most important people behind my work are Dr. Fernando Flores, Chauncey Bell, and Dr. James McManis. They helped me see the messes and wastes that destroy lives and careers and cripple our enterprises. I learned about the power of language and that all corporate success comes from the team’s ability to invent a new future in conversations with each other.

Early successes, such as a 1) $10 million project turnaround at Microsoft IT, 2) regrowth of team and revenue (to $40M) in a troubled business unit at Beyondsoft, 3) and the launch of innovative blockchain technology in less than three months at ZenLedger.

In my continued work with leaders and entrepreneurs, I have developed frameworks for thinking, taking action, designing and managing coordination, and dealing with major breakdowns as they occur. I have had a breakthrough insight that the skills that differentiate winners and losers could be taught. And that our work can be a source of great joy and power, and not misery and frustration.

Over time my work shifted from developing technology innovations to battling the most difficult challenges in our enterprises and enabling courageous entrepreneurial action. My deepest passion is to help gritty entrepreneurs and leaders navigate change and develop the skills and sensibilities necessary for undertaking important missions of building better worlds.

Today, I help leaders experience unprecedented growth by learning skills and sensibilities for provoking excellence in themselves their teams, and their enterprises.