The founder
Saqib Rasool
Builder and teacher. Founder of Conceivian and COROS AI.
The Seattle area · English, Urdu, Punjabi, and some Spanish
Builder and teacher. Founder of Conceivian and COROS AI.
The Seattle area · English, Urdu, Punjabi, and some Spanish
I want to tell you why I do this work, because it is not a success story.
I hit my ceiling at Microsoft and could not find the way through, so I left too early. Later I built a company and closed it, before I understood the breakdowns that were killing it. Underneath both was the same failure. I could not become a distinct offer, and nobody had taught me the moves. I paid for that in my career, in my health, and in relationships I cannot get back.
So I went looking for the map I did not have. That took a decade of mastery in the ontological tradition of Fernando Flores and the research done by his peers at Stanford and Berkeley, and more than ten thousand hours of documented coaching conversations.
I was generated by a background. What I want is to regenerate the background that generated me.
Computer engineering technology at Punjab University.
From Lahore to Oklahoma, then Texas, then Minnesota, moving around the United States in search of the right education. It ended in a bachelor's in computer science at Minnesota State University, Mankato, with an internship at IBM Rochester along the way.
Hired as a developer support engineer six months before graduating. Then application development consultant to education, healthcare and financial services customers, and finally senior program manager, put in charge of the Department of Justice compliance work for SQL Server, a product worth more than a billion dollars. Seven years, in Charlotte and then Redmond, with a Gold Star Award and a Top Contributor Award along the way.
Five years of programs with Landmark Education, running alongside Microsoft. An introduction to the vocabulary that opened the door to a whole new domain, and the start of a search for the teachers who had created the philosophy underneath it. That search would eventually lead to Fernando Flores.
Co-founder and CEO of Metafos, a decentralized payments company with patents granted in the US, Europe and Asia, acquired by an Australian private equity firm. Then inCampus, an online commerce platform for college students, named Best Consumer Product in the Web 2.0 category by the Washington Technology Industry Association. And SY Ventures, a green real estate fund.
A startup accelerator that built and launched fifteen products for founders. In 2012 he closed it to study the disciplines of innovation and entrepreneurship properly, sold its assets to Beyondsoft, and kept the name, to restart it at a later date.
Vice president, building the US revenue pipeline of a publicly traded Beijing technology giant, and coaching its executives on collaboration and coordination.
Two years in Pluralistic Networks' Dwelling program on innovation and entrepreneurship. Meeting Flores was a turning point in his life. From Flores he learned that entrepreneurship is public service.
Co-founded Harvester Academy with Chauncey Bell and started Mobilize! there, carrying Chauncey's work on diagnosis and mobilization into programs for leaders, and building the technology underneath it.
Head of strategy at a cryptocurrency tax startup through its founding year: core strategy, the first technical team, and the seed round. The company has since grown to a valuation of a hundred million dollars.
The name kept in 2012, relaunched as an institute for human potential research. The Power Course followed in 2021: twelve modules, from victimhood to humility and mystery, built out of years of coaching people one to one, with its cohort graduating in December 2022. From early collaborations with Capria Ventures came the Emerging Leaders Program, where founders in the ELP 101 cohort reported a 100% overall satisfaction score. A Planet Fitness franchise group of more than eighty clubs realigned its board and executive team and went on to record historic revenues. More than a hundred leaders coached.
Appointed practice lead in Mobilize 2024 by Fernando Flores and Chauncey Bell. Ten years after the Dwelling, back in the room with both teachers.
Launched COROS AI, a coaching intelligence built in this exact tradition, listening for the moods, commitments and assessments underneath what people say. Incorporated the company, and wrote its whitepaper on what becomes most valuable in human beings when machines take the automatable.
Read the whitepaper →INDISPENSABLE launches for senior professionals, coaches and companies, around one question: what does it take for a human being to be indispensable in the world AI is building? Following that question, two abstracts on restoring belonging through language are accepted at AcademyHealth ARM 2026 and APHA 2026, both presented by him as lead author, with collaborators at Oregon State and Penn State. A full paper on belonging and loneliness, a new approach written with Sara Imanpour and researchers at Penn State, is on its way to publication.
I have spent decades unable to settle a question other people seem to answer once and move on from. Am I a builder or a teacher? The builder wants to make the thing: software, systems, companies, a meal, a sentence that lands. The teacher wants to guide, and to be useful at the exact moment a person is deciding who they are going to be.
What I have come to is this. They are not two vocations competing for one life. They are the same impulse pointed at different materials. The builder makes an object. The teacher makes a person. Both are asking what the true nature of a thing is, and what it would take to bring that nature fully into the world.
And the desire for beauty and the desire for justice belong to the same category. Both want to see something come into its right form. That is why an identity that is beautiful and untrue is worse than one that is plain and honest: it has used the machinery of beauty to tell a lie.
Outside the practice I write poems, and once collected them in Saqibism. I have cooked for friends and family hundreds of times, and twice in my life I have made a painting.
Or start by reading: the Executive Briefings and the Letters to Friends, and the lineage I carry.