Between Beats and Balance Sheets: The Harmonious Life of Hassaan Ahmad

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Daniëlle Keeven

What is a laid back game of cricket. Any intense driving tools of electronic rock have to do with finance.

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Hassaan Ahmad

Whatever is up must come down. That's up in the air is getting it. This could be big. May it is Pakistan win the World Cup. But there was done as well. My name is Hassaan Ahmad and I'm the CFO of What the Fast

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Daniëlle Keeven

born in Pakistan with stops in the UK, U.S. and now Canada. He is now the CFO of what the fast.

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Hassaan Ahmad

We make Internet veteran investor for online multiplayer games.

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Daniëlle Keeven

But what happened in Hassaan's life before he was crunching numbers in the C-suite.

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Hassaan Ahmad

One of the interviews I had was the day that Lehman Brothers had collapsed. There was a time when I had to sell my car to buy groceries.

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Daniëlle Keeven

Join us as we take a look into the life of a CFO.

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Hassaan Ahmad

Every day I wake up, I just look forward to the drugs that treat me that day.

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Daniëlle Keeven

This is beyond the budget.

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Daniëlle Keeven

Our story begins in the nineties. Hassaan was a young kid growing up in Pakistan. As you'll hear from him. He actually got into finance much earlier than you would think.

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Hassaan Ahmad

So most of my early childhood was in another city called First Lubbock, and that's the third largest city in, if you like, slum. So I was the I still am the eldest of three siblings. We had a big house and no separate rooms, so we just had like one room for the kids. One room from the gates and then one room for parents and everything.

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Hassaan Ahmad

My dad was working with the government. He was not an accountant, but he was working with the government finances. So that's where I probably drew my own inspiration. I was good with numbers always. Interestingly, I never studied science beyond the eighth grade and chose like business, accounting, economics and law subjects for my high school. That sort of, you know, transpired into me pursuing accounting.

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Hassaan Ahmad

Accounting and computers were my two strong sports.

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Daniëlle Keeven

From that, it seems like Hassaan was ready to be the first pre-teen executive. But in reality, Hassaan had other interests that laid the foundation. And for, as we'll learn about later, a holistic CFO.

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Hassaan Ahmad

I did have a computer. Yeah, it was afforded six big screens and was really slow processors. So we used to play a lot of games. As kids, what else would you do? We used to have DOS at that time, so you were typing commands just to play games and entering cheat codes and stuff like that. So my mom always used to be angry and she would go on this, be like, Oh, you know, you guys are spewed to the screen all the time and it's not good for your eyes.

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Hassaan Ahmad

It's been good for health to cricketers is really big and something. So at that time in the nineties, Pakistan was the world champion. We used to play outside quite a bit. We used to play a lot. I think it was the perfect balance of being physically active and then also being virtual.

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Daniëlle Keeven

On top of his computer and cricket interests. Hassaan had an impactful moment early on that cause The Fight of the Land by Prodigy to become his favorite album.

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Hassaan Ahmad

That is still is my favorite album and I'm a big fan of hard rock and house music as well. So I was in my high school and one of my friends was also great and he hired a CD player and he just goes, Oh, you know, listen, listen to this. We just jammed for quite some time. And then so I got that off of him.

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Hassaan Ahmad

I still have it returned it. We didn't have access to good music. And these early 2000s, you can't really walk into a CD store in Pakistan and buy that music.

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Daniëlle Keeven

This love of music even drove Hassaan to pursue it himself. But I bet you can guess what happened to put a stop to that.

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Hassaan Ahmad

So I did learn a little bit of music when I was in school. We had a music class go for, went out to buy a piano, and then I did something stupid. I plugged in the wrong adapter or something and it worked. And my dad was like, okay, that's it. I'm not going to fix our demo, going to buy a new.

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Hassaan Ahmad

I spent about a fair bit of time to get that fix, but there's no coming back from probably the electronic items. I still remember those those chords and the notes and everything that I learned like 25 years ago.

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Daniëlle Keeven

What is music career ending before it began? Hassaan also stopped himself from dreaming too hard about becoming one of the next great cricket players. Instead, he was able to use legends like Wasim Akram as examples to drive his own ambitions forward.

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Hassaan Ahmad

Becoming the next Wasim Akram. This guy was so much out of your league that, you know, you've even imagining to be the next one was off the table. The inspiration was it's passion and hard work don't usually get there. And then you also need a fair amount of luck based on what your definition of success is. When you're like 15 versus when you get a reality check on, you know, when you become an outfit is like completely different.

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Hassaan Ahmad

I was probably smart enough to realize that luck is totally random. You've got to choose a career or you've got to play your odds where you're more likely to be successful. There's a very famous saying that a rich man is not the one with more money, a rich man who's whose dreams are affordable.

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Daniëlle Keeven

Whereas adolescence in the rearview mirror, an affordable dream ahead. Hassaan was ready to move forward, although originally Hassaan's CFO as a stepping stone.

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Hassaan Ahmad

When you were a teenager, like, your definition of success is probably ridiculous, right? So my inspiration came from movies where you knew your disciples opposed those big CEOs. So this was like still back in the nineties, most of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies would be CFO at some point. So in your head, you sort of, you know, figured that out, Oh, you know, if you become a CFO, then your chances of becoming a see you are higher.

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Hassaan Ahmad

And that was like the ultimate goal that, you know, all you have to be the CEO of a company. Otherwise, you know, you're not successful in What are you doing? You're like everyone in my friends group and everyone wanted to be scientists on an engineer. But I figured out all, you know, if you're a CEO, then you have engineers working for you.

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Hassaan Ahmad

You can be successful as an engineer, but mostly it's the guy who manages the money and is the guy who knows how business is done. Most of my early childhood friends are in the same boat. We were at the business gang and the other guys were like the science. And then we had these gang rivalries of these wars, each other.

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Daniëlle Keeven

What does the termination Hassaan A salary and forward attending Lahore University of Management Sciences and the prestigious London School of Economics. He had an interesting answer when we asked him if along the way his medal was tested.

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Hassaan Ahmad

No, that it's a flat answer, like no, I love numbers. Another number crunching. I love technology. And I had the privilege of being those institutions where, you know, they really open up your mind and you get a lot of exposure. But dang, there was not a single day where I'd would say, Oh, you know, this is too hard for me.

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Hassaan Ahmad

Doesn't make sense. It's so challenging. Maybe I should have switched. So no regrets in anything. I had a lot of flexibility in, you know, choosing my will, but I made the best of it. I'm just happy and content to say that, you know, I don't have any regrets at any point.

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Daniëlle Keeven

Upon entering the workforce, Hassaan had the world in front of him, but the world at that time didn't know front from back.

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Hassaan Ahmad

One of the interviews I had was with the hedge fund and Darkness the day that Lehman Brothers had collapsed. So I walked into the interview. The guys were like super stressed out, and I realized that early on that this was going to go nowhere. It was already planned and scheduled. So the after they go to the forum. So I just took a seat back and just just enjoyed the show.

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Hassaan Ahmad

And one thing that it makes you bring that interview was that, oh, you it's pretty interesting. The Lehman Brothers collapse and the folks that were interviewing me like they'd just lose it. So at the end of the interview, the guy just handed my resume like he just Stuart Bucket But it was pretty, pretty interesting times.

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Daniëlle Keeven

Hasan found early success at his first role at the Habib Bank Ltd. So much so that his one time manager, Uzair Rabbani, said that Hasan has the ability to absorb all the pressure we put on him during critical situations at HBO.

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Hassaan Ahmad

It was it was the largest corporate bank. It still is in the country, and I was one of the youngest relationship managers there. Maybe it was luck that landed me in that team. We had a couple of teams. I was handpicked, basically for a team that had the most stressed out accounts. My first boss was very demanding, so he would put a lot of pressure on me and you would just keep changing things at the last minute.

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Hassaan Ahmad

So generally though, he was a difficult person to work with. That's what everyone thought about him. This was my first job ever. My goal was just to learn as much as I could. I would act like a sponge, and there were things that he would throw out. We would I would just take it. That pressure probably did chip a lot.

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Hassaan Ahmad

If you're at rock bottom, you know it can't get any worse than that. You just have to bowl up. So you just have to hang in there. I hired about 15 clients or portfolio of around 150 billion USD and everyone was having cash flow issues and interest rates were at EDL. I. Economic activity was slowing down. It was very, very hard times.

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Hassaan Ahmad

I learned a lot. I learned how to manage cash flow. I learned how to generate and save cash from. Even the most would be enough things. Every day I would go out and meet these finance managers at these big corporations and I would learn and see how they see things and how they manage the situation. I used to interact a lot with the top business houses in the country at that time, and their vision would be You inspired me like everyone else would be really upset or crying about all you were losing money.

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Hassaan Ahmad

But those guys always out there vision, seek out and always be talking about, We're going to do this in the next five years or ten years. So if you know a way out of that pressure that just me. I worked at that rule for about two and a half years. My learning from that place was that the future is always going to be right.

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Daniëlle Keeven

Hassaan had learned a lot, but it was time for him to venture out on his own. The dream of him becoming his own CEO were ones he wanted to realize, but he soon found himself in a most dire situation of his life.

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Hassaan Ahmad

To achieve my goal of you being the C, you have to sort of create my own destiny. So create my own company at some point. One thing that I was absolutely sure of was I'd want to work, would start a company to create a difference in the world. After I left HP, I did create two startups, one that was sort of successful, and I sold that company back to my partner.

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Hassaan Ahmad

So for the next like eight years, I kept trying, had a lot of ideas, founded so many different things. For some reason, things were intriguing. Pick off for one reason, not the other. Eventually, when I moved to the Middle East, I was working with the venture capital bar and both of a university. My role was to help commercialize some of the deep technologies that were coming out from there.

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Hassaan Ahmad

And we were so working with scientists and telling them how you can actually build and sell and raise capital and create a company out of the breed mentioned that the thing with startups is that it's very challenging to actually raise money. Then it's also challenging to create and sell products. There was a time when I actually personally erano goffs funds to support my my self at that time.

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Hassaan Ahmad

Wave one of the companies that I was working in, we had some investment that was promised, but we didn't have money in the bank. So it was a very casual type situation and I had to sell my car to buy girls. He's you look back at certain moments and challenges will always be there, but you just need to take it up a notch.

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Hassaan Ahmad

But they were challenges that you get some of them is you your destiny from the universe telling you all you do. This is just a cycle. Part of that is you know how you respond and how you deal with those situations. Whenever I'm in a difficult situation, I just try to make the best of it and learn How can I avoid doing this the next time?

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Hassaan Ahmad

The thing about the universe is that if you hang out long enough, something will come sooner or later. You just have to not give up. Whatever goes up must come down and whatever is done, it has to go up.

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Daniëlle Keeven

Maybe there weren't any grown ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth. All of us doing the best job we could, which is all we really hope for. This is a quote from Neil Gaiman that Hasan shared in this Twitter in 2018. He shared that in part because it resonated with him during this Simmons's time in his life.

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Daniëlle Keeven

The universal responded in time. Less than a year later, he became CFO of what the fast.

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Hassaan Ahmad

Everyone's and imposter. Everyone's trying to make it work. And deep down like everyone was what their worth. So every day you wake up, there are certain demands on you that are given to you by your employer, by you, ruined by a society, by your family, kids and whatever. Just take one back to education and spend the best of it.

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Daniëlle Keeven

Hasan has been able to channel his own experience into his philosophy on money, lamenting the fact that safe bets often get more funding than virtuous.

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Hassaan Ahmad

Once money solves everything, be it solving engineering, be it your commercializing. People believe in ideas and things that will actually change the world, but then they're not willing to put their money down for it. People always find things that are safe a proven, reliable business model that can grow from 5 million to 20 million inches year is a safer bet than investing in No bio algae that can produce electricity or capture carbon from the atmosphere.

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Hassaan Ahmad

Typically, you would expect CFLs or people in the finance industry place a lot of emphasis on money because you also have bread and butter. But then in solving real world problems, money does solve everything. It it doesn't buy happiness, but it can buy things that make you happy.

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Daniëlle Keeven

In a son's role, he is constantly put into the position where he needs to utter the dreaded no. And while he takes it in stride, knowing what he's up against provides valuable context.

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Hassaan Ahmad

Being the CFO at an early stage tech company that is still, you know, going through some growth sports is very, very interesting. So I wear multiple hats throughout the day and I have to keep switching back and forth. So one side is obviously, you know, the the the core accounting side and you just have to make sure that, you know, all the reporting and all the transactions that we do, the revenue, the expenses, everything is like a quarter trillion.

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Hassaan Ahmad

A quirky the other side is, you know, looking into the future. So because you were just sitting on all of that information and you have a very good pulse, check off how things are going and where things are. You were able to project or see what the future is going to look like. And then so you have to be very aware of where you are spending money and where the money's coming from and how are things sort of panning out.

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Hassaan Ahmad

A big side of that is because at this stage, like most of the companies, are still burning money quite a bit. So priority on you, what to spend, where to spend this week, if I could, just figuring out which projects are important to the company in the long run. Resources which projects are important for the next couple of months?

00:16:06:05 - 00:16:28:14

Hassaan Ahmad

It's a constant battle every single day. I have an avatar in my company. Everyone has an avatar and my avatar is the one with the really eyes. It's another example. Here we go again. No managing investor expectations is another thing because we're constantly asking people for money because we're fundraising. We try all the time to Getting those questions and answering the investor questions is pretty tough.

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Hassaan Ahmad

Sometimes those things like really get to where things are going and how things are, but just overall, it's fun. Just to summarize, basically it's really multiple how it's managing the company internally, cash flows, what's the competition doing, what's the industry looking like, and then looking at the future. Are we heading in the right direction?

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Daniëlle Keeven

More than anything, Hassaan knows how to slow it down. It's easy to zero in on a crisis or the high you're currently experiencing, but when you're zoom out, it can offer a fascinating perspective.

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Hassaan Ahmad

If I was to summarize, my learnings from my very strange career is that, you know, just choose your battles one at a time. Focus on one thing. It's okay to pivot when things are not working out. That does not mean that things are not working out because as you forward, you might happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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Hassaan Ahmad

Just choose your battles wisely. Don't be afraid to fail. One thing that I've learned I'm a risk taker and I always wait until the last minute before UNLV to do something like before I left. Pruitt If you just trust the universe, trust God, more things will come. It's the law of averages. That's one thing that I actually learned from my academics.

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Hassaan Ahmad

I applied every single day. Whatever it is, almost come down, was done, must work. So if you're up, don't get too cocky. If you're down, don't get to the just ride it out. When my kids are at that stage, this is what I'm going to teach them that no matter what happens, never lose hope, be one thing at a time and then see.

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Hassaan Ahmad

Just enjoy the ride. If you just keep at it, good things will happen eventually. You just have to be ready to jump on the opportunity. There are people who would teach you how to convert every single thing. You get into an opportunity now to get the most traffic. But in my experience, like if you don't know that skill and if you just keep taking chances, you will enjoy.

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Daniëlle Keeven

But Hasan understands that while Fortune favors the bold, equality is not the same as equity, customers around the globe do not all fit into one box. In fact, remember what happened when he tried to buy his favorite album?

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Hassaan Ahmad

The developed world is so completely different than parts of the world that are slightly less developed and then from parts of the world that are completely underdeveloped. The amount of difference in someone's daily life, the struggles and the challenges that people face, or is it completely different? So in my current role, we sell a software product around the world.

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Hassaan Ahmad

We are always trying to grow our company and grow revenues and grow Users acquire as much users as we can. The challenges of a customer in a different part of the world are going to be different than challenges of a customer in this part of the world. So going back to that example, like, you know, in the nineties, like I was not able to buy an album of The Prodigy.

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Hassaan Ahmad

And so one thing that I realized is that creating a good product or having a good product to sell might make sense in one region, one culture or in one sort of economic culture. But then selling it in a different part of the world will be different, not because, you know, people don't want to pay for it, it's because maybe they don't have the ability.

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Daniëlle Keeven

A son was eventually able to purchase a lot of the land and he still uses it to this day to pop himself up. But he is an always go, go, go to decompress. He listens to the Fusion Sufi renditions from Coke studio, Pakistan, as I'm sure it's no surprise by now, between these two extremes is where Hassaan thrives.

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Hassaan Ahmad

There are times in things where you need that energy, but then there's times when you've had enough and you just want to decompress. You just have to hang in the balance. If someone was standing on a very hot piece of rock and then a really cold piece of wood, you could say that, you know, they're just thrilled by this.

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Hassaan Ahmad

But there's this battle inside them, ice and fire. That conflict is bad and dark ups and downs are like part of like Chance is really cool. Just being ready to take them.