Built on people. Kept by trust.

I grew up in Abu Dhabi, a Middle East kid with Pakistani roots. By grade six I was taking PCs and printers apart to see how they worked, then putting them back together. Sometimes they even worked. My dad never told me to stop. He bought the parts, put up with the mess, and quietly fed an obsession with technology that has never left me. The machines I rebuilt were the same ones I lost hours to playing Counter-Strike. When I wasn't indoors, I was out in the street with a cricket bat.

The engine under all of it was laziness. The productive kind. I'd happily spend a week building something so I never had to spend ten minutes a day on a task I hated. I still would. It's the truest thing I can tell you about how I'm wired.

I was never the textbook student. My marks held up until O levels, then turned volatile. My MBA landed in the upper tier, but I've used very little of it in real life. Most of what I know, I learned by building things, breaking them and building them again, usually to avoid doing them by hand.

Finance turned that habit into a career. At KPMG I built tools so I'd never grind through credit reviews by hand. At Etihad I automated entire inter-station processes and handed the finance team back thousands of hours. At Al Hilal I built an automated risk model so decisions rested on something firmer than opinion. At Emirates I led the tax side through the UAE's first VAT and cut a reporting cycle from 20 business days to 9. Every line of my CV says the same thing: find the dull, repetitive work, then build a way out of it.

And everywhere, I saw the same picture. So much expert work was repetition in an expensive suit. Businesses in the region were either paying Big Four rates for cookie-cutter advice, or going it alone and getting burned by audits. Once I'd seen it, I couldn't unsee it, and I had no intention of solving the same problem one client at a time.

So in 2018 I left the safety of all of it and started Oblique Consult from a coffee shop: a laptop, a stubborn idea about how advisory should be done, and not much else. It grew into a real firm, advising names I once studied as case studies, with a team that genuinely cares about getting it right.

The itch never left. Simpla came from wanting the numbers to carry their own weight. Oblique OS came from wanting my own firm to run itself. Hysaab came from wanting smaller businesses to reach what only the large ones could afford. Ibtidah came from knowing what good finance people look like, and wanting a better way to find them. Each one started the same way: refusing to do something the hard way twice.

People call it drive. Up close, it's a refusal to do by hand what a system could do better. Every one of these began with the same quiet thought: there has to be a better way, and I'd rather build it once than suffer it forever.