The life behind
the work.

My grandfather was Khaleel ur Rehman. He was orphaned at seven.

His childhood included orphanages and studying under streetlights. He continued his education, graduated, and became an officer in the Commercial Tax department. His work took him through small towns, where people came to know and respect him.

My father, Sadath, was his only son among five sisters. He passed his father’s name on to us. So Khaleel has always carried another person’s life inside my own introduction.

I grew up with possibilities my grandfather had to work his way towards. I think about that when I’m tempted to treat my starting point as something I made for myself.

I was born in Bangalore on 26 July 1990. By then, my family’s story had already taken a few turns.

My mother, Mubeen, was the sixth of eight children. She lost her father when she was fourteen. My grandmother was left to raise the children who still depended on her.

My parents came from the same extended family. My paternal grandfather proposed their marriage partly out of a wish to support my mother’s family. My mother was eighteen and my father was twenty-eight when they married.

I knew these people first as Mum, Dad and my grandparents. Understanding the lives they had before those names takes longer.

I studied architecture, with a focus on interiors, and graduated in 2013.

Architecture taught me to pay attention to the relationship between a thing and the person using it. A drawing can look right. Then someone walks into the room, and you notice what the drawing didn’t tell you.

Where do they pause? What feels obvious? What keeps getting in their way? Those questions have followed me into almost everything I’ve done since.

Over more than a decade, I co-founded eight startups and helped establish an NGO.

I like the moment an idea starts becoming real. People get involved. Decisions have consequences. Something that lived in a conversation becomes something another person can use.

My work has involved operations, teams, processes and the details that make a business function. I’ve spent a lot of time moving between the big idea and the small thing that needs doing today.

Eight startups is a neat line on a profile. It doesn’t answer the question I find more useful now: which problem deserves the next few years of my life?

During the pandemic, I went to a funeral and came across an orphanage.

There were a few children there who had no home to return to. They didn’t have teachers either. I volunteered to spend some time with them every day, teach them something and keep them engaged.

I had always enjoyed making things easy and enjoyable for younger kids. I just hadn’t recognised how much that mattered to me.

I kept showing up. And I began to see that this was something I could do with patience and passion, day after day.

Doha is home now. I share it with Aafreen, my wife.

I’m Mubeen and Sadath’s son. Khaleel ur Rehman’s grandson. A husband. A Muslim. These parts of my life shape the choices I make, even when they don’t appear in a professional introduction.

Faith is part of how I think about responsibility and character. Family is part of how I understand where I came from, and who my choices affect.

I have ambitions. I also have people I want to be present for. Giving enough attention to both is something I’m still learning.

Dare to know. It’s a thought I keep coming back to.

I want to understand how I arrived at what I believe. Which parts came from experience? Which came from people I trust? Which have I simply never stopped to examine?

Good reasons should be able to move me. I want to be able to question an idea I’ve built, including one I’ve spent a long time defending.

I don’t always find that easy. But I’d like to keep getting better at it.

I’ve been exploring an idea I call Digital DNA.

I want to keep a record of how my thinking develops. What I was trying to solve. The information I had. The mistakes. The moment I saw something differently.

If someone in my family reads it years from now, I want them to have enough context to judge it for themselves. I’d like them to be able to question me, even when I’m no longer there to answer.

This website is a beginning. I’ll keep adding to it as I go.