A little more than the usual About page.

If you asked the people closest to me to describe me, you would probably get several versions.

My wife would tell you that whatever I take on, I tend to approach it professionally, methodically and with a sometimes unreasonable desire to get it close to right.

Friends might say I am thoughtful, caring and empathetic; that I think quickly and tend to see around corners; and that my interests can move fairly easily from business strategy to carpentry to how the mind works, consciousness or spirituality.

My daughter would simplify all of that considerably. Her current summary of Dad is essentially:

Ayahuasca, the Creator and hikes.

She isn't entirely wrong.

I have a lot of ideas. I enjoy understanding how things work. I like building things — businesses, strategies, systems and occasionally something physical with my hands.

I am also capable of finding an impressively cumbersome route to an answer that, in hindsight, was sitting directly in front of me. Fortunately, I usually find that funny.

These days, a lot of what excites me is close to home. My son recently entered medical school directly from high school, and I love hearing about the new world opening up in front of him. My daughter is finishing Grade 12 and beginning to decide what comes next, and I am looking forward to helping her navigate that transition.

Professionally, I have also had several introductions lately that may become clients, partners, friendships — or something none of us can yet see. I enjoy that uncertainty more than I once would have.

When nothing needs to be accomplished, I am happiest walking in the forest and eventually finding somewhere quiet to sit. I don't go there to solve anything. I sit long enough for whatever noise or energy I have been carrying to settle, and for whatever thought or emotion needs to surface to do so — without deciding beforehand what ought to appear. Some of my clearest thinking has happened after I stopped trying so hard to think.

I was born in Iran, moved to Canada in my teens, spent nearly three decades on the Prairies and more than a decade in Vancouver. Canada is home and has given me enormously more than I could catalogue here. But I don't experience my sense of belonging — or responsibility — as being particularly constrained by geography.

The longer version of who I am probably starts much earlier. Grade 3, actually.

Some of what I know came from things going well. A meaningful portion came from things going badly.

I have trusted promises between friends and business associates that should have been documented. I have failed to plan adequately for worst-case scenarios. I have taken on projects larger than the resources available to execute them comfortably — and then had to find my way through the middle. I have made decisions to protect employees that came at considerable financial cost to me and my family. Looking back, I am not certain I would make all of those decisions the same way again. And I have learned that success does not always mean you should continue.

One of my ventures, LavaPay, went from zero to revenue in thirteen months, including obtaining the regulatory approvals we needed. Within its first year, we were trending toward more than $9 million in monthly payment volume.

Then our primary bank ended its relationship with us. So did our backup bank. As an online money-services business, securing banking in Canada on reasonable terms became increasingly difficult.

We could have continued investing capital into workarounds. Instead, I concluded that the risk-adjusted business case — given the dependency on fragile banking relationships — no longer justified continuing the company. So we shut it down.

The decision itself was not particularly emotional. The lesson was.

A business can be working and still no longer deserve additional capital.
Reality does not owe your sunk costs anything.

That scar tissue matters. It is one reason my consulting work tends to move beyond the mechanical question: What should the company do? There is usually another question underneath it: What needs to become true for the company, the founder and the people who depend upon both to move forward well? Sometimes those interests align perfectly. Sometimes they don't. That is where judgment begins.

Good advice also begins before the advice. You have to understand where someone actually is — not merely where the spreadsheet says they should be. That often means listening carefully enough to understand the business problem, the emotional reality around it, the founder's frame of reference, and where that person genuinely needs to get to before the next decision becomes possible.

Perhaps that is what some friends mean when they describe me as empathetic. I don't think of empathy as agreeing with people or making difficult things comfortable. It is more about meeting someone where they are, seeing what might be possible from there, and helping them move toward it — even when where they ultimately need to go differs from where I would choose for myself.

Experience has also made me fairly simple about trust.

Say what you mean. Do what you said you would do.

Surface difficult issues rather than manage around them. Know which principles should hold and which positions should change when the facts change. And when things become difficult, communicate more — not less. Those expectations apply equally to me.

"Potential fulfilled" does not necessarily mean bigger. It doesn't always mean richer, faster or more powerful. The potential of one person is not the potential of another.

The potential of one company may be global scale. Another may fulfil its potential by remaining small, extraordinary and independent. A founder may fulfil part of their potential by building a business. Eventually, fulfilling their potential may require leaving it.

The same question can be asked of a customer, an employee, a technology, a community, capital, a forest — or an idea. What is already here? What constrains it? What conditions does it need? What can I contribute? What should I leave alone?

That lens has changed how I think about ambition. There is nothing wrong with wanting something to become extraordinary. But extraordinary according to whose potential? That is a much better question.

I enjoy multidimensional people. Someone with whom I can discuss a business problem in the morning, challenge an assumption in the afternoon, wander into a conversation about consciousness, history or something entirely unrelated over dinner, and laugh about our own ridiculousness later that night.

I am increasingly drawn to people who are aware — not necessarily people who describe themselves as spiritual. Labels matter less to me than whether someone has enough self-awareness to notice when fear, insecurity, status or ego has entered the room.

I find it harder to work closely with people who are chronically driven by scarcity or fear, who are dogmatic, who cannot communicate clearly or directly, or whose certainty prevents them from considering another possibility. And trust is non-negotiable. I have learned that lesson sufficiently well.

But there is another side to this. I genuinely want people to move forward. Even when someone's direction is different from mine, I tend to look for what might help them become more fully what they could be. I see where they are. I recognize some version of myself in many of the places they have been. And where I can help them move forward, I usually want to.