Shining Star of the Month- May 2007

This month’s Shining Star features Ayaz ul Haque from Silicon Valley, CA, a successful Venture Capitalist. After growing up in Pakistan, Ayaz came to the U.S. to study at Middlebury College for an individualized liberal arts education, where he was able to hone cognitive skills, develop quantitative and qualitative skills, and gain a breadth of knowledge from numerous disciplines. After obtaining a BA in Economics, Ayaz began his career working as a Wall Street investment banker at Bear, Stearns & Co., gaining valuable training and experience on the job. As an investment banker, Ayaz focused on cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&A) with a particular emphasis on the emerging markets of Asia. While he started his investment banking career in New York, Ayaz additionally worked worldwide in Singapore, Karachi, Bahrain, Vancouver, Seoul, Hong Kong and London. Soon, he was able to successfully transition to the much renowned profession of a Venture Capitalist.

Today, Ayaz works for an international Venture Capitalist firm called Draper Fisher Jurvetson ePlanet Ventures as the Managing Director. This internationally-based VC firm, which has about eleven investment professionals like Ayaz, deals primarily with investments in the life sciences and technology area. The genre of industries Ayaz has dealt with include companies that have a focus in hardware, medical devices, enterprise software, semi-conductors, consumer internet, and new media. Within the last 5 years, DFJ ePlanet has invested in approximatly 70 companies and generated a 2.5x return (fairly meaningful for the field).

Ayaz loves his job as a VC; and is always excited by the types of unique people he meets, and their awesome ideas for business. These entrepreneurs are in the early stages of forming companies, and this is where Ayaz comes in; evaluating their plans to see if they make sense. If they do, his firm and advise the company to help it grow and achieve success from there on out. A typical day at work starts at 7AM, when Ayaz takes care of various standard procedures such as emails. From 8 AM to 11 AM, he is on various conference calls and after that, in a series of meetings. His job also involves traveling to various places around the world at least once a month.

Ayaz is very fortunate, blessed, and talented to be a part of the competitive VC industry, and his success can be attributed to his many prayers to Allah and endless diligence. For us young Ahmadis that might want to consider being a part of such a field in the future, Ayaz strongly emphasizes the importance of a great undergraduate education as well as talking to people in the particular field. Looking for summer internships in these fields is also very beneficial and recommended. To become a VC, it may be helpful to consider working in the specialized financial services area, for example, as an investment banker to acquire training in a two-year financial analyst program. After that, Ayaz recommends going back to school to get an MBA (Masters in Business Administration). VC firms are specifically looking for strong qualitative and quantitative skills which can be gained from entrepreneurial experience such as startup company experience, operational experience, management consultancy experience, etc. As was the case for Ayaz, one thing led to another, and so we too must stay focused and continually pursue all options.

At the end of the day, the building blocks to our success are our prayers that we offer to Allah regardless of what career we wish to pursue; and success is a sense of personal satisfaction that stems from us knowing that we did our best.