A long workshop in the city of poets.
Six short chapters about how a curious boy in Lahore ended up running a biometrics company, raising three daughters, and writing the occasional couplet between standups.
For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to make small, useful things that respect the people who use them. The shape of that wish has changed many times — first transistors, then terminals, then identity systems, now language models — but the wish itself has been steady. This is the short version of the longer story.
“Three daughters rewrote my definition of ambition.”
A boy in Lahore
I grew up in a city that hums in two registers — the call to prayer at dawn, the rickshaw horns at noon. My early education was equal parts books and elders. From both, I learned the same thing: attention is the highest form of respect.
First machines
I was the kind of child who took things apart to learn how trust was assembled inside them. A relay clicking on cue felt like a small miracle. It still does. The thrill of a small thing obeying logic has never quite left me — it just dressed up over the years and called itself a career.
The hardware years
In the early 2000s I began distributing biometric devices across Pakistan. Fingerprint readers, attendance terminals, ID systems. Hardware teaches you that trust is the only real product — software can be patched, but a reader that fails in a Punjab heatwave loses customers forever.
Founding VizTechno
VizTechno started as a question: could a Pakistani company own the identity layer for its own institutions, end to end? Two decades later we serve schools, governments, and enterprises. The work is unglamorous most days — patient integration, careful service, long contracts kept.
Three daughters
Then came the daughters. The compass realigned. Work became infrastructure for life, not the other way around. They listen for tone before they listen for words. So do good teams. They expect promises to be kept. So do good customers.
The Workshop, and after
Lately I have been building small AI tools — for writing emails, helping with homework, sketching a budget, drafting a couplet. None of them will change the world. All of them, on some Tuesday, will help someone get through their day. That is enough.
“The point of building anything is to leave the room a little kinder than you found it.”
That is the whole arc, more or less. The rest is footnotes — and footnotes, in a working life, are where most of the actual living gets done.