Commencement Address for the Flint Hill School Class of 2025

I graduated from Flint Hill School 30 years ago and was invited back this past week to deliver the commencement address to the graduating class. It was great fun, really enjoyed the experience and the opportunity to go back to campus and speak to the graduating Seniors. I am publishing the text of that address below. I tried to condense about 30 years of lessons into a 15 minute speech. Am also pasting a link to a recording of the speech online which is part of a longer recording of the overall graduation. If you lose your spot, my speech starts at around the 58 minute mark.

Coming back to campus after 30 years feels very familiar. In some ways a bit too familiar. That's in part because Maria Taylor gave me a May 28th deadline to submit this speech. 30 years later I still have assignments to hand in. So I did what every self-respecting Flint Hill student would do. I cracked open my laptop the night of May 27th and promptly proceeded to doom scroll twitter - pausing only to send memes to my wife and kids on whatsapp.

And for those of you in the audience wondering - is that the same Firas Ahmad that played on the 1995 Flint Hill Virginia Independent School State Basketball Championship team? - the answer is yes - that is me. And if you were to ask me - How many minutes did I actually play in that game? I would say: that doesn’t matter, that was 30 years ago before the internet recorded high school basketball box scores. What I tell my kids now is that I was known back then as the brown mamba. The black and white shades are both taken, but the brown one is open and I am claiming it today. And that’s weird because neither Kobe nor Brian Scalabrine were even playing back in 95. In another 30 years I will tell my grandkids I was the MVP. That’s my story and I'm sticking to it.

I wanted this speech to be meaningful to the graduates, as I sat in your seats 30 years ago. So 30 years later perhaps I can offer a few words of wisdom, a few lessons learned along the way. And if grey hair is an indicator of wisdom you all need to take notes because we got a lot of wisdom speaking today.

You all are graduating into an incredibly dynamic world that is dramatically changing technologically, politically and demographically in unprecedented ways. In my lifetime until now - this never happened all at once, but in your case they are happening all right now. Artificial intelligence will fundamentally change the way we work and interact and you will need to adjust. The world is moving from a unipolar to a multipolar world, which will result in major changes in areas of business, travel and education. For the first time in history, populations are shrinking by choice, not by war or by plague.

Every change brings an opportunity and for all of you contemplating what to study in university, how to think about the world and how to find your place in it, I would like to share five points that may help build a framework to answer some of these questions :

First: Figure out what you are really good at and hone that skill or craft. A lot of people will tell you to follow your dreams, pursue your passions and make an impact. All this is well and good, but the world does not hand you your dreams, you must go out and get them. And in order to do that you need skills. Richard Rouse was my 12th grade English teacher. He graded me hard, I felt almost unfairly. I think he did so because he knew I was good at it and he wanted to push me to get better and better. I am grateful for that effort on his part. Writing became a competitive edge for me in my career. For me writing refines thinking, and thinking leads to insight which is what I use to understand consumers, competitive environments and build things that people find useful. Writing is something that I am good at, but it may be something different for you. Whatever it is, do not neglect it. That is your super power. You will need it as you progress through your life and career. If you consistently develop the skill, it will compound over time, like a savings deposit - the more you are known for it, the more it will open doors for you. Among many things, my writing gives me the authority to speak on certain topics and I have a hunch it played a role in my speaking at this commencement today.

The world rewards talent refined by discipline. So have the discipline to work on your craft.

Second: Creative thinking will become the new technical skill - the jobs of yesterday will almost certainly be different from the jobs of tomorrow. AI can do certain things better, faster, quicker and more accurately than humans can. But at its core, AI is fundamentally derivative; it is based on observed patterns from data. To position yourself for a world of AI, focus on two things: creative thinking and execution.

With respect to creativity - how can your experience, your skills, your background, your unique understanding of the world contribute to what you are working on? I have yet to meet a computer that solves problems for any of my businesses. I do, however, work with people who can use technology tools to create solutions to problems we identify. Be that person. Bring your edge to the tools at your disposal. AI must be prompted to do something - and the thought behind that prompt is the key to the value of the algorithm.

With respect to execution - I always look to hire people who get stuff done. Ideas without execution are hobbies. Implementing the idea and achieving the goal, the result or the outcome - that is where careers are made.

Third: Perception vs. reality: I learned this concept in the context of Mr. Perse's History of Russian Civ class when discussing game theory used by nations to avoid nuclear war. The concept can also be applied at a micro level. For example, Sulayman and Yousuf, my 15 and 13 year olds, perceive that Zakariya -my 7 year old - is my favorite. But that perception is false. The reality is I just liked them all better at that age.

The difference between perception and reality matters, and in specific I want to talk about self perception - or how you think others perceive you. Everyone wants to be perceived as smart, capable, confident, courageous and all sorts of other positive attributes. The problem is none of us are perfect. We are never all those things all the time. No one is.

If you want to maintain the perception of expertise or excellence, don't ever start anything, don’t take a risk, don’t try anything new. Just talk about stuff. Failure is a given, you start off not being good at something, then you get better at it. Then you fail, and then you figure out how to make it work. Don’t worry about how others perceive you in that process. Focus on tenacity, grit and perseverance. How you overcome obstacles is more important than the fact that you run into them.

The fourth point is about how the world is changing. I grew up in a globalized world. One where large multinational corporations spread across every corner of the planet. You will see Pepsi or Coke in the most remote village of Africa or Asia because that was all that was available. Those days are coming to a close. You will build your careers in a different world. What I see happening across different markets outside the US, and even within the US, is the development and localization of products and services that meet the needs of local consumers. We are moving from a one-size fits all world to one where technology allows local businesses to build solutions that directly address the needs of the people they know the best. This is an opportunity that some of you can think about and for those of you with the chance to travel I encourage you to observe it. The world is no longer organized around one leading power. Your generation will have the opportunity to create and build in this context.

The fifth point is about relationships. Build relationships: Each of the companies I worked on throughout my career was based on a long term friendship - at the same time, I never befriended any of my co-founders thinking they could potentially be my business partner. In other words, sincere friendships can be the best source of opportunity because sincerity builds trust and trust is absolutely necessary in any partnership. Trust is built over time, which is why as you all go off to college, or otherwise maintain your relationships from high school, choose your friends sincerely and wisely, because as you get older you will run out of time to make old friends.

In the context of relationships I want to say a bit about family. Like Lebron James, I like to bring my kids to work. My two older sons have spent several summers in Tanzania in internships working on product, finance and route planning. One of them even shot a commercial with me in Swahili, you can look that up on Youtube. Making my family part of this journey I am on was, in fact, one of the reasons I took the journey to begin with. And there is absolutely no way I could have pursued the opportunities I have without the tremendous support and sacrifice of my wife, who is an accomplished film maker and Phd in her own right. What I will say is the most meaningful, consequential and important part of my life by a wide margin is being married to her and raising our three children together alongside her. I don’t have a lot of quotes in this speech but I want to share this one from John Maxwell about the definition of success. You may have your own definition, but this is one that resonates for me and also is a barometer that tells me if I am improving as a person or not: "True success is when those who know you the best, love you the most"

Let me end with the story of what brought me to this school. When I enrolled in Flint Hill my Sophomore year it was the 12th school I attended since Kindergarten. I changed schools so many times I don’t even remember half their names. Our family struggled, my parents immigrated to the US in the late 60s, and my father worked hard on different businesses but circumstances kept them from growing. Our family ended up moving a lot, around the country and even overseas. Stability was not something I was used to. As we got older, my brother enrolled in a public middle school in Syracuse, New York. The first week of school a student brought a knife to campus. My mother freaked out. We didn’t have a lot of resources, but somehow my Mom, motivated by fear for her children's safety and future, convinced a private school in the area to allow my older brother to attend high school for free.

Somehow she convinced them, somehow they agreed.

My brother got straight A’s. He eventually became the school president and ended up graduating from Yale. Based on his success me and my younger brother Aasil followed. We ended up later moving to Virginia. My Mom again worked her magic. She walked into Flint Hill's admissions office with our transcripts in hand from Syracuse and said "I have two boys, they are excellent students, look at their grades, you have to let them in." We still couldn't afford the tuition but that was a minor detail for my mom. Flint Hill accepted us, gave us a chance and brought some stability to my life. My three years at flint hill was the longest I ever spent at any educational institution until I got to college.

One of the reasons I was so honored to accept this chance to speak was for the opportunity to sincerely and publicly express my gratitude to this school and its administration for that act of kindness they visited upon myself, my brother and our family. They didn’t have to do it. And that is what makes kindness so powerful. It is not compelled, nor in self-interest. It is magnanimous and generous. I do not know if I would have been accepted to Georgetown if I did not attend Flint Hill. It was at Georgetown I met my colleague and business partner with whom we started AzamPesa, Sarafu and the rest. If we are successful in building out this payments platform and changing the payments landscape in East Africa which we aim to do, it could be in no small measure due to that powerful act of kindness.

I came to this line of work because I come from a part of the world where opportunity is not as readily available as it is to the people in this room. For you to be graduating from this school means you passed a series of exams and degree requirements over four years. No doubt a great accomplishment. But for you to be enrolled in this school necessarily requires that someone in your life decided that you and your future is worth investing in. That is a position of privilege. The truth about the world is that a portion of that privilege is random. You could have been born into any circumstance, including some of the terrible situations we see children around the world in right now. I know those situations viscerally. I spend a lot of time in East Africa where in urban environments many children grow up as squatters on unmarked plots of land by the road side. I spent a few years in grade school in Pakistan where I attended a school I hated so much because the bathrooms were an outhouse 100 yards away from the school building. 25 years ago during a semester abroad at the American University in Cairo I travelled through Gaza and met several Palestinians, not much different in age with our graduates today, with similar hopes and dreams who graciously took me on a tour of the town and some of whom have now lost their children or their lives.

But we all ended up here. In perhaps one of the safest places on earth, with almost limitless opportunity in front of us. I think about that a lot, and those thoughts are in part what motivate me to build businesses in places where there are fewer opportunities and where small incremental changes can make a huge difference. But one thing I will leave you with is that life can hold some bitter truths, you can work hard, be disciplined, do all the right things and never quite achieve the things you want. At the same time life can hold some incredible joys, and through all of it one way to balance yourself is to remain grateful for what brought you to this point. “Appreciating what you have is the best cure for missing what you may have lost” powerful words by author Mokokoma Mokhonoana.

I am grateful for the kindness shown to me and my brother by this school. I am grateful to my mom for the sacrifices she made to enroll me here so many years ago and my gratitude to the class of 2025 for allowing me to participate in this great moment of yours. Good luck to all of you heading off to univeristy.

Odds are that one of you will be taking my spot on this podium some 20 or 30 years from now talking about your journey and the role that Flint Hill played in it. Of course that journey won't include a Virginia Independent School State Championship basketball title, but I am sure it will be very impressive in its own right. Congratulations class of 2025!