Who is Ayden?

Early Career

I started as an intern at a semiconductor company, KLA-Tencor. My manager liked me a lot, so I was converted to a full-time employee before graduating college (I was probably only intern who received full-time offer and worked full-time before graduating college). I worked during the day and went to school at night.

I learned a ton working at KLA-Tencor. While the pay wasn't the highest, the expectations were high, so the finance team was much more involved in business decisions compared to other companies. I really loved the finance team. Looking back, I was happiest there.

After two years, I wanted to work for a company that everyone thought was hot.

My experience at Apple was underwhelming, to say the least. At KLA-Tencor, I truly felt that I was making an impact on the business. At Apple, I was given specific tasks and couldn’t deviate much from those responsibilities. A friend who worked at WhatsApp constantly told me to give startups a try. At first, I ignored her—who wants to work for startups? But after a few months, I saw the news about Facebook buying WhatsApp for $19B.

Taste in Startup World

My first startup was Symphony Commerce. The CFO who hired me literally left the company within two weeks of my starting. I was the only finance person. I worked nonstop, seven days a week, for the first two years. This experience really helped shape who I am today, but after working 60-80 hours a week, I needed a break. I decided to take some time off to reflect on what I wanted to do with my life.

Sabbatical

Ever since I was little, my dream was to work for a Fortune 500 company. My parents are blue-collar, and while I was not ashamed of them, my definition of success came from watching shows where many middle-class people worked for big companies. When you're young, you get envious of something you don't have. So, ever since I was in college, I was determined to work for a Fortune 500 company. I volunteered on weekends and worked during the day to pay my tuition and living expenses. After sprinting full speed for eight years (four years of college plus six years of working), I wanted to reset my priorities.

After a year, I got into Bitcoin. Back then, it was $11K per Bitcoin. I invested all my savings. At that time, I truly believed that Bitcoin was going to revolutionize the world.

I thought I had figured out the price movement of Bitcoin, so I started day trading.

I lost pretty much everything.

Back to Workforce

After losing a significant amount of my savings and recharging my mental health, I was ready to get back into the workforce.

Many companies were hesitant to hire me because they felt I might not be ready after taking a 1.5-year break. So, I started as a contractor, and within a month, the company, Shopkick, wanted to hire me full-time instead of waiting three months as they had originally planned.

Acquisitions

Shopkick was sold to Trax Retail; that's when I first learned about the acquisition process. All the C-level executives were let go.I reported to the new CEO at Shopkick and worked as if I were the CFO.

I could see that Trax wanted the entire finance team to move to Singapore, so I reached out to my manager from Shopkick and started a new role at a company called Rescale.

At Rescale, I learned how to work with engineers and implement various finance-related systems. I spent half my time creating new finance-related systems there.

My manager who hired me at Rescale left, and the previous founder I worked for at Symphony Commerce reached out. I took the new role without hesitation because I knew that they were growing so fast.

Within six months of my joining, Deliverr was sold to Shopify for over $2B. Probably the best outcome for the company because post-COVID, all fulfillment-related companies could no longer properly fund their businesses.

Back to Public Company

At Shopify, I followed existing processes and and tried to improve it here and there. The work was interesting, and I really wanted to grow with Shopify.

Twelve months after the acquisition, Shopify sold the company at a $1B loss to Flexport. Shopify no longer wanted to manage the fulfillment side of the business due to the capital needed to grow it.

Now

I'm currently working for an e-commerce company, Session AI. They make a cool product that helps increase buyer conversion. I report to CFO and owns all FP&A related tasks and order forms.