Hi, I'm Samira!
I was born in Afghanistan and came to Canada as a refugee when I was 7 years old. The uncertain and insecure world I grew up in, contrasted with the safe and abundant world I found in Canada, molded my approach and attitude toward life. In particular, I developed an intense desire to spend my time meaningfully and make the most out of the opportunities I had.
I was drawn into a lifestyle of growth and learning, as it felt like the most meaningful way to spend time. Early on, sports (especially basketball) gave me an avenue to observe continuous growing, while books fed my appetite for continuous learning. My philosophy towards work and my career also took shape. Since work takes such a significant chunk of "time", I realized purposeful work was a necessity.
Because of the political backdrop of my upbringing, I wanted to be a lawyer and then politician. I perceived it as the best avenue to engage in meaningful work and drive impact. I started studying Political Science at the University of British Columbia. Somewhere along my undergraduate studies, I started taking coding classes and quickly pivoted. Tech seemed like a field even more rife with opportunities and impact, and it had the added benefit of being driven by meritocratic principles: if you create a product that solves a problem, people are forced to adopt it. Regardless of who you are, or where you come from.
So creating useful products at scale for users became my driving force. But perhaps due to my perfectionist tendencies, I jumped into software engineering instead of product management, as I wanted to know how to build products from the ground up myself. Therefore, I began my career as a software engineer. I did a few internships (LoginRadius, PagerDuty, Coinbase) and then accepted a full-time offer from Coinbase.
I worked at a full-time capacity for a couple years, achieving a relatively fast promotion from L3 to L4 (L5 would be senior software engineer). Over time, though, I felt a growing pull to be more deeply involved in the product process rather than limiting myself to coding features at the end. That realization ultimately led me to pursue the founder route.
I got accepted into Antler VC's accelerator program (selected top 2% from thousands of applicants) where I met other would-be founders. This was a positive experience of testing being in different co-founding teams, validating/invalidating hypothesis, doing customer discovery, developing MVPs, pitching, and more. My takeaway at the end however was that there was no formula to create a startup. You could increase your chances of success by following the footsteps of those that had gone before and scribed their process, but it was not a guaranteed outcome and the beauty of startups is the wild terrain of it.
After Antler VC, I built, launched and marketed my own AI-powered consumer app. This app solved a major pain point for me, eliminating decision fatigue from daily meal choices so I could mindlessly eat healthy, but I had trouble validating the problem with others. This experience taught me that there is much more to product management than simply building and shipping a product.
Today, I remain deeply obsessed with products. I keep experimenting with new solutions and share my learnings on Substack. What continues to drive me are the same principles that guided me from the start: purposeful work, continuous growth, and delivering products at scale that solve meaningful problems for users.
