Hi, I'm Saquib.

I started my career as a tutor — a couple of years teaching quantitative reasoning to students preparing for competitive exams. Watching how differently people worked through the same material got me fascinated by why some approaches stuck and others didn't. That curiosity followed me into product at eGMAT, where I worked on adaptive learning tools and experiences that touched thousands of students. It eventually led me to co-found GMATWhiz in 2019 — an AI-enabled GMAT prep platform built on one conviction: a student's prep should adapt to their specific gaps, not make them sit through material they already know. Personalization wasn't a buzzword yet. It was just the right answer to a real problem. Building from 0 to 1 taught me what that phrase actually means: the part with no playbook, the part where you learn what you over-automated, and the part where you realize good AI still needs a human in the loop.

Now I work at Capital One, on the digital payment and payoff experiences for personal loans. The stakes are easy to underestimate from the outside. A payment that fails silently can add interest to someone's balance or affect their credit before they even realize something went wrong. A confusing autopay screen leads to missed payments, unnecessary calls to support, and the kind of low-grade financial anxiety that nobody needs when they're already working hard to get out of debt. I spend most of my time reducing that friction — clearer flows, fewer escalations, better self-service. I've spent my whole career around people in high-stakes moments, and I know what it means when a product actually works. Life is hard enough. Don't make it harder than it needs to be. That's the job.

I'm not the sharpest person in most rooms, and I've made peace with that. What I do have is patience, a stubborn habit of getting back up over and over, and a tolerance for starting over that my spouse finds both admirable and slightly exhausting. I grew up watching my father build a decent life from very little, which is probably where that came from. Kellogg added something different — not the credential, but the exposure to people who had achieved an enormous amount and carried no ego about it. High impact, low ego. I came in thinking individual impact was the point. I left understanding that the multiplier is the team.

I'm based in the U.S. now. My three kids — twin boys who just turned two and a half, and a baby girl who's three months old — are back in India with my wife. We're working toward being together sooner rather than later. Until then, I put the quiet hours to use. The problems I keep circling back to are ones where the user's stakes are high but the product attention hasn't caught up: payment confusion that costs people their credit score, learning gaps that close doors before people realize it, and mental health — something I care about more than I probably show in professional settings. I'm not sure exactly what contributing to it looks like for me yet, but I know it matters.