Learn the room. Then translate.

I grew up in Dinajpur, in the north of Bangladesh, in a household that treated reading as the default answer to boredom. If you were restless, you found a book. If you had finished the book, you found another one.

It was a small world, and I mean that kindly. Everyone knew everyone’s rhythms. Days had a shape. What it gave me was a habit: watch closely, keep the details, and don’t confuse noise for substance. Almost every room I’ve walked into since has been louder than that house. The habit still works.

It’s the one chapter where I wasn’t new to anything.

At twelve I left home for Rangpur Cadet College, a military school 66 km away. At twelve, it might as well have been another country. It was the first room I had to learn by myself. The rules were written down. How the place actually worked was not, and nobody explains that part. You watch the people who have been there longer, you notice what they notice, and you adjust.

At sixteen I left again, this time for a city in China I had never seen, on a full scholarship to United World College Changshu. I didn’t speak the language. Neither did a lot of my classmates, who came from more than 100 countries.

That was the point of the place. UWC puts people from very different realities in the same classrooms and the same late-night conversations, and asks them to find common language. You learn quickly that smart people can start from completely different assumptions, and that the fastest way across is curiosity plus honesty.

The International Baccalaureate rewarded range. You carried several disciplines at once and were expected to connect them rather than keep them apart. I still work that way. Whether the problem is a product, a regulatory filing or a client’s workflow, I look for the bridge before the silo.

You don’t just endure the unfamiliar. Done well, it makes you larger.

University took me to Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, a town of about 8,000 people. Winter there teaches patience. A small campus teaches you that depth beats breadth, if you let it.

I majored in Data Science with a minor in Computer Science and graduated in 2022. The degree gave me tools, but the bigger change was in the questions I asked. Where did this information come from? What is signal and what is noise? What decision is it actually supposed to support?

Junior year, I applied to Blackstone. Or I thought I did. When the interview invitation arrived, I read the name three times. BlackRock. I had prepared private equity case studies and was about to walk into a conversation about fixed income risk. I learned what duration meant very quickly. That mix-up sent me down a rabbit hole I have never fully climbed out of: how money is actually organized, and why two firms with nearly identical names ended up as opposites. I eventually wrote it all down in an essay.

I had prepared for private equity. I was about to walk into fixed income risk.

Healthcare, then institutional money

Before I graduated, the work started. At Mayo Clinic, as an AI intern, I worked with clinical data for research teams, where the distance between an analysis and a consequence was short. Clinicians brought questions that were important and vague at the same time, and turning them into something measurable meant learning how they thought first. Messy, real-world data isn’t an obstacle to the job. It is the job.

At SkyBridge, as a data scientist supporting manager selection, I helped build quantitative screens across more than 200 hedge fund profiles and contributed to investment memos. A good memo isn’t a pile of findings. It’s an argument, shaped to fit how decisions actually get made. That’s where I stopped thinking of narrative as decoration. Narrative is translation.

After graduating, I joined BlackRock as an analyst in Data and AI, working in Wilmington, Delaware. Yes, the same BlackRock I once confused with Blackstone. I worked on risk reporting, fund performance metrics and dashboards connecting capital-flow analytics to strategy performance. The lesson I carried out of the building: a trillion dollars is a spreadsheet problem, a risk problem and a storytelling problem, all at once.

The Form ADV explorer grows out of these years. It lets you look up BlackRock, Blackstone and six other advisers in their own SEC filings, the same public record manager selection starts from.

In 2023 I joined Dasseti, a fintech company that builds due diligence software for investors. My title is solutions engineer. I’m not a software engineer, and that distinction is the whole job.

A solutions engineer sits between two groups who both know exactly what they mean and rarely mean the same thing: investment and operations teams on one side, the product on the other. I learn how a client’s team actually works, then translate in both directions. The twelve-year-old working out the unwritten rules at Rangpur was practising for this. I just didn’t know it had a name.

These days I live in Land O’ Lakes, Florida, and work remotely. The rest of my time goes to three things that turn out to be the same habit, pointed in different directions. I write long-form pieces on how capital actually moves, from GameStop’s bid for eBay to Uber’s $32.8 billion hole. I build small tools I wanted and couldn’t find, like Captains View, a cricket fielding planner, and Regulatory Lens, a way to read an investment adviser’s entire regulatory file in one place. I build them with AI coding tools, which rewards the same skill as the day job: describing exactly what should exist, then refusing to stop until it does.

And on weekends I play league cricket across Tampa Bay, at grounds like Waverly and Evans Park, as an all-rounder who bowls right-arm fast. I write up the close finishes. Seven runs to defend in the last over. Four wickets and a chase. I still replay them, and you can too: three of these matches are set up in the fielding tactician, where you choose the field.

Numbers into stories, problems into tools, matches into memory. It’s all translation.