I fell into management consulting and stayed for eight years. It was a great school, but two things eventually pulled me out: an engineer's itch to build and fix, and the realization that consultants generate a lot of ideas but rarely have the standing to move an organization. I joined an early-stage startup as the first hire, the work scratched both itches. Two years later, I did it again at another startup. Eventually it became clear the highest-leverage version of this work was at an early stage firm, so I joined COTU in early 2023. Most of my time now goes to working alongside our founders on the unglamorous things that get a company to its next milestone, and building the operating spine of our firm itself.

I’ve been investing in startups for as long as I can remember. It was my second job after graduating from university and after spending a year and a half working as a software engineer. This was in London in 2005. I then moved back to Dubai to launch the region’s first Seed fund in 2008 backed by Dubai Holding, and went on to co-found Tandem Partners, an advisory firm focused on finance and strategy, and BECO Capital, one of the earliest VCs in the region. I’ve backed some of the region’s most incredible founders, from Mudassir and Magnus at Careem, to Michael at Property Finder, Will and Nick at Fresha and Mo and Sam at Kitopi. COTU is a culmination of all of my experience in this space, and my desire to make a change. I show up because I care deeply about the craft, the people behind these stories and the journey of breaking boundaries against all the odds. And I genuinely can’t imagine doing anything else.

I moved to Dubai from the Philippines in 2012, with no prior exposure to the UAE work environment. I joined BECO in its early days, where I first crossed paths with Amir and built a strong foundation across office administration, paralegal and finance processes. Over time, through hands-on experience and continuous learning, I became a highly adaptable operations professional. At COTU, I play a central role in ensuring the smooth running of day-to-day operations across the firm, supporting multiple functions, maintaining structured and efficient processes, and serving as a dependable point of coordination as the firm continues to grow. I thrive on working closely with people, and at COTU, I've found exactly that; a close-knit, collaborative environment where we operate as one team working toward shared goals.

I spent three years at Simon-Kucher advising global businesses on top-line growth, pricing strategy, and revenue performance across retail and entertainment. It's where I developed a deep belief in the power of getting commercial fundamentals right, and where I realized I wanted to apply that GTM thinking at the earliest stages of a company's growth. At COTU, I get to do exactly that. I work directly with founders on GTM and commercial strategy, while also serving as chief of staff across the firm, keeping things moving behind the scenes. I'm particularly focused on how we use automation and AI to sharpen our internal processes, because building a great firm is just as much about how you run it as what you back.

I started in corporate finance and investment analysis, then spent several years building finance functions from the ground up inside startups across FinTech and PropTech - environments where rigour and speed matter in equal measure, and where acting as a true strategic partner to founders is part of the job. At COTU, I own fund and management company finance across the firm's funds and co-investment vehicles, spanning capital planning, treasury strategy, and financial governance. I work closely with our auditors, administrators, and accounting partners to ensure the numbers hold up to scrutiny and support sound decision-making as the firm scales. I hold a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and am a CFA Charterholder.

I spent my early years in the UK, where I earned my degree in Law before deciding my future was in tech rather than contract review. In my mid-20s, I pivoted into the industry and spent the better part of the next decade as a commercial operator across enterprise software. My last role before COTU was at Unifonic, one of the region's scale-up stories, where I led Enterprise and International Expansion. Alongside the day job, I started angel investing, and quickly found myself taken by early stage founders and the arduous, improbable journey they signed up for. A recurring theme kept emerging across the founders I'd backed and the many more I was meeting through the ecosystem. The conversations always circled back to GTM, scaling revenue, breaking into enterprise, and these became the discussions I looked forward to most. COTU is where I get to do that full-time, translating operator experience back to founders at the earliest stage, and working alongside some of the region's brightest.

I studied Engineering Science at the University of Toronto, specialising in Machine Intelligence, and spent most of those years building things that were not assignments. My thesis pointed language model embeddings at the university's own engineering curriculum, because nobody had thought of curriculum design as an AI problem. That set the pattern. I go looking for the processes nobody has labelled as technical yet, the ones running on habit and somebody's memory, and treat them as engineering problems rather than facts of life. I build my way to an answer rather than reasoning my way there. Most of what I make gets thrown out. The rest teaches me something no argument would have. I worked data and product roles in Copenhagen, Toronto and Bengaluru, then a year and a half at Prime Venture Partners as their AI Lead. At COTU I build the firm's operating layer, the automation across finance, dealflow and research, so the team spends its time on judgment rather than execution.