Jeffery: Welcome to the supporters fund ask an investor I’m your host Jeffrey potvin and let’s please welcome Saad Hassan from Hassan family office CEO of investive as our investor for today welcome saad it’s a real pleasure having you join us today.

Saad: Hi Jeff thank you for having me

Jeffery: Brilliant well I’m excited to chat with you because you’ve chatted over the years you’ve built out something new that’s pretty exciting I think we first met at I’m gonna say it was at a pitch event and it was through uh Founders Institute yeah and I I always be a big fan of being able to jump in and help out when uh when they have companies go through and I think we both hit it off pretty quickly because of the space that you were tackling and jumping into so it was pretty excited to chat with you and we’ve continued that conversation over the years so I’m excited to jump in and the way we like to kick off our show is that we want to learn a bit more about yourself so you go back all the way to your Western Days TD give us a background on yourself a little bit about what you do and then one thing about you that nobody would know.

Saad: Interesting okay um so I went to Waterloo Northwestern um I’m very proud of that fact I would actually go even further back so our family is originally from Bangladesh um a little bit of roots in the Middle East as well but um we moved here when I was nine years old um Waterloo was 20 2008 I think when I started in Waterloo and I actually did Health Sciences that’s something that a lot of people don’t know about me given my my industry but my plan was to go through med school and become a doctor my mom is a pediatrician so the and when I was uh four years old I broke my hand I got two elbow surgeries and spent the next two years you know three years doing therapy and all of those things at the hospital Ward with my mother in her department and basically it was after school all the way until you know night time when she would come home so I got to really understand and know the hospital scene so from a very young age I had been ingrained with the fact that I want to be in this space this is what I want to do with my life so um you know fast forward through high school I did um I did uh an IB Program here in Toronto got into Waterloo for Health Sciences in my third year I did my mcats you know got into some Caribbean schools I wasn’t good enough to get into the Canadian schools and then I had a just a decision to make and I thought to myself okay I spent a couple of thousand hundred thousand dollars go to med school spend the next you know seven eight years of my life in school just to be a GP um maybe if I wanted to specialize that’s more school all to you know then work in a hospital and and some sort of clinic in a depressing environment staring at you know gray walls for 16 hours a day or I make a decision now and just make a change go towards something that I’m more interested in and so that’s where I made that little switch and went into uh to business uh people have always told me I’ve always been very good at science my thinking has always been science science and even in business the way that I felt like think and process information has been through sort of scientific method but people always tell me that I’m much better with people than I am with uh with you know inanimate things so um you know it always worked out so I did a uh business in Waterloo I finished up the program in eoit which is now University of Ontario and um then I when I worked at TD for a little while while I was going through the last aspect of school started out you know doing very simple basic analyst stuff in TD then went into TD Securities went into the over-the-counter trades uh Department did some Investment Banking that’s when I got into private Investments um and all through this time you know my family and my family office it’s a single-family office um we had I had completely opted to stay away from the family office most of the family has been managed by you know outsourced wealth managers and Etc I hadn’t touched that altogether at all and I had made it a point to myself that I was going to make it on my own and not try to you know take advantage of the the situation that I had so um it was required of me to gain my own credentials is required of me to make it my own way and only when I was able to really prove my worth then I slowly started moving into handling some work for the family office now my area of expertise has always been uh private Investments public markets has never really been something that I’ve been very good at um and so private Investments I understand it I get to roll up my sleeves I get to sort of put my thinking cap on and I think that’s what’s interesting so as I made more relationships and as I did more deals in the private space I was able to start taking some of our families um allocations and start to put it into private Investments so that’s really how I got into it now we’re at a situation where I manage the private arm of the family office the public arm is still you know outsourced but uh mostly what I spend my days doing um I wear a couple of hats but on the family office side I spend most of my time doing uh research and DD and and allocations for real estate for private equity for Venture often for infrastructure deals which is uh along the lines of what we do and um you know then along the way we created invested and so I spent a lot of my time doing that as well and we can talk about that a little bit as well so yeah that’s a little bit of help me um to to answer your question about something that most people don’t know about me it’s it’s I’m I was almost a doctor.

Jeffery: I love it and that’s a really exciting background you’ve I love the idea that you actually at one point decided I have to make a call here and make a change and I think that’s crucial and any youth life is to see the picture ahead of them and figure out if this is a picture they want to be part of.

Saad: Yeah I mean you can imagine how that went you can imagine how that went in the family you know a family you know Brown family one mother one’s a mother of a duck mother is a doctor and the founder is an engineer and so you tell them hey I’m going to quit sciences and I’m going to go into business um that was lovely for them.

Jeffery: Well I’m sure it was a little bit of a turning point but as you mentioned they weren’t going to just hand over the keys to the car they were waiting for you to kind of prov