Aydin
Ferrari-Shaikh

CHAPTER I · GRADE 12 SUMMER

The Spark

It started with my brother. He'd imported 500 donut pillows and hauled them back from the border in a U-Haul. I wanted the same lesson on my own terms, so I ordered 50 off Alibaba, knocked on every door in the neighborhood, and sold all of them. The product was absurd on purpose; the point was learning to sell face to face.

The same summer I traded futures on prop accounts. I lost some money and learned something better: discipline. You show up every morning, you stay consistent, and the market punishes emotion faster than any teacher. It's the reason I chose finance in university. Before that summer I had no direction, just random ideas.

Then my brother showed me Vapi, and I fell down the rabbit hole. I taught myself to code, line by line, starting in C and Python, and the first thing I ever got working was a plain timer. Small, but it flipped the switch: from wanting things to exist to making them exist.

• 50 donut pillows imported and sold door to door: raw sales, rejection-proof
• Futures trading: discipline, market psychology, and the road to finance
• Self-taught in C & Python. First build that worked: a timer

CHAPTER II · 2023

AIBA: AI Business Automation Club

I founded AIBA at the University of Guelph on one principle: ship real automations, not theory. Every session ends with something working: weekly Build Nights, hands-on workshops, and a campus-wide hackathon. It grew to around 100 members, all learning by building in public.

Running it taught me the other half of building: recruiting people, keeping momentum, and explaining ideas to rooms that only care what the tech does for them. It also became a talent pool: Sera AI started with people I met here, and members went on to get hired off what they shipped. I'm ramping it back up now.

• Founded and lead the club: ~100 members, weekly Build Nights, a campus-wide hackathon
• "Ship real automations. Not theory." Every session ends with working software
• The launchpad for Sera AI and a network that got people hired

CHAPTER III · 2024

Sera AI

Shopify store owners lose sales every time a customer's call goes unanswered. Sera AI put a voice agent on the line, answering order questions and handling support around the clock, in a voice that didn't sound like a robot from 2010. I co-founded it with people I met through AIBA; three of us to start, then two.

We built deep on the voice stack: Vapi to orchestrate, Deepgram to hear, ElevenLabs to speak. That pulled 100k+ views across social, took $1,000 and a pitch to Guelph alumni entrepreneurs through the Hub incubator, and got mentored at Velocity in Waterloo. It didn't survive, killed by lack of funding and the honest inexperience of being young and building for the first time. It's the swing that taught me the most.

• Co-founder (3 → 2): product, engineering, and pitch
• Voice agents for Shopify stores · 100k+ views across social
• Guelph Hub incubator ($1k + alumni pitch) · Velocity Cornerstone mentorship
• Wound down: the lesson that made everything after it sharper

CHAPTER IV · NOW

Indigo Stride

At Indigo Stride I'm a software engineer working where real estate meets AI, building real production systems, not demos.

I do it while finishing a finance degree at Guelph (class of 2027), which turns out to be the right pairing. The code builds the product; the finance sharpens the thinking behind it.

• Software engineer at the intersection of real estate and AI