Hi, I’m Rahim.

I live in San Francisco — born and raised in London, nine years in China (2010–2019), here since. Along the way I’ve been a product manager at Amazon and Google, co-founded two companies (Oakam and Euristix), qualified as an accountant (CIMA), read PPE at Oxford and later went back for an MBA, and picked up a BS in computer science from Western Governors University. I speak English, Mandarin, Gujarati and Spanish, in descending order of competence.

Today I work for a family office in an operating-partner role, helping portfolio companies become more effective — leading software teams, applying AI where it actually pays off, and building things quickly when buying isn’t an option. Part of that is serving as Chief Digital Officer at Orascom Development Holding.

Education and learning

I think math competence is a superpower — not just for STEM or economics, but for almost any field, if only because so much of what you read is written by people who fundamentally misunderstand data. So I care a lot about how children learn math, and about whether the evidence behind math education reform holds up. I wrote a two-part series for Education Progress on the latter: The Evidence Crisis in Math Reform and Part 2. It’s personal, too: I have a son, born in 2019, who is on track to master Algebra 1 before he turns eleven. For his earlier years I built a dot-cards tool for teaching toddlers numbers and a prime factorization game. And I will happily talk your ear off about spaced repetition: I’m a long-time Anki evangelist and once wrote up how to compute custom statistics from your Anki review history.

AI in practice

I’ve had several thousand conversations with AI tools over the past few years, and I’ve ended up with strong opinions about what separates people who get a lot out of them from people who don’t. I wrote them down: How I use AI.

Tools

I build small, single-purpose web tools — there are about two dozen at tools.encona.com. A few I use regularly: visual PDF diff, Markdown → EPUB conversion in the browser, and an explorer for California school test scores.

Probability

Some of those tools exist because I think most people’s intuitions about probability are wrong in interesting ways. There are interactive demos of Berkson’s paradox, publication bias, the Jevons paradox, and a game that teaches kids the Kelly criterion.

Older writing lives in the archive.