005Mocha Hoodie
01
Mocha
Mocha
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“C'est la vie dans la six.” Heavyweight fleece, dyed like your morning coffee.
Now · Building Qull
After agents,
Personalities.
Chatbotstaught AI to speak
Agentsare teaching it to act
Personalitieswill teach it to relate
We all saw the growth of AI from simple chatbot interfaces to agents. But what's next? My bet is what I'm calling Personalities. Chatbots allowed AI to speak, while agents are allowing it to act. But agents are quickly becoming interchangeable tools built on the same models and integrations. The next major category will be AI personalities: an AI speech therapist that remembers how a person speaks in different situations, understands their emotional and behavioural patterns, and adapts its support over years rather than simply completing isolated exercises.
An agent can perform a task, but a personality can build trust, develop a relationship, and become a persistent presence in someone's life.
First personality
Meet Kind, an AI pediatric speech therapist.
Kind is one of the first personalities I am working on because I have had a speech impediment for 20+ years. Speech therapists still manually note down the letters, syllables, and words children get stuck on or have a hard time pronouncing. This makes actual therapy subjective rather than objective. On top of that, research has shown that practicing improves results, but there is no way for children to consistently practice with great feedback. And despite 1 in 12 children having a speech disorder, the average wait time to see a therapist is about 6 months.
With Kind, we can tackle all three of these problems at once. We will aim to certify Kind as a registered speech therapist so parents can trust it and regulation actually becomes our moat. We aim to do this with the help of speech therapists, to find out exactly what makes a great speech therapist.
1 in 12children have a speech disorder
~6 moaverage wait to see a therapist
20+ yrsliving with my own impediment
This is just one of the many personalities we will aim to build at Qull. Our selection method will be extremely rigorous. Quality will be our differentiator, not quantity.
The story so far
How I got here,
a timeline.
Chapter 01 · 2013 · Age 13
The story of
the white van.
I'll tell you an interesting story about my first job. I was 13 at the time, and on the way home from school there was this man handing out flyers. I took one and it immediately gripped me. “Call this number to make up to $200 in a weekend,” the flyer said. In grade 8, even $5 was a huge deal, so I immediately called the number without thinking twice about what the risks might be. He said “be ready at 8am on Sunday and I'll come pick you up.”
I didn't know what the job was, who this guy was, or where he was going to take me on Sunday. So I said “Yes! I'll be ready.”
He came on Sunday and called me at 8am to come down to my lobby. I went down and it was a sketchy white van. He told me to get in, and it was at this point that I started thinking about whether the $200 was really worth it. Anyhow, as soon as I got in, I was relieved to see other children inside. He handed each of us a box and explained the job. He would drop each of us outside a major supermarket, like Costco or Walmart, and we had to sell $8 chocolates.
He dropped me off at a random Walmart and I stood outside in the sun for 8 hours trying to sell expensive chocolates. The first few hours were very difficult, but then I started selling a lot as I would only target the people who didn't have both hands full with grocery bags. When the white van came back at 5pm, I had sold the most chocolates. I went again the next day and earned $215 that weekend.
I fell in love with sales.
Chapter 02 · 2015 to 2018
Captain,
Team Canada U19.
CANinternational U19
17captain, on tour, at age
🏏queen's park oval, trinidad
I grew up being obsessed with cricket. This obsession led me to represent Canada at the international U19 level. I not only got the chance to play at this level, but also to captain the team at the age of 17 on international tours. This taught me more about leadership than 10 books could.
The heroes I used to watch growing up, I got to share changerooms with. The stars I wanted to become were playing against me. It was all really weird. But I found out an important key to success:
Dreams can come true.
Chapter 03 · 2018 to 2022
Sixco®
comfort, engineered.
Unfortunately, a few injuries cut my sports career short, so I had to figure out what's next. I decided to start a fashion brand called Sixco. The goal was to design and sell apparel that was genuinely the most comfortable. I started reading about the industry from first principles and things started making sense. I understood the science behind different materials, their GSM, the stitching, supplier management, and most importantly, what resonates. Sixco became a global brand, with customers across 5 continents.
The most important lesson I learned while building Sixco was the power of a brand and the story that brand tells. We didn't merely want a transactional business. We wanted to create a community.
The collections · keep scrolling · swipe
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005Mocha Hoodie
٤١٦Arabic Tee
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Arabic
Arabic
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٤١٦ is Toronto's area code, written the way half the city's families first learned to count.
TORONTOReflected
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Toronto
Toronto
Collection
The city, mirrored, because Toronto looks different depending on where you stand.
SIXFESTWonderland
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Sixfest
We brought some of our top customers together for a day at Canada's Wonderland. That's what community looks like.
💧The Wells
05
The Water
The Water
Wells
We built these wells in areas where clean water is scarce and put the names of the 30 people who purchased from us on the well, so they would share it with their friends and family. It started spreading like wildfire.
2.1 billion people still don't have clean drinking water.
💧Uganda
06
Uganda,
Uganda,
2022
The wells crossed continents with borehole projects in Uganda. We emailed images of the water wells to our customers and thanked them for helping us do this.
But then covid happened. Our main supplier shut down and our backup stopped taking calls. We found a third, but the quality was not the same and shipping costs skyrocketed, so our CAC went way up and the business was not sustainable. With heavy hearts we had to shut down operations, but the lessons I learned from Sixco will stay with me forever.
Chapter 04 · 2023 to 2024
ZIA
VENTURES
HELPING LOCAL OPTICIANS
COMPETE WITH A MONOPOLY
one store at a time
After Sixco, I started working at Luxottica as an Account Executive. Luxottica is a conglomerate that has a monopoly over the eyewear industry. From Ray-Ban and Oakley to Chanel, Prada, Versace, and Coach, Luxottica owns everything.
I wear glasses myself, so when I went to buy a pair at a local optical store, they mentioned that they're not allowed to sell online. This was surprising to me as I knew Luxottica's brands sell all kinds of glasses online. So I went home, did some research, and found out that for the last 20 or so years, local optical stores couldn't sell prescription glasses online due to safety reasons. But the law had changed, and this local business owner was unaware of it.
My curiosity sparked, and I went and asked a few more optical stores. To my surprise, all of them said the same thing. They would like to sell online, but due to regulation they can't. On the other hand, brands like Ray-Ban were starting to sell direct to customer through online channels and undercutting the local optical stores. So I devised a plan.
I resigned from my job at Luxottica and started going to these local optical stores to tell them what was going on, and that I could build them online stores. Through an omnichannel strategy, they could have customers coming in physically through their doors and also online through their website. This way, they at least had a chance to survive in front of Luxottica. Most of them were thrilled, and it brought me joy that for the next year I helped local business owners compete in a rapidly changing environment. But the market was too small, and that was an important lesson I learned.
The pitch, Instagram edition. Swipe through the campaign.
Great mission, small market. That lesson was worth a year.
Chapter 05 · 2025 to 2026
Order up,
at Toast.
In early 2025, I started seeing the Toast POS system at almost every restaurant I visited in Toronto. I started thinking about the similarities between what Toast was doing for smaller restaurants and what I was building at Zia Ventures. The industries were different but the goal was the same. Both wanted the local business to feel the technological power that bigger corporations leverage. I decided to apply for an Account Executive position and got the job.
But I have never felt restricted to doing only the job I was hired to do. Fundamentally, every organization is trying to delight their customers and shareholders. After I joined the sales team at Toast, I realized that with artificial intelligence we now have amazing ways to improve sales productivity by automating a lot of the admin work. So I started building.
I built a tool that does pre-meeting research analysis on prospects, an AI Solutions Engineer that sits on calls with reps, and an AI agent that does the post meeting work: follow up emails in Gmail, next meetings in the calendar, and updated fields in the CRM. It also coaches reps on the Sandler methodology that sales reps at Toast use.
This was so important to the company that I was able to get a meeting with Steve and Aman, the co-founders of Toast, who run a public company with a $18 billion market cap.
The product itself
Interlude · A personal project
Mr. Ikigai,
my wise old man.
Ikigai (生き甲斐) is a Japanese idea. It means your reason for being, the place where what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for all overlap. I've always believed goals die in your head and come alive on paper. So I built Mr. Ikigai for an audience of exactly one: me.
He's an AI in the shape of a patient old sensei. Every goal I give him gets interrogated before it gets accepted: Why does this matter to you? What will you sacrifice for it? What's the game plan? What obstacles will you face? How does your life change when you reach it? Vague dreams don't survive those five questions. They either become commitments or they get dropped. He keeps my daily journal, catches my stray ideas, and greets me every morning by name.
What you
love
love
What the
world needs
world needs
What you can
be paid for
be paid for
What you're
good at
good at
生き甲斐ikigai
Four circles. One overlap.
Mr. Ikigai's only job is to keep me pointed at the middle.
Looking back, he was my first personality. I just didn't have the word for it yet.
The notebook
Essays.
On startups, AI, psychology, philosophy, and politics. The first one is live.
My Interests
- Startups
- Artificial Intelligence
- Psychology
- Philosophy
- Politics
- Architecture
- History
- Go-to-Market
The end, for now
Thanks for visiting
my world.
wasiqzia18@gmail.com
Building a personality? Fighting a monopoly? Selling chocolate outside a Walmart?
I'd love to hear from you.