I wake up naturally, usually between 7 and 7.30. No alarm if I can help it, and never a snooze — I’ve never liked it. I’m normally up because I’m keen to get going, not because a problem is nagging at me. The first few minutes of the day aren’t for work.
WhatsApp stays off for the first 10 or 15 minutes, deliberately. I need to load before the day loads onto me. Those few minutes, before the messages start, are when I decide what actually matters today — rather than letting the day decide for me. Then coffee. First coffee is the one I don’t compromise on.
Some mornings I’m thrown straight into calls with Asia. By the time I’m up, the team and clients there are already well into their day, so mine begins mid-flow. Often it’s a live account — something to plan, something to deliver, occasionally something to negotiate. I don’t mind it at all; it’s a quick way to get moving.
SEPANTA runs across three time zones, so my day moves from right to left across the map. It opens with Asia, the UK sits through late morning and early afternoon, and it closes with the US in the evening. We build an AI operating system for large, complex multinationals — software built around how a business actually runs, with people kept at the top of every decision. Running the commercial side of that means living in a few clocks at once.
The trick with working across regions is that you can’t borrow their rhythm. It’s very easy to get swept into the pace of wherever you happen to be — the chaos of Manila, the ambition of New York — but the only way to manage it is to keep your own metronome. You set the tempo; you don’t let the traffic outside the window set it for you. It took me a while to learn that. Early on you try to match everyone, and you just end up half-present in every conversation.
I’ll do a couple of hours at home first, then head into the office. I genuinely enjoy being in — there’s something about the room that a video call can’t replace. So much of this job is energy and tempo, and both are easier to set in person than through a screen.
No two days are identical, but most have the same three ingredients. There’ll be one or two key client accounts I’m close to — planning, working out what we’re delivering, or getting something over the line. There’s usually an investor conversation or two — right now especially, as we prepare for a raise, which means a lot of answering questions, sharpening the strategy and getting the data room right. And there’s almost always someone in the leadership team who needs a hand with something.
A good day has a particular buzz to it. You can feel it in the team, and it’s usually set off by a customer win of some kind — the last one that did it was [recent win — e.g. a client going live, a deal landing]. That energy is infectious; it’s the best part of the job. Bad days I don’t really count. They’re just temporary challenges, and then the next thing to think about.
What’s changed most in the last year is that I’m far less hands-on. We’re bigger and a lot more complex than we were, so my day is less about doing the work myself and more about leading, influencing and selling the plan. That’s a harder skill than it sounds — the instinct is always to jump in and fix it yourself, and most of the job now is resisting that.
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Lunch is no big deal — a late breakfast at home, or a pastry grabbed somewhere. Dinner is the opposite. I’ll set a couple of hours aside for it, cook a go-to dish or sit down properly, and switch off completely. It’s the one hard line in the day.
Then I come back for the evening. From around 9.30pm or 10pm I’ll do three or four hours of focused work — no calls, no interruptions, nothing to react to. It’s when things actually get made, and it’s my favourite stretch of the day. The irony isn’t lost on me that the most productive part of my day has no meetings in it at all.
The two things that show up over and over are Claude and Spotify. Claude runs through most of the work; Spotify turns up in different forms at different hours. Lately it’s been a lot of Sina Bathaei — Persian traditional music blended with electronic. No lyrics, very melodic, but it keeps moving, which is exactly what I want while I work.
The moment that reminds me why we’re building SEPANTA is that team energy. When someone is genuinely, properly excited about what they’re working on, that’s the whole thing. I didn’t start this to add another AI tool to the pile — I wanted to build something that actually helps businesses, and the people in them, grow. That buzz in the team is proof it’s landing.
The thing on my desk that might surprise people is how many desktops I keep open on my Mac — not tabs, desktops. It’s the most underused feature going. I keep a separate space for each region and each big piece of work, and I move between them all day. It’s how I stop three time zones from bleeding into one another.
There’s no grand evening ritual. When the work’s done, I stop. That’s its own kind of discipline.