The Man Who Quit a Perfect Career to Wire the World
Most people at 32, sitting on the boards of two publicly listed companies, earning real money, trusted by one of Pakistan's most powerful industrial dynasties - most people would stay. Isfandiyar "Asfi" Shaheen looked at all of that and asked a different question: what if half the world is not online, and I know why?
He quit. He got on a plane. He ended up in San Francisco with no H1B visa, no company, and a theory. Within eight months he had a deal with Facebook. Within six years, that deal had crashed. Today he lives in Portugal, codes alongside AI assistants, and is building something new again.
This is not a story about failure. This is a story about a man who has made a career out of betting on the whole world - the whole messy, un-wired, underserved world - and refusing to stop when the bet does not immediately pay off.
Here is the tension that makes Asfi Shaheen genuinely interesting: he is an obsessive financial modeler - a man who competed in the inaugural financial modeling championship in 2012, who taught Excel for over a decade, whose entire professional identity was built on spreadsheets, deal structures, and number precision - and yet he has spent the better part of a decade making enormous bets based almost entirely on conviction.
The models said fiber was expensive. The models said rural broadband had no return. The models said the robot might not work. Asfi built the models, saw the numbers, and charged ahead anyway. Because the models also said that if you change the financing structure, align incentives differently, and get Facebook to build you a robot that wraps fiber onto power lines at a few dollars per meter - the math changes.
He is, in other words, a rigorous dreamer. A man who believes deeply in the power of careful analysis, and also deeply in the power of quitting your safe job when Singularity University gives you a one-week program in Silicon Valley and breaks your brain open.
"We want to level the playing field for all human aspiration. Bridging the digital divide is step one to achieve that. And of all the things that we could make abundance in our life, I think making connectivity abundant is the easiest of the problems."
- Isfandiyar Shaheen, Community Broadband Bits PodcastFive Lives in One Career
Asfi's story does not run in a straight line. It runs in spirals - each loop wider than the last, each landing in stranger territory than anyone could have predicted from the starting point.
The Deal Guy. Franklin and Marshall College, Economics and Mathematics degree in hand, Asfi enters the New York finance world, eventually landing back in Pakistan with the Dawood Hercules Group - one of the country's largest industrial conglomerates. He becomes a board director at Engro Corporation and Engro Foods. He helps build Towershare, a cellular tower sharing company spanning the MENA region.
The Singularity Shock. A seven-day executive education program at Singularity University in Silicon Valley. Asfi attends and something irreversible happens. He comes back convinced that solving a genuinely hard problem is more important than doing well at an easy one. He hands in his notice.
The Facebook Gambit. He moves to San Francisco. He walks into Facebook for the first time in August 2017, posts an article on their internal board about what he learned at Towershare, and within eight months has become their first Entrepreneur in Residence at Facebook Connectivity. The plan: Facebook's engineers build a robot that wraps fiber optic cable onto overhead power lines.
The Long Build. NetEquity Networks is incorporated. Deal pipelines are built across Pakistan, rural America, Nebraska. A partnership with Althea Networks brings smart contracts into the broadband financing picture.
The Crash and the Pivot. By 2022, the NetEquity effort has, by Asfi's own frank accounting, crashed. He writes about it publicly in a Medium post titled "Chasing Internet for All: my fears, cheers and tears over the last 6 years." Then he pivots into crypto and DeFi, founding Stablecoin Labs and Wagmi Labs.
The Return to the Spreadsheet, Upgraded. Now based in Portugal, Asfi is building AsfiModels and leaning deep into the intersection of AI and financial modeling. He's teaching Excel modelers to code and building a web app that lets anyone describe a dashboard in plain English and have it built automatically.
Six Panels That Explain the Man
He mentioned to colleagues that he was curious about bridge. Within weeks, he was playing in tournaments.
He competed in the inaugural financial modeling world championship in 2012. He taught Excel for over ten years.
His minimum viable version of "solving a problem" involves deploying fiber to every country on earth. He wants the whole world online.
Multiple LinkedIn recommenders use the same word: mentor. Colleagues describe him as someone who made sure everyone on his team was "realizing his or her dream."
He documents everything. His conviction that transparent reflection helps him find collaborators means his Medium archive is a real-time autobiography.
His current LinkedIn bio lists his loves as: "video games, financial modeling and programming." He lists video games first.
A Robot, a Power Line, and Half the World
The plan was audacious. Asfi's core insight was infrastructure geometry: while only around 10% of mobile network towers are connected to fiber, over 80% are connected to the electrical grid. If you can deploy fiber alongside power lines cheaply using Facebook's wrapping robot, the economics of universal connectivity change entirely.
The financing model was equally precise. Rather than traditional structures, Asfi designed a cost-based pricing structure where fees decline as usage grows. The more people who connect, the cheaper it gets.
He walked into Facebook headquarters for the first time on August 24, 2017. One week later, he posted on their internal message board about what he had learned at Towershare. An engineer named Karthik Yogeeswaran read it and became his technical partner. Within eight months, he was Facebook's first EIR for Connectivity.
The robot ran into delays. By 2021, Asfi had pivoted toward smart contract-based broadband financing with Althea Networks in rural Nebraska. By 2022, he wrote the post-mortem with detailed chronology and honest assessment.
The Excel Guy Learns to Code (With Help)
In June 2024, Asfi published a 22-minute Medium read titled "Leveling up as a financial analyst in the age of Generative AI." It was addressed specifically to "Excel modelers."
The arrival of large language models changed the equation. It makes the gap between knowing what you want data to do and knowing how to write that in Python jumpable in an afternoon.
"I've always been the 'business guy' or the 'financial modeling guy' or the 'deal guy'. Now I want to learn how to build and ship software."
- Isfandiyar Shaheen, Medium, June 2024