Dan built and led sales and marketing teams for Citibank, Lehman, UBS and Deutsche Bank where he worked in Bahrain, London, Switzerland, Australia, Singapore, HK and Dubai.  Since the early 1980s he identified and focused on investment opportunities in Emerging Markets and especially Pakistan where he introduced the first Equity Fund for the Country followed by orchestrating the first investor trips to Pakistan working to open the Capital markets for foreign institutional money mangers.  He was also the first to introduce Public Equity investors to markets across Asia, the MENA, Latin America and Africa.  In 2002 he moved to the buy-side with Deutsche Bank where he built and led the distribution effort for Deutsche’s Asset Management arm in the MENA responsible for the region out of Dubai. Instrumental in establishing the MENA region’s first truly independent asset management firm - Algebra Capital where he was a Founding Partner. Shortly after the latter’s successful sale to Franklin Templeton, Dan built and led the distribution efforts globally for different Asset Managers in London before joining Homestrings, the oldest and largest dedicated EM and Frontier Market Crowd Funding firm where he was responsible for Partnerships.  He helped to initiate and grow Lakson Investments from inception.  He is also a Board Member of Media, Fin Tech and Consumer Companies based in the UK and the MENA and a graduate of University of Chicago Business School (MBA) and American University in Washington DC.

Ather is an experienced business and technology executive with 18 years of experience in corporate sector, the last 6 serving as Chief Executive of 2 organizations. He specializes in business, technical and operational leadership of large technology focused organizations. Ather is currently serving as Chief Executive Officer, and Director on Board of Sybrid (Private) Limited, a Lakson Group company with a 1000 strong workforce in Islamabad, Karachi and Sharjah, UAE. Ather previously served as Managing Director for Numetrics Pakistan, and was involved in the due diligence and ultimate acquisition by McKinsey & Company in 2013. Ather has vast experience in hiring, training, mentoring, developing and transforming knowledge workers into effective teams that have delivered results in globally distributed organizations. Ather has been involved in product development, business strategy, project management and customer engagements. Ather has performed budgeting, financial planning and forecasting, operational management and development and execution of HR policies alongside his leadership roles.
He holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in Computer Science from Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute (GIKI) and Purdue University respectively. He received a Gold Model for best academic performance from GIKI in 1999 and is an honorary member of Upsilon Pi Epsilon IEEE Computer Science Honor Society since 2003. Ather has been a founding Chairman of the Board of Trustees of OPEN Islamabad, and currently serving as President of the chapter as well. He is on the Board of Trustees of other philanthropic and social development organizations. Ather has published a research paper on role of Agile practices in disaster management and business continuity, that he presented in IBM CASCON conference held in Toronto in 2009. Ather is a certified ScrumMaster (Virginia, 2006) and has managed globally distributed Scrum teams for many years. He frequently volunteers to deliver public lectures in universities and entrepreneurial organisations, mentoring aspiring engineers and for organizations promoting literacy.

Ather serves on many committees for public and government organisations, including National Scholarship Management Committee of Higher Education Commission and Innovation Steering Committee for reforming ORICs in universities of Higher Education Commission. Ather has also served as an Industry Representative for Accreditation of NUST Business School as part of HEC’s Business School Accreditation Council.

Ather is a prolific blogger who has written on management and productivity issues of knowledge workers at thinkingspirits.com.

Founder and publisher of The Express Tribune, one of Pakistan’s leading English-language daily newspapers and a publishing partner of The New York Times. Also responsible for driving business growth across other media properties of the *Lakson Group including Daily Express, the most popular Urdu newspaper in the world. (http://tribune.com.pk/)

He is also an angel advisor/investor at DotZero Ventures, an early-stage investment fund based out of Karachi (http://dotzeroventures.com/)

Studied at Yale and Brandeis Universities where he read management and political science.

In his spare time he loves to travel, most recently visiting Cambodia, reading fiction, playing squash and the board game, Catan.