The proofThe comeback, engineered into a firm
From a hospital bed, with the one skill he still had, Zaid went back to the markets he had loved since high school. He had begun investing in crypto in 2014 and committed fully through the 2016 to 2017 cycle. He treated the reinvention the way an engineer treats a rebuild, rewiring his body and his psychology for a white-collar world that rewards patience over force. He came to see the same thing in markets that he had always seen in machines. There were systems with patterns, and there were problems waiting to be solved.
He taught himself, learned from mentor after mentor, and then he scaled. In 2018 he founded an algorithmic trading company, acquired a London arbitrage firm with a proven track record, and advanced that engine into super intelligence (SI) and machine learning. In Dubai he merged three firms, Khan Tech Trading, ARB Trader, and FinScientists, into a single quantitative platform. Starting from $1.1 million invested, he built it into a business that an independent auditor valued at $24 million within five years, a more than twentyfold increase.
He then founded Manhattan Global Investments, a private-equity and consulting firm through which he gained experience across more than $4.5 billion in public and private deals, and in the Gulf he worked with the royal families of the United Arab Emirates, family offices, and investment banks from Dubai to Abu Dhabi. He even raised capital toward acquiring a bank in Dubai, with an option on three board seats. That effort ultimately failed, an expensive and humbling chapter that compressed decades of experience into three short years. He then exited Manhattan Global Investments, his second exit after the mechanical-contracting company, and his first after launching and running a private investment fund of his own.
The boy who once imagined himself on CNBC then found himself there, delivering market analysis on CNBC Arabia. With that experience behind him, he formed a private family office alongside his general partner Taj Sawh and Anjum Malik, an early backer who became his mentor and advisor. They pooled their own general-partner capital and, in 2022, filed Manhattan Crypto Fund LP with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. It never opened to the public. The offering was oversubscribed at launch and taken in full by a single institutional partner, which was brought inside the general partnership, and the firm has run on that footing ever since. He wrote the doctrine it still follows. Architecture over speculation, with the question of loss coming before the question of gain.
The capital was never the goal. It was the proof that the discipline worked.