Wahid Tashkandi

At seventeen he worked loss claims for McLarens, on a desalination plant that had gone down and on a sugar refinery and the port beside it that had burned. The job was to establish what the loss was worth, which meant tracing every dependency downstream of the failure until the trace reached people.

Insurance attaches to the plant and stops at the plant, so the sum written on a claim runs smaller than the loss the place took. That gap measures how far a place depended on the thing that stopped, which means it ranks systems by what happens when they are absent. Power, Eat and Heal came off that ranking, and he has read the world through it since.

A licence held by a third party settles what is owed once a thing has failed. The same instrument stands in front of the first invoice, where it settles whether anything can be sold at all. So the question that establishes a loss and the question that establishes a position are one question asked at two ends of one instrument, and we run it forwards.

He grew up between New Zealand, Australia and Saudi Arabia, and his working life and friendships have run across Asia since, Japan included.

Our method is the work he has already done: reach technical founders before the first round, then build the commercial side with them.

1. GoodFit VP of Revenue · 2022 to 2026 · Global; UK, Europe, United States

   Data platform built to identify companies before they enter a sales pipeline. Finding a company before it raises its hand is the same problem as reaching a founder before a first round, and the classifier methodology that runs the first two layers of our sourcing was built and validated across those four years. Led marketing, sales and post-sale as one organisation, carrying revenue to 5x through a USD 13M Series A led by Notion Capital in September 2025. He has since departed to work full time on hmm.

2. Skalata Ventures Investment Manager · 2021 to 2022 · Australia, national

   Led the pivot from accelerator to a national pre-seed and seed fund. Built the sourcing engine from nothing and hired the associate team that ran it. That engine reached and closed 15 investments in a year, which is a sourcing volume measured over twelve months.

   The engine reached companies fast and reached them at the round, which is late, and it ranked on signals a generalist screen already carries. We screen on the regulatory condition instead, because that one resolves years before a round exists.

3. Paddle Commercial lead, then Head of APAC · 2017 to 2021 · Global, then APAC and China

   Payments infrastructure for software companies, operating as merchant of record. Paddle becomes the seller of record in each country, which means tax registration, payments licensing and the obligations attached to both sit with Paddle, and the software company sells into that country holding none of them. List price was 5% plus 50 cents a transaction, which across software transaction sizes averaged around 7% of revenue.

   Around seven cents in every revenue dollar bought a regulatory position, which the company rented for as long as it sold there in preference to building the position once. So what a company pays to cross a border sets a floor under what that position is worth to a company holding it already, which is why the same asymmetry reads from the acquirer's side of the table. Built the commercial function from zero as a player-coach for the first three years, then took charge of APAC expansion, focused on China.