Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today I am very pleased to say is Ayman Rahman, Founder and CEO of Dare, the energy tech trading firm. Having realised, to his parents’ disappointment, that rather than become a doctor, he was drawn to the risks and rewards of the financial world, Ayman became as he says, ‘obsessed’ about how to get a job in trading. When a small energy trading firm gave him a chance to learn his craft on the high pressure trading floor, Ayman’s rapid rise saw him in less than two years become the company’s head of fuel oil trading. In 2016, he launched his own venture called Versa with his wife, Fateha Begum, and best friend, Jono Ooi, focussed on providing liquidities for refined products such as gasoline and propane. But spotting an opportunity to shift their model towards emerging data driven power and renewables markets, Ayman rebranded his business to Dare in 2021. Dare now trades on average 8.5 billion dollars of energy contracts every day and aims to help the world reach a renewable future faster. It’s lovely to have you here. Fabulous that you can make it. Tell me firstly, before we go through all the fabulous questions I have to ask, well we’re see if they’re fabulous or not but interesting questions to me, tell me what you do because some people won’t quite know.
Ayman Rahman
Certainly. Well, Elliot, thank you for having me on the show today, a real privilege and pleasure to be here and meet you all. So what do we do? Well, like you said, we provide liquidity to energy, financial contracts, but what does that actually mean? Well, when companies who have exposure to energy prices, that could be a refinery or it could be a wind farm, want to kind of make a decision about something that they’re going to do in the future, whether that’s how much oil they’re going to refine, how much power they’re going to produce, they want to do that safe in the knowledge that a price is available for them to lock in. We can sell it at this price, we can buy it at this price, we can make some certain business decisions around that. That’s basically what hedging is. So we as a service trade with a lot of these counter parties in the markets and we are the other side of those deals, so we use kind of models, analytics, our own kind of proprietary way of looking at things and help big companies, who have energy price exposure, manage that risk.
Elliot Moss
How many are there of you in this business doing this clever thing?
Ayman Rahman
So our team size is about 200 right now. There’s probably about 50 people on the trading side.
Elliot Moss
Okay, I understand that your first foray into the world of trading was something out of Trading Place, I think it was called Trading Places with Eddie Murphy many years ago. All I’ve got in my head is this lunacy. Is that the true story of what happened to Ayman Rahman that day?
Ayman Rahman
It’s surprisingly pretty close and that surprised me. I remember on my first day stepping onto a trading floor, lot of shouting, you know a lot of screaming, a lot of buying and selling and I thought well look it’s 2012, and that’s when I started my career, look it’s going to be all on computers, going to be all models and analysis, you know this kind of Trading Places style you know in markets is gone but low and behold there’s a niche OTC oil and energy product market that still is done on voice.
Elliot Moss
OTC standing for?
Ayman Rahman
Over the counter.
Elliot Moss
Yep.
Ayman Rahman
So a lot of these deals are still on voice and that means emotions, that means you know shouting, that means just a really vibrant atmosphere on the trading floor where there’s a lot going on and yeah, it’s something that needs to be experienced to be really appreciated.
Elliot Moss
And you were thrown in, I mean obviously at some point you have to do something for the first time. I remember years ago someone said that you know the first time you ever have ‘insert name’ and in this instance it was a McDonald’s Big Mac, you never forget the taste of the McDonald’s Big Mac. Whether you eat them now or not is neither here nor there. That first time you made your first trade, if you can go back, what was the sensation?
Ayman Rahman
Sensation, so there’s a couple of types of trades right, so when you’re first starting out as a new trader, you might be trading on someone else’s portfolio right, so you’re kind of doing a trade at someone’s request. Mentally, that’s relatively easy, right, so it’s okay my boss has asked me to do this, fair enough, well that’s his decision, that’s his skin in the game.
Elliot Moss
And you’ve got to execute.
Ayman Rahman
And you’ve got to execute. So that’s okay, right, he usually, he or she but usually he in our industry unfortunately, is going to ask right well why did you do that in line with what I asked? What were you thinking about? Did you consider these factors etc, etc? But ultimately that decision has been made on top of you so it’s not too bad. The first time you make a trading decision for yourself, that’s a different experience because all of a sudden, it’s what you’ve thought about personally, it’s what you’ve considered and analysed in the market. That is, you know, a scary experience right, you’re out there and you’re going to live and die and the results will show a basis of what you’ve decided. It’s thrilling and it takes some getting used to but, yeah it’s an experience.
Elliot Moss
You said something about the thrill, so obviously your family background, you’ve got parents who say, ‘We’d like you to be a doctor’ and you say, ‘That looks lovely but no thank you’. Where’s that thrill seeker come from in you? What do you think brought you to this place where you’re interested in risk?
Ayman Rahman
I think I’m blessed, privileged to say that I had a pretty secure and safe upbringing and that then allows you take risk, right, when you have parents and a back network around you that you know if you fail, you’ve got something to fall back on. Right well my dad, my mum, reasonably well off, middleclass, if I go into trading and it doesn’t work out, well worse case I’ll move back in with them.
Elliot Moss
Did you really think that though?
Ayman Rahman
Yeah, yeah, genuinely. I knew that like I’m not going to be out like on the street or working in you know a really basic retail job to pay the bills, right, there’s that option.
Elliot Moss
I think there’s something more though because lots of people have, you know I had a secure background but it doesn’t mean that I’ve gone and done what you’ve done.
Ayman Rahman
That’s true.
Elliot Moss
And I meet lots of people that haven’t done what you’ve done and of course very privileged for me to meet people like you who have. Is there something else that drove the risk? I’m looking in your eyes and these aren’t, these little eyes of yours are big eyes, are twinkling, you’re going okay, I want to know where that juice is from Ayman, what’s, where?
Ayman Rahman
No, you’re right, you’re spot on. I mean, I think to be honest I don’t know but I’ll tell you what I think, right. I think it comes from insecurity. I think there is a desire to want to prove yourself. There is a desire to show the world or people around you or even yourself like what you’re capable of and what you can do. You know I grew up as a Muslim guy in the wake of 9/11 in a town which had hardly any people of colour and a very few number of Muslims. You know going to school after 2001 like you feel that sense of othering right, like that sense of hey you’re not, you know part of the real community here and it’s only really after I moved to London that I recognised that but I think subconsciously there was definitely an element of well actually I’d like to show that I can contribute and do something great in the community and you know be a part of this great country that we’ve built so, that’s my theory but it’s one of these things that a lot of things go into making something happen and easy to put a story on it in reverse, difficult to figure it out as maybe you’re going through it.
Elliot Moss
Well that’s I wonder when you said it’s my family, I’m thinking yeah no that ticks a box but that tells you why you weren’t frightened to do it, it doesn’t tell you what was drawing you towards the heat of battle. At what point then during that sense of proving yourself bit, at what point did you I want to set out my own shop? Do you remember that moment and what was that about?
Ayman Rahman
Yeah. So I mean I was ridiculously naïve right. I came in sixteen, seventeen, as soon as I figured that I wanted to be a trader, that was always my plan. I would read about hedge fund guys and people that had set up their own business and I didn’t want to just go sit in an investment bank and trade, my whole kind of methodology of thinking about it was right, how do I learn something that I can do myself straight away? So yeah, just chasing that and looking for like avenues constantly to be like, right what can I take away? How scalable is this? What do I need? So there’s certain things within trading you can’t do unless you’ve got a huge balance sheet behind you right, if you get into those areas then unless you’re at a bank you’re not going to be able to build a business. Luckily after 2008 some new regulation came in. Dodd-Frank, you may have heard about right. So for some of the listeners, what did that mean? It meant banks couldn’t take risk in the same way that they could before. They couldn’t have positions, buy and sell stuff speculatively, which meant they became really limited as to like their levels of activity. It created an opportunity for some independent groups to start up and that was what the first company I started in was doing right, they were coming in and taking the role that banks had had previously to help other counter parties manage risk, so I got very lucky, right, got very lucky to go into a niche area within another nice area that also had scalability for someone starting with a relatively small pool of capital. I kept my eyes open looking for something like that but the starts aligned and you know I can’t take too much credit for ending up in the right see at the right time.
Elliot Moss
No I don’t buy that either but we’ll come back to that. I love this guy, he’s not taking too much credit. Ayman Rahman is my Business Shaper, he’s the Founder of Dare and they deal with finance and energy and there’s lots more coming from him very shortly. Right now though we’ve got a clip from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions, they can be found on all the major podcast platforms. MDRx CEO Tom Grogan and COO Sian Rodway talk about the metaverse, what it is, why companies would wish to explore it and the potential risks that we should all be aware of.
You can of course find all our former Business Shapers, I think there’s around 500 of them, which is fabulous, on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today, as I’ve mentioned earlier and I hope you’ve been with me, is Ayman Rahman, Founder and CEO of Dare, the energy tech trading firm. You talked before about oh I just go lucky, you know stuff happened and I was in the right place at the right time. A sixteen, seventeen year old version of you, which you referenced as well, you said oh well you know what could be scalable, what’s this, what’s that and I’m thinking well, I mean I have a seventeen year old, I’ve a nineteen year old and they’re pretty interesting characters and maybe they are sort of thinking in the same way as you but that’s not that normal, to already be pondering on those things and then there’s something else you’ve mentioned I think about the trader who looks at the deal. All that stuff, how did you bring it together to actually get business one off the ground? What actually happened in those, in that period of time, that gestation and then the, the creation of the first version of Dare?
Ayman Rahman
Yeah, so, joining my first company and having it be quite a small company allowed me to observe what a startup felt like, right, so you can see the quirks, the nuances, the difficulties with growing and you know you kind of pick up a lot of that by diffusion. My first role was nominally a trader, a junior trader, but because it’s such a small company, you’re doing support work, you’re doing risk management, you’re doing reconciliations, so you’re kind of learning like a lot about the wider business. In my second role, I went to kind of start a department, so the department, the desk as we call it in the trading world, fuel oil which I had learnt at my previous company, I started a brand new department at company that didn’t have a fuel desk. So again I’m getting like a little bit of training about how to start something up, right, so I’m doing a new desk having been at a startup, so there’s the building blocks are kind of coming together, I’m seeing the challenges, I’m learning as I go and then kind of we had a blow out year in that second company, right, so the company was pretty small, they were doing about two million a year, we came in with this new department, fuel oil trading and in our first year we made $12 million, right, so it’s like okay, wow this is really good, you’ve 5, 6 X’d the company size here, it’s super significant. At that point I kind of turned around to the Founders of that company and said look, you guys are nice and this is okay but you know I feel like I should have some skin in the game here right, I should be a partner in this firm I’ve 5 X’d you in one year.
Elliot Moss
I’d love their face, what were their faces like? That’s very interesting, thank you very much and they say there’s the door. Not quite.
Ayman Rahman
I mean, not quite but pretty much you know. They said look, it’s never going to happen, equity is not on the table right, you’re a trader, we don’t think you can do this by yourself. Well, you know you light a fire under petrol then, you know, didn’t need any more motivation but if I did you know they gave it to me right there. In a great position at that point because I’ve got a track record. I have a bit of a reputation in the industry and the oil industry and the energy industry is small, right, so people know each other so right okay well that used to be the head trader at company X, start speaking to some investors, have a little bit of interest and you know have a track record to show right so it’s not, it’s not Ayman saying oh he made $12 million, it’s here’s Ayman, here’s his employment contract that says he gets paid X percentage and here’s his last pay cheque which shows he actually did make this much money so, you can’t argue with it.
Elliot Moss
So then you convince investors, then you go and do it. The bit I’m interested in is that the trade is cut and thrust, trading is fun, negotiating is fun, putting positions on and realising a profit, thank you very much and that’s what really what you grew up on. The second piece though, building a company and you’ve mentioned the, I was running a department, I looked at compliance, all those pieces around it, which bit gives you a buzz? Has the buzz changed from the cut and thrust to the building?
Ayman Rahman
Yeah, the buzz always comes for me from growth and progress and new challenge. So whether that’s starting a new department at the earlier stages of my career or starting a new company at the foundation days of Dare or whether that’s today and we’re growing into new areas like we’re looking at electricity now, renewable products, metals, agricultural things, things that are outside my core expertise but I get to meet really great people who are experts in these fields and build a business combining what we’re good at which is this kind of liquidity providing market maker style of trading with new products and figuring out how to do that and I love it particularly when people say it can’t be done, that’s…
Elliot Moss
Which is more all of this is much more three dimensional than a two dimensional trade essentially, like that’s what you’re really into, the whole picture.
Ayman Rahman
Yeah. The building, yeah.
Elliot Moss
The building. This thing about you and your relationship with change, as again I look at you and you’re a young person, a young person compared to me, young person doing his thing, why are you driven to constantly trying to shake things up? Why is it interesting that you can apply data science? Why is it interesting that renewables are important to you? What’s going on for you every day as you look at your business?
Ayman Rahman
At it’s core, there’s an enjoyment there. I can give lots of different reasons about being at the forefront of change and you know navigating the energy transition which is a big theme in our lives but ultimate I find it fun, just solving problems, coming together as a team and trying to tackle things that are hard. If it wasn’t fun, I wouldn’t do it. So I’m having fun and building the business and that’s it and kind of simple but it’s the truth.
Elliot Moss
And I was looking at the culture of Dare, I always when I do my research, I look at what people say and often it’s very similar, you know we have integrity, we have all this but yours is a bit punchier, your Twitter feed is a bit punchy, you’re like we failed here, we interviewed eight and a half thousand people for this job over here, it cost us 14 million what it was, all these numbers, in other words, we’ve mucked up, so you’re outspoken about the failures, you drive an outspoken culture, where’s that search for truth from? Where does that come from because I, again it seems to inculcate everything about you and this business?
Ayman Rahman
I’ve found over the last kind of ten years that being direct, being honest and sometimes even if required being blunt is the best way to get to the heart of the issue. We’re trying to do difficult things, we’re trying to solve things that haven’t been done before, we can’t do that unless we’re really honest. Being really honest and trying things means we will make mistakes and we do make mistakes, we need to talk about them, we can’t shy away from what our failures are, speaking about them normalises them, speaking about them I hope encourages our team to continue taking risks and it’s those risks that take us to the next level. When we started Dare, you know my last pay cheque at my previous job was £1.2 million, 24 years old. Any sane person would probably look at that and say let me do this for three or four years before taking a huge risk and starting a business which may or may not succeed but that kind of culture and that ethos of being open to risk, being able to feel comfortable with risk and being able to feel comfortable with failure, has led to all of the great successes in my life and it’s something I really want to continue encouraging in our whole team at Dare.
Elliot Moss
And there’s a massive contradiction in there of course because most people are incredibly uncomfortable with risk. So again that, apart from the, is that going back to the listen, I just still want to prove to the world that I’m the guy, is that where that comes from, that comfort with it because you know you’re going to have to go to the edge of risk before you can push on to doing something remarkable, is that what that is or is it something else?
Ayman Rahman
I think it’s definitely a part of it. I think there’s also like a dissatisfaction with the status quo, a restlessness of being too comfortable in any one position. We’re in a fantastic position, the business has done brilliant, there’s no need for me in the traditional sense to carry on, right, I could be on the beach somewhere but I’m not because I love the team, I love the challenge but also because I don’t feel I’d feel content unless we got to the limits of what we could do, right, and I’m trying to find the limit.
Elliot Moss
You should see the way he said that. It’s like you’re going to get there at this rate, I’m not arguing with you. Ayman Rahman is my Business Shaper and we’ll have our final chat with him in a moment. We’ve also got some soul for you from Gabriels. That’s coming up shortly, don’t go anywhere.
Just for a few more minutes, Ayman Rahman is my Business Shaper and we’ve been talking about your attitude to risk. We’ve been talking about the fact you love building stuff. We’ve touched on renewables, it would be impossible to avoid a headline or an interview with the Prime Minister or anything else at the moment about Net Zero about the fact that climate change is serious, it’s no longer a side issue, it was a side issue when I was growing up, people were talking about it in the eighties and we all said don’t know what you’re talking about, now literally everybody knows that we have to make the shift. Tell me what you’re doing specifically to be part of making that shift and why that makes sense to you.
Ayman Rahman
So, our kind of role is within energy markets, so anyone that wants to do anything at a price needs to know what that price is. We help companies discover what that price is and what it can be in the future so they can plan and make their decision. That’s our kind of role. It is at the edge of the energy transition, it’s not front and centre, right. Front and centre I think we need massive action, massive action from governments, massive actions from groups of countries coming together, forums like the United Nations and you know I think like a lot of people today probably feel like we’re not doing enough, right, the targets keep getting pushed back whether it's 2030 we’re going to be Net Zero, 2050, a lot of the companies in our industry are pushing back their targets too and there isn’t a lot of consequence from doing that, right, look at what BP have done most recently, scaled back massively their targets for when they’re going to be a net carbon zero company or reduce their emissions by X percent.
Elliot Moss
So is your point that you’re really part of that rather than the key driver of it or is there anything you feel that you can actively do to make this transition quicker?
Ayman Rahman
So is there anything we can actively do? I am racking my brain to try and figure it out because it feels like there should be, right, we’re a company that’s involved trading billions of dollars of energy every single day, we have massive data, massive access to these markets, I feel like there’s something there that we can add value to that transition in a material way. I haven’t figured out what it is yet if I’m being very honest.
Elliot Moss
No, that’s alright but you’re looking at it.
Ayman Rahman
We’re trying, we’re trying but it’s a huge problem, you know you need to come up with something clever, so let’s see.
Elliot Moss
You’ve mentioned money along the way and obviously you’re in the money business and for those people that hear these numbers, $8.5 billion a day, that’s a lot and huge numbers being thrown around and if people have seen the, I think it was the Times Young Persons Rich List and all these other things, they go wow, this guy he must be doing something right because there’s some money attached, there’s some value attached. Couple of questions for you. Firstly, and you talked about the 1.2 million pay cheque before you moved. What’s your relationship like with money? Does it, does it give you any kind of buzz? What’s that about? And secondly, is there a responsibility that you feel to use that money in the future to do things that genuinely have a big impact?
Ayman Rahman
Yes, it’s such an important question and something that I’ve thought about. My relationship with money is kind of two-fold right, on the one hand I don’t consider myself like a hugely material person, right, I don’t drive a Ferrari or anything like that, it’s never really interested me, you know we live comfortably as a family, we try to give to charity, we try to you know look after our friends and family and be good with it, so in that sense you know the actual kind of quality of life that money can give you is great but it’s not everything, it’s not the be all and end all but the other side of me, the driving part of me, the business shaper side of me if you will, is obsessed with money, right, and it’s obsessed with money as a scorecard, right, that’s what I see it as, it’s how high can I put this total on the scoreboard, you know pushing the limit as a measure of success, right, it’s not that makes you successful, that’s not your impact on the world but it’s a objective thing about how much value you’ve created on our planet. You know I have mixed feelings about feeling like that in a weird way, you know I want to build a business that has an impact and we’ve spoken about doing things within renewables but the money is a part of it, right, the money is that measure of success and that barometer that we use to compare ourselves, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t look at it in that sense.
Elliot Moss
I really like your honesty, I appreciate it and I think you’re right, without that you’ve got no engine to drive all the things that you want to drive anyway regardless. It’s been really nice talking to you and I’m sure you will continue to shape your industry. You are only at the beginning by the looks of things so, super good luck with that. Just before I let you disappear though, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Ayman Rahman
Well Elliot, firstly thank you for having me today on the show, it’s been a pleasure and the song I’ve chosen to play us out is Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street and I first heard that when I was seven years old with Lisa Simpson and Bleeding Gums Murphy on The Simpsons, so can’t beat it, absolutely love that tune.
Elliot Moss
Gerry Rafferty there with Baker Street, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Ayman Rahman. He talked about the importance of learning something he could do himself and he was referring of course to trading. He talked about the buzz beyond trading coming from progress, growth and challenge and really building something which is a phrase I loved when he said it. And he also talked about an ongoing dissatisfaction with the status quo, that’s what drives him and finding and honestly, he talked about money being a scorecard and really important for him in the context of being able to do something and making an impact. That’s it from Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.