Editor’s note: The following is the third profile in a series of articles about startup founders from non-technical backgrounds who have launched successful venture-backed companies. Read the previous interviews with MagicSchool AI founder Adeel Khan here, and Trunk Tools founder Sarah Buchner here.
Ali Hussain spent much of his childhood in his family’s St. Paul, Minnesota, convenience store, where he packed cigarette cartons and watched his father run a business seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Hussain was the son of a first-generation immigrant who arrived from Karachi, Pakistan, and worked his way from employment at a 7-Eleven to owning his own corner store. That experience instilled in Hussain a work ethic that stuck with him. But his father made a clear trade-off with him in high school.
“My dad didn’t want me to necessarily come back to the store,” Hussain recalls. “He’s like, ‘Look, like this is what I did and built. Go use school as a mechanism to leave.’ ”
Ultimately, Hussain went on to form Tabs, a New York-based AI startup that automates parts of finance and accounting. Founded in 2023, the company has raised around $90 million, employs about 180 people, and was last valued at $400 million, according to Hussain.
But unlike many tech startup founders, Hussain didn’t study computer science in college. Instead, he earned a humanities degree at Cornell, won a Marshall Scholarship to Oxford, left academia abruptly to work at The Boston Consulting Group, and spent six years learning the operational ropes at early-stage startup Latch before launching Tabs in 2023.
From St. Paul to Oxford
Hussain leveraged a scholarship from the Telluride Association to attend Cornell, where he fell in love with comparative politics and history. Fixated on academia, he graduated and immediately headed to Oxford to pursue a Ph.D. Two months in, reality hit.
“I realized this is a terrible idea,” Hussain admits. “I grew up … way too scrappy packing the cooler to survive through a postdoc and potentially a very structured 10-year career, which seemed very hard and long and not in my control.”
Deciding to reset his trajectory at 23, Hussaini took a chance on management consulting at BCG in the Midwest. Though it provided an intensive crash course in business operations, spreadsheet modeling and corporate processes, the structured corporate hierarchy lacked the agency he had seen in his father’s store.
By 2015, he decided to embed himself directly into tech, taking a massive pay cut to join Latch — then a 10-person seed-stage startup — as its first operations hire.
“Had I tried to do this directly out of Oxford or out of BCG, I think [it] would have been impossible,” Hussain told Crunchbase News in an interview. “One of the things that often keeps many non-traditional founders out is … the ability to access capital, but also understand the playbook of how to build, how to design around a real problem, and build a team.”
Over six years at Latch, as the company grew to tens of millions in revenue, Hussain picked up a few lessons about building venture-backed companies. He learned to pursue large markets, to surround himself with people whose strengths complement his own, and to build for major shifts in technology.
Humanities vision meets deep tech
In 2023, Hussain applied those principles to start Tabs, an AI platform that automates revenue recognition, billing and collections. From the beginning, the founder knew he had to leverage his strengths. He also knew his weaknesses. Hussain recognized that he brought commercial vision and operational execution, not the ability to write code, to the table. So he partnered with a deeply technical co-founder, Deepak Bapat, to balance his own background.
“I came from the humanities,” Hussain noted. “Tabs is a deeply technical and complex problem to solve, and so having someone who could augment my vision … was a very important part.”
Investors took notice. Early relationships and the operational credibility Hussain built during his “apprentice” years paid off. Tabs quickly raised a $4 million pre-seed round co-led by Primary Venture Partners and One Way Ventures. Since then, the startup has grown to roughly 180 employees, raised about $92 million in total capital, reached a $400 million valuation in its last round, and maintained triple- to quadruple-year-over-year revenue growth.
To Hussain, non-traditional backgrounds in tech are a strategic advantage that fosters the resilience required to survive early-stage uncertainty.
“I think a lot of non-traditional folks … have to embrace a ton of volatility, even ahead of being a founder, to make the sacrifices to learn,” Hussain said. “Sometimes it’s just the non-traditional background that allows you to embrace non-traditional ways of learning that ultimately get you into entrepreneurship.”
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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