Grew up in a small town and had to work extra hard to get my foot in the door working on cool tech startups. My first job at age 15 was fixing iPhone screens in the mall. Then I scooped ice cream at Cold Stone Creamery and bussed tables at a local airport restaurant to pay for college. 

After football practice in high school I'd be learning how to code on CodeAcademy. People thought I was a nerd. 

Fast forward 10 years -- I've built multiple apps, b2b SaaS, internet businesses, websites, and e-commerce businesses that have generated over $100m collectively. 

I got to work remotely, travel to 12+ countries, invest in real estate and stocks and built a fruitful living for myself. 

Learning how to build apps changed my life. Now I’m on a mission to teach 10,000 people how to build apps.

Alim Charaniya

In 2019, I joined PrizePicks as employee #19, Head Mobile Engineer, when the app only had 5000 users.

This weekend, we celebrated PrizePicks acquisition by Allwyn for a mind boggling $2.5 (potentially $4.15) BILLION DOLLARS!!! 

Ready for the story? Let’s go!

At the time I joined, we were regrowing through a hyper-scale phase — and there were no sports on TV.

Post-COVID, my parents thought I was crazy for joining a sports startup when the entire sports world had shut down.

But my little brother and I played $50 worth of PrizePicks… and immediately hit our first entry for a $150 profit.

That was the moment I knew: this thing was going to be big..

I still remember the call with Jay Deuskar  and Adam Wexler :

“Can you rebuild the entire PrizePicks mobile app in 10 weeks before football season?”

I said, “You bet I will.”

For the next 10 weeks, I worked 14-hour days rebuilding the entire mobile app from the ground up. At the time, we had about 2,000 weekly active users, and the business was staying alive through esports action.

We rebuilt:
• The entire onboarding flow
• The monetization engine
• The core mobile experience

The app only had 20 screens.

20 screens.

But those 20 screens powered the next $100M+ in revenue while I was hands on the app, every single day. 

I was watching thousands of users join PrizePicks every day, and our payment processor blasting, via an app that I built with Ziyan Prasla and Adam Blaschke  

From there, it was an absolute movie. A rollercoaster. Every month the chart just went up and to the right.

But what people don’t see are the downturns.

The stress.
The uncertainty.
The moments we could have sold.
The moments we didn’t know how much bigger this could get.

Adam Wexler  is one of the most relentless founders I’ve ever met. A visionary with ruthless conviction over the product. There were many times we could have exited early — but Adam always believed the TAM was bigger than anyone realized.

And he was right.

Over three years, we scaled from a scrappy team of 19 to 300+ employees. I eventually departed when the company had grown beyond the stage where I thrive most.

But that ride changed my life.

It changed my family’s life.

It rooted me in Atlanta — a vibrant, business-forward city where I plan to build for years to come.

I’ve met incredible investors.
Made lifelong friends.
And still to this day, people don’t believe me when I say I rebuilt the PrizePicks app.

I’ll wear PrizePicks on my chest for the rest of my life.

Before signing off, I need to thank:

My mom, my dad, my little brother, and my fiancée — for believing in me when the cash salary wasn’t glamorous and the bet felt risky.

Shoutout to Andrew Steinberg , Aaron Holland , and Robert S Beadle  for making the introduction when I needed a change after my first startup.

And most importantly, thank you to Adam Wexler  and Jay Deuskar  for taking a bet on me.

Shoutout PrizePicks.
Shoutout Atlanta.

On to building the next one. 🚀

Founder, CloserCoach.ai | Scaling Sales Teams With AI | Ex-PrizePicks Early Engineer

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Naveed Lalani

Chief Growth Officer @ VeroSkills | Co-Creator & Chair @ Founder Mental Health Pledge

Naveed is an entrepreneur, executive, and early-stage investor. He is the Co-Founder and CEO of Plexor, visual AI to supercharge retail.

He started his first company, Rally, after dropping out of grad school, which was used by 60K causes with over $1B in fundraising volume. Naveed's other startups were in the payments, mental health, generative AI, social good, and edtech spaces. Naveed's ventures have been backed by Greylock (Reid Hoffman), Floodgate (Mike Maples), Google Ventures (Kevin Rose), SV Angel (Ron Conway), Naval Ravikant, Tim Ferris, and Silicon Valley Bank.

He created the Founder Mental Health Pledge, which now covers 26K+ startups across 600+ investors and leaders, including General Catalyst, Benchmark, Y Combinator, Techstars, Sophia Amoruso, Brad Feld, Eric Ries, and Justin Kan. It's been covered by TechCrunch, Forbes, Fortune, and others. 

As an executive, Naveed led strategy, growth, partnerships, and revenue for Career Karma (YC W19), Trilogy (Acq. by 2U - NASDAQ: TWOU), Galvanize (Acq. by Stride - NYSE: LRN), and VeroSkills. 

Naveed served as an advisor to the Thiel Fellowship (fellows include founders of Ethereum, Figma, Oyo Rooms, Scale AI, and Luminar) and on the board of Ismaili Professionals Network, where the portfolio of startup founders he accelerated raised over $1B across 14 countries. He currently curates Global Ismaili Innovators.

Executive Member

Unlock Product Insights from Gong using AI. Join waitlist: Unwire.ai.

The Ismaili Startup Deal Flow is not associated with IPN or any Jamati Institutions. It's a private group I run as a volunteer.

Co-Founder & CEO @ Plexor.ai (Visual AI to Supercharge Convenience Stores), Judge @ The Smartest Store in the World Competition (Co-Hosted by NACS)

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