Key Takeaways
- Engineering teaches systems thinking that applies directly to company building.
- The switch from technical to entrepreneurial work is a skill gap, not a personality change.
- Most founders benefit from understanding how things are built, even if they never write code.
When people find out that Saim Abbasi studied mechanical engineering at Queen's University before building three companies and launching a venture capital fund, the reaction is usually some version of confusion. What does engineering have to do with startups?
The answer, it turns out, is almost everything.
Systems Thinking as a Foundation
The core skill of an engineer is not knowing how to design a specific machine or write a specific equation. It is knowing how to break a complex system into its component parts, understand how each part behaves, model the interactions between them, and predict how the whole system will perform under different conditions.
That is also a fairly accurate description of what a founder needs to do every day. A company is a system. Marketing feeds sales. Sales generates revenue. Revenue enables hiring. Hiring determines product quality. Product quality drives retention. Each part connects to the others, and understanding those connections is what separates founders who can diagnose problems from founders who can only treat symptoms.
The Gap Engineering Does Not Fill
Engineering did not teach Saim how to sell. It did not teach him how to navigate investor dynamics, how to tell a story that moves people, or how to manage a team through ambiguity. Those gaps were real and required deliberate effort to close.
Saim spent his first year after Queen's at Scotiabank Capital Markets working in derivatives, not because the job was his long-term plan but because it forced him to develop commercial judgment in a high-stakes environment. Watching how sophisticated buyers and sellers approached risk, how they priced optionality, how they made decisions under uncertainty, gave him a commercial education that engineering could not.
What the Combination Produces
The combination of systems thinking from engineering and commercial judgment from capital markets created something useful: the ability to model a business the same way an engineer models a structure. Where are the failure points? What happens when this variable changes? What is the maximum load this system can carry before it breaks?
Those questions now drive every investment decision Saim Abbasi makes at Iron Key Capital. The founder pitching has a great story. The engineering question is whether the underlying system can actually support the vision they are describing.
"Engineering taught me that every system has inputs, constraints, and outputs. A company is just a more complex system with the same structure."