Zaid Khan is Chairman and CEO of Manhattan Crypto Capital, a private hedge fund run by super intelligent agents, and Managing Partner of Manhattan Global Partners, the Khan family office. He is an investor with an algorithmic track record that began in 2013 and experience across more than $4.5 billion in deals. Ask him what he does, and he will tell you about the children.

The streets gave him grit. Wall Street gave him reach. Main Street is the lesson he was born to teach.

IThe streets

He was born in Manhattan, the financial capital of the world, and raised on some of the toughest streets in the Bronx. Money was never plentiful there. Ambition was.

He was the boy who took machines apart to see how they worked, then put them back together better than he found them. School was hard for a child with ADHD, and the classroom rarely knew what to do with him. His hands always did.

At home, a second education was under way. His mother was a banker at Citibank. His father worked in finance. Markets were the language of the family table, and CNBC played in the background while a teenage Zaid imagined that one day he would be the one on the screen. When his first summer paychecks arrived, his friends bought an Xbox. He bought Microsoft.

IIThe believer

At Alfred E. Smith, a vocational high school, a teacher named Pete Gonzalez saw something in him that nobody else could see. He walked the teenager into rooms full of the top executives in the boiler and technology industries and introduced him, every time, as someone who would one day be a very successful man.

Zaid remembers standing beside him and looking up, asking himself the same questions over and over. How does he know that? What makes him say it? What if I never become anything at all?

He did not have the answers. He decided to become them. He graduated at the top of his class, enrolled to study mechanical engineering at New York City College of Technology, and watched hardship cut it short. He never earned the degree. He became an engineer anyway. Self-taught, the kind who learns by building.

IIIThe room

He learned early that a life is shaped by the rooms it chooses. His friends were always the oldest people in the room. He made sure he was always the youngest, the poorest and the one with the most to learn.

“If I am ever the richest, smartest and most successful person in the room,” he says, “I am in the wrong room. I have to change the room.”

IVThe trade

As a teenager he joined Steamfitters Local 638, the union of the men who build the arteries of New York, and became known as the technician who found the fault no one else could find, and fixed it.

In his mid-twenties, Anjum Malik became his first investor and handed him his first multimillion-dollar contract. His first government contracts followed, with the New York City School Construction Authority and the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

He built his own mechanical-contracting company, became one of the highest paid in his trade, merged with a plumbing firm to scale, and won multimillion-dollar public and private contracts across Manhattan and greater New York for city, state and federal work.

The boy from the Bronx was building the city that raised him.

VThe fall

Then came 2016.

An accident took his leg below the knee. In the same season, his business partner passed away. He spent two years in a bed, unable to work, unable to bid, unable to build. He was forced to sell the company he had spent his youth creating, and the empire he had built in the construction world came down with it.

His partners did not walk away. They pivoted with him.

There are years that end a man’s story. For Zaid, that year became the first page.

From a hospital bed, with the one skill no accident could take, he went back to the markets he had loved since he was a boy. He had begun investing in digital assets in 2014. Now he studied markets the way an engineer studies a broken machine, until he saw in them what he had always seen in engines: systems with patterns, and problems waiting to be solved. He had spent his life rebuilding machines. Now he had to rebuild himself.

VIThe climb

He taught himself, and he learned at the feet of mentor after mentor. In 2018 he acquired ARB Trader, a London arbitrage firm whose automated trading record runs back to 2013, and advanced its algorithms into artificial intelligence and machine learning.

In Dubai he merged Khan Tech Trading, ARB Trader and FinScientists into a single quantitative platform for AI trading, automated advice and risk management. From $1.1 million invested, it grew into a business independently valued at $24 million within five years.

Through Manhattan Global Investments, his private equity and consulting firm, he gained experience across more than $4.5 billion in public and private deals, and built relationships with the royal families of the United Arab Emirates, sovereign and family offices, investment banks and law firms from Dubai to Abu Dhabi.

He raised capital toward acquiring a bank in Dubai, with an option on three board seats. It failed. It was expensive and humbling, and it taught him more in three years than most careers teach in thirty. He exited the firm and kept every lesson.

And the teenager who once watched CNBC at the family table went on to deliver market analysis on CNBC Arabia.

VIIWall Street

He formed a private family office with his general partner Taj Sawh and with Anjum Malik, one of his first limited partners and his investor, advisor, teacher and mentor. It was Anjum who taught him to think global and act local, and who opened his mind to something greater than he could yet perceive.

In 2022 Manhattan Crypto Fund LP filed its Form D with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The fund is private and closed. It does not raise capital. It runs on a doctrine he wrote himself: architecture over speculation, and the question of loss before the question of gain.

Today it is a private hedge fund run by super intelligent, agentic systems and sophisticated quantitative models, governed by people, with an algorithmic record that began in 2013. Its headquarters sit at One World Trade Center, a few miles and a whole world away from the streets where he started. Disruption is his discipline. You either disrupt, or you get disrupted.

VIIIMain Street

Now the capital flows back to where he came from. Through MGP Private Credit, the family office finances businesses across the country and invests in real estate in 47 states. Through its private equity arm, it backs established American companies and the families who built them.

From the streets, to Wall Street, to Main Street. The circle is the point.

IXThe children

Everything he has built points in one direction.

Around the world, in emerging and developing countries, there are children in orphanages who carry the gifts of engineers, founders, scientists and artists. Most of them will never meet a single person who tells them so. He was once a boy who needed one believer. He found Pete Gonzalez. Millions of children never find theirs.

So he is building the believer at scale. Orphanages rehabilitated and reinvented as innovation centers and venture labs. Power, internet, mentors and capital. The tools to exercise their God-given gifts, and a stage big enough for the whole world to see them shine, no matter where they were born.

He serves as president of one of New York City’s largest interfaith non-profit organizations, and a share of the General Partner’s profits is committed to orphans for as long as the fund earns. The hedge fund is not the destination. It is the engine.

XThe meaning of a name

In Arabic, Zaid (زيد) comes from the root z-y-d, which means to grow, to add, to increase. It is a name of abundance. It is also the only name of a companion of the Prophet recorded in the Qur’an.

He did not choose the name. He has spent his life trying to deserve it. To increase what he is given. To increase the people around him. To leave every life he touches greater than he found it, and to inspire as many lives as he can before he expires.

None of it was mine alone. All praise and thanks belong to God, who carried me through the bed and the darkness and set me on my feet again.

To Pete Gonzalez, the teacher who introduced a boy from the Bronx to a room full of CEOs as a future success, before I had done a single thing to deserve it. To Anjum Malik, my first investor, my teacher and my mentor, who gave me my first multimillion-dollar contract and taught me to think global and act local. To Billy, my partner. To the partners who pivoted with me when everything fell. To Taj Sawh. To my mother and father, who taught me the language of markets at our kitchen table. And to every mentor who gave me their time when I had nothing to offer in return.

What I have been given is a trust, and I intend to deliver it. Inspire before I expire.

Zaid Khan, Chairman and CEO of Manhattan Crypto Capital