Altaf Nazerali has a very successful international business career. He has started and built up several multi-million dollar companies and took many of them public. He is a modest man though, and content to stay out of the spotlight.
Risk taking has been a necessary party of Altaf Nazerali’s life from a very young age, and this life skill has translated well into the international business world. He was born the third generation of his family in Kenya, and then raised in the Congo. While he was growing up, European governments were returning many African colonies over to self-rule. This was a very difficult transition for the area, and a dangerous time for non-black Africans in certain countries. To escape the trouble and danger at the time, Altaf Nazerali’s family migrated to Canada in the early 1970s, along with thousands of others in the similar situations.
The Nazerali family has always highly valued education as it’s an asset than can never be taken away from you. Altaf Nazerali was a star pupil at his high school in the Congo. His desire to continue into higher education led him to apply to Columbia University in New York, and he was accepted at the young age of 15. However, at the time, New York law did not allow anyone under the age of 17 to live in the dorms, so the university recommended he did not attend. His father wrote to the university, taking full responsibility for his son so that he could attend. Ali found himself in New York with a suitcase, $200 dollars, and nowhere to stay. As taking risks was not new to him though, he did find somewhere to live, and went on earn both a Bachelor of Arts and MBA from Columbia University by the age of 20.
At the time of his graduation, the rest of Ali’s family was forced to leave Africa, where they had lived for three generations, and relocate to North America. While he helped his family settle in Canada, he got a job at GTE, though he lacked any experience. He started in Boston, but was soon transferred to Algeria as the in-country manager of a $235 million project to build an electronics plant that would be the largest in the world under one roof at the time.
He went on to have many more successes in his international career. He worked on several large communications network projects in the Middle East and North Africa throughout the 1970s and 1980s. By 1988, he had returned to Canada where he was the principal of a commodity futures trading company that operated one of the top performing mutual funds in Canada from 1989-1991. In 1995 he founded Canbras Corp. He has been a principal of Valor Invest Ltd. since 1991, where he has financed numerous companies in Japan, North America, and Europe.
He currently lives in Vancouver, BC, Canada, with his wife and their youngest son. The high value of education has continued in his family, and his adult son earned his Executive MBA from Duke University, and his daughter earned a Master’s in Public Health from Harvard University.
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