A High-Action Life Story
Akbar’s history before gaming seems ripped from the pages of a novel. For one thing, he’s scraped through some sticky situations, including narrowly dodging death. And yet he recounts them all with a vivid sense of humor.
While a sophomore at Rutgers University, the Pakistan-born Akbar was invited to have tea with then Pakistan president General Pervez Musharraf on December 31, 2003. He was invited by an advisor to the president who had been impressed by Akbar’s insight into the region’s affairs. He met the military leader and had an hourlong conversation with him—although Musharraf, shaky from recent assassination attempts, seemed bemused by who exactly the brainy 20 year old was.
Just five weeks later, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, Akbar was jumped by a group of guys with knives—they beat him up and demanded “his cocaine.” All they got was $13 and two train tickets.
“I think I was confused with a dealer,” he says. “Not a glorious night for a college sophomore, but all jokes aside, it had me shaken.”
In spring 2006, now a senior in his final semester, Akbar began to have terrible neck pain. After getting dismissive shrugs from a few doctors on what might be causing the issue, he finally consulted a rheumatologist, who was quick to suggest Akbar go straight to the hospital: he was suffering from some kind of severe infection, which had penetrated bone and inched near his heart.
“They had to excavate it,” Akbar says. “I had a two-inch hole in my chest. I still have a scar.” One of the infectious-disease physicians told him that his story belonged on the medical TV drama House—because they had no idea how he had gotten the infection in the first place. The best guess was Akbar had somehow contracted it on spring break in Mexico, but they never determined the cause for sure.
Despite missing all his finals because of the surgery, Akbar maintained strong enough grades that he was still able to graduate on time with the rest of his classmates.
While at Rutgers, he had accepted two job offers—one to be a financial analyst at Merrill Lynch and another to be a targeting analyst with the US Central Intelligence Agency. “I was really passionate about political analysis,” Akbar says. “I also happened to speak Urdu, and I took Farsi in college.” He would work at Merrill while he underwent a long security clearance process with the agency. The process featured a visit to headquarters at Langley and an interview while hooked up to a lie detector. Ultimately, Akbar didn’t receive security clearance, and his hopes for his dream job had been crushed.
Undeterred, Akbar launched a blog, The Insider Brief, featuring analysis of the AfPak region and South Asia during the height of the War on Terror. Akbar’s readership grew quickly among policy circles, including readership at NATO, the State Department, and think tanks. He started making appearances in the mainstream media, including Reuters, BBC World, and Fox News.
Akbar feels that his work with his blog had a meaningful influence that he couldn’t have anticipated after losing the chance to work with the CIA. “Sometimes the positions we want limit our capacity to influence and inform the world around us in balanced, meaningful ways,” says Akbar.
After two years at Merrill Lynch and another two as a senior business planner at Disney Theatrical Group, Akbar decided it was time to return to the classroom. He wanted to hone his entrepreneurial skills, and was also looking for a really strong international relations program. He came to the University of Chicago and Chicago Booth and earned a joint MBA/Master of Arts in International Relations.
“Booth just really fit the bill,” Akbar says. “I loved the academic rigor—the legacy of all those Nobel laureates. The folks who wrote my poli-sci and finance textbooks at Rutgers were at Chicago. Not to mention the burgeoning startup ecosystem at Booth.”
Akbar still has those books—including The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), written by John Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago—and he keeps a document on his laptop of all the things he learned while at Booth, including lessons from courses such as Building a New Venture taught by adjunct professor of entrepreneurship Waverly Deutsch, Entrepreneurial Selling taught by former clinical professor of entreprenurship Craig Wortmann, and Cases in Financial Management taught by former clinical professor of finance Kevin Rock, AM ’80, MBA ’80, PhD ’82.
Many of those lessons have come into play as he tries to navigate the sometimes rough terrain of primary and secondary education. “At its heart, Booth is a finance school,” he says. “It taught me a lot of valuable lessons around how to manage a business and how to think about financing your business as you grow it.
“Even seemingly mundane stuff like, ‘Never finance long-term assets with short-term debt’ or ‘Long-term trends turn into long-term prices,’” he says. “Those lessons have really taught me to take the long view and not chase after short-term, quarterly, unsustainable approaches.”
His thoughtful, strategic, Booth-inspired worldview has influenced his home life as well. “I make very intentional decisions to block off my calendar in the morning to work out, and to spend time with my wife and kids,” Akbar says.
Akbar got married in 2011 to Chicago-reared social worker Katie McHugh. “If you couldn’t guess by her name, she’s Irish Catholic,” Akbar, himself a Muslim, jokes. They have two children together. Raising kids in an interfaith family has its challenges, so much so that the Akbars decided to create an online community designed for similar couples who celebrate both Christmas and Eid al-Fitr. It’s grown to more than a thousand members. There, Akbar says, “people can talk about their challenges and share their experiences in a loving, supportive community.”
And while (spoiler alert) Akbar did leave the video-game industry, he hasn’t entirely given up gaming. In his rare free time, you might find him online assuming the role of Guardian in the first-person shooter game Destiny.