Meet our Founders

Kamran has an extensive Pre-MBA entrepreneurial background, having launched his first startup while still enrolled as a student at Vanderbilt. He developed the social networking site Monaco Motion with a prep school classmate after spending a college spring break in Monte Carlo. The site was focused on creating an exclusive online network catering to the international jet-set and was approached by multinationals, including Rolex, who were interested in advertising on the platform at the time.

After graduating from college, Kamran pursued his dream since age 14 of opening a restaurant. He launched Grand Trunk, an upscale fast-casual eatery in a historic Washington, D.C. building along the city's famed Pennsylvania Avenue directly between the White House and Capitol Building. Kamran personally led the design and restoration of the building, and to save on development costs, he spent several months living in China, visiting over 200 factories to source materials the restaurant would require in its development and opening.

The restaurant found success in its very first year of operations with seven-figure revenue generation and a first-place ranking on review apps, including Yelp. Kamran would be named by Google - Zagat as a top 30 under 30 and a "restaurant industry game-changer." He would ultimately expand Grand Trunk to China in 2017 and become the first American under 30 to establish a multinational restaurant brand. Kamran was responsible for a staff of up to 50 working across time zones and takes great pride in having managed them with exceptionally high job satisfaction and low turnover. In 2019, he successfully exited the business with a sale to a small group of investors.

In 2018, Kamran founded Manhattan Design, leveraging his relationships with factories in East Asia. The Company furnishes and provides décor and design consulting to some of the world's leading five-star hotels and resorts, including Sofitel, with six-figure order valuations. As Founder, Kamran directly managed relations with Chinese factory executives and conducted onsite inspections, personally overseeing product development from planning to completion.

Kamran is a third-generation American and, like his search partner Craig, is also a tri-citizen of the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Kamran is the grandson of the late Nazir A. Chowdhry, one of the earliest South Asians to arrive in the country prior to the partition of the Indian subcontinent when he received a scholarship to study at Johns Hopkins University more than eight decades ago.

Kamran grew up in an entrepreneurial household. His father, who is also a physician, together with Kamran's mom successfully built a small chain of urgent cares serving the Greater Washington region. While Kamran was in middle school, his father also started constructing and flipping houses in the nation's capital. Kamran was active in assisting with the design and oversight of these projects and would spend his summers during middle and high school at construction sites learning firsthand all that it takes to build a home from the ground up. What he learned during these formative years would guide him later when he constructed his own restaurants.

Kamran attended St. Stephen's & St. Agnes, a college preparatory academy in Alexandria, VA, for his schooling in lower, middle, and upper school. While still in high school, he had the unique experience of attending a summer program at Oxford University's Pembroke College. He would go on to complete his undergraduate studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he graduated with a B.A. in Political Science. Kamran holds an MBA from IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain (ranked #1 MBA in the world by The Economist in 2021 and #3 MBA in the world by Financial Times in 2023).

From a very young age, Kamran had the privilege of traveling extensively overseas with his family and friends. A prime example of this is how for his 15th birthday, Kamran's mother and aunt took him to China, and together they hiked and scaled a relatively remote part of the Great Wall. As a result of his wealth of travels, he would become incredibly curious about the world around him and adapts quickly to new countries and cultures. More recently, with his family now working in rural settings, Kamran began to spend more time in remote and agrarian towns across the United States from Kansas to the Mississippi Delta, familiarizing him with the American heartland. Having grown up in an equestrian community just 15 miles outside of downtown Washington, D.C., Kamran quickly finds common ground with urban and rural folks alike.

Kamran has traveled extensively in over 30 countries and is a passionate polyglot able to communicate in 5 languages, including Mandarin Chinese and Spanish, while presently learning a 6th, Arabic. In his free time, Kamran enjoys fencing, playing golf, and watching Formula1; he is an avid chess player and a lifelong fan of his hometown, Washington sports franchises.