From McMaster to Silicon Valley: A startup founder’s journey

By the time Bukhtar Khan (BCom ‘18) walked onto McMaster’s campus in 2013, the script for his future felt more or less prewritten. His parents imagined medical school. Khan imagined satisfying them. And for a time, he tried, dutifully working through Life Sciences courses while keeping an uneasy grip on a dream that wasn’t really his. 

But university life has a way of widening the lens through which students see themselves. For Khan, that moment came not in a lab, but in an introductory Economics class. It was an unexpected spark that shifted the tenor of his entire academic life.  

That quiet realization grew into a decision bold enough that he waited until his third year to reveal it: he was transferring to the DeGroote School of Business. “I was too nervous to tell my parents that I wasn’t becoming a doctor,” he says, smiling at how significant and personal that decision felt. 

From there, nothing unfolded in a straight line. The choice opened doors Khan couldn’t yet see, leading him beyond Hamilton, into the uncertain terrain of startups and venture building and eventually to Silicon Valley. Today, he is the co‑founder and CEO of Finni Health, a Y Combinator–backed company headquartered in Santa Monica, California. 

A shift toward something new

Once immersed in DeGroote’s ecosystem, Khan began approaching business with urgency and intention. Finance drew him in first. Structured and analytical, it felt familiar as it comfortably aligned with traditional definitions of success. He secured an internship at Manulife, hoping it would confirm the path he was on. Instead, it did the opposite. “That was when I realized I don’t like working at big companies,” he says.  

A turning point came through an unexpected connection: Shopify’s former Head of Growth. That relationship opened the door to early‑stage startups, and with it, a new way of learning, which was less polished and more immediate. For more than a year, Khan immersed himself in the day‑to‑day realities of building a company from the ground up. By his final year at DeGroote, he was working full time at a startup while also studying full time. “My grades weren’t great,” he admits, without hesitation. “But I was learning a ton.” 

Learning, Khan realized, wasn’t limited to classes or jobs. Life at DeGroote outside the classroom mattered just as much. He served as VP of Charity with the JDCC. Khan also gravitated toward entrepreneurship clubs that, at the time, had a scrappy, almost underground feel. Those spaces introduced him to people willing to take risks; something he hadn’t known he was missing.

At McMaster, he found that community.

Mentorship followed a similar logic. Rather than lofty icons, Khan sought out what he calls “near peers”; people just a step or two ahead of himself. “A billionaire can’t really mentor you,” he says. “They’re too far removed.” Over the years, he’s leaned on more than a dozen mentors, each relevant to a different stage in his career. The goal, he believes, is always to eventually outgrow them. 

That perspective was tested when Khan and his co‑founder applied to Y Combinator. “When I checked, there were no people from DeGroote there,” he says. Silicon Valley, he learned quickly, runs on its own informal hierarchy of pedigree: people from Harvard, Berkeley, MIT often got in. “You get humbled there pretty quickly.” But the flip side was reassuring: traction mattered more than background. Finni Health already had revenue and real user adoption, and in an ecosystem obsessed with building, that spoke louder than any degree. 

What Y Combinator offered was familiar, in an unexpected way. “It felt like being in school again,” Khan says, “but around a bunch of nerds who actually want to build something meaningful.” 

Finni Health itself grew out of a problem he and his co‑founder couldn’t ignore. In autism care, families are deeply vulnerable, and too often, clinics are driven more by financial incentives than patient outcomes. Inspired by Shopify’s ethos of empowering individuals, they asked a simple question: what if providers could run their own practices, with the right tools? 

Finni does exactly that, handling everything from intake and documentation to insurance billing. The goal is straightforward but ambitious: give clinicians autonomy, improve outcomes for families and align care with people rather than profit. 

For Khan, the work is far from glamorous. “I still reset passwords at 1 a.m. if no one else is awake,” he says. Grit, he insists, is essential. So is growth. “If your company grows 300 per cent year over year, you need to grow 600 per cent,” he says. Otherwise, the founder becomes the bottleneck. 

It’s advice he offers freely to students questioning traditional paths. “If you don’t fit the stereotypical career box, that’s okay,” he says. “You don’t have to sleepwalk 10 or 20 years in a job you don’t like.” His own story, which was shaped by curiosity, community and a willingness to veer off script, stands as proof of what can happen when you don’t.