hassan pardawalla, parda sense, portfolioyvr, helen siwak, entrepreneurs, canadian business, west coast business, vancouver, bc, yvr

Hassan Pardawalla of Parda Sense: Culture, Systems, and the Unexpected

Hassan Pardawalla is a chemical engineer with an MBA and more than 25 years of experience building, fixing, and scaling operations across industries and continents. He has lived and worked in over ten cities, held more than twelve distinct roles, and spent the better part of three decades at the intersection of culture, systems, and scale.

Hassan is the founder of Parda Sense Solutions, where he works as a fractional COO, business development executive, and operations strategist for founders and growth-stage businesses in cleantech, sustainability, energy and materials, hard-tech, AgTech, carbon tech, and advanced manufacturing. His background spans supply chain management, talent development, business strategy and transformation, regional operations, and programme direction. He has founded three ventures, invested in others, and taught at the MBA level.

As an educator, Hassan works with MBA students, engineers, executives, and high school students. He volunteers with Innovation UBC, New Ventures BC, the Black Business Association of BC, Vantage Point, The Improv Centre, and the Vancouver Fringe Festival.

He is not the ideas person. He is the one who builds the machine, trains the people, and clears the path so others can succeed

hassan pardawalla, parda sense, portfolioyvr, helen siwak, entrepreneurs, canadian business, west coast business, vancouver, bc, yvr

BUSINESS BIO

Parda Sense Solutions exists because too many good companies fail for the wrong reasons. Not because of bad ideas or lack of ambition, but because their culture drifted, their systems could not keep up, or their leadership was carrying too much alone.

Parda Sense works with visionary founders and growth-stage businesses in energy, cleantech, sustainability, hard-tech, and AgTech that have found product-market fit and need the operational engine to match. The work sits across three areas: building intentional, human-friendly culture where values are lived rather than laminated; designing systems people actually use, including sales and operations planning, cross-functional workflows, and process redesign that makes the complex simple and the invisible visible; and preparing leaders for the unexpected through smart, grounded planning so that when something goes sideways, there is already a plan in place.

The flagship engagement is a 71-hour deep dive covering three strategies, three business plans, resource planning, ROI analysis, and a high-level execution roadmap, with a retainer pathway for teams ready to keep building.

Parda Sense is for founders who are serious about scale and understand that the right operator in the room changes everything.

hassan pardawalla, parda sense, portfolioyvr, helen siwak, entrepreneurs, canadian business, west coast business, vancouver, bc, yvr

IN HIS WORDS

“It was not a boardroom moment. I was twelve years old, standing in a kitchen in Pakistan, and I had decided to bake cakes and sell them to people in my neighbourhood. No business plan. No brand. Just flour, heat, consistency, and the very fast realization that if you burn the cake, you lose the money. I baked and sold around twelve to fifteen cakes that first run. That was my first lesson in cash flow: every burned cake is a cost, not just a mistake.

Around the same time, I noticed my brother had exceptional notes. Other students needed those notes. I became the distribution channel. Nothing I would put on a resume, but everything I needed to understand that spotting an unmet need and building a bridge to it is the core of what entrepreneurship actually is.

The word entrepreneur did not fully land until around 2020, when someone asked me directly: are you one? I had to sit with that question. When I did, I realized the spirit had been running since I was twelve. It just took me a few decades to name it properly.

TWENTY-EIGHT, THE FIRST BET

Five years of corporate life behind me, and I thought I was ready. A friend and I co-founded a venture sourcing and repackaging specialty chemicals for Pakistan’s textile dyeing industry. The idea was solid. The demand was real. We found clients, started selling, started delivering. For a moment it felt like we had cracked it.

Then the wheels came off quietly. Not dramatically. No single blow-up moment. Just a slow erosion of trust between two people who had never agreed on how to actually run a business together. Communication got patchy. Information stopped flowing both ways. Business practices we had each assumed were shared turned out to be very different in practice.

By the time I did the full accounting, I had lost close to $5,000. At twenty-eight, having just walked away from a steady salary, it felt like the floor dropping out. I walked away, left my investment on the table, and parted ways. The venture is still running today, now a family business managed by my former co-founder.

What I took from it has shaped every partnership conversation since. Due diligence is not just for the market. It is for the person sitting across from you. Before you talk revenue splits and client lists, talk about what happens when things go wrong. Find out if you would trust this person with your prized possessions before you trust them with your business. The $5,000 was tuition. Expensive at the time. Cheap in retrospect.

hassan pardawalla, parda sense, portfolioyvr, helen siwak, entrepreneurs, canadian business, west coast business, vancouver, bc, yvr

INTRAPRENEUR TO OPERATOR

For years I was what I now call an intrapreneur: sitting inside large organizations, pushing new products, challenging the status quo, introducing new processes and technologies. I was entrepreneurial in spirit but using someone else’s capital and runway. When I stepped out of corporate and started working directly with startups and smaller businesses, the nature of the risk became visceral. You are the one putting everything on the line. Nothing is guaranteed.

Three ventures shaped this evolution most.

Portable Electric brought me in to expand their scrappy cleantech startup into California. Within eighteen months we were delivering mobile power and EV charging solutions during public safety power shutoffs in wildfire season, setting up protocols, building logistics systems, and scaling into a new market under real pressure with real stakes. This was the engagement that crystallized what I do best: take a founder’s vision into new territory and build the operational machine to make it work.

TrendiTech wanted to reduce food waste. The company eventually went into receivership, but the story underneath that headline matters more. We connected farmers across borders, set up processing facilities in Ecuador, built partnerships with government and agricultural stakeholders, and designed an end-to-end project management system built around continuous quality and culture alignment. The mission was real. The impact was real. The systems, the relationships, and the proof that culture built right makes teams perform even when conditions get hard, all of that survived.

The common thread across the ventures that worked best: they started small, grew the community around them, gave people room to develop, and built systems that did not gatekeep knowledge.

THE COST OF CARRYING TOO MUCH

The honest list of sacrifices includes my health, my personal relationships, financial stability, and a long stretch of comfort and certainty. The least visible cost was health. Taking on too much, focusing outward instead of inward, and accumulating stress without real community support led to type 2 diabetes. The body eventually sends you an invoice you cannot ignore.

Balance, I have learned, is not a destination. It is a setting you adjust constantly based on what the season requires. For a long time I believed that being able to do something was sufficient reason to do it. That belief did serious damage to relationships and to me.

What shifted things was community. Not just the concept of it, but the actual practice: finding people I could be vulnerable with, peers who would sit with me in the mess and help sort through it. When I stopped trying to carry everything alone, things changed. Now the weekend belongs to me. That is not negotiable. Humour is not a luxury on a founding team. It is a pressure valve, and if the people you are building with are not finding some version of joy in the difficulty, it is time to look at what you are doing and why.

THE ROOM THAT CONFIRMED

The moment I knew the work was resonating happened at a workshop I ran on networking and storytelling. More than fifty people showed up, people I had never met, who then stayed, offered to help, and connected me to others. That room was a signal.

When organizations like the Black Business Association of BC started asking me to run workshops, when Vantage Point brought me in to work with non-profit executives on leadership capacity, and when referrals started arriving before the pitch did, that was the confirmation. The work was meeting a need in the market. Now the job is to scale the access.

hassan pardawalla, parda sense, portfolioyvr, helen siwak, entrepreneurs, canadian business, west coast business, vancouver, bc, yvr

PEOPLE WHO SHOWED UP

I have been fortunate to find support from people spread across every continent, and I work constantly to pay that forward. Kyle Cheriton pushed me to reframe everything and showed up when I was at an extremely low point in 2022 and 2023. Mark Rabin taught me about entrepreneurship, grit, fundraising, and leading with passion. Dana Ramnarine brought depth of perspective on people, culture, and organizational leadership, including how to manage a great deal while still making time for oneself. Prashant Agarwal is the constant questioner, value-aligned but never short of a different opinion. Chang Han slowly became a friend who is always there with sound advice, the right questions, and a genuine understanding of how to build founders and ecosystems by simply showing up.

The wider community, including Ruby Sandhu, Neel Singh, Michele Wallcraft, Michelle Sklar, Nerissa Allen, and Paschal Okwundu, has each shown up with different angles and the willingness to tell me when I am wrong. I will take a valuable no over an empty yes every time.

WHAT COMES NEXT

I am looking for warm introductions to Series B founders in cleantech, sustainability, hard-tech, energy and materials, and AgTech who are ready to scale internationally and need an experienced operator to build the machine. I am also seeking connections to established SMBs generating $10M or more annually who are plateauing and need a fractional COO to unlock the next phase, along with collaborators in energy transition, carbon tech, and advanced manufacturing, and speaking invitations at events where founders and executive teams are wrestling with culture, operations, and scale.

The legacy I want to leave is a community that thrives on curiosity, grit, humour, and adaptability. People will remember how I made them feel and the connections I helped them make. Hassan showed up for people who did not have the platform yet, and then he introduced them to someone who did.”

Author Profile

Helen Siwak, Collaborator: This story is created in collaboration between Helen Siwak and the featured subject. As the founder and publisher of Portfolio.YVR Business & Entrepreneurs Magazine, Helen works closely with entrepreneurs to share their paths of innovation, resilience, and growth. Each story in this series is co-developed through interviews and first-person insights, blending authentic voices with Helen’s editorial expertise to highlight the remarkable individuals shaping British Columbia’s business landscape.