User:GRedgrave from AKQA/Ajaz draft

Ajaz Khowaj Quoram Ahmed, (born 1973) is a British entrepreneur who is best known as the founder and CEO of AKQA.

Early life
Ahmed was born in Taplow, Buckinghamshire in 1973. His parents were born in Punjab, India. Ahmed grew up in Maidenhead, where his father, Khowaj Ahmed, worked at a Beechams factory, while his mother, Sughran Ahmed, worked at a hospital launderette.

While Ahmed was in school, he was a paperboy and delivered newspapers to the UK headquarters of what was then the world's third-largest software company, Ashton-Tate. He wrote to the company asking for a job, and received an offer initially for work experience during the school holidays when he was 15. Ahmed continued to work at the company through his teens from 1989 to 1991, working in the marketing department and eventually as a programmer. He used the company's dBASE software to author an improved financial system for purchase orders.

Career
In addition to working for Ashton-Tate as a teen, Ahmed also worked for video game developer Ocean Software. He left school in 1992, and for the next year he worked in marketing and public relations for Apple in its UK offices in the Thames Valley. He was offered roles with BBDO as a copywriter and in brand management for Unilever, but turned them down and began a business studies degree at the University of Bath.

Ahmed decided to leave university in 1994 and work on launching a multimedia agency. There was a high level of interest in the World Wide Web at the time and he felt that it was crucial to start a company right away, rather than completing his degree. He first undertook a "fact-finding" trip to the US, to find out how companies were using the Internet. Following this, at the age of 21, he founded AKQA and named it after his initials.

Ahmed led the company as its CEO and public face, and by 1999, it was ranked as the largest independent new media agency in the United Kingdom. The London-based company received an investment of $71 million from Accenture in 2001 and merged with three other agencies in San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and Singapore establishing it as an international agency. WPP acquired a majority stake in the agency in 2012, with the deal valuing AKQA at $540 million. AKQA became an autonomous subsidiary of WPP, with Ahmed as its CEO. In November 2020, WPP announced that Grey Group would be merged with AKQA into one resulting agency named AKQA Group.

Ahmed was appointed Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2018 Birthday Honours for services to Media. Later that same year, he was awarded an honorary degree as Doctor of Business Administration from the University of Bath.

Ahmed has authored three books, as of 2021: Limitless, published in 2015 by Random House; Velocity, published in 2012 by Random House; and Defeat, published in 2019. Velocity was co-authored by Stefan Olander, the vice president of digital sport at Nike, and discusses how companies should embrace the digital world. The book was a UK bestseller in non-fiction.

He serves on the board of trustees for non-profit organizations including the Elton John AIDS Foundation, Virgin Unite, and The Royal Foundation's Mental Health Innovations.