From Islamabad to CEO of a US Company: Suhail Ahmed's Journey to Leading Hearthy Foods

Suhail Ahmed's career began in 2018 on online marketplaces — and it has taken him from Islamabad to the chief executive's office of a California-based company. In 2024 he became CEO of Hearthy Foods, a US company that closed 2025 with $5.27 million in revenue. It is a journey built step by step, through e-commerce, team leadership and his own agency, and it has made him one of the more striking examples of Pakistani talent reaching the top of an American business.

Starting with online marketplaces

Ahmed began in 2018, working with online marketplaces — the digital shopfronts where sellers list products and learn, often the hard way, how online trade actually works. He moved from there into managing Amazon stores, a role that demands attention to listings, pricing, customer service and the platform's constantly changing rules.

That grounding matters. Running a store on a marketplace teaches the unglamorous fundamentals of e-commerce: which products sell, what customers complain about, and how thin the margins can be. It is the kind of experience that cannot be learned from a course alone.

Building a team and an agency

From managing stores, Ahmed moved into leading a 12-member team, and then founded his own e-commerce agency. The step from doing the work to leading the people who do it is often the hardest in a career, and it is the step that separates a skilled operator from a business builder.

An agency of his own meant finding clients, delivering results for them and building a reputation — the same skills, at a larger scale, that a chief executive needs. By the time the opportunity at Hearthy Foods came, he had already run a business of his own.

Leading Hearthy Foods

Hearthy Foods, based in California, appointed Ahmed as its chief executive in 2024. Under his leadership the company closed 2025 at $5.27 million in revenue — a figure that says as much about the team he leads as about him.

His rise also says something about the path Pakistani professionals are increasingly taking. Rather than the traditional route of a foreign degree followed by a corporate job abroad, Ahmed's route ran through freelancing, marketplaces and agency work — all of which can be done from Islamabad, with clients anywhere in the world.

What the story means

Stories like this matter because they are repeatable. The tools Ahmed used — online marketplaces, remote work, a small agency — are available to any young Pakistani with an internet connection and the patience to learn them. His journey does not depend on family wealth or a foreign university; it depends on skills that compound over years.

For Pakistan's large and growing community of freelancers and e-commerce workers, that is the real lesson. The distance from Islamabad to a CEO's office in California turned out to be shorter than it looks — measured not in miles, but in the years of work in between.

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