People who build lasting things are those with a curiosity about rising trends and how those can impact the existing status quo. That’s the difference between chasing trends and truly contributing to how people work and the tools they depend on — a mindset that product manager Emil Rustamli has carried at every stage of his career.
Rustamli has moved through roles in venture capital and fintech research, experiences that sharpened his instinct for how ideas turn into systems. Now at the San Francisco–based company connecting healthcare professionals with facilities across the United States, he applies that perspective to product design: staying near the problem, listening first, and shaping services that seek to make work easier and more streamlined.
Learning How the World Builds Things
As a teenager in Baku, Rustamli was captivated by the question of how an idea can turn into a real product. At the time, Azerbaijan had little in the way of a startup ecosystem, but that absence only fed into his curiosity. When college came, he chose a program that forced change by design: a university that relocated students to a new country every semester.
Living across cultures taught him that adaptability matters more than certainty. In Seoul and Hyderabad, he saw how resource-limited founders improvised to solve real problems. In Buenos Aires and New York, he witnessed how the right pitch and investment strategy could turn a prototype into a business. Those contrasts built his notion of not just how technology works, but who it reaches.
“Even in my teens,” he says, “I used to think the goal was to stay young — and the way I could realistically do that was by staying close to new ideas.” That mindset naturally led him into spaces where learning was a constant and an integral part of the work.
Giving Technology a Moral Center
During his semester at Minerva University’s Hyderabad campus, Rustamli co-founded AI Consensus (AiC), a student forum born from a growing worry over how fast this technology was outpacing public understanding. AI was becoming more widely used not only in company operations but also in people’s lives, but he felt there wasn’t enough industry discussion on the impact of AI in education.
Rustamli saw that gap as a risk but also something that could be dealt with. He believed technology should advance with conscience, that progress meant little if it ignored the people it affected. The AiC forum became his way of contributing to that conversation, a place where industry experts could discuss prescient moral questions on this technology and how those could translate into real-world change.
Within months, AiC’s model of open discussion drew interest from abroad, spreading to London and San Francisco, later to Paris and Tokyo. Recognition from the Responsible Technology Youth Power Fund followed, showing Rustamli that even small, principled projects could shape a global conversation.
Turning His Insights Into Actions
After university, Rustamli began working for Fiat Ventures in San Francisco, a firm investing in financial startups. There, he led market research that informed investment theses and founder strategy. Over this time, he authored several of the firm’s flagship research pieces, including AI in fintech, stablecoins and cross-border finance, and their 2025 Fintech Market Trends Report.
He describes that phase as learning to “see the signal in the noise.” The job required turning broad industry data (alongside insights from individual startups) into practical advice founders could act on. It also got him in contact with hundreds of early-stage companies, sharpening his sense of which problems were worth solving.
But over time, observation wasn’t enough. “Being a VC felt like watching an incredible game from the sidelines,” he once noted. “I wanted to play.” This led him to Clipboard Health, a move that took him from helping others build to building himself.
At Clipboard, Rustamli manages core marketplace systems that connect tens of thousands of nurses and healthcare facilities every week. One of his first projects involved redesigning the company’s timekeeping and shift-verification system, a workflow used by 60,000 professionals weekly. The redesign reduced late clock-ins by 14% within three weeks, improving reliability for both workers and hospitals without creating extra friction for the user.
As one mentor once told him, “Every time you choose which problem to solve, you’re deciding not only for the user but the company’s future.” That idea continues to guide how he prioritizes what to build next.
Giving Back to the Builder Community
Rustamli has also become a recognizable voice among early-stage founders. At the San Francisco Tech Week event by Founders Village, for example, he joined a panel of product leaders and investors discussing how to build products people genuinely want. There, he shared advice that he took from his own experience with founders, including the importance of testing assumptions early, constantly improving the end product, and avoiding building in isolation.
He also mentors startup teams and judges hackathons where he aims to teach contestants to develop practical problem-solving skills above all else. Those conversations, he says, keep him close to the energy that first drew him into the field. He considers mentorship as another way of “staying young”: learning through the questions others bring.
Looking ahead, Rustamli aims to continue taking on problems that affect more users while helping others find their footing. “I don’t know what my title will be in ten years,” he’s said, “but I’ll still be building — that, or helping someone else build.”
Staying in Motion
Emil Rustamli’s story is less about destination than direction. From co-founding an AI collective in India to shaping fintech strategy in San Francisco and now connecting health workers at Clipboard Health, his path shows how a drive to improve how systems work can be applied to industries of all kinds. The thread connecting it all is motion, an instinct to keep learning and translate his insights into actions with tangible impact.
