Story 2 of 3

Akash Kapoor graduated from the School of Accounting and Finance (SAF) as the highest-scoring CPA candidate in the country. What came next had nothing to do with accounting. Except that it had everything to do with it. 

Kapoor is a CPA Gold Medalist, two-time UWaterloo Co-op Student of the Year, and the founder of PASS EdTech, Canada's first CPA exam learning app. His career has taken him through PwC, McKinsey and an internship at Apple before landing at Workday, where he leads AI strategy and product management alongside engineers, designers and data scientists. 

The CPA used to signal one kind of career. Kapoor took it somewhere else entirely. 

That foundation is built on what he calls first principles problem solving. Not doing something for the sake of doing it, but grounding every decision in outcomes, in what will actually move the needle. Early in his career, that same instinct led him to build PASS EdTech. He recently rebuilt the entire app using AI tools. What once took months took days. 

On AI, Kapoor isn't anxious. He's clear-eyed. "Change is the only constant. Today it's AI. Yesterday it was analytics. The only thing you can do is adopt a mindset that is agile and that allows you to learn." 

"The curriculum and breadth of experiences you get at SAF are unmatched," he says. "You will come across failures. I learned a lot from those failures. You only get exposure to that when you're in an environment that challenges you." 

The co-op program gave him a head start that compounded over time. "The sooner you start working and get that exposure, it's a snowball effect," he says. 

The credential didn't define where he ended up. It's what got him there.