Crypto, Scams and Growing Up In a Broken Home Ft. Esha Khan

This one is a conversation I had with Esha Khan, a crypto expert and businesswoman who walked a path most of us don’t see a lot of women walking. It started out as a chat about digital currencies and financial markets, but it ended up somewhere much deeper. We talked about growing up in a broken home, moving schools over and over because of parental issues, and how all of that shapes a girl who then goes on to run businesses and mentor others in a male dominated space.

It is an honest conversation about loss, resilience, and the quiet truth that leaving a bad situation can be the most healing thing you do. Esha speaks plainly about her life and it reminds me that sometimes the strongest people are the ones who had to build their own stability from scratch.

Parental issues and a childhood in motion

Esha was born and raised in Karachi but her schooling was anything but stable. I asked her about her early education and she said her school got changed multiple times. The reason was not a simple one. “There was that time of separation,” she shared, referring to her parents. The constant moving around was tied directly to the tension at home until her parents finally got divorced around 2012 or 2013.

This part of her life left a deep mark. She told me about one teacher, Miss Faisa, who became a steady figure for her when things at home were chaotic. Esha is still in contact with her today because that teacher saw her when she was a child who had to move again and again and never quite felt at home. But that anchor was temporary. Esha lost her at the age of eight, and after that she says she had no option but to keep going.

The conversation touched on something I think a lot of us feel but don’t say out loud. Living in a home full of conflict when you are young forms your entire view of the world. Esha admitted that while her parents tried to cover things up with love and financial support, the damage was real. When I asked her if the divorce was ultimately a good thing she was clear: “It was for the good,” she said. The fighting stopped, and that was a kind of relief. After the divorce, she lived with her mother and brother. Her father, a busy businessman, remarried the same year and while he supported them financially, the emotional closeness was different. She put it simply: “You just run away to your mother,” because as a girl it can feel hard to tell your father when you are hurting.

The push to become something of her own

I asked Esha if she always saw herself becoming a businesswoman. She laughed and said she actually wanted to be a doctor. Like a lot of Desi girls, the path felt prescribed. But she shared a memory that shifted something in her. She remembers times when her family was stretched so thin that a commitment of 300 rupees was a real struggle. Seeing that scarcity pushed her to want her own footing. She did not want to be in a position of relying on someone else entirely, and that quiet determination became the seed of her entrepreneurial drive.

She went from social media marketing to selling jewelry online and then deep into the world of cryptocurrency. She explained the difference between B2B and B2C business models with ease, and it was so refreshing to hear a young woman talk about logistics, vendor issues, and the brutal realities of e-commerce with zero sugar coating. She got into jewelry because it was something she could manage and because the demand, as she put it, is crazy. But managing customer expectations and timeline matching was a massive challenge, especially in an unstable economy where your costs shift every few months.

Crypto, women, and the fear of finance

When the conversation turned to cryptocurrency, Esha became the mentor. She had recently been invited to a community meetup in a well-known Pakistani space and was amazed to see young people hungry to learn, spending more than three hours just absorbing information. I told her what I know to be true for so many of us: women and young girls tend to shy away from finance and money talk because we are scared of it or because we feel it is not for us.

Esha acknowledged that representation makes a real difference. When you see another woman in these spaces, it normalizes it in your head. It lets you think, if she can understand this, so can I. I asked her to explain cryptocurrency in the simplest terms for our listeners, the ones who hear words like blockchain and immediately check out. She broke it down beautifully: paper money is what we hold in daily life, but crypto is simply a digital edition of that. It is not magic, it is just a different form.

Then we addressed the stigma. Why do so many people call crypto a scam in Pakistan? Esha did not shy away from the answer. The problem, she said, is that people start telling thousands of others about impossible shortcuts and overnight riches instead of explaining the fundamentals. It becomes a house of cards built on hype. For Esha, any shortcut to success is unsustainable. “It’s a castle of glass,” she said. “It’s going to collapse anytime.”

Stop sacrificing yourself

Towards the end I asked Esha if there was anything else on her heart that she wanted to share. She paused and then offered something that I think will stay with our listeners for a long time. She spoke directly to anyone carrying the weight of family and parental issues. “Stop finding love in the wrong places,” she said. “Start taking risks. Life is so much more than just sacrificing yourself.”

She added a truth that feels especially relevant in our culture where women are often praised for how much they give up: “The one who really loves you won’t ask you to sacrifice yourself for them.”

This episode taught me something. I have never sat down one on one with a crypto mentor before, and I came into this conversation expecting to learn about digital money. I did. But I also got a reminder that the women who build their own tables are often the ones who learned early that no one was going to build one for them. Esha failed a million times, as she says, and she kept going. That matters. It matters for every young woman listening who needs to see that her messy, complicated backstory does not disqualify her from success. It prepares her for it.