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I hope these thoughts make you think a bit.
June 2022 I went to Pakistan’s largest tech and startup conference - an event that was meant to talk about innovation, scaling, investors, investing, and all other things that come to mind when you hear the word “entrepreneurship”. At that conference I found all kinds of people from most tech verticals, coming from across Pakistan. I found investors, I found large corporate people who were experts in their fields for more than 2 decades and people who had careers that were older than me. I met many people there except entrepreneurs. Especially young entrepreneurs. And that’s the issue with Pakistan.
Just a few months before returning to Pakistan, I was wrapping up my undergraduate degree at Duke University in the US. As an entrepreneur, I was always biased towards seeking out events, classes, and people that were entrepreneurial in some way. But when I would enter those communities, I would see hundreds and thousands of people my age, most of them far more successful than me, in those communities seeking those things. So it came as a complete shock to me that at a tech and startup conference in my hometown Lahore, which has a population of 13.5 million people, I could count the young people on my finer tips. Only 3 of which were founders of some kind of a startup/business
This is the problem. Where are Pakistani young people and why are they not present in these events/activities? This, I think is due to 3 factors:
Lack of societal knowledge. It’s the year 2022 and yet the parental mindset of the upper middle class is to “find a good job”. Parents raise their kids to conform to the schooling system, sacrifice a ton of their money to essentially build new pipelines of top level managers. But top level managers do not create new things. They’re phenomenal at managing things. So we are stuck in a quicksand of parents continuing to push their kids to some arbitrary concept of ‘career stability’ that leads them to severely limit their worldview in pursuit of the noble professions of medicine and engineering - both of which are over saturated, under resourced and under skilled in Pakistan
Systemic crimes: Strong words. I know. But look at it this way. 220 million people, with median age of population being 30. This means 60% of the population is the youth. But guess what? An unparalleled illiteracy rate, with absolutely no plans for the future. No direction, no policy that could be implemented, and focus on all the wrong things. Policy design and governance are critical skills but unfortunately we’ve been deprived of them for 3 quarters of a century. Taking some Zen inspiration here, and telling myself hope is the root cause of all suffering. So I’m eliminating hope from centralized authorities of all sorts.
Lack of good role models: I say this not just as a girl, but as a young person in general. Most of our television content falls under news, soap operas, film/movies, sports and… that’s it. The soap operas all have the same exact content which I would like to call the cookie-cutter Ekta Kapoor stencil. We get one drama every decade that has a different story line, but in terms of viewership and ratings, it usually gets overshadowed by a repeated, time-tested storyline that does more harm than good. Print media is stuck in an age that no longer exists, and digital media is focused on sensational content only - there is almost NOTHING for people who want to consume content that isn’t paparazzi clicks or the latest updates on celebrity gossip. I think of the girls and boys around me and I think to myself: who do they have to look up to? I really don’t know. Our artists, sportsmen/sportswomen, filmmakers, designers, entrepreneurs, innovators, educators, leaders - all get lost somewhere. Very few become visible but then they become inaccessible or still invisible from the general population. The result? We are forced to derive inspiration from people outside of Pakistan, which in my humble opinion contributes to this overwhelming feeling of not being valued enough in the country and an eventual decision for people to move abroad and settle for a mundane (but blingy) corporate lifestyle.
WHY DO I CARE SO MUCH?
First off, as a Pakistani, I cannot help but draw comparisons to where we stand in comparison to the rest of the world. My exposure to both China and The US taught me a ton about 2 of the world’s economic giants. It pains me to see that 220 million people are headed absolutely nowhere and our best strategy to fix it is to … do nothing. As a citizen who heard accounts of partition first-hand from her grandparents, it’s strange that 7 decades ago, people were willing to give up their lives for a piece of land. And yet today, due to whatever factors, we are significantly lagging behind our fellow nations in terms of economic, technological, social, developments.
The second reason this pains me is because I am an entrepreneur and I understand how valuable teams are. Good ideas are useless without good execution which is impossible to achieve without good people. Not just skilled people, but good people. If the current stakeholders in Pakistan were to be put in the prisoner’s dilemma, the best-case-scenario will be for them to invest in the people, upskill the population, and ensure a mutually beneficial environment for all. After all, eventually, you need someone to buy whatever you are selling - goods, services, or ideologies.
WHAT DO I HOPE TO SEE IN THE FUTURE?
An interest. Look I don’t know if you’re a 16-year-old reading this, or a 32 year old, or a 57 year old - the reality is that you are dependent on the youth of the country. With each year, millions of us get inducted into the voting age, we’re entering the job market, the marriage market, the tech, finance, gaming, politics, - every market. I hope to see the people who currently have the authority to invest in, and trust Gen Z with responsibilities and listen to their ideas not just because we might be right, but because with each passing day, we become the most important stakeholders in your day-to-day decisions.
I also hope to find a community of like-minded people: adults willing to teach, and fellow young people willing to learn. I know that somewhere in the streets on Lahore, Islamabad, Quetta, Karachi, Peshawar, Multan, Faisalabad, there are young boys and girls who have a spark inside of them to do something, anything. I hope to find those people, and learn from them, and be on a path to grow with them.
IS IT ALL GRIM?
Nope. As a matter of fact, I have seen people in the Pakistani startup ecosystem not just open and receptive to young people, but actively searching for younger talent to add to their teams. But it’s not enough. And it’s not nearly there yet.