I have been meaning to write this post for a while now. Last year in November, I was in Pakistan for my quick tour through Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. I had posted about this on my blog and on my twitter account and made an open invitation for anyone who wanted to meetup with me to talk about anything related to Pakistan, startup and technology.
And I did end up meeting some really great people!
This is part 1 of the series of posts. This post is going to cover all about my experience in Islamabad.
First off before landing in Islamabad, during my transit from Abu Dabhi, I met a really nice young fellow (not that I am really old or anything) Naveed Zafar. Naveed is an IT/network professional based out of UK and was going back to Islamabad to visit his family. We had a nice exchange of ideas and thoughts around what can be done in Pakistan. Thanks for the talk Naveed, it really help me forget the first 14 hours of my flight from Toronto to Abu Dabhi. 
Next, I met up with Owaeis Kiyani, a very energetic and young entrepreneur from Islamabad/Rawalpindi. Owaeis had me curious about his next startup called GidMid. So I asked him to tell me a bit about it, he wants to keep it off the record. So I won’t go into details but it all sounded very interesting. We also talked about his journey into entrepreneurship so far and the experiences he had as a freelance developer and even helping his friends and family in getting into the freelance business. Thanks for the lunch Owaeis.
Then after a day’s break and eating as much as I possibly could. I ended up scheduling a meeting with Aamir Attaa the founder/editor of ProPakistani.com – a technology related news website. I had very long and interesting conversation with Aamir regarding his views on online journalism, media, marketing, advertising and technology in Pakistan. I can confidently say that what Aamir is doing with ProPakistani is simply an outstanding effort and example of how to leverage the power of web to generate value for yourself. He is a great person, with very well thought out ideas and if I was running a newspaper in Pakistan, I would certainly hire him as a consultant to get the online presence setup that our newspaper industry seriously lacks.
I wanted to meetup with Osama Hashmi from Green&White but he wasn’t feeling well, so I had to settle with a phone call. I hope you are feeling better now and I wish you a speedy recovery.
I have missed out on meeting a few other good people from Islamabad and Rawalpindi who had contacted me to meetup with them, but unfortunately, due to short time-span of my stay I couldn’t meetup with all of you. InshaAllah that would be done in my next trip, which would be a longer.
To all those whom I met (and didn’t meet): keep up the hard work, encourage people around you to take action and create value.