A Journey from Silicon Valley to Karachi
“By Maham Arif, Anum Khan and Sayyada Shaama Hasan Kazmi”
“You don’t need to be satisfied with the way things are… there’s always a better way to do things… there’s always a different way to do things…”
With this thought in mind and his resolve to create something new, Mr. Salman Ahmed started his entrepreneurial journey with nothing but his experience in the field and a handful of skilled bodies and now he is the Chief Executive of Blue Zorro which is a partner company of Netpace located in the Silicon Valley. The company provides infrastructure setup for cloud services as well enterprise level services for offshore clients mainly, but also deals with certain projects in the local market.
Mr. Salman graduated, with a double masters, in Economics and Electrical Engineering and like most of us he had no idea about what to do with his career. And also like most of us, he did what everyone was doing and followed the uproar at the time that ‘if you are an engineer then you need to be in the Silicon Valley’. He got his first job at Zilog where he worked for 4 years as a chip designer and then at CISCO Systems where he worked for 6 years. He realized during this time that the people he encountered there had a completely different outlook on life and on their career; according to him “In the silicon valley, every other person lives and breathes the idea of making something new”, and the people are motivated to do things in a different way, solve problem and make things more efficient. The 10 years he spent in the Silicon Valley completely changed his way of thinking; it molded him into an innovator and turned him into an entrepreneur. It made him realize that it was time for him to do start something of his own in his own country and bring that mindset back to Pakistan, so he came back and started his struggle.
After coming back to Pakistan, he observed the 180° shift in the mindset of the people; here he saw problems but no one was making any effort to solve these problems, he said:
“If we solve some problem then we’re actually creating a value… we’re building something that wasn’t there and we lay the foundation for much greater things which to me was more important than simply doing a 9 to 5 service.”
He wanted to change that mindset and nurture innovative thinking in the people and wanted to make bring international market projects into Pakistan to give people exposure, thus after working as a consultant at UNDP started his own company (Blue Zorro) with help of his ex-colleagues in the Silicon Valley. One of the biggest hurdles in doing so was the shift in background knowledge and technical expertise of hardware to building a software industry. But ‘where there’s a will, there’s a way’ and the ample amount of knowledge on the internet, along with courses and a technical background had helped him carve the way towards his destination. According to him:
“Phase of learning never ends for people who want to do something… this mindset is important even when you’ve been working for 20 -30 years, things change very quickly so you need continuously learn and adapt.”
He thinks that networking with people is highly critical for entrepreneurship, but at that time, it was difficult to find like-minded people in Pakistan. So his entire network for developing the startup comprised of the people in silicon valley and their network. He thinks that exposure is important, because people here and abroad have a different way of working but it’s important to learn new ways and adopt methods that are more efficient and yield better productivity. But the people here are set in their traditional ways and show little inclination towards change. This inability to adapt to change is the reason the industries here aren’t growing. This is one of the he faced in his firm and one of the mindset he’s trying to fight against ‘if you can make it better than why be satisfied with the current conditions’.
The other problem was the lack of human resources at that time when there were a small number of Java Developers which were being sought out by large number of firms. He came with a method to deal with this problem by providing training to fresh recruits and it is still being practiced in his company. He thinks that people don’t realize that the more human resources we generate, the more opportunities will be created for individuals and IT industry in Pakistan. One of the initial mistakes that he made at the start of his venture was to go for experienced developers, but eventually realized that fresh graduates that are much easier to train and provide better productivity and also help increasing able personnel in the industry. He said:
“The idea is to make the pie bigger, not just your slice.. and eventually with the bigger pie your slice will also be big.”
Entrepreneurship was a continuous process for Mr. Salman. When he came back to Pakistan, he did a lot of project based things and the mistakes he made led him to make better decisions. According to him the problem here is that the younger lot wants to come up with the best idea and then just start a successful business like Mark Zuckerburg, but they fail to realize that the probability of a start up failing within 4 -5 years is 90%. They need to continuously make an effort, come up with new ideas and have a go at them to succeed and be prepared for failures. Problem solving attitude is the most important instinct for an entrepreneur. ‘A successful entrepreneur has a history of failed attempts’ and even after creating a startup, he keeps coming up with new ideas and solutions.
According to him, quality is major problem entrepreneurs are facing, since standards and processes are not followed strictly in Pakistan. In order to globalize the products quality is very important and that will help the business grow. For that either a more efficient solution can be provided or the entire process can be disrupted to create something completely different. But we fail to meet the standards because the people here are lacking international exposure because of the lack of international firms and thus are unable to compete with professionals from other countries like India. And that is a major reason why the IT industry is still in the infant stage and only small firms operate here. There is a need to change the mindset of people here and work in a collaborative manner to make the IT industry grow bigger and stronger so that it can be in the same league as IT dominant countries.
