I was born and raised in a small village of Punjab, Pakistan 🇵🇰.
From 2003 to 2011, I worked my way up — selling water at Lahore railway station, washing dishes, tutoring, then accounting and admin roles in schools. It wasn't glamorous, but it taught me how to survive and how to build.
In 2008, I co-founded my first venture, Garnish Academy. I walked away in three months — I wasn't convinced. In 2011, I co-founded Fashion Street, a retail apparel store in Lahore. In 2013, I started Tutor Links Pakistan — a vision for the country's largest tutor network. It never launched; deep down, I didn't believe in patching the old system. In 2015, I founded Royal Suppliers — uniforms, stationery, custom apparel. It closed within six months.
None of these felt like it. But I kept going.
In 2016, I launched Pakistan's first STEM and entrepreneurship center for school children, along with the Young Innovators Challenge. That same year, Uber launched in Pakistan. I used to take it to the office sometimes. The first time I booked a ride, I was genuinely amazed — technology had made things so easy, one tap and the car's at your door.
And a thought kept coming back to me: could a platform like this exist for education too? Something that connects learners directly with industry experts?
That same year, I was traveling with my former boss. Somewhere in that conversation, I said it out loud for the first time — "what if someone built an Uber-like platform for education one day, connecting learners directly with industry experts — imagine the kind of disruption that could bring to the education space?"
I didn't know that "someone" would be me. Alhamdulillah. May Allah grant success. Ameen.
In 2017, I founded EdTech Pakistan — my Uber for Education. But I couldn't build it yet; I didn't yet know how. In 2018, I renamed it EdTech Global — same dream, still no way to build it.
After four, five years of research and development on this idea, I realized something: yes, entrepreneurship education needed to be democratized, uberized in that sense — but the Uber model itself wasn't the right one for it. What it needed instead was a model with a much higher degree of curation, not something short-term and transactional the way Uber is.
So in 2019, I renamed it once more — to Innovation Valley — and set out to build it on the Airbnb model instead.
In 2020, I pre-launched. It failed — then COVID hit. Even up until that pre-launch, I was still using the "Uber for Education" analogy. But by 2022–23, once the world had fully come out of lockdowns and markets had reopened, I became fully convinced — entrepreneurship education can only be democratized through the Airbnb model.
But the story doesn't end here. Beyond building the platform, the biggest challenge was still ahead: where would the real-world experts come from to teach? How would company experts and startup founders connect with me for entrepreneurship education?
For that, I launched my podcast show — Talks at Innovation Valley.
My podcast show is the real "magic." It didn't just connect me with experts from the world's top tech and AI companies and top universities — every question I had about how to design an Airbnb-like model for entrepreneurship education, I put straight into my podcast questions. That's how I got to learn from hundreds of experts around the world, for free.
And then came Claude AI. Claude did something incredible. Using Claude, I launched the first version of Innovation Valley — after 77 failed versions, the 78th came out the way I wanted it.
And that's it — it took about twenty years, from selling water at a railway station to launching the first real version of Innovation Valley.
But after all those years, I've built a framework and approach for other founders — so that if anyone wants to build a global-level product today, they can use Claude AI or similar tools, take a low-code or no-code path, and build their MVP properly, in far less time.
If you're a founder working on your idea's first version or MVP — DM me on LinkedIn and I'll send you my full framework and approach. It could save you a lot of time and money.