Meet the man and university who are giving Pakistan’s tech entrepreneurs a boost

2007 was a landmark year for tech around the world. The launch of the iPhone and the dawn of the smartphone era created opportunities for countless new businesses. For Khurram Zafar, the year marked his return to his homeland, Pakistan. At the time, he wanted to do anything but run a new business. “Startups are consuming. And after running two companies in the US and Canada and selling one of them, all I wanted to do was to have some family time. Having a decent job won’t hurt as well,” Zafar tells Tech in Asia.

“But as it turned out, I was wrong about myself.”

Zafar (pictured below) was CIO at the Lahore Stock Exchange when he realized a corporate job was not in his DNA.

It might have had something to do with the economic situation in Pakistan. But whatever the reasons, Zafar started to hang out with the local business community. In 2012, in a meeting that included government representatives and almost all the owners of major small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the country, a consensus was formed that Pakistan is a bright prospect for startups and new businesses. Two major breakthroughs came out as a result – looser tax legislation for businesses, and the formation of Plan9, Pakistan’s first startup incubator.

Khurram Zafar

Zafar was instrumental in the formation of Plan9. He credits founder and renowned computer scientist Umar Saif in making this happen. “Things work pretty slow in government sector as we all know. To his credit, Saif got things done in quick time,” Zafar said.

Starting small

Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) as a business institute has always been a central figure in promoting entrepreneurship in the country. In 2013, the university decided to have a separate department where things should be addressed specifically for entrepreneurs. Zafar became part of that team through a friend’s reference. In a meeting where they were speculating about how to launch a scheme that deals with entrepreneurship and all the woes that come with it, Zafar chipped in and said that we don’t need to start big. We can start with a small building and a small team where we incubate business ideas, he said. All we need is someone who can run this place and make those small things happen. Everybody in the room looked at him and said why don’t you be that person. He paused for a moment or two and said yes. And hence the journey culminated. Zafar’s dream of evangelizing entrepreneurship in Pakistan had finally taken a more practical form.

The LUMS Center of Entrepreneurship (LCE) is sponsored by LUMS. All operational costs are beared by the university. The center’s business model is to take equity from startups, ranging from 2.5 to 7.5 percent depending on how much cash startups want to take in return. But startups in Pakistan are not yet profitable, so the whole scheme is currently run from LUMS fund. This makes the startup’s success even more important for LUMS because it has a vested interested in every startup that passes through the incubator.

The LCE incubation program lasts for four months. So far, two batches have graduated from the center. Each batch had eight startups.

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