I’m Saad! Innovation & Community Lead for i2i Accelerator. AMA!

Hi TIA Community,

I am Saad Hamid. I lead Innovation & Community for one of the premiere impact accelerator program in Pakistan known as Invest2Innovate or i2i (pronounced as eye-to-eye). My job is to build the community and ecosystem for startups in Pakistan. i2i works with early-to-mid stage startups and social enterprises through its flagship accelerator program and helps them refine their ideas, scale their business and gives them access to investment opportunities via its curated pool of i2i angels and mentors.

I have been a part of this ecosystem for more than a decade now having launched a few Internet ventures of my own and have helped various organizations in building communities in Pakistan, such as TED, World Economic Forum, Google and IDEO. I am also a member of the board of mentors for Plan9 TechHub, WeCreate Center for Entrepreneurship, Code for Pakistan and Startup Weekend Islamabad.

Some fun facts about i2i:

• We owe to Taher Shah’s Eye to Eye for much of our publicity. Or perhaps the other way around – we are still figuring that out!
• Half of our team is based in D.C. while the rest are in Islamabad, Pakistan so we work in two very different timezones.
• We recently won an award for the ‘Best in Brand Development’ by PashaICT Awards.

You can talk to me about

• General entrepreneurship landscape of Pakistan
• The state of social impact entrepreneurship
• Freelancing and Online work Ecosystem
• The Good, the bad & the ugly of the Ecosystem
• Getting starting – taking the right steps
• What it feels like to build communities

And feel free to ask anything generally about the Pakistani culture or Apple (I am a huge fan)!

Note from Daniel, TIA’s community manager:
The host may choose at his/her preference to not answer particular questions. The AMA is moderated by the community managers, so let’s keep the questions friendly. 🙂

Read more i2i related articles here, here and here.