IBA CEDIR is hosting a full day session this Saturday, September 12, 2026, bringing in three founders with direct operating experience to walk participants through the practical mechanics of building and scaling a business rather than theoretical frameworks alone. The session runs from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM at City Campus, IBA Karachi, and is structured around three distinct but connected topics chosen to reflect what founders actually grapple with once a product exists and the question shifts to how it makes money and grows.
Hamza Abdul Rauf will open with a session on business and revenue models paired with pricing strategy, an area that often gets underexamined by early founders who focus disproportionately on product before working out how value gets captured. Dr Khalid Basit follows with a session on platform and API business models, a increasingly relevant category as more Pakistani startups build infrastructure layers and developer facing products rather than purely consumer applications. Hanzala Raja closes the day with entrepreneurial marketing and growth hacking, an area where resource constrained startups typically need to substitute creativity and rapid testing for the marketing budgets available to larger competitors.
The decision to bring in founders who have built, scaled, and run businesses themselves, rather than relying solely on academic faculty, reflects a broader shift in how Pakistani business schools are approaching entrepreneurship education, prioritizing practitioner knowledge that reflects current market conditions over generalized theory. IBA CEDIR has increasingly leaned into this format, positioning its sessions as direct transfers of operating knowledge from people who have already faced the pricing, platform, and growth decisions that participants are likely to encounter as they build their own ventures.
The session adds to a steady cadence of hands-on programming coming out of IBA CEDIR this month, following closely on other recent sessions covering negotiation, market analysis, and product design for its SAP, CIE, and CITE participants. Taken together, the sequence suggests a deliberate curriculum design intended to move students through the full arc of building a venture, from initial market understanding through to the revenue and growth questions that separate ventures that scale from those that stall.
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