National Incubation Center Sialkot is hosting a Pitch Mastery workshop today for its cohort, led by Shahzaib Zulfiqar and Rishad Shaikh, co-founders of OpenSoch. The session takes place on November 4, 2026, from 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM at the center. Zulfiqar is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of OpenSoch, and Shaikh is Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer. The workshop brings the cohort into an intensive session on how to present a startup, with the stated aim that founders leave ready to turn their pitches into real deals.
The two speakers bring more than 40 years of combined experience in scaling startups and guiding global brands across Singapore, the United States and Pakistan. They will use their play-based approach, which they apply in masterclasses such as The Founder Cycle and The Art of Pitching. Rather than relying only on lectures, the approach uses activities and practice to help founders absorb the skills, which suits a subject like pitching where confidence and delivery matter as much as content. Having worked across several markets, the speakers can also show how expectations of a pitch differ between investors in different regions.
The workshop will help founders break down complex ideas into clear core narratives, a skill that many technical founders find difficult because they know their products in detail and struggle to decide what to leave out. It will also cover delivery and stage presence, so that founders learn how to hold an audience’s attention and communicate with confidence. A further focus is learning how to handle tough investor objections with ease, which is often where a pitch succeeds or fails. Investors rarely accept a presentation at face value, and a founder who can respond calmly and with evidence to challenging questions is far more likely to earn trust and move the conversation toward funding.
The session is backed by the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication and Ignite, the National Technology Fund, with CyberVision International and Mobilink Bank supporting the center. Pitching workshops are a regular part of incubation programs because founders in a cohort frequently face investors, selection panels and potential customers well before their companies are fully developed. By giving the Sialkot cohort practice in shaping their stories and answering difficult questions, the center aims to prepare founders for the meetings where deals are actually decided.
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