OPEN Lahore Youth is hosting Build Before You Graduate on July 11, 2026, at 5:30 PM at NIC Lahore, bringing together students, aspiring founders, and young entrepreneurs for an evening designed around the proposition that the most valuable time to begin building a company is not after graduation but during the academic journey itself. The event features two panelists with substantive practitioner experience, Ammar Ali Ayub, a leading EdTech entrepreneur, policy advisor, and national mentor, and Yahya Humayun, a veteran entrepreneur, consultant, and angel investor in delivery technology across the MENA region and Africa. Registration is open at lnkd.in/dyrwE4sn.
The event’s format is structured around three elements that distinguish it from the more common variety of student entrepreneurship panel where polished success stories are presented from a comfortable distance. Unfiltered founder stories, raw and unscripted question and answer sessions, and direct connection with founders and mentors combine to create an environment where the gap between the audience’s current reality and the panelists’ experience is acknowledged and bridged rather than papered over with motivational framing. The explicit commitment to sending participants away with an actual plan rather than just motivation reflects an awareness of the most common failure mode of student entrepreneurship events, which generate energy in the room that dissipates within days because it was never connected to anything concrete enough to act on.
Ammar Ali Ayub’s background in EdTech gives him a perspective on building that is particularly relevant to a student audience, having built within a sector that serves the same population he will be speaking to and having navigated the specific challenges of digital scaling, accessible learning framework design, and building high-growth online education platforms that serve millions of students. His role as a policy advisor and national mentor adds a systemic dimension to his experience that allows him to speak about the ecosystem conditions facing student founders rather than only the internal dynamics of company building. Yahya Humayun’s experience as a veteran entrepreneur and angel investor in delivery technology across MENA and Africa brings an investor’s perspective to the conversation alongside a founder’s, giving participants insight into how ventures are evaluated from the outside as well as how they are built from the inside, and a regional frame of reference that extends the conversation beyond the Pakistani market alone.
Build Before You Graduate as an initiative by OPEN Lahore Youth addresses a specific and consequential moment in the entrepreneurial journey of young Pakistanis, the period when academic resources, peer networks, low personal financial obligations, and relative freedom to experiment are all available simultaneously, and when the decision to begin building something real rather than waiting for the right moment after graduation can define the trajectory of the next decade. NIC Lahore, as the venue, places the event within the national incubation infrastructure in a way that connects the aspirational conversation of the evening to the practical pathways that exist for student founders who are ready to take their first structured steps toward building a venture. Students and aspiring founders who want to be in the room on July 11 can register at lnkd.in/dyrwE4sn.
Follow the SPIN IDG WhatsApp Channel for updates across the Smart Pakistan Insights Network covering all of Pakistan’s technology ecosystem.
