Details from around the blogosphere about the SI Islamabad Session. If you’ve written about it somewhere let me know and I will add a link to your story below:

• “… a one of a kind event being held for and by people in the local startup community …” – Metroblogging Islamabad
• “… Spoonfuls of Insight… the campaign slogan isnt off the mark at all.” – Mansoor
• “… one of the most popular seminars of the year..” – Comment on Mansoor’s post
• “all of you who want to start a startup do attend Startup Insiders sessions” – Self Exile Blog
• Brightspyre at Startup Insiders
• Coverage in Urdu!
• NIIT Students’ perspective – here and here

The full panel:

• Atif Khan, CEO, LMKR
• Ovais Ashraf, Director, Bentely Systems
• Saeed Qadri, Director, Voxel Communications
• Zahid Mirza, Netsol Technologies
• Atif Mumtaz and Faisal Chohan, Brightspyre
• Faizan Buzdar, CEO, Scrybe Corp
• Amir Jehangir, Consultant, Competitiveness Support Fund
• Osama Hashmi, CEO, CDF Software
• Dr. Arshad Ali, NIIT

Other contributors – Faisal Butt, TIE Islamabad; Haris Khan, Zigron; and a bunch of other people.

The list of questions asked (no particular order):

1. How do you know that your vision about your startup is correct?
2. How do we select the founders team? What is the difference between the founders team and the rest of the team?
3. How important is the business plan? How much effort should I put into it?
4. If we have a product for the media industry – how do we market it? How do we present our plans to TV Shows?
5. If someone builds a product but cannot sell it, and then someone else takes that product and is able to sell it to a large audience, which one of them is the better entrepreneur?
6. How do the tricks of business change if we move from brick-and-mortar businesses to businesses based on the e-economy?
7. When you were all starting out – in your first year how many hours of sleep did you all get on average?
8. With the high-stress life of a startup, how do you balance work and life?
9. How can we startup without any funding?

The key answer: from Atif Mumtaz: “We’re never raised any funding since we started, and we pay all our salaries from our revenues from customers”

Read onwards for pictures:

Atif Mumtaz explaining how its possible to be successful without any investments – but rather with customers.

Faisal Chohan (BrightSpyre) explains how to build useful products as Faizan Buzdar (Scrybe) looks on

Atif responds to a question while Amir Jehangir thinks about how to add to that response

Faizan Buzdar in action while Ovais Ashraf (far right) looks on.

Zahid Mirza answers a question while Atif Khan (left), Saeed Qadri and Atif Mumtaz look on.

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