By Aijaz Hussain
Forbes has recently included four Pakistanis as the new inductees in their list of Forbes under 30. The new faces apart from raising their country’s flag high, have also laid the foundation, and provided inspiration to the many other brilliant young minds in the country to pursue their dreams and follow their ambitions as talent combined with hard work doesn’t go unnoticed for long.
These four incredibly skilled individuals were added as honorees in the list of North America and were selected out of the bunch of the other 600 young entrepreneurs, socialists, scientists, and entertainers who were featured in the 10th annual issue. Let us take a look at these four stars along with a brief introduction for each.
Starting off with 29-year-old Sana Khan, who works as a Program Manager at Google and is responsible for heading the go-to-market strategy and hardware planning team of the company’s cloud gaming service ‘Stadia.’
She came up with ideas like the ‘Stadia’s Free Play Days’, which was launched for financially restricted gamers during the ongoing pandemic. Apart from this, she also runs a scholarship program for female developers, which helped her to become the only Pakistani woman to be taken in the list.
Next up is Asad J Malik, who is the CEO of JaduAR, an app that generates holograms and captivating 3D performances with the aid of TikTok stars and other music artists, making these look realistic and connecting the audience in a better way in the process.
Receiving his Bachelor of Arts/Science degree from Bennington College, Asad chose to move to the US to pursue his higher education, and from then onwards, has been one of the first ones to practice storytelling through augmented reality.
Asad featured young Muslim immigrants in his breakout project, Terminal 3, and also joined hands with Magic Leap in exploring the essence of AI using A Jester’s Tale.
The 24-year-old is currently a Los Angeles inhabitant, and works with Verizon to construct educational AR experiences with 5G.
The third in the list is Danish Dhamani, a Pakistani native who was raised in East Africa. Danish used to get worried and anxious while giving class presentations and job interviews when he moved to the US. This inspired him to invent a speech coaching app by the name of Orai (short for oral AI) along with his Drexel University batchmates, Aasim and Paritosh Gupta in 2017.
Danish managed to find 5000 active monthly users who would record themselves speaking and in turn, get feedback such as the number of times they said ‘um’, through his app. He received this information from corporate clients which constituted of HP Enterprise, Comcast, IBM as well as people wo paid 10$ on a monthly basis.
The startup has accumulated $2.3 million through seed funding and is expected to start earning profits by 2021.
The last but not the least is Faizan Bhatty. Currently enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania, he co-founded Halo Cars in 2019 with his friend, Kenan Saleh. This initiative was put in place to act as a basis of creating new ad space on rideshare vehicles and for Uber and Lyft drivers to increment their earnings.
Forbes mentioned that smart digital screens sit atop cars which enables them to display hyper-targeted ads, further saying that $500,000, prototypes and a pilot were received from angel investors which were funded by start-up competitions awards. Lyft bought Faizan’s company within its first year of operation.
