Past Events

Wardah Inam is the Co-founder and CEO of Massachusetts-based startup Overjet that raised $7.85 million in a seed round to bring data-driven care to dental practices.

Join us as Fahad Aziz, Co-founder of Caremerge talks to Wardah about her entrepreneurial journey, her most recent round of funding and how has COVID 19 impacted her startup.

Amir Khan

President, CEO & Founder

Amir Khan is a computer networking visionary who founded and led Viptela’s market-leading, cloud-first, Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) business before the acquisition by Cisco. As prescient as he was in identifying the $8B opportunity for SD-WAN, Amir recognized that network hampered the cloud journey and founded Alkira in 2018 with Atif Khan to reinvent networking for the cloud era. Amir’s vision is to deliver the cloud network as a utility. As CEO/Founder, he has led Alkira’s delivery of the industry’s first on-demand, as-a-service, point and click, unified multi-cloud networking service that enables cloud architects to design, build, and deploy a global multi-cloud network in minutes. Alkira enables enterprises to implement 50% less firewall capacity, and reduce TCO by up to 40%. Before Viptela, Amir held leadership roles at Cisco, Juniper, and Nortel. He holds 4 patents. Amir earned an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Mississippi.

Atif Khan

CTO & Founder

Atif Khan is a renowned routing expert with extensive experience bringing ground-breaking networking solutions to market and in architecting some of the largest and most sophisticated global networks. He is responsible for Alkira’s technology vision and overall engineering and product development of Alkira Cloud Services Exchange. Atif was VP Technology and Solutions, and a founding team member at Viptela, where he developed a world-class, cloud-first, highly scalable SD-WAN solution with advanced routing, segmentation, and security capabilities. Following the Viptela acquisition, Atif was Senior Director of the Enterprise Networking Business at Cisco. Prior to Viptela he held senior positions at Alcatel, Huawei and Juniper Networks and holds 7 patents in routing, security and overlay multicast. Atif received a BS in Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

This session focuses on how you should go about exploring a solution that solves the problem for the user in an iterative and agile manner. One of the most common mistakes that entrepreneurs do is fix their minds on the original idea they had. They cling to their original idea and overlook many other ways of solving that problem. They also become attached to specific use of technologies and lose sight of the user’s context. This session will help you with brainstorming techniques to explore ideas using a wider angle. You will also learn some prototyping techniques and approaches to get feedback from the user and creating an experience vision. You’ll also be introduced to the power of storytelling.

This session focuses on exploring all the stakeholders relevant for your problem statement. It will introduce you to the tools and techniques in doing the research to understand the context and needs of the user. Some of the techniques include ethnographic user research, empathy map, persona, current journey and user’s perspectives to help build empathy with the user. Empathy helps in seeing the world from the perspective of the user.

Dr. Syra Madad is American pathogen preparedness expert. She is the Senior Director of the System-wide Special Pathogens Program at NYC Health + Hospitals where she is part of the New York City’s response to the Corona-virus disease pandemic across the city’s healthcare system. She was featured in the Netflix documentary series Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak.

Dr. Uzma Syed is Infectious Disease Specialist, Education Leader, Civic and Political Activist, Humanitarian and Founder & President of Align Us Inc. She is part of the COVID-19 Task Force, WHO training Healthcare preparedness for epidemic, Antimicrobial Stewardship Committee, Infection Prevention Committee at Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center

This is first of 5 workshops by Mashhood. In this session, Mashhood will introduce the concept and benefits of Design Thinking as a human-centered process of innovation. He will also introduce the participants to the “Transform 3+1” framework for transforming an idea into a business with Design Thinking which is published in his book as well. The four stages are: ‘Understand problem’, ‘Devise solution’, ‘Craft business’ and ‘Manage risk’.

Tania Aidrus is Pakistan’s Chief Digital Officer. A former Chief of Staff and Head of Strategic Initiatives on the Next Billion Users (NBU) team at Google, Tania quit her position to head Prime Minister Imran Khan’s ‘Digital Pakistan’ initiative. She will share her vision and will be joined by Khurram Jamali, who is the CEO of Digital Pakistan Foundation and together they are leading the Digital Revolution is Pakistan. Tania and Khurram will talk about the Digital Pakistan initiative, milestones and next steps.