LAHORE: The inaugural meeting of the PUCIT Entrepreneur Alumni Forum was held in the Senate Hall of the University of the Punjab, Allama Iqbal (Old) Campus, on Saturday.
Over 57 companies founded by the PUCIT alumni registered for the meeting. CEOs of these companies and PUCIT teachers participated in the meeting. Speaking at the occasion, Prof Dr Syed Mansoor Sarwar, the PUCIT principal, acknowledged the CEOs as an integral part of the achievements of the college and its future hopes. He informed the audience that the primary purpose of the meeting was to brainstorm the idea of establishing PUCIT Entrepreneurship Center (PEC) in the college and carry out the spade work necessary to make it a success story for other institutions to follow.
The founders gave briefs about the companies that they had founded and offered their help to inculcate the culture of entrepreneurship and business incubation among PUCIT students through the establishment of PEC within the next few months.
Dr Sarwar informed the audience that all over the world, most of the successful entrepreneurs are from the oldest, wealthiest, and elite universities, including Stanford, Harvard, Cambridge, MIT, and Berkeley. He further said that almost all of these universities are situated close to hubs of venture capitalists (VC) and angle investors, and have industry-affiliated investment funds. Also, the alumni of these universities are deeply entrenched and settled in technology companies, and they almost make sure that funding goes to the graduates of their Alma Maters. He informed the house that the graduates of Harvard and Stanford alone had founded nearly 5,000 companies during the past decade, creating tens of thousands of jobs and contributing hundreds of billions of dollars to the world economy.
He said that there were also plenty of people in the world who ventured into amazing businesses with very little money and without raising VC funds. He said that PEC would be modeled to enable the college graduates and students to venture into entrepreneurship with initial support from PUCIT and its alumni. The participants agreed to establish the PUCIT Entrepreneurship Forum (PEF), a bottom-up, indigenous, cost effective, and self-sustainable framework to foster and inculcate entrepreneurial culture at PUCIT. In this framework, successful entrepreneur alumni and their teachers would brainstorm ideas and devise strategies to foster entrepreneurial culture at campus. PUCIT will provide a platform for regular forum meet-ups and activities as deemed necessary for the purpose. PEF would also seek help from CEOs of other technology companies.
Published in Daily Times, January 15th 2018.