Fatima Rizwan

خودی کو کر بلند اتنا کہ ہر تقدير سے پہلے
خدا بندے سے خود پوچھے ، بتا تيری رضا کيا ہے
— علامہ اقبال

I'm from Lahore, where I first got hooked on computers as a teenager. That passion drove me to study software and computer engineering in high school. Along the way, I started a little community that grew to 100,000 students across Pakistan.

Right after graduation, I was itching to start a product company. Entrepreneurship wasn't really a thing in Pakistan back in 2014. I had an idea I believed in and applied to a brand‑new startup incubator in Lahore for support. I got rejected twice.

I was upset and angry, I believed in myself, but I couldn't get the tech folks to see it and back me. So I channeled that frustration into building a media platform for stories about startups and technology. I called it TechJuice, bootstrapped the whole thing, and watched it grow to 12 million users a month. It became the biggest startup and technology news platform in Pakistan. As a fresh grad, my wildest dream had been to reach 1 million people online. TechJuice blew past that, and I realized my ambitions needed to get bigger.

TechJuice got acquired and I decided to move to Singapore.

Singapore was a different world for me. I knew no one there, but I'd somehow convinced my parents I needed three months in the country to register a company and work on a new venture. My dreams had grown. I wanted to tackle a massive problem, one that could change the lives of a billion people. Pakistan felt too small for that now, and Singapore seemed like the perfect launchpad for something global.

In 2022, I focused on education and launched Metaschool, a platform to help developers learn web3 by building and shipping dApps. The opportunity was huge: there are ~100 million developers worldwide, but only ~18,000 are active in web3 each month. Metaschool took off, we scaled to 150,000+ devs and became a go‑to place for web3 learning, working with 25+ leading blockchains and enterprises.

But then AI exploded. Things shifted slowly at first, then all at once. Developers' habits changed, they ditched course platforms for vibe-based coding tools, turning to AI models for questions and learning. Suddenly, our model of web3 education for developers felt irrelevant.

That's when I made the tough call to step back from education and rethink the problems I really wanted to solve.

These days, I'm working in the privacy and AI security space, in stealth mode, with an exceptional team from India, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Singapore. I still call Singapore home, what started as a 3-month experiment turned into my permanent base.