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I'm the new Chapter Lead for @arc Pakistan 🇵🇰
Pakistanis abroad sent home a record $41.6B last year.
Yet millions of Pakistani freelancers still can't open a PayPal account.
The money arrives. The rails fail the people earning it.
I'm here to fix that.
Thank you @bobbilee, @samconnerone and the Arc team for trusting me with this.
Builders, we're open:
community.arc.io/public/club…
Arc House 🇵🇰 Pakistan chapter is live!!!
let's give a warm welcome to chapter lead @Sherazzhs for kicking off the team
Sheraz, @ezgiyaltay, and I will be building out the Pakistan chapter team over the next couple weeks. stay tuned for updates if you applied to help this region.
apply to join now: community.arc.io/public/club…
i'm co-owner and head of ai at re:shark. we build ai that does sales outreach.
what i didn't expect:
the ai is the easy part.
anyone can get a model to write a good cold email now. that's a commodity.
the hard part is everything around it.
domains that don't get burned. inboxes warmed up properly. sending volumes that keep you out of spam.
the best email in the world is worthless in the spam folder.
the model isn't the moat.
the boring infrastructure is.
the solana superteams category matters more than people think.
i watched pakistan's hackathon submissions go 26, then 39, then 99 over three rounds.
that kind of curve doesn't happen without people mentoring builders from zero
Solana Community Awards voting is live.
12 categories: artists, creators, traders, streamers, ambassadors, memelords, NFT and meme communities, Superteams, Seeker dapps, collab and campaign of the year.
Vote now: solana.com/breakpoint/awards
people keep asking how i run a few businesses and still keep up
so i wrote the whole setup down
a second brain on whatsapp, a chief of staff, a clone that explains stuff to my team, and one rule: nothing goes out without my yes
airlines made flying cheap for the whole world and were a rough ride for the people who funded them.
if ai plays out the same, the winners aren't the ones buying gpus. it's the businesses quietly running on cheap intelligence.
that's the side i'd rather be on
the $100m moat used to be features. ai rebuilds features in weeks now.
what's left is distribution and trust, and those still only come with size. that's why the bar jumped to $1b
When I was a SaaS CEO, scale was $100M ARR
If you got there, you couldn't be killed. Your brand was so strong, your feature moat would take years to match, etc. etc.
Today, it's probably $1B ARR
If you get there, there's probably enough scale that you'll continue to win, even with all the change in the Age of AI
But you probably need $1B ARR
right!! i started my first company at 16, back when i had nothing to compare it to.
most adults give a job they hate ten years and a new business one bad quarter.
same patience, pointed at the wrong thing
every chain wants every stablecoin. fair.
but the freelancers i've seen in pakistan getting paid in crypto never ask which chain. they ask how fast it hits their bank in rupees.
that's the race that actually matters
at 23 i got invited to an event in dubai.
it started in 15 hours.
i booked a one way ticket.
i didn't come back for a year.
ended up living in abu dhabi as head of asia expansion for a blockchain company.
back in amsterdam everything was fine. same friends, same routine, same streets.
that was the problem. fine was all it was ever going to be.
in abu dhabi nobody knew me. no safety net. sundays became workdays.
comfortable is fine.
i just didn't want fine for the rest of my life.
ALT Office view in Abu Dhabi
pakistani builders, you've got till nov 1
@arc is giving 8 microgrants of 500 usdc for experiments built in arc studio that move real usdc on mainnet
arc studio turns a prompt into a working app, so "i don't have time" isn't really an excuse this weekend 🛠
ship something and reply with the link, i'll check every one
Built something in Arc Studio?
Ship it on Arc Mainnet and apply for one of 8 microgrants, 500 USDC each.
Experiments must be built in Arc Studio and move real USDC on Arc Mainnet.
Submissions close Nov. 1.
Details + apply: dorahacks.io/hackathon/arc-m…
i've been automating my life since i was 10.
runescape auto typers back then. a whole team of ai bots now.
here's exactly how i run my day
everyone is demoing what agents can do. the real money is going to whoever decides what they're allowed to touch.
the boring layer always wins
Congrats to @matsiiako, @dangtony98, @maidulll and @infisical (W23) on their $40M Series B!
Infisical is the open source security infrastructure that manages API keys, passwords, and certificates for developers, machines, and AI agents.
When an AI agent needs access to a sensitive system, Infisical hands it a fake credential and swaps in the real one through a proxy. The agent does its job without ever seeing the actual key.
More than 1,300 organizations use the platform, including Airbus, Hugging Face, and the US Government, and they just passed 30,000 stars on GitHub.
forbes.com/sites/rashishriva…
the 5 questions i ask before building any ai system for a company:
1. who does this task today, and how long does it take them
2. what does one wrong output cost
3. where does the data actually live (not where they say it lives)
4. who owns it when the agent gets it wrong
5. what happens on day 30, not day 1
can't answer most of these? we don't build yet.
the model is the cheap part.
the expensive part is the process nobody ever wrote down.
a marketplace where agents buy services from other agents only works if paying is as easy as calling an api.
that's the part most people skip. the model was never the bottleneck. the checkout was xitter.cf/arc/status/21151112847…
Arc 🤝 @TollyLabs
Tolly is an open marketplace for AI agent services, with Arc-first settlement.
Live on Arc.
thank you ezgi 🫶
i've watched that energy build up close for years. students taking ethereum and solana courses. freelancers getting paid in crypto because nothing else worked.
it just never had a home.
now it does. let's make it count 🇵🇰
Pakistan joins the Arc House family 🇵🇰
A warm welcome to @Sherazzhs as chapter lead. The energy from this region has been building for a while, and now it has a home for builders.
Excited to support this chapter as it grows 🫶
appreciate you sam 🙏
i've been on both sides. building startups, and helping pakistani builders find their way into web3 when nobody was paying attention.
now we get to do it with arc behind us.
the talent was always here. let's give it a home 🇵🇰
Welcome @Sherazzhs to the @arc family!
Sheraz brings a wealth of experience building startups and growing communities across the ecosystem.
Excited to have him leading our new Pakistan 🇵🇰 chapter, connecting builders, fostering collaboration, and helping grow the Arc community in the region.
Looking forward to what we’ll build together!
most ai agents don't fail.
they just get switched off quietly.
not because the model was bad.
because nobody wrote down what "done" looks like.
no definition of done = no way to tell if it's working.
no way to tell if it's working = it gets cut in the next budget meeting.
before you pick a model, write one sentence:
"this agent did its job if ___"
can't fill it in? you're not ready to build.
Appreciate you ZK 🤝
Glad to have you with me on the Pakistan chapter from the start. Let's build.
congratulations to @Sherazzhs ! Full support to him. 🤝
Pakistan has a home at Arc now🇵🇰
Huge thanks to the @bobbilee , @ezgiyaltay and the arc team for bringing our community together.
Excited to see Pakistani builders grow, connect, and build together in the @arc ecosystem.
This is just the beginning!
Let's go🇵🇰 🔥
Pakistan has 240 million people. most of them under 30.
Millions of freelancers getting paid by the world.
And still fighting to get their own money out.
i've seen this first hand.
Founders building with less funding and worse rails.
Builders learning ethereum and solana because no one handed them a job.
Freelancers already taking crypto because the old system failed them.
The talent is here. the rails aren't.
That's the gap i'm spending the next years on.
