Last weekend’s #StartupSaturday, our series of fortnightly informal meetups for the tech community, was one of those which really stand out.

We were really proud to have Haseeb Awan from BitAccess. A native of D. I. Khan, a Peshawari, an Islamian, a hardware engineer and of course an alumnus of Y-combinator (which is, for those of you who’ve been living under a rock somewhere, the world’s most prestigious accelerator for startups!).

On the audience side, it was so cool to see an enriched crowd of fewer enthusiasts and more hardcore founders, designers and engineers. Yes, it brought together some of the best members of our startup community.

For those of you who have missed it, I leave you with 3 main takeaways from his session. I wont elaborate much but I would invite you guys to reflect on them.

1) ‘If you can’t speak to two customers a day, you should get yourself a job!’ A startup is not your game then. That’s how important customers are and that’s how passionate you need to be.

2) ‘Make a person’s day, every day’. ‘It could be as a simple and small as a smile, or waving a hand at someone’, Haseeb added, ‘but the positive energy you take in from this on a daily basis is profound’. I think this is pretty deep. And you have to experience this first hand in order to make sense of it.

3) When asked which fields he likes (other than his of course) and what areas he thought were ‘hot’ these days.

  • ‘Drones’ he exclaimed. ‘Not the ones in Pakistan, but the ones used for civilian purposes’.
  • ‘IoT’ (the internet of things) he said is another cool area which will make it big. ‘Sensors are developing fast’ he said and they are going to have a tremendous impact.
  • Finally, he mentioned biosciences, especially some colleagues from YC who are doing biotech startups like the Glowing Plant and uBioMe. He also said he has got parts of his genome sequenced through 23andme.