Faisal Sherjan

About this event

Startup Grind will be hosting Faisal Sherjan at this month's event. Faisal is the Director Operations at the LUMS Center for Entrepreneurship, one of the leading business incubators in Pakistan. He is the key evangelizer for going digital with almost any business and is a strong believer for data being key to customer understanding and the most important growth driver.

Speaker

Faisal Sherjan

LUMS Center for Entrepreneurship

Faisal Sherjan (FSJ) brings over 30 years of experience in advertising, television, 3G telephony and new media to his role as a mentor of ten startup exsosytem.
Starting out in advertising in 1985, FSJ, together with two partners, transformed Interflow within five years from a fledgling agency, into an advertising and marketing powerhouse.
In 1990, there was only one television …

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Faisal Sherjan

LUMS Center for Entrepreneurship

Faisal Sherjan (FSJ) brings over 30 years of experience in advertising, television, 3G telephony and new media to his role as a mentor of ten startup exsosytem.

Starting out in advertising in 1985, FSJ, together with two partners, transformed Interflow within five years from a fledgling agency, into an advertising and marketing powerhouse.

In 1990, there was only one television channel in the country, PTV, and the broadcast industry was a sleepy, state-owned, monopoly, ripe for disruption. Seeing the opportunity, FSJ and his partners sought permission to set up a rival network. This would make advertising rates more competitive and programming more compelling leading to a growth in Pakistan’s media markets and viewership.

Not yet comfortable with privately-owned channels, the government agreed to a hybrid model. State-owned Shalimar Recording Company was granted a license to set up transmitters for a second free-to-air, network, Shalimar Television Network (STN). STN’s airtime, however, would be bought by Network Television Marketing (NTM) set up by FSJ and his partners. NTM would then acquire and also develop programming to broadcast on STN transmitters, selling advertising spots to finance the airtime and programming.

NTM/STN was an instant success, and, as a pioneering initiative in South Asia, Middle East and North Africa, it served as a catalyst for transformation of the broadcast industry in these regions. Buoyed by NTM’s commercial and artistic success, FSJ decided to target, South Asian diaspora audiences in the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US).

In 1992, with just USD 20,000, FSJ set up TV Asia, first in the UK and then in the US, to distribute, via satellite, original and acquired South Asian programming to audiences there. There was no South Asian programming in either country and audiences had to rely on video cassettes from home. Today, these audiences are served by dozens of television channels re-transmitted from South Asia and distributed into Western Europe and North America via satellite and cable systems.

Too far ahead of its time, TV Asia also floundered on a combination of slow adoption, expensive distribution, and expensive home receiving equipment. In 1994, FSJ returned to NTM for another five years before turning his attention to the new frontier of mobile telephony.

In 2000, he became team leader at Hutchison 3G in the UK to apply his content creation and delivery expertise to mobile telephony in order to create a market for South Asian mobile content. Before this could be replicated in Pakistan, FSJ was lured away in 2003 to the Jang Group of companies based in Karachi.

Hired as chief operating officer of International Geo Networks, FSJ established the networks’ international footprint and helped design and launch several entertainment, youth and sports targeted channels for the company.