The OPEN Silicon Valley Synergy Event – Filling a Void

By Aisha Sarwari

American progress is built on hyphenated identities. Pakistani-Americans are one of those clusters where wealth - medical, scientific, technological, philanthropic - concentrates. The OPEN forum, a community of tech-based leaders, saw the need to organize. Pakistanis, globally, excel as individual contributors. Collectively, though, they struggle to build long-standing institutions and to keep them productive and true to their original mission. OPEN forum is an outlier.

I’ve returned to Silicon Valley after two decades in emerging markets.

What I found: the Bay Area’s best practices blended with the hearty Pakistani spirit. The result? A seamless, vibrant run of show at their latest event: Synergy, the Women’s Leadership Forum. My feminism in tow, I saw three principles at play. First: no zanana-mardana segregation. Diversity of age, gender, cognition, and background was everywhere. Brilliant women spoke, sharing hard-won experience, not just preaching to the choir. Second: men with power passed it on, generously. Third: flawless execution. Attention to detail balanced with a casual, creative openness.

At the center: Zainab Jeewanjee, Partner at Insure123 and conference chair. In her welcome, she called for a redefinition of success: “Success is also about adding social impact on the list, too.” Zainab wears humility and ambition equally. The era of the demure woman, passing on credit and control, staying in the shadows, is over. She is the woman who takes charge, consolidates, directs, supports, and leads by feet, not just words. I want to be her. She gets things done with shared power and a self-assuredness that doesn’t need accolades.

“I have a special soft corner for working women who are also mothers, because I needed support when I became a mother,” she told me on our first Zoom, welcoming me back to the US and urging me to attend the upcoming event on May 10th. She followed through - what she said happened.

Often, when I talk to people about working back home, we agree: Pakistan’s context structurally and systemically presses the brakes on any progress, speed, scale, and agility. Things are harder to get done. People talk but rarely act. Follow-ups come with excuses. I struggled, too, working in teams, ethical disharmony, and over-indexing on familial privilege. I yearned for a place where people propped up their communities for collective social uplift, building social capital and credibility. What Zainab pulled off is suave. Maybe it’s the lineup of high-achieving, generous leaders rallying behind her. Perhaps it’s her persuasive skills, rooted in the moral authority she commands.

“We are here because Zainab invited us. We hopped on a flight and came because she said we needed to. That was that,” said Aamir Chalisa, CEO of FFIG and an OPEN Forum Founder. The night before, over daal tarka, pani puri, saag paneer, and a conversation about entrepreneurship at Zareen’s Restaurant in Palo Alto - apparently a Zuckerberg hangout, too. Even tech giants need gourmet comfort food.

Tariq Khan, Associate Professor at NYU and OPEN Forum President Global, spoke about a peculiar gap in the younger generation. "Agile, innovative, brilliant - but needing capacity for flexibility, soft skills, and human connection. OPEN can help build those complementary skills," he said. This is the hyphen at play -- the bridge between old and new, wisdom and turbo-charged activation, and that strange but necessary loyalty to serve one’s country of origin. The baton has been passed. The equity and level playing field in the organization remind me: this, too, can be done in Pakistan. But how do we transform a cultural context?

How is it that Raghib Hussain can be CEO of Altera, and why can’t we have a Raghib and an Altera back home? In his fireside chat, Raghib said it’s all about the horsepower of luck. Zain Jeewanjee, in his glittering jacket, led Raghib to articulate the formula for success - no shortcuts. Like Malcolm Gladwell’s thesis in Outliers, Raghib explained: Luck is about the company and community of great minds around you. “Your network multiplier is the biggest strength you will ever have, but it takes a lot of time to establish it.”

Transforming Pakistan’s cultural context will take time and consistent effort to create positive, powerful contexts for growth and learning. No shortcuts. Pakistan may be emerging from conflict with India, but Pakistanis everywhere see the consistent effort India has put into technology and innovation. We know where we missed the train. To catch up, we’ll need to get on that back-to-square-one train, with intellectual honesty.

 At the end of the day, our people are known by the problems we solve - climate change, hunger, poverty, inequality, and water scarcity. In the coming years, breakthroughs will come - cancer drugs powered by data, improved policy, and synthetic data enabling AI solutions to challenges that feel insurmountable now. But how many of those will come from Pakistanis, or hyphenated Pakistanis?

I believe in the magic at OPEN because I saw the power of passing the mic. The conference began by thanking volunteers. This is servant leadership lived.

 The power shone through when Dr Anita Zaidi, President, Gender Equality Division Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in her keynote, talked about solving for typhoid first in Pakistan - because people abandoned silos for collective synergy. She did some potent real-talk: “Don’t spend all your time following hierarchies, you will never make any change. Be ok with the mess. It’s ok. People will have your back if you have been sincere. For women specifically, following process does not get them success.”

Power at this conference also came from Indian-origin leader Sahana Sarma, Global VP GTM Strategy, Growth, and Ops. Her talk topped my list. Everyone talks about AI changing the world, but she made it real - she talked about AI as a tool to bring speed to expertise. Any expertise. AI as an add-on. She won my heart when she spoke about her husband’s stage four cancer and her father’s Parkinson’s. Given my own battle with caregiving for my husband’s brain tumor, her sharing this part of her life moved me. She urged everyone to be more than a career: “Be holistically you. Take time for what matters in life. Take time to have kids and to do things personally.”

Power also came through in an all-women panel, where the moderator’s claim to fame was being a girl-dad. Panelists spoke openly about postpartum depression, the childcare and eldercare challenges pushing women out of the workforce, the need to speak truth to power, to normalize ambition in women, the dark side of the internet, trusting intuition, going down the hierarchy, leading with curiosity, pivoting when needed, being vulnerable despite a culture of shame, the importance of peer networks, and, crucially, knowing how to story-tell to a tough audience.

To have a vision to provide survival skills in a time of economic ambiguity and volatility is one thing, but to serve it up, bite-sized, to about 200 Pakistani-Americans from across the country - that’s real synergy. Applause. Thanks, and gratitude to the organizing committee, speakers, and panelists. You are part of a much-needed void that has now been filled.