What I understood differently after leaving the builder’s seat
Sarah Farooq, an Acumen Fellow, and Associate Director at Acumen Academy returns to a founder room.
- Blog
- All impact sectors
- Pakistan
There’s a term we use in the Acumen Fellowship: being “on the balcony” versus being “on the dance floor.” When you’re building, you’re on the dance floor. Every decision is close, urgent, and personal. When you step back to support other builders, you move to the balcony. You can see the whole room and the patterns that are hard to see when you’re inside the work yourself.
Walking back into a founder room in Skardu, after spending years of my life building social enterprises in Pakistan, I felt both at once. Familiar, because I’ve sat where they were sitting. Different, because for the first time, I was watching the dance floor from above.
It felt like coming home, the kind of familiarity where you catch yourself thinking, “These are my people.” Not just people solving similar problems, but people who understand the specific weight of trying to solve them in Pakistan — with all the complexity, urgency, and possibility that comes with that work.
The Skardu Summit Fellowship brought together 10 of Pakistan’s top social entrepreneurs to pressure-test how their models would hold up under growth, using the Mulago Foundation‘s framework. It was organized by the educational technology company Taleemabad, led by Acumen Fellow and Acumen Angels awardee Haroon Yasin, and supported by the Mulago Foundation, which actively scouts and funds high-impact, scalable organizations in Pakistan. The faculty in the room reflected the full ecosystem a founder actually needs: funders, seasoned builders, and government officials, sitting alongside each other, asking hard questions, and engaging in wide-ranging conversations about creating meaningful impact.
The location was intentional. Skardu, nestled in the mountainous Gilgit-Baltistan region of northern Pakistan, drops you into a landscape built on a different scale. Mountains on every side, rivers cutting through valleys, and some of the highest peaks in the world at your doorstep. There’s something about that vastness that gets into your thinking and pushes you to think bigger.
The week was framed around scale. But for me, it also became a more personal reflection on what it takes to move from building an organization to building something that can truly meet the size of the problem you set out to solve.
Scale is not the same as growth
This is the line I keep coming back to: Scale is not the same as growth.
Growth is more revenue, more users, more headcount. Scale is your biggest bet on how you actually solve the problem you started with and everything it will take to make that bet real. As the Mulago framework puts it, it means finding something good enough, cheap enough, big enough, and simple enough that a doer will do it and a payer will pay for it. And it means iterating relentlessly until you have real evidence of impact and unit economics that hold up.
But beyond the language of any one framework, the deeper question is this: What actually works, who needs it, and who else must carry it forward for the solution to reach the level of the problem?
During my time as COO at Taleemabad, we were obsessed with getting more children to reach grade-level learning across Pakistan. That’s what led us to partner with the government as the path to scale. We went through rounds of learning from low-cost private school models, stripping our model down, and simplifying it until we landed on a large government pilot. Eventually, the government became a paying customer, and today the model reaches over 300,000 students.
The lesson was not that government is always the answer. It was that scale did not come from doing more ourselves. It came from understanding the system we were operating in, identifying partners who could take it to millions of children, and asking who could carry the work further than we could alone.
The hard part isn’t having conviction about the problem. It’s learning from the data, making the hard calls to kill what isn’t working, and putting everything behind what is working — until your model is refined enough to scale.
This isn’t an easy process. A few founders hit the same wall that week in Skardu. They were doing too much. The sessions pushed them to dissect their models and find their biggest bet among all their activities, looking at the data to see what showed early evidence, what would be easy for someone else to carry out, and what could create an outsized impact. What fit their mission, and what were they doing just to keep the organization running?
Part of the breakthrough was simply picking what to focus on and letting the rest go. But the bigger realization was that scale isn’t something you do alone. It means working with others, learning from people who’ve done it or are a few steps ahead, so you can see what you’re missing. That is where community becomes more than support. It becomes infrastructure.
Community is scaling infrastructure
I have seen this in my own leadership journey as an Acumen Fellow. Through the right tools, skills, and peers around me, I could finally see where I needed to grow as a leader and where I was getting in my own way. The community did more than encourage me. It challenged me. It held up a mirror. It helped me step off the dance floor long enough to see the system around me, and my own role within it, more clearly.
For founders working on problems of poverty, that kind of community is not a soft benefit; it shapes decisions. It helps leaders stay honest about what is working and what is not, and it gives founders the courage to keep going without confusing endurance with doing everything alone.
In Skardu, I saw that community again. Haroon, an Acumen Fellow, helped bring the room together. Acumen Fellows were there not only as participants, but as peers and guides, carrying lessons from their own journeys into conversations with founders facing similar questions.
It was a reminder that Acumen’s work in Pakistan is not only visible through programs, investments, milestones, or application cycles. It lives in the people who keep building, keep learning, and keep showing up for one another. Acumen has been backing builders in Pakistan for over two decades.
Builders like Osama Shahid, Founder and CEO of Soby Agro, an Acumen Fellow, Acumen Angels awardee, and Acumen Agri Accelerator participant. Osama has spent years building affordable farm machinery for Pakistan’s smallholder farmers — many overlooked by traditional providers because their farms are considered too small. Today, Soby Agro serves more than 10,000 farmers, dairy operators, and food processors with equipment better suited to local realities. In Skardu, Osama brought those hard-won lessons back to other builders facing their own questions of growth.
The week in Skardu reinforced something I keep relearning: Community, capital, and capacity are critical inputs that make scale possible. That’s what I understood differently, watching from the balcony. Scale is never about how far you can go alone. The important question to sit with is this: How do you build a model that others can take to solve the problem at the size it actually exists?
More from our Knowledge Hub
No school, no football: How one rule changed 40,000 lives in India
Acumen Fellow Ashok Rathod shares the story of the OSCAR Foundation, which uses football to build resilience, leadership, and opportunity for children across India.
