Bilal Hameed & Asad Hashamali

Bilal Hameed: early life

Hameed was born in Karachi. His father served in the Pakistan Navy, and the family moved often because of the armed forces. The family lived in Islamabad, and Hameed spent about a year in the United States. [1]

Bilal Hameed: education

Hameed completed his O-levels and A-levels in Karachi. After A-levels he went to New York to study because he liked it there. He studied at City University of New York and then transferred to Rutgers. His undergraduate major was computer science, and he also took a minor in chemistry and studied Middle Eastern studies. His Middle Eastern studies coursework included the ethics and history of Islam and Persian language. He graduated in 2002, and says his most amazing learning years were his four years in college, not A-levels. [1]

Bilal Hameed: teaching and schools

Hameed has said he was the eldest and had to take care of his family and earn a living, and that he had to start earning a living at 22 to support his family. He has said he always loved teaching, having taught his friends before tests. He taught tuition by going to students' homes, and he taught at an O-level school during the day and did tuition in the evenings. [1]

Hameed was one of two people on the committee that set up Nixor, and he turned down a partnership offer there. He helped set up Cedar College, with about four or five people at first. He has said Cedar was the first school in Karachi set up only by teachers. He served as dean and principal of Cedar College, and said that while he was running a school, it had something called core courses. [1]

Hameed said he first thought he could innovate within the school system, but found the resistance from within too much. He says he quit his other schools, including Cedar, and quit most of his other commitments to focus on Alt Academy. He said he has been teaching the exact same thing for 20 years. [1]

Asad Hashamali: early life and education

Hashamali was born in Hong Kong. His father was sent to Hong Kong to set up the family business. His family moved to Dallas in 2001, and he moved to Pakistan in 2005. He completed his O-levels and A-levels and did an undergraduate degree in economics and finance from the University of London. [1]

Asad Hashamali: career

Hashamali said he left within six months because he was not in tune with the culture. He joined the Cedar team in 2015, starting as an intern. At Cedar he helped set up the admissions team and ran it for a year, and he started working full-time at Cedar in the summer of 2017. Bilal Hameed said that when Hashamali was looking for a job there was no department, so he asked him to come and set up a department. Hashamali said his team ended up calling the department the Digital Media and Communications Department. [1]

Hashamali met someone in January 2018 who in October 2018 became his business partner. In summer 2021 he left a COO role and joined Alt Academy full-time. [1]

Alt Academy

Hashamali says Alt Academy was already public in 2018, before COVID. It first published free YouTube videos for physics, economics and chemistry, and initially saw no point in monetizing its content. Hashamali says it was bootstrapped in its early phase. The founders made a business plan after COVID subsided, around 2021, and say they did not want to launch during COVID, so the launch would not seem to rely on the pandemic. They said the venture went from being bootstrapped to becoming a startup, and say they raised a decent amount of money to start the project. [1]

Hashamali says Alt Academy has served over 55,000 students in three years, and that its community was 50,000 to 60,000 people over three years. Alt Academy was testing a paywall in beta. Hameed says its biggest customers are parents, and said the decision makers are not the students. The founders say they do not claim to be heading for unicorn status because the market is niche. They said that at least three other founding members have had 20 years of experience in a classroom. [1]

Alt Academy's first phase aims to lower costs to a tenth or a twentieth of what a child spends in these four years. The founders said they have really focused on trimming down the entire content, and that with about 80 hours along with practice, a person can take the whole course. They say they have had curriculum developers design at least six courses, which have not yet been produced and were designed for in-person delivery. They said they are very much okay with using as much existing third-party software as possible. [1]

Views

The founders say Pakistan's education system is broken, and say they want to disrupt schools, with the academies already out the window. They say they use education as a means to enhance and elevate the country. They said that startups might have hired educators, but the educators are not sitting at the decision maker's table. Hameed said that, honestly speaking, in most schools students are not learning anything, and that many children in Karachi and Sindh are out of school. He said schools do not want to change just the exam they give, and that the second problem is that the government is not changing anything. He says the founders are waiting for companies in Pakistan to stop requiring bachelor's degrees, and said people in Karachi are more conservative about changing anything about their schooling. He says the long-term solution is a curriculum built on citizenship and honesty. [1]

Hameed believes students need somebody who knows a little more than they do, and that children should only go to school to engage in social learning with other friends. He says the approach he describes is what is called a flipped classroom model. He said that what he described as mastery based learning does not need technology, and says schools grade everything, while life does not grade things. He says the future of education will mimic how people learned from personal tutors, and predicts schools will become hangout spots. He defines radical redesign as building something that makes A-levels forgotten within ten years. The founders say what people see now is the first step of a multi-step process, and said they want to spread their idea around because the more others do it, the better everything becomes. [1]

Hameed believes that without innovation, everything will die out, and says innovation cannot occur in a company that has only standard roles. He says hiring should focus on attitude, because skills can be learned, and that computer science seems to be a very good general degree for being able to think. He describes himself as always an optimist, said he has lived his life in his own lane because he chose one, and predicts the world will become increasingly boundary-less. Hashamali believes you have to have insight into how you see the world and the future of an industry before you come up with an idea, and believes a business should be sustainable. He says Nixor was successful and broke even after its second year. [1]

Personal life

Hameed's mother lives with him. He has siblings living in Canada, Sri Lanka and England. [1]

Timeline

2001

Hashamali's family moved to Dallas.[1]

2002

Hameed graduated.[1]

2005

Hashamali moved to Pakistan.[1]

2015

Hashamali joined the Cedar team.[1]

2017

Hashamali started working full-time at Cedar.[1]

2018

Alt Academy was already public.[1]

2021

Hashamali left a COO role and joined Alt Academy full-time.[1]

Appearances

Frequently asked questions

References

1. Pakistan's schools are built to give grades, not education . Thought Behind Things , 2022-11-23.