This summer, as ‘Women Rising: A Practical Guide to Building a Business You Love!’ makes its way into the hands of readers across Pakistan and beyond, it arrives at a moment when many women are searching for something more than business advice…they’re searching for permission.
Permission to be ambitious, to take up space and to build lives and businesses on their own terms. For generations, Pakistani women have entered the world of work carrying invisible burdens: expectations to be everything to everyone, pressure to shrink their ambitions, and a persistent lack of roadmaps from women who have navigated the journey before them. While shelves are crowded with startup manifestos and leadership guides imported from Silicon Valley, few speak directly to the realities of building something meaningful while balancing family, culture, identity, womanhood and purpose in Pakistan.
That is what makes Mahe Zehra Husain‘s forthcoming book feel so very significant. A mathematician, data scientist, entrepreneur, educator, artist and author of more than twenty books, Mahe Zehra occupies a space few people can. She’s as comfortable discussing artificial intelligence and data systems as she is talking about creativity, intuition and personal fulfilment. She has spent years leading technology companies in industries where women remain underrepresented, while simultaneously nurturing a creative practice grounded in storytelling, art and education. In many ways, she embodies a rare harmony between logic and imagination, structure and soul.
Yet for all her incredible achievements, what strikes you most about Mahe Zehra is not her intellect, though it is formidable…it is her generosity. Throughout our conversation, a consistent theme emerges; a desire to make things easier for those coming after her. Whether she is mentoring women entrepreneurs, teaching, writing, or building businesses, her work is guided by a belief that success should create opportunities, not just accolades. She speaks openly about failure, loneliness, self-doubt and the hidden costs of achievement. She challenges the idea that entrepreneurship must come at the expense of joy, relationships or identity. And perhaps most importantly, she refuses to accept that women must choose between building successful businesses and living meaningful lives.
At a time when conversations around leadership often celebrate relentless, back-breaking hustle and endless growth, Mahe Zehra provides a different, far more comforting vision — one rooted in self-awareness, sustainability and purpose. Her message, that women do not need to become someone else to succeed, is deeply reassuring. For Mahe Zehra, women simply need the courage to become more fully themselves…
Your book opens with a seemingly simple question: ‘Who are you?’ Why do you believe self-awareness is a business skill, and why do so many women overlook it when starting a venture?
It’s because every decision a founder makes is inherently based on who she is. If you don’t know what you value, what drains you and what lights you up, you will build something that looks successful on paper and quietly costs you everything. Women often skip this step because we are trained to start with usefulness. Maybe this is a side-effect of always seeing ourselves as something to someone. A daughter, sister, wife, mother…when we start building a business the question, ‘who are you?’ might feel indulgent next to that, but without it we build a business that is at risk of failing or taking a huge toll on our soul. A business built on someone else’s definition of success is a very expensive way to discover you were running in the wrong direction. I open with that question because the answer is the foundation that everything else stands on.
Much of the entrepreneurship advice available today comes from Silicon Valley or the West. What realities do Pakistani women entrepreneurs face that those playbooks often fail to account for?
The Western startup story assumes things that simply are not true here; easy access to capital, a culture that celebrates risk and even failure, infrastructure you can rely on, and a founder whose time is largely her own. A Pakistani woman building a business is often doing it around family obligations that are non-negotiable, with limited access to funding, in a society that may quietly disapprove of her visibility. The ‘move fast and break things’ ethos assumes you have things to break and a safety net to catch you. Many women here are building carefully, with their own savings, while protecting relationships they cannot afford to fracture. So, I am wary of advice that treats hustle as a personality and capital as a given. What works here is resourcefulness, patience, and building something real before you build something big.
In Women Rising, you argue that businesses should be built from values rather than someone else’s blueprint. What does that look like in practice, particularly in a culture where women are often expected to prioritise everyone else’s needs before their own?
In practice it means starting with a different first question, not ‘what is the gap in the market’ but ‘what do I actually believe, and what would I be proud to spend a decade on.’ Values are the best decision filters. When you know yours, you can say no quickly, which is the most underrated business skill there is! For women raised to put everyone else first, this is genuinely hard, because building from your own values requires believing your needs are valid input and not a distraction. Look, I am not asking women to become selfish. I am asking them to count themselves as one of the people they are allowed to serve. A business built on your values can hold your life. A business built on someone else’s blueprint will always ask you to shrink to fit it.
Pakistan’s entrepreneurial ecosystem remains heavily male-dominated. Have there been moments in your own journey when you felt your expertise or authority was questioned because you were a woman…if so, how did you overcome those experiences?
Yes, and I suspect most women building here could tell the same story. I spent 14 years running a software company, and there were rooms where people assumed a male colleague beside me was in charge or directed their technical questions to him and their logistical ones to me. I’ve conducted interviews where potential candidates would not look at me and been in rooms where I was the only woman present. We have come a long way from that, and Pakistan is rapidly changing in that more women founders are taking the stage, and I am so happy to see that. But given we make more than 50% of the population, there is still a long way to go for women-led and women-owned businesses.
For me, what changed things was not proving I belonged, but quietly being undeniable: knowing the numbers better than anyone else in the room, letting the work speak before I did. I will not pretend that is fair, because it is not. Men are assumed competent until proven otherwise, and women are assumed otherwise until proven competent. But competence, demonstrated patiently and repeatedly, is very hard to argue with. That became my answer. That and a quiet confidence that you build over time.
Many women hesitate to start businesses because they fear being judged as too ambitious, too visible, or too focused on money. Why do you think those perceptions persist, and how can women challenge them?
Those perceptions persist because they are useful to everyone except the woman herself. A woman who wants less is easier to manage. We are taught to fulfill our ambitions through the language of helping, because open ambition in a woman still reads as a threat, while in a man it reads as leadership. Money is the sharpest version of this. A woman who wants to be paid well is somehow suspect, as though wanting financial independence were a character flaw rather than basic sense. The way to challenge it is not to wait until the judgement disappears, because it will not. It is to decide that your discomfort with being seen costs less than the life you give up by staying small. Be ambitious in public. It gives the next woman permission!
You’ve spent years leading technology companies, an industry where women remain significantly underrepresented. What changes have you seen over the past decade, and where do the biggest barriers still exist?
The visible things have improved. There are more women in the room, more programmes pointed at us, more language about inclusion. What has changed less is who gets believed, who gets funded, and who gets to fail without it being treated as proof that women should not have been there. The barrier has moved from the front door to the leadership table – to technical leadership and to the decisions about whose judgement is trusted under pressure. Representation at the entry level is not the same as power. I have watched plenty of women get hired and very few get handed real authority over money and direction. Until that changes, the rest is decoration. The encouraging part is that women are increasingly building their own tables rather than waiting for a seat at someone else’s.
One of the book’s most compelling ideas is that women shouldn’t have to choose between building a business and living a meaningful life. Why do you think entrepreneurship is still often framed as an all-or-nothing pursuit?
Because the people who built the dominant story of entrepreneurship could afford to give everything to it. If someone else is raising your children, running your home, and absorbing the cost of your absence, total dedication looks heroic. For most women that arrangement does not exist, so all-or-nothing quietly translates to nothing. I reject the premise. A business is supposed to serve your life, not consume it. The most radical thing I tell women is that they are allowed to build at a sustainable pace, to want a business and a full life, and to refuse the idea that suffering is proof of seriousness. Burnout is not a credential. The goal should never be to build something impressive that you are too depleted to enjoy.
You write candidly about ventures that didn’t work out. Looking back, what is one failure that taught you more than any success ever could?
The most useful failures were the ones where the idea was good but it was not mine to build. I once poured energy into a venture because it made sense on paper: the market was there, the logic was sound, but I ignored the fact that I did not care enough about it. It failed slowly, which is the worst way, and it taught me that an idea can pass every external test and still fail the only one that matters, which is whether you would choose it again on a hard day. Now I have a filter. Does it help women build something? Does it connect to what I am already making? Can it generate income or audience reasonably soon? And, do I have the energy for it right now? If not, I let it go. That filter came directly from getting it wrong.
If a young woman in Pakistan picks up Women Rising and dreams of building something of her own, what is the one message you hope stays with her long after she finishes the book?
That you do not need permission, and you do not need to be ready. The voice telling you to wait until you are more qualified, more confident, more deserving, is not protecting you. You are allowed to begin badly. You are allowed to build something that is entirely yours, on your own terms, in your own context, without apologising for taking up space. The women who came before you did not have the tools you have now, so use them. Build the thing. And when you do, create more opportunities for other women to succeed. Help and support other women entrepreneurs wherever and whenever you can.
You write that women often lose themselves while building businesses. Was there a moment in your own journey when you realised you were in danger of doing exactly that?
Yes. There was a stretch where I was running at full capacity, every venture moving, every box ticked, and I could not have told you what I actually wanted, because I had not asked myself in years. I had become very good at producing and completely out of practice at choosing. The warning sign was not exhaustion, because I was used to that. It was that I had forgotten what happiness looked like and if you were to ask me what would make me happy, I would have stared at you with a blank face. I was making decisions on autopilot, optimising a life I had never paused to design. Catching that is what led to a great deal of what is in this book. You can be enormously productive and entirely lost at the same time. The two are not mutually exclusive, which is exactly what makes it so dangerous.
As a CEO, you’re expected to be rational, analytical, and decisive. As an artist and author, you speak about intuition, creativity, and purpose. How do those sides of your personality coexist?
I have stopped seeing them as two sides. I describe myself as a translator between structure and soul, and I mean it literally. The mathematician in me builds the system, and the artist in me decides what the system is for. Intuition is not the opposite of analysis, it is pattern recognition. The mistake is treating creativity as soft and rigour as serious, when the best decisions need both. My data science background tells me what is true, and the creative side tells me what is worth doing with it. I would be a worse founder if I amputated either one. The structure keeps the soul from drifting, and the soul keeps the structure from becoming a cage.
Many successful founders talk about resilience, but few talk about loneliness. What has been the loneliest part of entrepreneurship for you?
The loneliest part is carrying certainty you cannot share. As a founder you make decisions that affect other people, with information you cannot fully explain and outcomes you cannot guarantee, and you carry the weight of that alone. Resilience gets talked about because it sounds noble. Loneliness does not, because admitting it can feel like admitting weakness. But there are decisions only you can make, doubts you cannot voice to your team because they need you steady.
What’s a belief you held about success in your twenties that you no longer believe today?
That success was a finish line. In my twenties I believed there was a point you arrived at, a level of achievement after which you would finally feel like enough, and everything before it was just the cost of getting there. I do not believe that any more. There is no arrival. The founder who hits the goal simply sets a new one, and if your sense of enough is tied to the next milestone, you will never actually have it. What I believe now is that success is whether the way you spend your days is something you would choose. It is a quality of life, not a destination you reach. I spent my twenties deferring my life until I succeeded. I would tell that younger woman that every day happiness is the destination.
Mahe Zehra Husain’s forthcoming book, ‘Women Rising: A Practical Guide to Building a Business You Love!’ will be released this summer. Follow her on LinkedIn for updates and to be among the first to hear when it’s available.