ISLAMABAD: On January 20 of this year, viewers of Finnish television channel MTV3’s popular show “Good Morning Finland” were witness to something rather unusual: a businessman making the argument that one of the great unreported emerging markets’ business opportunities in the world lay not in India or China, but in Pakistan.
The entrepreneur in question was Wille Eerola, a technology and media consultant who first visited Pakistan eight years ago and for the last several months has been spending one week of every month in Islamabad. Eerola’s argument is simple: Pakistan gets far too much negative attention in the international media which overshadows the tremendous untapped potential in the country, specifically its young entrepreneurs.
“There is huge potential and a growing market that nobody knows of,” said Eerola in an interview with The Express Tribune. “The potential and size of the Pakistani market have generated great interest in me and everyone else who I have been talking to.”
Eerola visits campuses across the northern part of the country, meeting students and talking to them about their business ideas. While he did not explicitly say so, he appears to be in the process of setting up a venture capital fund to incubate, advise and grow small Pakistani businesses and start-ups.
“We are creating a project for new companies to start up from – whether it means providing funding or management expertise, understanding of sales abroad and so on,” he said. “And adjacent to that I am building up a fund by this spring which will then support funding of those new born companies.”
The concept Eerola speaks about is one that some of the largest venture capital funds in the United States have already employed. Some US venture funds provide not just capital, but also office space and consulting on how to grow the business. More
