Pakistani Immigrant Builds Websites

A story about Syed Balkhi's early days as a 12-year-old immigrant from Pakistan, building websites while learning English.

"We moved from Pakistan to US when I was 12. My dad had a mechanical engineering degree but it didn't validate when he came to US, so he was working 16 hours a day as a gas station clerk attendant, just swiping things Monday to Friday. On the weekend he had his third job, so I didn't really see my dad.

I started high school at 12, the youngest person in school. I didn't speak English well - I could read English because we were taught alphabets, but my communication skills weren't there. I spent most of the time in the library during lunchtime because I couldn't talk to humans. I wanted to play games, but those game sites were blocked, so I figured out how to unblock them.

I started getting clients through online forums and family friends. My first websites were online proxies because I wanted to play games in school, and I was making ad revenue. I helped small local businesses set up their websites - I would build these websites super cheap, like $250-$300. But these clients would always rely on me to make changes to the websites. As I started doing consulting at a bigger scale, I didn't want to do these small things anymore. That's when I discovered WordPress in 2006."