This is the third piece in a series produced by Acumen Academy and 100x Impact, exploring what it takes to achieve outsized impact while staying rooted in purpose. The first piece, with Samina Bano of RightWalk Foundation, examined the inner game of scale — the mindset and moral clarity required to lead through complex systems. The second, with Sara Saeed of Sehat Kahani, focused on the architecture of scale — the models and design choices that allow impact to grow. This final piece turns to a different question: when the goal is real transformation, what should success actually look like?

 

For Haroon Yasin, the founder and CEO of Taleemabad, answering that question required dismantling some of social entrepreneurship's most ingrained assumptions — that success means staying visible, retaining ownership, and keeping the organization at the center of the work.

Taleemabad was founded to improve learning outcomes for children in Pakistan. Over eleven years, it began by broadcasting educational cartoons on national television, eventually reaching around 10 million children through prime-time programming on Pakistan's state broadcaster. By most standards, it looked like a success story. But Haroon came to see a problem inside that success.

"We had scale, but it was wide, not deep. You really can't alter the trajectory of a child's life in a ten-minute broadcast."

That realization pushed Taleemabad to evolve away from broad distribution and toward working directly with teachers and schools inside the public education system. Today, it reaches around 200,000 children through this model. A smaller number than the television audience, but to Haroon, a more meaningful kind of scale.

Along the way, Haroon and his team made decisions that ran against the usual logic of growth. They open-sourced content and technology, invited government partners to rebrand the work, and gave up control, IP, and visible credit so that the model could travel farther.

"Most organizations believe they are central to the mission," he says. "They may be, in the first few years. But insisting that the organization remain at the center can become one of the biggest barriers to scaling impact. I think an organization's mandate should be to make itself redundant in 10 or 15 years."

That belief sits at the heart of his story. Success, in his view, should not only be measured by whether an organization continues to grow but by whether the problem it exists to solve begins to disappear.

The beginning was not a grand plan

Haroon came to education almost accidentally. After dropping out of chemical engineering at the University of Waterloo, he found himself with a year of unstructured time and began teaching in a slum near his home in Islamabad.

"There was no grand plan," he says. "I was not thinking that I was going to solve education for the country. But somewhere in that first week, showing up as a 19-year-old in front of all these expectant children and watching what learning did to them, I saw something I had never really seen before."

"They could be hungry for days, but the satisfaction that came from their thirst for learning being met was its own kind of magic."

That experience gave him an early glimpse of what education could unlock. One of those students — also named Haroon — was 12 years old, had never been to school, and now works as a software engineer at Taleemabad, helping build the very technology the organization has since open-sourced.

"If that does not convince you that there is something close to magic in education," Haroon says, "I do not know what does."

When scale stops being about you

Taleemabad's first lesson was that reach alone is not enough. The second was that organizations themselves can become bottlenecks.

"The biggest thing by far — the one that has had the most outsized influence on our scaling journey — is letting go of control and letting go of credit. Most organizations have this belief that they are central to the mission. They may be in the first few years. But then insisting that the organization remain in the center of the playing field is as damaging as it can get to scaling impact."

He describes a common trap: an organization proves its model works, and then assumes that continued self-distribution is the path to scale. Over time, that logic works against growth.

"They end up becoming the biggest bottleneck. In a way, an organization's mandate should be to kill itself in ten or fifteen years, to make itself redundant."

For Taleemabad, that meant giving away the very things it had built: its content, technology, curriculum, and in some cases, even its brand.

"When our content was broadcast on national television, our logos were stripped out and the government put their logos on it. For all intents and purposes, it looked like the government had made it."

The same pattern played out in schools. Programs built by Taleemabad were rebranded under government institutions. Ministers could inaugurate them and claim ownership.

"We gave up the naming rights, the IP rights, open-sourced this stuff, and said it will only scale if somebody else can look at it and say, with the same pride that we do, 'this is ours.'"

The harder decision

This was not a clean transition. Haroon traces it back to a period when Taleemabad was receiving frequent recognition. The organization's content was visible, its schools were branded, and Haroon himself was winning awards and being invited into elite circles. For a while, that momentum looked like validation. Then it began to feel like a distraction.

"There was this period in 2018 and 2019 where every few months we were getting some kind of award or recognition. And I think at some point I got sick of it, because it was one giant distraction from the work."

He began to worry about becoming the kind of founder whose success was increasingly defined by recognition rather than results. "I suddenly had this fear that I would become the kind of entrepreneur that has a cabinet full of awards, but really little in the way of making a dent in the problem."

That fear reshaped his thinking about success: "When you start to chase recognition, it becomes a very poisonous chalice to hold. We didn't want to do that."

Letting go of credit also required an organizational shift, not just a personal one. Team members had poured years into materials and tools that were now being handed over.

"Nobody wants to do this. Imagine a developer working for years on a mobile app that is now open source. Or an animator producing content they're really proud of, which is now someone else's property."

And yet, again and again, the decision unlocked adoption that would not have been possible otherwise. One example was Taleemabad's work on public school textbooks in Islamabad. The team spent a year and a half developing them, bringing together writers from across Pakistan and beyond, then handed all rights to the government.

"We said, you can have all the IP, all the profits, all the distribution. If you want, you can remove our name from the entire thing. Today, these textbooks are the de facto public school textbooks in Islamabad. If we had insisted they were ours and demanded more credit for them, it would never have happened."

What happened next

From the outside, giving away intellectual property can look like a threat to sustainability. Haroon acknowledges how counterintuitive the model sounds.

"If I were to tell you right now that we are giving away the IP and giving away our stuff to someone, the first thing you would worry about is: how are you going to survive?"

In practice, the opposite happened.

"Since we made the decision to do this, we have gone from making about one hundred thousand dollars a year to making around 1.1 or 1.2 million every year. Paradoxically, it has made us more money."

The reason: adoption created demand for support. Once governments and partners no longer had to negotiate for access to the technology, they felt comfortable adopting it at scale, and then turned back to Taleemabad for help with implementation, training, and quality.

"We call it the managed services model. The technology is all there, so the government has peace of mind. But they also know that we are the maker of the technology. Then they hire us to help them deploy it better, to help them use it better."

This dynamic also opened growth beyond Pakistan. Taleemabad's second-largest group of teacher users is now in Sri Lanka — a spread that happened not because the organization orchestrated it directly, but because someone found the work, adopted it, and reached out.

Clarifying the endgame

Both Acumen and 100x helped sharpen Haroon's thinking, though in different ways. With Acumen, the most influential contribution was systems thinking.

"At the time, in 2017, it did not feel very relevant to us. But when we began building government partnerships, we ended up mapping the system ourselves: different government actors, who was supportive, who was blocking, where ownership sat. That systems lens from Acumen became instrumental."

100x brought a different question into focus: what is the endgame?

"The first question you get asked there is: what is your endgame? You could answer by saying you want your organization to be large, well-recognized, and delivering the model forever. Or you could say your endgame is to become irrelevant because somebody else is doing it at scale."

"Once we said that our endgame was for the government to be the implementer at scale, 100x helped make that practical. Have you given government ownership? Is the model affordable for the government? What is the incentive for the government to adopt it? That was incredibly useful."

Together, those influences helped Haroon push the horizon of what Taleemabad was building toward: not just bigger reach, but a future in which the work could spread beyond the institution that started it.

Redefining the founder's role

Haroon argues that the hardest part of building something that can outlast you is not operational, it's personal. Founders must gradually accept that the organization should need them less and less.

"I do think that at some point, you've got to consistently think about the founder being irrelevant to the functioning of the entire company. About two years ago, I began to think about what it would mean to extract myself from every corner of the company. It definitely feels like a surgery."

He speaks openly about the grief that can come with stepping back: "The first piece of inner work is simply being kind to yourself and recognizing that letting go does feel like loss. The second piece is time. I have always loved speed and urgency, but on this question I am trying to give myself time to adapt."

There is structural work behind that transition too. Taleemabad now has a five-person leadership team, and Haroon intentionally hired people stronger than him in their own areas, with the board serving as another mechanism for reducing founder-dependency over time.

The real endgame

For Haroon, the true measure of success remains outside the organization. It is not whether Taleemabad becomes permanent, but whether Pakistan's education crisis begins to recede.

"If the work succeeds, then Pakistan should not have a learning problem anymore. There are 100 million children in the country. At that point, we may talk about many other national challenges, but this should not be one of them."

Each year, Taleemabad's team returns to a reading set in the future: a newspaper clipping imagining a Pakistan that has solved its education problem. What matters most in that vision is that the story is about the country, not the organization.

"That future looks different in all kinds of ways. Once a country is educated, it becomes kinder, more tolerant, more united. It has fewer security problems. The whole texture of life changes."

For founders working in fragile systems, Haroon's advice distills to one framing: urgency in the short term, patience in the long term.

"One of the most helpful framings for me has been to be urgent in the day-to-day, but patient in the long term. What that means is that you begin each day as if today is the day the problems need to be solved. You push hard. But in the long term, you also have to be patient enough to recognize that in uncertain ecosystems like Pakistan, one major shock can wipe out a great deal of work. Governments change. Black swan events happen. That is why long-term patience matters just as much."

Haroon's story offers a different definition of ambition: one willing to give up credit, control, and centrality in service of something larger taking hold. The kind that builds not just for growth, but for irrelevance. And the kind that understands success, ultimately, as letting the work travel farther than the organization itself.