As Rozee.pk took off, Rahman realized that he needed to raise more capital. For that he headed to Sand Hill Road. It was 2007, “when everything was turning upside down in Pakistan. The constitution was suspended, bomb blasts were going off everywhere, and Benazir (Bhutto) was assassinated,” he said. No surprise that the majority of his presentation focused on Pakistan. (Click here to see a Portfolio.com's special report about Sand Hill Road, the hub of venture capital in California's Silicon Valley.)

“From a business perspective,” Rahman noted, “all these funds understood jobs and understood the Internet. The sell I had to make was that we are a job website based here (in Pakistan) in a country, one that they didn’t know that much about, and what they knew about was not very good or positive…. My investor pitch was focused as a country pitch rather than a business pitch.”

It was not easy. But Rahman had a relatively high hit rate compared to most startups that pitch. Three out of nine funds expressed interest. They were ones that “had experience in emerging areas of the world.” Still, they had their reservations. Rahman was told that Pakistan was a complete unknown. “They had never operated in this area of the world.” After an exhausting back-and-forth, Rahman said, “I was prepared to say, ‘if you’re afraid to invest, it’s OK.’”

But something inside him pushed him to fight on.

“As a VC fund, you know that investments are high risk. You’re investing in startups, and the probability of success is super, super low,” he said. Startup risk far outweighs country risk.

“Our business had shown that we were profitable and viable and able to withstand (country) risk.” It worked. Two firms in California's Bay Area, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and EPlanet Ventures, backed not so much Rozee.pk, but Monis Rahman.

“These investors showed confidence in our ability to grow the business and were not interested in spinning this out quickly,” Rahman said, “that meant a lot to me as an entrepreneur.”

It also made the Naseeb Network founder realize that human capital was the carrot Pakistan needed to lure investors and help rewrite the country’s narrative.

That is why he, along with the country’s top entrepreneurs such as the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) founder Syed Babar Ali, organized TiECon 2010 Pakistan this coming Friday and Saturday, October 29 and 30.

A chapter of the The Indus Entrepreneurs group, TiE focuses on promoting entrepreneurship in 12 countries in south Asia. TiECon 2010 is focused on bringing “together key stakeholders of the entrepreneurial ecosystem to unleash change.” The change Rahman is hoping to unleash isn’t so much among the country’s numerous entrepreneurs but among the investors he believes can help jump-start Pakistan’s growth.

Given the country’s economic weakness, Pakistani entrepreneurs do not require millions to begin.

Shamoon only needed several thousands for Khaadi; Rahman $60,000 for Naseeb.com.

A scrappier and scrawnier twenty-something MBA I met at the Institute of Business Administration in Karachi, Wasae Shaikh, needs slightly more for his alternative-energy startup. Inspired by a National Geographic program in which he learned about wind farms in Amsterdam, Shaikh thought, "We’ve got wind here in Pakistan. The sun too. We can launch an alternative-energy business using solar panels and biomass fuels," he said pausing to look at me. “I want Pakistan to be self-reliant. We have to give it a try for our people. I want to do it for my people.”

It was heartening to hear the 25-year-old Shaikh spill JFK-like pearls about doing something positive for Pakistan. At the same time, it made me shudder to think about all of those other twenty-something Pakistanis who also believe they’re doing something positive for their country through bombs and violence.

“They’re entrepreneurs as well,” one Pakistani government official told me. Perhaps, but they are not the true disrupters.

Shamoon Sultan, Monis Rahman, Wasae Shaikh, and the others I met in Pakistan are waging their own revolution through entrepreneurship that, if successful, will lift their country out of its paralysis.

Yes, they are a minority. Yes, they live in a challenging environment. Yes, they have limited resources. But for each thing they lack, they make up for in conviction that Pakistan can change—not through the government, development assistance, increased business, or military intervention.

“People will change Pakistan,” Monis Rahman told me. The reality is, they’re the only ones who can.

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Elmira Bayrasli writes and works on global economic issues. She is working on a book that looks at aid and entrepreneurship in the fight against poverty.