Abdaal Mazhar Shafi

The through-line

Everything Abdaal Mazhar Shafi says comes back to a single test: whether an organisation actually operates the way it claims to. Reflecting on the year UpstartED spent absorbing the pandemic, he frames the shock less as a disaster than as an audit of the organisation's own methodology, since the group had been teaching young people lean startup and agile thinking well before it had to apply that thinking to its own survival. "I saw the pandemic it really is the ultimate test," he says, the question being "are we doing what we say we do like are we you know talking the talk and then walking the walk as well" [1]. The fact that the team was still standing and able to record a retrospective was, to him, the modest proof that it had passed [1].

The second constant is that institutions are made of people, and that what carries an organisation through a shock is the relationships it built before the shock arrived. He returns repeatedly to the idea that funding and partnership cannot be transactional, and that years of shared values are what convert a partner into a rescuer at the moment of crisis [1].

On the first weeks of a shock

He describes the shutdown in mid-March 2020 as "surreal," something that "felt like some kind of post-apocalyptic fantasy tale that that just became reality," arriving as an "intense domino effect overnight" as conferences and leagues cancelled one after another [1]. What is striking is his admission that he never processed it emotionally, because the operator's questions crowded out everything else: he was "just trying to answer that question of like how is this impacting our business," with the health of the team first and then adaptation [1]. His framing of the goal was deliberately more ambitious than triage. The task was to adapt the business "not just to continue operating but to survive and hopefully thrive beyond that" [1].

On building what schools cannot

Shafi argues that the value of UpstartED lies precisely in offering young people something they are "not getting from either your traditional classroom or other extracurriculars or educational initiatives," and that this is genuinely hard to find [1]. His diagnosis of why is structural: academic environments struggle when you "need to change quickly with you know the marketplace" [1]. Because the organisation had started around technology, entrepreneurship and startups, it carried "that kind of dna of of rapidly changing iterating," the lean startup and agile methodologies, and he credits that DNA with letting the team keep supporting students on their own terms when everything moved online [1]. The pandemic, in his telling, made those services more necessary rather than less [1].

On partnerships that survive a crisis

His most developed argument concerns corporate partnership. He is clear-eyed about why most partner conversations froze: those organisations were "shell-shocked," running much larger businesses with far more employees and different problems, and needed time to handle a "massive you know black swan event that's disrupting everything that we do" [1]. He treats the pauses as understandable rather than as betrayal [1]. The exception mattered enormously. Blue Cross, whose own travel insurance business was being upended, came in with committed funding at the moment UpstartED had almost nothing left, and Shafi reads that decision as evidence of the relationship and of the belief the partner held in the work [1]. He also describes a second-order effect: that support functioned as "that corporate trust you know that seal of approval," setting off a positive domino effect with other partners [1].

The generalisable lesson he draws is against transactional funding. The long-standing supporters, some of them there since the organisation's first event, stayed because of shared values and alignment, and he doubts multi-year support is possible without it: "it can't just be transactional" [1]. Alongside that he places trust as the thing to build over years, because it is what lets you keep doing the work when a crisis arrives [1].

On giving credit and telling the story

A smaller but consistent habit runs through his contributions: he redirects attention to the people who did the work. Asked to narrate the shift online, he hands the account to the colleague who spearheaded it, saying she would be "doing yourself a disservice by not sharing it" [1]. He repeatedly credits the funding partner by name, and suggests the truly interesting version of the story would be the one told from inside Blue Cross, whose leadership he wants to hear recount what was happening on their side [1]. The impulse to publish the retrospective at all was of a piece with this, an attempt to let others learn from the failures as well as the successes [1].

Takeaways

• Treat a crisis as an audit of your own stated methodology: the real question is whether you are "talking the talk and then walking the walk as well" [1].
• Set the bar above triage. The goal in March 2020 was to adapt "not just to continue operating but to survive and hopefully thrive beyond that" [1].
• Agile and lean startup habits, built into an organisation's DNA early, are what make rapid adaptation possible when conditions change faster than institutions can [1].
• Expect partners in crisis to pause rather than abandon you; they are absorbing their own "black swan event" and need time [1].
• A partner who commits during a crisis provides more than money, acting as a "seal of approval" that unlocks other funders [1].
• Multi-year corporate support depends on shared values, not deal terms: "it can't just be transactional" [1].
• Programmes designed around experiential, in-person, team-based learning face their hardest test in migrating online, and the surviving asset is the trust already built with students and coaches [1].