Irfan Malik built a business. Then he opened the classroom.

The freelance client arrives with a problem. The beginner arrives with a question. Irfan Malik has built much of his working life around the distance between those two visitors. He founded Xeven Solutions in 2016, grew a software business, and later helped put free AI lessons within reach of people wondering how to enter the same world. Somewhere between the proposal and the classroom, his career acquired a second audience.

There is something pleasingly practical about the combination. Technology has no shortage of people explaining that the future is coming. Malik also makes room for the person who needs to know what to learn on Tuesday, how to approach a client on Wednesday, and what to say when a project goes late. The future, after all, has an unfortunate habit of arriving before the invoice is paid.

The client came before the classroom

Malik’s professional story includes work as a computer operator and a subsequent freelancing career. In his Out of Sync podcast conversation, he returned to that route into technology. The episode’s title foregrounded more than $2 million earned through freelancing. The more useful detail is the progression behind it: an individual learning to win work before becoming responsible for a business.

A freelance marketplace makes the relationship between skill and confidence unusually visible. A profile has to persuade a stranger. A proposal has to address an actual problem. Delivery has to justify the conversation that preceded it. Viewed through that experience, Malik’s later interest in teaching has a clear logic. People need help with the technical work and with the human arrangements that allow the work to happen.

His July 2024 appearance on The Ehmad Zubair Show devoted an hour and fourteen minutes to this less theatrical side of earning online. The discussion covered Upwork, initial proposals, conversations during a project and the handling of delays. These are modest subjects with expensive consequences. A founder willing to discuss them gives beginners something firmer to hold than a photograph beside a motivational slogan.

Four chairs become a company

Starting Xeven Solutions in 2016 changed the scale of Malik’s responsibilities. A freelancer can organize a working day around personal output. A company needs other people to deliver together. By March 2022, when Malik appeared on Xeven’s TechTalk with Maida Affan, the business was describing an expansion from four team members to 150 and two global offices in just under five years.

The figures describe a particular chapter. They also suggest why a founder’s job starts to involve more than technical answers. One person can remember a promise. A larger organization has to make that promise understandable to everyone responsible for keeping it. The appealing freedom of entrepreneurship comes with a rather sociable obligation: other people now need you to be clear.

Xeven today presents its business through two activities: building AI solutions for clients and developing platforms of its own. That gives Malik’s public teaching an interesting backdrop. His working environment includes customers asking for a result and product teams deciding what to build. The lessons he discusses in public sit close to those questions about usefulness, delivery and the people who will eventually use the software.

A classroom with the fee removed

In May 2023, Malik announced a free AI learning course planned to run for four months. Its intended audience included people from different backgrounds, particularly underserved areas. The proposition was direct: make serious learning available to people who might otherwise struggle to reach it. A price of zero is a helpful beginning. The teaching still has to earn the learner’s time.

He did not present the undertaking as a solitary performance. His public posts acknowledged the team managing the AI awareness campaign and the work of getting lessons online. Sheraz Naseer and Muhammad Haris Tariq became recognizable names alongside his own in learner accounts. Even a lesson watched alone at home has people behind the camera, the course sequence and the explanation.

The initiative’s name, Hope to Skills, is unusually candid about the gap it hopes to close. Hope supplies a reason to begin. Skills require a syllabus and repeated effort. In July 2023, Malik was announcing that lectures seven and eight had been uploaded. There is a small but telling dignity in that detail. The launch had become the next lesson, and then the next.

Recognition followed. In 2023, Malik announced a P@SHA ICT Merit Award for the initiative. An award offers a moment to pause for a photograph; the course itself asks people to sit down again. The continuing work is where the idea becomes useful. An invitation to learn has to survive the perfectly ordinary discovery that learning takes time.

The audience starts moving

One glimpse of that work comes from Kashaf Jabeen’s account of completing the free basic AI course. She described studying fundamentals and Python, moving through data science, building machine learning and deep learning models, and working on AI chatbots with LangChain and LlamaIndex. Her account also credited the instructors by name. The learning had acquired identifiable subjects and identifiable people.

It is a more revealing picture than a crowd count. A beginner can recognize a progression in it: first the language, then the model, then a piece of software that does something. Jabeen wrote that the experience gave her confidence to explore international courses. The next step was further learning, a useful reminder that a good introduction can make the larger subject feel approachable.

Another learner, Talha Nisar Mughal, recorded a different kind of next step. After following Malik’s YouTube channel, he went to Xeven Solutions in September 2023 and asked to meet him. The visit led to a conversation with the HR team about his background, skills and interests. The significant event is wonderfully physical: someone who had been watching online arrived at a company’s door.

That account belongs to Mughal. It gives Malik’s public work a human scale without requiring every viewer to have the same experience. An online audience contains people at very different stages. One is testing an interest. Another is completing a course. Another has decided to leave the house and ask a question in person. Those are all beginnings a subscriber total cannot describe.

Trust needs a working connection

Malik’s attention to beginners also reaches beyond the lesson itself. During Pakistan’s internet slowdown in August 2024, he discussed the consequences for freelancers on television alongside xWave founder Warda Noor. His concern was the relationship with the client: unreliable connections could damage confidence in the people trying to deliver the work.

“Once a client leaves, it’s nearly impossible to bring them back.”

Irfan Malik, August 2024

The warning puts a practical edge on his education work. A person may learn diligently and communicate carefully, yet still depend on infrastructure outside their control. For someone selling work across borders, a working connection is part of being available. The aspiring freelancer’s classroom and the established company’s customer relationship meet at the same inconvenient place: the network has to function.

It also explains why client communication keeps returning in Malik’s public conversations. Trust is accumulated through small, repeated acts. Answer the question. Clarify the task. Explain the delay. Teaching the tools without addressing those obligations would leave an awkward hole in the education. His own route through freelance work gives him a reason to keep bringing the conversation back to them.

Back through the university gates

By September 2023, Malik and Sheraz Naseer were taking the discussion of AI, freelancing and career growth to FAST-NUCES in Chiniot-Faisalabad. The setting matters. A university contains people accumulating knowledge while trying to imagine where it will take them. A founder visiting that room can make professional expectations less abstract, especially when the conversation includes the ordinary business of finding and doing work.

On April 6, 2026, he addressed a session at the University of Sialkot on challenges facing the technology industry. The event ended with a memorandum of understanding between the university and Xeven Solutions, signed by Malik and the university’s board chairman, Faisal Manzoor. It gave his recurring interest in the relationship between academia and industry a formal expression.

The agreement is a milestone in that relationship. Its human context is the same question that runs through the earlier courses and client discussions: how does someone move from knowing something to being able to use it professionally? Malik has approached that question as a freelancer, an employer and a teacher. Each role meets the beginner at a different point in the journey.

His career now has a useful circularity. Paid work helped him build a company. The company gave him experience to bring into public teaching. The teaching reaches people trying to approach work of their own. The circle does not complete itself with a speech. It continues whenever a learner opens the next lesson, asks a better question or decides to knock on a door.