When Mokhinur Inamova arrived at Woosong University in 2017 to study Hotel Management, she did not yet know what she wanted to do with her life, but she was full of energy and eager to learn, open to opportunities that would come her way through Woosong. By the end of her first year, her thoughts had started to streamline. "I was drawn to tech, to people, and the impact it has, not necessarily hotel management," she says of the shift, one that would end up shaping nearly everything that followed.

The university encouraged students to get involved, and Mokhinur took advantage of it. She became one of the founding members of PATA, the Pacific Asia Travel Association's student club at Woosong, where she spent her time organizing events and learning, in practice, how to lead. Looking back on that period, she describes communication as the real education she received at Woosong: how to speak up, how to organize something from nothing, how to begin a thing without being certain it would work. It was also during this time that she met her mentor, Professor Michalis Toanoglou, who encouraged her to pursue entrepreneurship.

That same willingness to act before she felt ready is what got her an internship at a San Francisco-based HR-tech company while she was still a student, found through networking rather than a job posting. As an Account Executive there, while still a student, she managed dozens of client portfolios and helped recruit interns who went on to roles at companies like Google and Airbnb. It was in the middle of that work, somewhat unexpectedly, that she realized what she actually loved doing was helping other people find their own way forward.

What she built once she went home

Mokhinur graduated in 2021 and went back to Uzbekistan. It was around that time that the government had started taking tech entrepreneurship more seriously, and a community of people building things was starting to form around it. She wanted to be part of it.

She started, modestly, with a blog: practical advice on CVs, LinkedIn, and job searching, aimed at young Uzbeks trying to figure out their next step. It found an audience, and kept finding one. Today, @karyerist_uz has grown to more than 85,000 followers who follow her for career advice and job search tips.

From there, she went further. In 2025, she co-founded YorYor with her husband, whom she also met at Woosong, a startup built around modernizing the Uzbek wedding industry. Weddings there are major events tied closely to family honor and community expectation, and the logistics behind them can be considerable. YorYor gives couples a single digital space to manage invitations, gift registries, and vendor coordination, a fairly simple idea applied to a genuinely complicated problem.The name comes from a traditional Uzbek wedding song sung as a bride leaves her family home. It began with a smaller product called To'yona and has since grown into a full platform backed by Aloqa Ventures, Google for Startups, TikTok Startup Academy, and Tumaris Tech. 

The part of the work that has nothing to do with funding

When asked about the hardest part of what she has done, Mokhinur does not talk about product decisions or investor meetings. She talks instead about what it means to be a woman building something visible in a society that is still, in many ways, conservative about what women are allowed to risk.

"I feel like I'm carrying every Uzbek woman on my shoulders," she says. "In our society, it's okay for men to fail and try again. For women, it's different. If I fail, it doesn't just affect me." That pressure is real for her, not something she brushes off. But she has kept building anyway. She has met with the President of Uzbekistan twice to discuss youth entrepreneurship. She was chosen from among 200 applicants across the CIS region to win a place in the TikTok Startup Academy. She remains involved with UN Women's initiatives in the country. None of this has made the underlying pressure disappear, but it has not stopped her either.

Her advice to anyone facing something similar is characteristically unsentimental: start even while you are still afraid. Hold onto your own belief in what you're doing, especially in moments when no one else is offering theirs.

What she would tell the students still in Daejeon

For the students sitting in the same classrooms she once did, Mokhinur's advice comes down to something simple: get involved before you have a clear reason to. Join something. Organize something. Say the thing you're thinking before you're sure it's worth saying. You do not need to know where any of it leads, she says; you only need to start moving, and the direction tends to become clearer once you do.

That was, in the end, how it happened for her: a student who did not fit the major she had chosen, a founding member of a club she helped build without any real model for how to do it, a young woman who came to Daejeon with more possibilities than direction, and left knowing what filled her cup: helping and teaching people, in the middle of a hectic, fast-paced environment.

She was a Woosong student. Look at where she is now.

Mokhinur Inamova graduated from Woosong University in 2021. She is the founder of @karyerist_uz and co-founder of YorYor (yoryor.net), based in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.