Meenah Tariq

Early life and background

Tariq started selling bracelets she made when she was six or seven years old. She says she has run some kind of business her whole life. She says she has wanted financial independence since childhood. [2]

She says few women were allowed to have jobs in that period. At the time, she felt that business could give financial independence. [2]

Education

Tariq completed a BBA at a business school. She says her BBA taught little about running a business and more about business management. Her final-year project was on entrepreneurship, and it involved visiting entrepreneurs in different cities. She has said she studied business and accounting. [1][2]

She did an MBA in entrepreneurship and strategy on a Fulbright scholarship. She returned to Pakistan in 2015 after finishing graduate school. [1][2]

Career

Tariq has said she and her team have worked inside the startup ecosystem for about 10 years. After returning to Pakistan, she started working with a startup accelerator, and she ran the accelerator's program for about three and a half to four years. Her expertise from that work was in helping startups in Pakistan. She has said she and her partners still provide startup accountancy services. [1][2]

She has said she ran an accelerator that worked with hundreds or thousands of startups. She has said she worked in the development sector, building projects and programs for donors and running business trainings. She says she conducts trainings. She has said she trained about 700 to 800 entrepreneurs in person across smaller cities. [1][2]

Venture capital and investing

Tariq has said she and her partners later moved onto the investor side and invested in startups, and that she made about eight investments. She has said they felt too young to be investors at the time. She has said they went back to the operator side because they could contribute more to the world. [1]

She is a partner at a venture capital fund and describes herself as a partner and fund manager. She is an investor who holds a portfolio of companies. She is also a consultant for the World Bank on entrepreneurship. [2]

Metric

Tariq has said she is CEO of a fintech product company that is building an accounting product. She has said Metric automates accounting for small businesses and startups. She has said her product stems from work she did on a project. She has said people repeatedly told her they needed something like this. [1]

She has said her co-founder is a chartered accountant. She has said accountants are on her team and are helping build the product from the ground up, and that her team has a chartered accountant syndicate, which she described as good validation for the product. She has said her company's CTO holds a PhD in machine learning and data science and that the company has a tech team in Pakistan. [1]

She has said AI is a very important part of her company's product. She has said her team was in beta and was giving the app out in small groups. She has said about 150 businesses were on the waiting list, and that the app can be used free of cost from day one. [1]

She has said iOS support would depend on market size and that a web app was coming soon. She has said her team had spent nothing on marketing so far. She has said the 150 businesses on the waiting list come from places including New Zealand, Malta, the Philippines and India. She has said some aspects of the product could go live two to three years or four to five years later, once the rails are built. [1]

According to Tariq, Metric raised $900,000 as a pre-seed round. She has said the team wanted to raise $800,000 and had already added $100,000 more, and that the fundraise was oversubscribed. She has named I2I Ventures and Deosai among her company's investors. She has said it is hard to say no to money when it is coming in. [1]

Views on accounting

Tariq has said managing accounting or finance is one of the biggest issues businesses face. She has said businesses are held hostage by their fear of numbers, and that when owners fear numbers, they do not do their accounting. She has said an owner who avoids their numbers may learn, when someone reviews the books, that the business is running at a loss. [1]

She has said about 97% of businesses in Pakistan have fewer than five employees. She has said an accountant would not give insights of this kind unless working with about 100 similar businesses. [1]

Views on venture capital and startups

She says a venture capital fund is a pool of money built from other people's money. She says a wealthy investor typically puts 5% of their portfolio into startups. She says a venture capital investor expects a return within seven to ten years, and that investors expect at least 10 times their money, measured across the whole portfolio. She says nine out of ten startups globally fail. [2]

She says a venture capital investor takes equity rather than dividends or a profit share, and expects the company to reach a point where the stake can be cashed out in seven to ten years. She says later investors usually buy out the shares of early investors so that they can exit. She says a small fund usually looks at checks of about 30 to 50,000 dollars, and that 50,000 dollars is a safe amount for a person to invest in a fund. [2]

She says deploying money into startups is very hard. She says a startup is simply a business, and that money is one of the things a business needs in order to grow or scale. She says first-time business owners usually do not know their business case, and that is acceptable. She says investors back ideas with potential because they believe the founder can work out the business case. [2]

She says tech matters to investors because it scales, and that a cart has a capacity ceiling. She says tech-enabled businesses are much more attractive to investors now. She says a company may rather buy an existing business than spend many years building its customers. She says many businesses are stuck taking orders by DM and have not moved to Shopify. [2]

She defines product-market fit as a customer segment that is willing and able to buy the product at its price. She says problems arise when founders do not work on their customer segment. She says product-market fit comes when customers start coming to the business on their own. [2]

She advises founders to start a business that combines passion with a business case. She says founders should focus on the resources they have rather than on what they lack, and that founders should start small. [2]

Views on incubators

She describes an incubation center as an organization where founders bring a basic idea to be developed. She says an incubator connects founders with mentors and provides physical workspace. She says whether an incubator helps depends on the individual incubator and the experts it has. She says founders can grow without an incubator. [2]

Views on Pakistan

She says Pakistan has a strong business case, and that Pakistan's startup ecosystem is still very nascent. She says there is a great deal of optimism in the ecosystem right now. She says international funds come to Pakistan knowing it is still a high-risk country, and that foreign money would not come without a sense of stability. [2]

She says most investors in Pakistan today are first-time investors. She says startups may become more selective about investors as more money flows into Pakistan. She has said company registration with SECP used to be very hard and can now be done in a day. She says applicants can wait two to three weeks for each approval. [1][2]

She says the stories of Pakistan's local heroes are not publicly available. She says Pakistanis returning from abroad bring money, education, experience and networks to start businesses. She says many people who lost their jobs turned to entrepreneurship, and that COVID pushed people who were not online before to come online. She says the total money raised by startups in 2020 exceeded all previous years. [2]

She says good talent is now available at a lower cost after many inefficient older companies failed. She says an online business can sell a product from a small city to the whole world. She says export businesses have many layers where corruption can creep in, and that a manufacturing business needs money to open a factory. [2]

She calls a business that gives people a good product cheaply while earning money a beautiful business. She says most success stories come from a place of privilege, though some do not. [2]

Timeline

2015

Returned to Pakistan after finishing graduate school.[1]

Appearances

Frequently asked questions

References

1. Why Meenah Tariq raised exactly $900,000 — not more . Thought Behind Things , 2022-03-18.
2. What separates funded startups from the rest . Thought Behind Things , 2021-02-03.