Raza Matin

Early life and background

Matin was born in Dubai. He spent his first six years there, then about 11 or 12 years in Oman. His father was a chartered accountant who led a large firm's practice across the Middle East. Matin moved to Canada as a teenager and went to university there. [1]

He describes his relationship with Pakistan as having been distant. He says he began building a deeper relationship with the country, its people and its culture. Matin has lived in Pakistan since about 2012. He does not know whether he will still be in Pakistan in 26 years. He expects Pakistan to be stronger than it is today. [1]

Education

Matin became interested in economics through a high school economics teacher. He studied at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and graduated around 2005 or 2006. He says many people expected him to have pursued a technology-related degree, but he did not. He says that by his third year of university he fell out of love with the subject, but finished it nonetheless. [1]

Career

Matin says he could not find himself compatible with the Pakistani way of working. He says he ended up in project management, working in retail project management. He says the call to come home became strong as his parents aged. [1]

He says a fintech he was involved with is known today as PayPro, a payments company in Pakistan. He says he got bored with it and then spent a while at Google. He was Google's country consultant and representative in Pakistan for the better part of five years. [1]

Google and YouTube in Pakistan

Matin says he was part of the Google effort that brought YouTube back to Pakistan. He says nearly all the credit for making this happen goes to one person. He says the government of Pakistan was unwilling to bend on its request for oversight of content in Pakistan. [1]

He says Google's key leadership was brought to Pakistan for a four-day trip across the country. He says the solution was localization, a set of content deemed culturally acceptable for Pakistan. He says YouTube was officially unbanned in Pakistan in October. [1]

Views on the Pakistani market

Matin says he and his Google colleagues created the 240 million population narrative to sell Pakistan internally. He says numbers can be shaped to suit a particular narrative. He says the connected population with disposable income is a subset of about 50 to 60 million people. [1]

He says Pakistan is a market worth going after, but not a 240 million market. He says many of the 240 million people have a low level of education. He says distribution, sales and marketing are very complex in Pakistan. [1]

PayPro

Matin says he was paying his own bills in cash or by check. He says the payment rails already existed, but no one had turned them into a business solution. He says PayPro is digital invoicing and digital payment. He says a bill can be paid through credit card, debit card, banking apps, EasyPaisa and other solutions. [1]

He says PayPro's initial solution was built on a system that lets a third party such as PayPro send and receive confirmations on transactions. He says PayPro now offers apps where individuals and businesses can sign up, generate invoices and accept payments. He says PayPro does not yet serve informal businesses. He says there is accommodation for informal businesses, known as the marketplace model. [1]

Matin says digital payments are one component of a full business solution. He says one bank is the only choice he sees for payments in Pakistan, given its history. [1]

Content and product data

Matin says he and his team have built what he describes as Pakistan's largest aggregated database of high-quality product information. He says that, given a product, he can tell its ingredients and place of origin based on its barcode. He says there is no self-onboarding: people have to come and meet the team to get access. He says his company works with Daraz. [1]

He says his company creates content for some of the largest fashion brands in Pakistan. He says much of that content is created in his company's facility in Karachi. [1]

He says the arduous process of creating, identifying, cataloguing and uploading products can be reduced to a simple camera operation of scanning a barcode. He argues that a barcode with context can create a common language of commerce. He says creating and managing content and catalogs is a business in itself. He says there is a law requiring every piece of information on a product's physical packaging to be in its digital representation. [1]

He says that on the content side, he and his team see themselves as a boring infrastructure play. He says his company works on a partner-first principle. He says his company steps in only where partners are not doing something and it can do it better in some very meaningful way. [1]

Merchant software

Matin says the initial idea was to create a Shopify for this part of the world. He says there was a clamor, with all the shutdowns, to start selling online as a way of preserving business continuity. He says customers wanted a point-of-sale solution so that they could see everything from one window. He says a merchant can set up a digital version of their business in 30 seconds. [1]

He describes a system that caters to walk-in customers, orders over Facebook or Instagram, and orders on a business's own website. He says his team designed with the little guy in mind. He says a merchant's Foodpanda account can be connected to the product, and that a merchant's Daraz account can also be connected. [1]

He says his team has put the product on the card machine, which they are doing with a bank. He says his system identifies a customer by name, by card or by phone number. He says businesses in Pakistan usually adopt technology for control and visibility rather than efficiency. He says his team is waiting for partners to catch up and be ready to connect their pipe into their system. [1]

Company and funding

Matin says he has a co-founder at Brandverse. He says the two divisions together have about 130 people. He says his company has raised a total of about $2.5 million in funding to date. He says it has raised largely from institutional investors in Pakistan. He says JS Bank is an institutional investor he can name in Pakistan. [1]

Views on funding and startups

Matin says he does not think that, as entrepreneurs or a business, his company is a good fit for venture capital. He says his company is a slow burn because its market is developing. He says the market is not ready today and that his company never said it was. [1]

He says his company's hypothesis is that the tailwinds, and what they are building, will eventually prove a greater force than the headwinds in this market. He says every startup is supposed to be a business. He says his company is in the red today but will turn it into the black. [1]

He says there is no gold rush of VC money, and there should not be one right now. He says the ecosystem had too much money too quickly, with the wrong expectations. He says he does not think it was necessarily the fault of the entrepreneurs. [1]

He says failure is the process through which innovation happens. He says sharing stories of failure does not weaken the ecosystem. He says postmortems should be told as stories by VCs and entrepreneurs themselves. [1]

Views on technology

Matin says data by itself does not really help. He says technology is an enabler of growth, profitability and uplift. He says technology can uplift people economically and socially. He believes every business deserves the chance to be a better business. [1]

Timeline

2005 or 2006

Graduated from university[1]

2012

Has lived in Pakistan since about this year[1]

Appearances

Frequently asked questions

References

1. Pakistan does not have 240 million customers — and we made that number up . Thought Behind Things , 2023-12-22.