What separates funded startups from the rest

The accidental entrepreneur

Meenah Tariq began as a child hustler. At six or seven years old, she bought bracelets and resold them, early evidence of what would become a lifelong obsession with business. But in Pakistan at that time, entrepreneurship wasn’t yet a path. “Entrepreneurship wasn’t sexy. It was called business,” she says. For a girl especially, the default was medicine, engineering, or a corporate job. Financial independence through business seemed radical.

She studied business administration in university, but the BBA curriculum taught management, not how to start. Entrepreneurship was a single course, taught as an afterthought. The real education came later, at Babson College, where she did an MBA focused entirely on strategy and founding. By the time she returned to Pakistan and joined Invest to Innovate, an accelerator, she had built a knowledge base in startup scaling, capital requirements, and market sizing. That foundation proved invaluable when she moved to the other side of the table, as an investor.

The venture capital math

When an investor gives you capital, they’re not betting on your idea. They’re betting that in seven to ten years, your company will be worth enough that their initial check returns ten times the investment. Meenah explains why: “Globally, ten startups have to fail every single time. Right? Ten startups have to succeed. Okay? So startups, you know, they are one of the highest risk bets that you can make.”

Only one win needs to pay for nine losses. That brutal math is why venture capitalists ignore revenue-positive small businesses in favor of unprofitable startups chasing massive markets. A biryani thela might be profitable and even scalable, but it caps at a certain size. Tech-enabled businesses scale with less capital. “If the business case for that is sorted, which you were talking about, if the business case is sorted,” Meenah says, “so we would rather, and that is why investors are betting on those insane ideas that have some potential and with the belief that the founder has the ability to sort through the business case.”

For a portfolio investor, the fund itself is also diversified. A wealthy individual might put 5 percent of their net worth into startups, 5 percent into real estate, the rest into bonds and safe assets. Only startups can offer that 10x upside. Everything else is ballast.

Product-market fit, not the pitch

Here is where most Pakistani founders fail: they confuse an idea with a business. Muzamil raises this directly: “Our young people graduate and they read articles and they leave the business. They say that I have to do something interesting, so I have to mix AI with deep learning and I have added augmented reality.” But founders without a customer problem are building in the dark.

Product-market fit is the moment when customers seek you out instead of you chasing them. Before that moment, you’re selling. After it, you’re scaling. Meenah describes it this way: “When the customer starts to come to yourself, rather than to convince him to come to the customer.”

She gives a concrete example: a t-shirt brand targeting peri-urban customers with Rs 25,000 monthly income cannot charge Rs 4,000 per shirt as premium. The gap is the flaw. You either make a basic product and market heavily, or you make a premium product and reach premium customers. Most Pakistani small businesses skip this step. They copycat, spend on influencers, make some money, and then plateau because they never identified who actually wanted what they were selling.

Why incubators don’t matter

Muzamil asks if incubators are necessary. Meenah’s answer: “You get what you put in. So incubation centers are the same way.” An incubator is a tool, not magic. It provides mentorship, workspace, networking. But YouTube, Twitter, and online communities offer the same knowledge free. “You don’t need any incubation center or accelerator,” she says. “If you want to start something or achieve something then you focus on that.”

What matters is founder discipline: Do you know who your customer is? Can you reach them cheaply? Will they pay? Those questions have nothing to do with office space.

The Pakistan opportunity

Pakistan has 220 million people. Sixty percent are under thirty. Tech adoption is accelerating, not slowing. “If you literally make any product, whether it’s a bread or tech product, if you have identified your customer segment and your product market fit achieve, for every thing one to two million market is available at this time,” Meenah observes.

The startup ecosystem is nascent, but hope is justified. Before COVID, digital adoption might have taken a decade. The pandemic compressed it into months. Businesses went remote. People came online who had never been online. When demand shocks force people to hustle, founders emerge. Simultaneously, the best talent from failing old-school companies is available at cheaper salaries. “I think there is a lot, a lot of interesting and exciting things going to be happening in the next decade,” Meenah says.

Success untold: Interloop and Saver

Muzamil pushes Meenah on a painful absence: Pakistan has successful businesses, but we don’t know their stories. Global success stories from Elon Musk and Bill Gates flood the internet. Local heroes remain hidden. A Faisalabad exporter told Muzamil about a company called Interloop: an engineer who left a stable job and built a sock factory into the world’s largest socks supplier to the Middle East, a 300 million dollar business. Most Pakistani kids finishing engineering believe they have no future outside employment. They don’t know Interloop exists.

Saver, another example, started as a roadside biryani stand. They didn’t go tech. Instead, they vertically integrated: acquired poultry farms, rice mills, controlled their costs so ruthlessly that they never needed to expand with franchises. Success came from standardization and discipline, not disruption.

These stories matter. They break the spell of American exceptionalism and show that founder obsession, not location, builds empires.

The calculus ahead

Meenah sees money flowing into Pakistan’s startup ecosystem and young talent ready to deploy it. The probability of failure remains high, but the number of tries is increasing. Before, a Pakistani founder who wanted venture capital had to move to Silicon Valley. Now, capital comes to Karachi.

“This is a time when, when there are lockdowns when there’s economic crunch and everything and still there’s growth. So inshallah I mean you probably know a ton of people who have started side businesses in 2020 side hustles started side gigs started these people who probably don’t do it before,” Meenah says. When survival becomes urgent, entrepreneurship becomes possible.