The man who built Pakistan's startup incubator from scratch

From a village in Murree to Central London

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Parvez Abbasi as a brand name in Pakistan’s startup and SME world — someone he had been trying to get on the show for weeks. The conversation begins, as Muzamil’s conversations often do, at the very beginning.

Parvez was born in a small village near Murree called Nirgoldi, and relocated with his family to Central London before he was two years old. His father had gone ahead as an economic migrant in the late 1950s, and by the mid-1960s brought the family over. “My father felt that his family would be able to get a better life, hopefully a better education — and he was absolutely right,” Parvez says.

Growing up in a mixed-race neighbourhood in 1970s London — surrounded by Jamaican, African, Indian, Greek, and Italian communities — meant that racial bias was not something Parvez consciously registered as a child. He is careful to qualify this: later in life, there were incidents of racial discrimination he encountered. But the early environment, he reflects, was genuinely formative.

The Pakistan of his childhood existed only in the abstract. There was no halal food easily available. Eid prayers happened in parks or on streets because mosques were scarce. Communication with relatives back home was rationed to emergencies — and even then, a three-minute booked call was “frightfully expensive.” Families recorded messages onto cassette tapes and mailed them across continents.

British Telecom, electromechanical exchanges, and the art of trading weekends

Parvez graduated as a telecom engineer from the University of North London and joined British Telecom — at the time a government-owned monopoly and one of the largest telecom providers in Europe. His job was to maintain electromechanical exchanges: physical switching systems with moving parts that occasionally got stuck and needed oiling or module replacement.

He stayed for about two and a half years. What stands out from this period is less the technical work and more an early instinct for trading value. His older colleagues loved weekend overtime because it paid double. Parvez did not want to work weekends. “I realized I could trade that as a commodity,” he explains. In exchange for letting colleagues take his weekend shifts, he got the free time he wanted. It was, he notes, not his first such move — at thirteen, he had run the school tuck shop to generate his own spending money, because his father’s rule was simple: food and education were covered, everything else was up to you.

Falling in love with Pakistan, then joining its first mobile companies

In 1985, Parvez’s father insisted he visit Pakistan as a student — concerned his son was becoming too westernised. Parvez landed in Karachi and felt, by his own description, like he had arrived on a different planet. Urdu was alien to him. The city was tense, with MQM-related security issues at the time. But he traveled by train and coach across the country — Peshawar, Lahore, Quetta, Karachi — and something unexpected happened. “I fell in love with Pakistan,” he says.

That feeling stayed with him. Back in London, he felt unsettled. By 1991, when mobile telecommunications was just beginning in Pakistan through Instaphone and Paktel, he reached out to both companies. His background in British Telecom and his fluency in English gave him an edge in an industry then managed largely by British and American executives. He was offered a role in commercial distribution.

He helped set up what would become Jazz, then called MobiLink, which commercially launched in 1994 after holding its license since 1992. Parvez joined formally around 1995 as chief commercial officer, overseeing sales, marketing, distribution, and customer care.

The early mobile industry in Pakistan, he recalls, was genuinely startup-like. Lahore had a total of four cell sites. Coverage was patchy. Established professionals from banking or textiles refused to join because they did not consider it a real industry. “The good side is that then we had to go for younger people, more fresh graduates coming in with open minds, great ideas, great energy,” Parvez says. “And you can see some of that culture within the organisation even to this day.”

Getting fired, and the revelation that followed

In 2001, Motorola — the majority shareholder in MobiLink — sold its stake to an Egyptian company called Orascom. The new CEO, a man Parvez refers to as Al-Bari, had a board seat. Parvez did not. They did not get along. One day, without warning, Parvez was asked to leave the company he had helped build from its earliest days.

“I realized that day — the car I was driving, which I thought was my car, they took it back. The laptop I thought was mine, they took it back. The mobile phone, they took it back.” He had a wife and three children. He had no job. And he had a realisation that he describes as a turning point: “Never again would I like to see myself in this situation.” He has not applied for a job since.

Mobile Zone: a billion-dollar company built on a Nokia letterhead

The timing was brutal. September 11 had just happened. Pakistan was isolated internationally. Foreign executives could not travel here. But Parvez saw the gap. He had relationships with Nokia, Motorola, and other handset manufacturers from his MobiLink years. He flew to Dubai and Singapore — travel was cheap because hotels were empty after 9/11 — met with those contacts, and came back with a letter on Nokia letterhead authorising him as their representative in Pakistan.

He found partners in Karachi who had capital but no business. In December 2001, they launched Mobile Zone. Within three years, it was a billion-dollar revenue company.

The key differentiator was warranty. At the time, the standard in Pakistan’s handset market was that once a customer walked out of the shop, the seller bore no responsibility. Mobile Zone introduced a twelve-month manufacturer’s warranty with back-to-back support from manufacturers. When one batch had over 40,000 phones with a camera defect, they replaced all of them. “The confidence level went through the roof,” Parvez says. Mobile Zone’s warranty became a market signal — phones sold under it commanded higher resale value.

The company expanded to Afghanistan, where Parvez noticed that every minister, bureaucrat, and driver owned a Nokia 3310 — the only phone available. They moved into Bangladesh, where Parvez discovered on the drive from the airport that the first person he met owned a phone sourced from Karachi. Pakistan, at that point, was ahead of Bangladesh in mobile penetration.

The 2008 global financial crisis ended it. The rupee fell from 60 to 90 to the dollar in under a hundred days. Mobile Zone was buying in dollars and selling in rupees. The currency conversion loss alone came to roughly $20 million. Parvez sold his shares to his partners. The company did not survive.

Consulting, London, depression, and the six-week formula

After Mobile Zone, Parvez moved into consulting — deliberately choosing a business with a 95% margin and near-zero capital requirement. “My expense was petrol to drive to the client. The client gave me their office, their internet, their tea and coffee.” He worked with major telcos including Warid and Vimpelcom, and with companies like British American Tobacco, Dell, and Nestlé, focusing on commercial strategy, organisational transformation, and digitisation.

His children grew up, completed their O and A levels in Pakistan, and left for university in the UK. His wife suggested they follow. Parvez agreed — and within three months of arriving in London, he was depressed. His childhood friends were busy. Coordinating a dinner between four people took three weeks. The weather was dark and cold. On a forty-five-minute walk in the rain, he made his decision before he got home. He told his wife: “If you want to stay, you are most welcome. I’m going.”

He settled into a rhythm of six weeks in Pakistan, six weeks in London — which he calculated as the optimum split to get the best of both. During those London stints, he reconnected with Zuher Halik, former CEO of MobiLink Jazz, a colleague from the Instaphone days in 1992. Over coffee, the two men — both semi-retired, both feeling relatively young — asked themselves what they were going to do with the rest of their lives.

Conceiving the National Incubation Center

The answer came from a convergence of personal conviction and government intent. Parvez and his colleagues believed in youth and in technology. They had seen, during the MobiLink years, how a mobile tower going up in a rural area changed everything — a farmer who previously had to trust a middleman’s word on mandi prices could now call the mandi directly and verify the rate himself. “If you were able to merge youth and technology together, you would be able to create a better Pakistan. It was a very simple idea.”

The government of Pakistan was thinking along similar lines. They joined hands and built Pakistan’s first National Incubation Center. When Parvez went to his old colleagues at MobiLink Jazz to explain the concept, they were politely baffled. “They thought we were starting a poultry business,” he says. Six months after the NIC opened, those same friends came to visit, met the founders, and told him: “Now we understand.”

Muzamil asks Parvez directly why it took so long for Pakistan’s startup ecosystem to produce results — noting that Indonesia, Bangladesh, and India had moved faster. Parvez is direct: the single biggest structural reason was the late deployment of 3G and 4G. “Without 3G and 4G, you can’t run a Careem, you can’t run an Uber, you can’t run an e-commerce store.” Terrorism, FATF grey-listing, and international isolation compounded the delay. But he is clear that those conditions have now changed — and the results are visible. In 2017 and 2018, a $50,000 investment in a startup was considered remarkable. By the time of this conversation, multi-million dollar announcements were happening two or three times a week.

What the NIC has learned about founders, and what needs to change

Later in the discussion, Muzamil pushes on whether the incubation model itself needs to evolve — noting that experienced professionals leaving corporate roles at Jazz or Telenor tend to apply to Y Combinator rather than NICs, while NICs attract younger, less experienced applicants.

Parvez agrees the model must upgrade, and offers data-backed observations from six years of running the program. A single founder who is not coachable is a reliable failure signal. The optimal team size is three founders with complementary skills — marketing, technology, finance. Fresh graduates with no work experience have a much lower success rate than founders with five to seven years of domain experience.

He also notes a structural shift in mindset: when he first returned to Pakistan in the early 1990s, over 90% of people wanted a government job. Twenty years ago, the aspiration shifted to multinationals. “Today, more than 40% of students would like to run their own business. This was not the case even five years ago.”

The NIC’s KPIs were originally set by the government around job creation — not investment returns. Over 120,000 jobs have been created through the program. Fifty billion rupees in investment and revenue have been raised by NIC-incubated startups. Seven NICs now operate across Pakistan, with two more — in Hyderabad and Faisalabad — on the way.

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Parvez how he sees Pakistan in 2050. Parvez is unambiguous: “Pakistan is going to emerge as a very large economic superpower.” His reasoning is that the leaders of 2050 are today’s young people — technology-native, globally informed, and starting from a low base that only has one direction to go. “Because we are in perhaps such a relatively bad situation, we only have one way to go — and that is up.”

Muzamil thanks Parvez for finally making it onto the show after several scheduling attempts, and mentions he plans to visit the NIC in H-9, Islamabad, which he has not been to in over two years. Parvez closes by saying he is a fan of the work Muzamil is doing — and that the invitation is open.