Going from 700 employees to 7,000: Umar Javed's plan

From a tuition academy to a first Corolla

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Umar Javed, founder and CEO of tkxel, as someone operating in what Muzamil calls his “favourite sector right now” — Pakistan’s fast-growing IT services industry. Umar is quick to correct any assumption of a smooth trajectory. He was born and raised in Lahore, educated entirely through public institutions — government school, Government College for FSc, then UET for electrical engineering — and describes those university years as “some of the most wasted years of my life,” not because of any personal failing but because of the relentless strikes and disruptions that stretched a four-year degree into six.

The first entrepreneurial move came during those UET years. With time on his hands and a genuine talent for maths and physics, Umar opened a tuition academy. At its peak, fifty to seventy students were coming through. “I bought my first Corolla myself while in the academy,” he says — a detail that matters because it establishes the pattern: he was never waiting for someone else to fund the next step. The academy also gave him his first lesson in what he would later apply to sales: you have to reach out, you have to ask, and the top twenty percent will find their way regardless of the system, but it is the middle sixty percent that good processes and good teaching can actually move.

The LUMS detour and the Microsoft offer he turned down

After UET, Umar went to LUMS for his MS. He describes the contrast sharply: “The difference between a LUMS and an ordinary public sector institute is that their systems and processes are good enough to make the average better.” He graduated as a gold medalist. Microsoft offered him a role in the US. He turned it down. His mother had just been diagnosed with motor neuron disease — ALS — and he chose to stay. “I think that was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life,” he says, without a trace of regret.

That decision to stay shaped everything that followed. He joined a local software company, taught at LUMS and several other Lahore universities for years, and in 2006 started his first IT services company with a co-founder. The partnership lasted about eighteen months before the money arrived and the arguments started — a dynamic Umar describes with dry humour as entirely predictable. “Fights don’t happen when there’s no money. Fights happen when the money comes.” They parted ways, remained friends, and in 2008 Umar formally started tkxel.

Building sales from scratch — with no US network

The early years of tkxel were defined by one constraint Umar is unusually candid about: he had no American network, had never worked at a big tech firm, and had never even visited the US until around 2011 or 2012. His first client came from a cold LinkedIn outreach to someone in the UK. “He said, okay, tell me what you have, what do you want to sell — and he gave us work. He is still our customer today.”

For the first several years, growth was steady but slow — roughly a quarter million dollars added per year, moving from one million to one and a half to two to three. By 2013 the headcount was around sixty to seventy people. The turning point came when Umar decided to treat sales as a proper function rather than an afterthought. He read Predictable Revenue, the book written by a Salesforce employee about how Salesforce built its inside sales teams. He then hired a VP of Sales — a Pakistani-American — at twenty thousand dollars a month, at a time when the company’s total revenue was around one to one and a quarter million dollars. “I am never shy of doing an investment to learn,” he says. “There are tuition fees that you have to pay.”

That investment compounded. By the time Muzamil and Umar are speaking, tkxel has a sales team of forty to sixty people operating entirely out of Lahore, generating over ten million dollars in new sales annually against a total company revenue of more than twenty million dollars. The target for the following year is twenty to thirty million in new sales.

Why the “bad old days” weren’t as bad as people say

Muzamil raises the conventional narrative — that the years between 2008 and 2018 were brutal for Pakistan’s IT services industry: financial crisis, war on terror, load-shedding, and a stubbornly stable rupee that crushed exporter margins. Most people he has spoken to describe it as being “on a ventilator.” Umar pushes back.

“If after 9/11 Pakistan was still getting outsourcing from the US, that is just an indication of how large the demand-supply gap is.” His argument is that the companies struggling in that era were struggling because they could not generate demand — not because the environment was uniquely hostile. “People didn’t know how to generate demand then. People still don’t know very well now, though it’s gotten better.”

He goes further: the current boom, he argues, is not evidence that things have fundamentally changed. It is evidence that global demand has become so overwhelming that companies are getting business without really trying. “Right now this is a blood bath in the industry because you have limited supply and everyone is vying for the same supply.” The talent war, in other words, is the flip side of the demand windfall.

The critical mass theory — and what India’s Y2K moment means for Pakistan

Muzamil raises a point from a conversation with someone at Systems Limited: that India’s IT services success was partly built on traditional business families — Tata, and others — who had the institutional muscle and capital from other verticals to take IT seriously as a business, not just a technical exercise. Pakistan lacked that pedigree. Umar agrees, and extends the argument.

“Do you know why I’m the CEO of the company? Because I was the first one who joined and the share of the CEO was empty, so I took it.” He is making a serious point under the joke: most Pakistani IT company leaders, including himself, had no formal business training. They were engineers who became CEOs by default, without the mentorship or institutional knowledge that would have come from working inside a large, well-run organisation.

But he sees that changing. His framing is what he calls “critical mass theory”: every industry has a threshold beyond which growth becomes self-reinforcing. India crossed that threshold partly because of Y2K, which created a surge of credibility and experience. Pakistani professionals are now reaching director and VP levels at LinkedIn, at big tech companies, at FAANG firms. “My own LUMS students are now CTOs, directors of engineering at big tech.” That diaspora is beginning to return, or at least to mentor and invest from abroad. Pakistan is approaching its own critical mass moment — slowly, but visibly.

The capital trap: why dollars stay in Dubai

One of the sharpest exchanges in the conversation comes when Muzamil asks whether Pakistani IT companies are actually bringing their foreign earnings home. Umar is direct: most are not, and the reasons are structural, not cynical.

“If I list tkxel on the stock exchange, raise money, I cannot take it out of Pakistan.” The problem is that IT services companies grow through acquisitions — buying smaller firms, expanding into new markets, building sales infrastructure abroad. All of that requires capital deployed outside Pakistan. If you bring dollars home, you can only use them to hire more people locally. You cannot acquire a company in Europe or the US. “So what do I do with the money here? Buy another plot?”

His prescription is narrow but specific: the government does not need to do much. It needs to stay out of the way on most things, but it does need to fix the rules around capital inflow and outflow for exporters. “Give them free inflow and outflow. Give them a little confidence and they will bring it back.” Everything else — demand generation, talent supply, sales capability — the private sector has to solve itself.

Solving the talent supply problem over ten years

Later in the discussion, Muzamil presses Umar on the supply side: how do you actually increase the number of employable engineers when universities are already producing twenty-five thousand CS graduates a year but only twenty percent are genuinely job-ready?

Umar’s answer has three parts. First, companies at tkxel’s scale now have the resources to invest in training themselves — not waiting for HEC or government universities to improve. tkxel is planning to spend “a couple of million dollars” on talent development programs over the next two to three years, including bringing in coaches from FAANG companies to train mid-level managers, and running open programs for fresh graduates that anyone — including people from competitor firms — can join. “Train your people well so they can leave. Treat them well so they don’t.”

Second, as companies mature from bespoke software development into solutions and platforms, the skill requirements shift in ways that are easier to train for. You do not need the world’s best engineer for a solutions-oriented engagement.

Third, the supply constraint is not really about content or trainers. “Knowledge is not scarce. You can audit any course for free.” The bottleneck is willingness and self-motivation. Market corrections — layoffs when salaries become unsustainable, engineers pricing themselves out — will do some of the work. The rest comes from putting data in front of people so they can self-correct, rather than mandating behaviour from above.

Culture at 700 people — and what disappears when you double

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil and Umar are deep into the question of whether tkxel can actually get from 700 to 7,000 people without losing what makes it work. Umar is honest about a near-miss. During COVID, the company doubled in headcount. When things settled, he looked around and realised that practices and values he thought were embedded had quietly disappeared — not because anyone had rejected them, but because the new majority had never been taught them.

“I said, why are these people not doing this part? I thought I had told them. Who did I tell? Those people aren’t here anymore.” The company has since invested heavily in codifying its values under what Umar calls the TEXEL framework — Trust, Excellence, and Learning as the core pillars — and in separating HR into distinct functions: organisational development, talent acquisition, and people operations, rather than collapsing everything under a single head of HR who, he says, “used to fail.”

On the broader question of work ethic and remote work, Umar is measured but clear. The problem is not uniquely Pakistani — “labor wants to do as little work as possible and get the most benefit, that is economic theory” — but Pakistan’s specific conditions make it more acute: joint family living arrangements that make focused remote work difficult, poverty that creates short-term thinking, and an education system that trained people to cram before exams rather than learn continuously. His solution is not surveillance or micromanagement. It is data. “Show people their own numbers. You don’t have to scream. It’s like a pull-up warning in a cockpit — the system tells you, you’re going below threshold, correct yourself.”

Muzamil closes by asking Umar how he sees Pakistan in 2050. The answer is cautiously optimistic: “Other than any untoward incident, I think we will be a great country.” The agricultural base means food security. The military means a degree of external security. The young population is either a ticking time bomb or the country’s greatest asset, depending entirely on whether intolerance is managed and opportunity is created. “Where there is nothing, there is opportunity. And Pakistan has a lot of nothing right now.”