If you're mega ambitious, stay home and build

A standardised industry inside an Endeavor series about non-standard ones

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the conversation as part of the ongoing Endeavor Pakistan series, where Thought Behind Things has been profiling the fifty most exciting businesses in the country. He notes that coworking is not the kind of category that usually fits this kind of list. “We generally look at startups and we want something cutting-edge, something that will change the world,” he says — and what coworking actually does is take a very ordinary input, office space, and make it more efficient.

The size of the prize, by his read, is not ordinary at all. He puts the total addressable market for coworking in Pakistan at roughly 250 million dollars today, growing past a billion by 2030. The reason he believes it: Pakistan’s economy is being pulled, slowly but visibly, toward services exports. If the country gets to 30 billion dollars in services exports, it will need somewhere between one and three million people working remotely at a reasonable standard. Homes with load-shedding and unreliable internet cannot host that. Coworking infrastructure has to.

This is the wedge into the guest. Muzamil introduces Omar Shah, the founder and CEO of Colabs, which Omar claims is Pakistan’s largest coworking operator. Muzamil flags the claim openly and says he intends to test it during the conversation. Before the formal interview begins, Omar drops a line that becomes the spine of the episode: “If you’re ambitious, go to Europe, get a job, or to the US. But here you’re mega ambitious. Stay home and build.”

Lahore, SOAS, and the route into Abraaj

Omar grew up in old Lahore in a family he describes as “very old” and very patriotic about Pakistan. He watched Lahore transform from Kalma Chowk outward — through Mall Road, Gulberg, Model Town — and he is direct about what he thinks that means for the city’s place in Pakistan. Muzamil agrees, observing that people consistently underestimate Lahore relative to Karachi: “Lahore is going to absolutely dominate over the next couple of decades as well.”

Omar then went to SOAS in London — the School of Oriental and African Studies — to study development economics, drawn to the discipline because, as he puts it, he wanted to “change the world.” What he actually found in the syllabus was that Pakistan’s growth had outpaced South Korea’s into the 1970s and that other countries were openly copying Pakistan’s model. Reading that, then watching what came next, sat with him.

After graduation he did the opposite of what development economics usually leads to: investment banking. M&A, then a year of equity trading, then private equity. Seven or eight years in, he had ended up at Abraaj Group.

Inside Abraaj — and inside the liquidation

The Abraaj passage is the most personally weighted part of the conversation. Omar describes the firm at its peak: 16 billion dollars under management, 180 portfolio companies spread across eighteen countries, only 120 to 130 investment professionals — fifty to sixty percent of whom were Pakistani. “It really gave us Pakistanis a page or a seat on the global level,” he says. The Abraaj edge was hyper-local teams that could place a Saudi QSR chain or a Nigerian dairy business better than General Atlantic or Warburg Pincus ever could from New York.

He stayed through the end. He was, by his own count, one of the last few employees, working 16- to 18-hour days through the liquidation in London, flying in to sit directly across from the board and from names like Tom Barrack. “Every day a story would come out — Wall Street Journal, FT — someone saying you stole money, this and that. We had no clue,” he says. The emotional load of that period is what Muzamil presses on, and Omar’s answer is more honest than the rest of the conversation: the prestige of being a senior Abraaj banker at 27 inverts very quickly when you are the one sitting in a creditor meeting trying to work out the liquidation waterfall.

He flew to a village called Weibermeier in the Austrian Alps for a digital detox. The counsellor there ran an HRV stress test on him and told him he was at 4.7 out of 5 on critical burnout. He left his phone behind for ten days. He went back to London, declined a job offer at a major fund that would have doubled his roughly 250,000 to 300,000 dollar salary, and got on a flight to Pakistan with what he describes as “no plan whatsoever.”

Muzamil draws the broader lesson out of him: the foundational reason Pakistani institutions break at global scale. Omar’s answer is not about capital or governance — it is about behaviour. “All Pakistanis fundamentally want to find an easy way out. They want to find ways around it. They do not want to follow the system.” He contrasts this with the Gulf, where a minister or a billionaire stands in line at Dubai’s Sheikh Khalifa Medical City the same way anyone else does. He extends the same logic to BCCI and Abraaj: institutions that competed with global giants but were undone, in part, by an internal refusal to accept the regimentation those giants demanded.

Building Colabs out of an old tower factory

The Colabs origin is small and physical. Omar’s twin brother had been working in the family’s real estate business and pointed him toward the Vartex tower factory in Lahore — a 1958 building, Pakistan’s oldest tower factory, with sixties-era looms still inside. The first Colabs flagship was a 27,000 square foot space in that building with 350 seats, an auditorium, meeting rooms, and a conference room. The pitch from the start, Omar says, was that the customer base would span the full spectrum — freelancers, startups, SMEs, and enterprise — not just one slice.

He describes the platform today as three layered businesses. The first is the flexible workspace itself. The second is what he calls “initiatives” — programmes like Colabs Live, work with Spotify and Coke, hackathons, pitch competitions, helping Google Cloud launch in Pakistan, plus an art initiative that has hosted 150 to 200 artists and run a residency now working with the BNRA Foundation. The third pillar is back-office support: recruitment, payroll, accounting, legal, laptops, phones, health insurance through Jubilee, bank cards through AfiLeaks.

The scale claim Muzamil pushed on: ten locations across Pakistan, mostly in Lahore and Karachi, 5,000 seats, 300 client companies. Spaces range from 10,000 square feet to a 150,000 square foot main campus. The basis for the “largest” claim, Omar argues, is revenue per seat — Colabs’ international clients pay north of 200 to 300 dollars a seat, two to three times what competitors collect.

Who actually buys coworking — and why the freelancer was never the story

The split surprises. Enterprise accounts for 40 to 45 percent of Colabs’ clients. Startups and SMEs account for another 30 to 40 percent. Freelancers are under 10 percent.

Omar walks Muzamil through how Colabs handles a large enterprise client like Glow Insurance — a US company that raised 30 million dollars and scaled from 50 people to 250 inside a Colabs facility. The deliverable is end-to-end: design, IT, security, attendance, even down to the 49-inch gaming monitors the team wanted at their desks. He cites Digital Ocean, which acquired Cloudways, as another example of the same end-to-end build.

Muzamil’s challenge is sharp: a Pakistani company with 250 people can hire one facilities manager and run its own office cheaper than paying a service provider per seat. Omar’s answer leans on capital efficiency. The upfront capex is zero. Scaling from 20 to 40 to 60 seats does not require breaking a lease. And on a twelve-month horizon, the per-seat cost of internet, coffee, electricity, AC, furniture, reception, and security shared across hundreds of users is meaningfully lower than what a 2,000 square foot floor would cost a single tenant fitting it out themselves. “Wastage space,” he calls it.

He uses a family example to make the underlying real estate point clean. A 10,000 square foot building rented to a single tenant might generate 500,000 rupees a month. The same building running a KFC or a Chughtai Lab diagnostic centre can do five million. A flexible workspace can do similar multiples — four to five times the raw rental — by actually operating the asset.

WeWork, the story that broke, and the story that didn’t

Muzamil is direct about the cultural problem that surrounds this category in Pakistan: the local market chases foreign templates without examining them. Karim copied Uber. Airlift copied something else. When WeWork blew up, every Pakistani coworking operator inherited the WeWork question. He asks Omar to disentangle the model from the company.

Omar’s reply is the cleanest accounting passage in the conversation. He notes that Colabs broke even after the first six months in 2019 and that aggregate operational burn since then has been under a million dollars against five million raised. WeWork, by contrast, raised against a 60 billion dollar valuation and a 14 billion dollar SoftBank cheque from Masayoshi Son, with founder behaviour and governance failures stacked on top of straightforward overspending.

The number he wants on the record is the WeWork India comparison. WeWork India, which acquired 95 percent of the international franchise, does close to 800 to 900 million dollars in revenue and roughly 250 million in EBITDA. The same brand. Different operator. Different unit economics. “Conceptually,” Omar says, “WeWork did change the game.” Dubai and Abu Dhabi WeWork locations carry eighteen-month waitlists today. The model works. The operator was the problem.

He also concedes the obvious: these businesses should not have been valued at twenty or thirty times revenue. A good coworking centre runs at a 25 to 30 percent margin. An excellent one — well-located, with a low rent base — can run at 45 to 50 percent.

The pivot to revenue-share and what really blocks Pakistani growth

Until last year, Colabs invested its own capex into every site. The first partnership it signed was with the Pakistan Air Force, taking the old Lahore Airport — what Colabs is now developing as a 65,000 square foot, thousand-seat technology park space. The capex came from the landlord. Colabs operates on a revenue share.

This is the model Omar wants for the next phase of Pakistani expansion: Karachi, Islamabad, Sialkot, Faisalabad — none of it on Colabs’ balance sheet. The reason is blunt. “For every dollar invested and every rupee invested, that return profile, on which a seat is sold today, it is not there.” A seat that sold for 25,000 to 30,000 rupees in 2019 still sells at the same price. Electricity has moved sharply since then. Minimum wage went from 14,000 to 44,000 rupees. The math no longer supports owning the fitout.

Roughly 30 percent of Colabs’ revenue is now dollar-denominated. Sixty percent of its clients are international — US, Norway, Europe, Middle East. Dollar contracts come with a 5 percent annual increment instead of a 10 percent rupee increment, and clients prefer them because they pay an employee a thousand dollars and then a flat 150 to 200 dollars for the seat and the headache disappears.

When Muzamil pushes on the consumer wall, Omar names it directly. “It is a spending problem from the consumer,” he says. The user base can keep growing. The price ceiling will not move. He concedes Muzamil’s broader point — that coworking in Pakistan has been over-indexed to startups and under-indexed to exporters in Sialkot and Faisalabad — and acknowledges Colabs has not pushed into those tier-two industrial belts.

Saudi at 10x the seat price

The single highest-stakes claim in the episode is about Saudi Arabia. Omar says that an international operator in Riyadh charges 1,500 dollars or more per seat per month. A local Saudi player charges 800 to 1,000. Colabs charges roughly 100 in Pakistan. The arbitrage is 8x to 15x on revenue per seat against capex that is perhaps 4x to 5x higher. A site that runs at 30 percent margin in Saudi clears more in absolute dollars than four Pakistani sites combined.

There is a structural reason this is open. India is enormous and its operators have no incentive to leave their domestic market — the same way Chinese platforms stayed Chinese. Saudi, in contrast, has only one or two local operators above five locations. International players are present but expensive. The local hyper-local brand position, the one Omar argues Colabs has built in Pakistan through art, music and startup community work, is empty in Riyadh.

Colabs is going in with a large Saudi family as a partner and additional investors on top of the existing cap table of Indus Valley Capital, Fatima Gobi, Zayn, and Shorooq — the only Pakistani company, Omar says, to have raised all four into a single round, three million dollars in 2022, followed by an additional two million from Shorooq alongside a large Saudi investor. The Saudi entity is not separate. The holding company sits in Singapore. The same Colabs, the same CEO, the same investors. The first Riyadh location is targeted for end of year.

The deeper reason Omar believes the brand transplants is Vision 2030. Saudi’s stated programme is built around investing, entrepreneurship, art, music, community, and growth. Those are the same words Colabs uses about what it has done in Pakistan. “Colabs’ success in the last four-five years has not been space,” Omar says. “It’s been the fact that we’ve been able to create communities.”

Why Pakistan does not produce a Systems

The last extended exchange in the episode is about why Pakistan has not produced more billion-dollar companies. Omar opens with the standard Pakistan pitch — 250 million people, low median age, consumer spending ahead — but Muzamil refuses the script. He says he has had this conversation with more than 450 guests over four years and the pitch has not changed.

Omar concedes the productivity point. He frames it through wealth creation. In most countries that produced large fortunes over the last fifty or sixty years, those fortunes were built by the children of the lower middle class. In Pakistan, the wealth is inherited from land. Most family wealth runs back to a grandfather’s or great-grandfather’s plot. Very few first-generation, self-made operators have scaled. As long as that is the founder pool, the export economy the country needs will not arrive on its own.

Muzamil adds a sharp coda on the IT sector. The CEO of Systems Limited had told him directly that the Pakistan-India difference is that a Pakistani IT founder is an engineer who built a business by accident and has no business instinct, while Indian IT was built by people who actually wanted to build companies. Muzamil’s harder version of the same point lands on Pakistani family offices: “They are all degenerate gamblers who went from sugar mills to gambling on startups so they can 40x their value while not going through the hard thing of actually running a services business of managing 10,000 heads.”

Omar adds the policy layer. In India, a factory or a startup can borrow at three to seven percent. In Pakistan, there is no real subsidy outside the State Bank’s solar programme — Colabs has 250 kilowatts of solar because of it — and a small or medium business that wants growth capital is offered loans at 14 or 15 percent against pledged land. There is no actual government scheme for SMEs, despite the rhetoric.

Pakistan in 2050

Muzamil closes with his standard final question: what does Pakistan look like in twenty-five years, holding all the ifs and buts aside?

Omar’s picture is qualified. More billion-dollar companies. More developed Lahores, Sialkots, Faisalabads, Gujranwalas. But, he says, “unless you are able to get rid of all these political challenges, just be stuck in its bubble.” Seventy years of the same circus. He attaches that to a personal observation about ambition: most people he knows in Pakistan are content. They have a house, a driver, friends to eat with. His own mother tells him she wants to live and die in Pakistan and nowhere else.

He moved to Saudi, he says, because he could see the ceiling. “Pakistan is good, there is growth, but there is a limit. 10x. Very limited.” Without ambition at scale among the people who sit comfortably inside the bubble, the country’s quality of life is real and the country’s quality of growth is capped. Two truths, sitting next to each other, with no resolution offered.

The conversation ends at the one hour forty minute mark. Omar thanks Muzamil. Muzamil wishes Colabs well in Riyadh.