The EdTech founder who left Nestle for a scholarship

Born in a building that became a mental ward

The episode opens with Muzamil reading out a CV that stops him mid-sentence: Nestle, Telenor, ICI Pakistan, P&G, LUMS, Harvard — and then an edtech startup. “I was blown away,” Muzamil says. “Haven’t read such a diverse experience.”

Muhammad Fahad Tanveer was born in Lahore’s CMH hospital, which he notes was later converted into a mental ward. “There’s a running joke in the family,” he says, “that you were born to be crazy.” His parents were both army doctors, which meant the family moved constantly — Gujranwala, Peshawar, various army public schools — before eventually settling in Lahore at the Lahore American School. He graduated high school in 2001, had been accepted to NYU’s architecture program, and was days away from leaving when September 11 happened. He ended up at LUMS instead.

LUMS in the year it doubled

Fahad’s batch was 400 students — equal to the entire previous student body of LUMS. “People were scared,” he recalls. The campus was still confined to the main academic block; the School of Engineering didn’t exist yet, and what is now a parking lot near the gate was the basketball court where Fahad served as the student representative for the sport.

He started in economics, drifted toward development economics, and then into political science. When Muzamil asks him to explain the difference between economics and development economics for a general audience, Fahad draws a clean line: “Economics is a much more generalized field. Development economics is more applicable — more real world. What is happening, basically, and how politics and political science you cannot understand without understanding why those decisions were being made.”

Before his MBA, he spent two years building a small company that sold copies — notebooks and printed materials — eventually reaching 140 stores. He went back to LUMS for his MBA partly because the business was generating revenue but he didn’t understand why. The MBA’s case method, he argues, is what separates it from lecture-based programs: “You are not only against the judgement of the faculty. It is the judgement of your peers. That is what will happen in the boardroom.”

Half the salary, twice the learning

After the MBA, Fahad had roughly thirteen or fourteen job offers. He took the one that paid half the next best offer — ICI Pakistan — because of a single recruiter named Hassan Tarik. “He said, look, you might not like it and you can leave, but I guarantee you this will be more than a job for you. It will be a learning experience parallel to none.”

He joined the pharmaceutical division, chose to go into sales by preference, and spent a year driving 120,000 kilometers visiting doctors and hospitals. His father, who was running one of Lahore’s largest hospitals at the time, once looked up from his desk and asked: “If you had studied medicine, which side of the table would you be sitting on?” Fahad laughed and told him it was a good thing he hadn’t.

ICI was in the middle of being acquired and broken up — AkzoNobel had taken the paints business, a local group was acquiring the rest — and Fahad watched the entire process from the inside. “Being in it made me understand a lot and understand the value of finance. Your marketing and brands are good support parts of an organization, but the real decision is finance.”

EasyPaisa, Nestle, and the Fulbright that changed everything

From ICI, Fahad moved to Telenor’s EasyPaisa in Islamabad around 2012–13, joining as assistant brand manager at what he describes as “the startup of that time.” His brand manager left three months in, leaving him to run the brand alone. He ended up standing next to the Governor of Punjab at a prize distribution event, representing a sponsorship he had personally approved. When the anchor asked his title, he said: “Assistant brand manager.” He was in his early twenties.

He left EasyPaisa for Nestle and the Milo brand — not because EasyPaisa was slow, but because he wanted full business ownership. “I wanted to be an industry captain. I don’t want to be just another guy doing a job.” At Nestle, he was one layer below the CEO and helped launch the Champions of Tomorrow program, a sports-focused initiative printed on Milo cartons. He also worked on removing commercial sugar from the product — Nestle Pakistan was the third market in the world to make that change.

Then his wife Anam, his co-founder, received a Fulbright scholarship to study public policy at Carnegie Mellon. Fahad had made her a promise: if she got it, he would leave everything and go with her. He kept it.

The family history behind the decision

Muzamil presses Fahad on what it meant to walk away from a fast-rising corporate career to support his wife’s goals. Fahad’s answer goes back three generations. His grandmother was orphaned at thirteen in 1913 and raised five younger brothers on her own. One became the first president of Pakistan’s income tax tribunal. Another became chief of naval staff. Another became an admiral. “She was the matriarch of the family,” Fahad says. His own mother was a major in the army medical corps, serving alongside his father who held the same rank. “I never saw my mother work less hard than my father.”

He is direct about what this means for Pakistan more broadly: “Our women are second to none. But Pakistan has a particular problem — you go slightly east, women are working everywhere. You go to Muslim Indonesia, Muslim Malaysia, they are fine. But Pakistan has something specific.” He describes a post his wife published about financial independence for women that received twelve to fifteen thousand likes and then a wave of threatening DMs by the third day. “It really fascinated me,” he says, “and it is a Pakistan and South Asia specific problem.”

Harvard, behavioral finance, and the idea that wouldn’t leave

In the US, Fahad enrolled in Harvard’s ALM program through the School of Continuing Education, focusing on behavioral finance. He had a small amount of savings and a clear condition: score 3.7 or above in the first three courses or go home. He did. He also started teaching informally while there — “totally by luck” — and the experience planted a question: if someone like him could add value to people’s lives through teaching, why couldn’t that be made scalable?

Anam was interning in Chelsea, a Boston suburb with a large undocumented immigrant population, working on teacher training for underfunded schools. She was pregnant at the time, commuting by two subways and a bus. They came back to Pakistan with a three-month-old son and a shared conviction: “The bridge between the world that we have and the world that we want is education.”

Eight hundred households and a YouTube channel

Edkasa started at LUMS’s center for entrepreneurship in 2016, when there was almost no venture capital ecosystem in Pakistan. Fahad, Anam, and a third co-founder named Sohail — an MIT and Caltech graduate who later left for a scholarship in Boston — went to 800 households across cities and villages to understand what students actually wanted from a learning product.

The first finding: nobody wanted a Khan Academy-style blackboard video. “Our kids hated that. Nobody said, what is this? Like, I cannot give this more than five minutes.” What worked was a teacher on screen — something that felt like a classroom. They built roughly a thousand video lectures in eight to nine months and put them on YouTube. Twelve percent of their viewership was coming from India. “Why are they watching this?” Fahad recalls thinking. “Something about our way of speaking was different.”

YouTube, he concluded, had a different agenda. “Their number one goal is to drive ad views. Our number one value is student success.” They needed a proprietary platform. Within six months of raising a pre-seed round from investors including I2I and Zen Capital, they had built out the entire science syllabus for every board in Pakistan. A student selects their board, and the content, quizzes, and analytics are calibrated to that specific exam.

The board exam as the equalizing force

Later in the discussion, Muzamil raises the question of whether curriculum reform — specifically the Single National Curriculum and changes to how board exams are structured — would make Edkasa’s content redundant. Fahad’s answer is careful. He agrees in principle that a four-hour exam determining a child’s fate needs to be rethought. But he is skeptical of the execution timeline.

“When you change your curriculum or mode of assessment, you are indicating to your teachers across Pakistan that the way they were working before needs to change. You have hundreds of thousands of teachers at different skill levels, different locations, different motivations. All of them will have to move with that change.” He argues that change management at this scale requires thousands of skilled change managers working collaboratively — “it is not I said it, now it is done.”

The reason edtech companies keep targeting the board exam space, he explains, is structural: “It doesn’t matter what school you go to. You can be a private candidate. End of the day you are sitting the same board exam as the HSN College student and the government school student.” That shared exam is the product-market fit. Over one crore students sit it annually, growing at sixteen percent year on year. “Big market — over a billion dollars at least.”

Conviction before capital

Muzamil pushes on the user experience gap — the Zoom fatigue problem, the difference between an encyclopedia of content and a genuinely engaging school experience. He draws the TikTok-versus-Instagram comparison: TikTok removed the friction of sign-up and just started serving content the moment someone opened the app, which is why it captured users that Instagram couldn’t.

Fahad acknowledges the gap directly but frames it as a function of where the industry is. “This is very early days. This is built totally on conviction.” He points to the iPhone: the first version was tested on mothers, not power users. “You start building with conviction. You don’t have research and data and all that.” He is clear that Edkasa is the soap-box derby car, not the Formula One car. “As resources come, as we understand things better, this will evolve.”

He is equally clear about what Edkasa is not: “We are educators first, technology company later. We are technology-enabled. If users don’t want to use our product, we’ll build something else.” He describes a team that has become an accidental national microcosm — the UX designer from D.I. Khan, the backend lead from Gilgit-Baltistan, the marketing head from Dharki. “We galvanize around a purpose. Product will improve. It’s a work in progress.”

On government, he notes that procurement rules requiring seven years of company history effectively blocked Edkasa from a National Bank of Pakistan contract even though they could have saved the bank significant money. “Our company didn’t exist six months before that. How do I send that to the Government of Pakistan? You are shot down right there.” He calls for a dedicated startup procurement mechanism — something Pittsburgh built, he notes, after Anam worked on the city’s procurement policy during her Carnegie Mellon years.

Thirty years out

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Fahad to look thirty years forward — for Edkasa and for Pakistan. On education, Fahad’s prediction is that Pakistani learners become independent learners, less reliant on systemized instruction, and that the private sector — through impact entrepreneurship rather than nonprofit models — drives the change. “Next thirty years, you will see Pakistani learners becoming more independent learners. There will be less reliance on systemized learning.”

On Pakistan itself, he is blunt about where responsibility sits. “It is not just the government’s responsibility. It is our responsibility to build a better country.” He describes driving from Lahore to Karachi during COVID — fourteen hours to Hyderabad, fields on both sides the entire way. “There is no shortage of anything in this country. What we do with it — that is where our thinking may be lacking.”

“I’m the old guy at 37, 38,” he says. “Two thirds of the country is under 30. They should have better ambitions, better energy. And if Edkasa can play a very small significant role in directing this massive wave towards larger goals — job well done.”