Nobody had ever displaced a number one in classifieds

A Pakistani engineering childhood, and a father who decided his sons would be engineers

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing his guest carefully. Haider Ali Khan is the CEO of the Dubizzle Group across the Middle East and North Africa, one of the three brothers behind a company that now owns Dubizzle, Bayut, Zameen.com and OLX in Pakistan, and that recently raised at a valuation north of a billion dollars. Muzamil admits that going into the conversation he did not know much about Haider as a personality and was unsure how it would go. By the end he calls it one of the best conversations he has done on the platform.

Haider was born in Lahore and spent the first eighteen years of his life inside the Pakistani schooling system — government metric, FSc, and the legendary practice of asking for extra answer pages. “We used to talk about how many extra pages you had asked for,” he tells Muzamil. “That’s what your marks depended on.” Mathematics was fine because mathematics was mathematics, but the system never told you why you were doing what you were doing. Slope was slope. Derivatives were derivatives. Nobody explained the point.

His father — who was not an engineer himself — had decided that all three of his sons would be engineers. Haider laughs about it on the show. He did not know any better, and he didn’t even really know what engineering was. He just knew that if you wanted to work at IBM or Intel, you needed an engineering degree. He is, as he puts it, “grateful that I actually did engineering” because of how it shaped the way he thinks.

The childhood Haider describes is a specific generation of Pakistani life. He still remembers the morning after Vital Signs released Dil Dil Pakistan on PTV — the entire school did not talk about anything else that day. Cricket in the playground until evening. Friends, scrapes, real-world play.

Going to UT Austin in 1994 — and what the American system actually teaches you

In 1994, Haider went to the University of Texas at Austin to study electrical and computer engineering. The story he tells about that transition is not about the syllabus. It is about what the American university system does to a person.

“It really helps shape you as a person,” he tells Muzamil. Roommates from different backgrounds. Small rooms, two beds, two desks, everything shared. No supervision. Nobody to tell you which class to take, when to wake up, which internship to apply for. You navigate the career fair yourself. You talk to the recruiter yourself. You figure out the job yourself. “As fair a system as I’ve seen,” he says. If you put in the effort, you see the reward.

He graduated in 1999 and stayed in The US for fifteen years. He started in hardware engineering at National Instruments in Austin — a deliberate choice, because someone told him hardware engineer roles were the hardest to get, with eight software engineers for every hardware engineer. He took that as a challenge. From hardware he moved into firmware, then application software, then up into management, eventually running a 160-person engineering organisation building tools that some of the world’s most advanced labs used. He mentions in passing that some of the code his team wrote ended up landing a rover on Mars, and that the company was part of the 5G standard definition body before 5G existed in anyone’s phone.

In between he did a stint at Silicon Labs working on a three-by-three-millimetre chip that let early iPods and iPhones tune into radio stations. The goal was to keep shrinking it because the phone did not have room.

What the dot-com bust and 2008 actually taught him

Muzamil presses Haider on the 2001 dot-com bust and the 2008 mortgage crisis, both of which Haider lived through inside an American hardware company. The lesson Haider takes away from both is the same, and it is a lesson he learned twice.

The company he was at — well-hedged, with a broad customer base — chose neither layoffs nor stoicism. They cut everyone’s pay across the board, the leadership cut deeper, and then they doubled the sales force. Twice. “We’re going to all take a bite out of ourselves,” he remembers the company saying. “But when we come out on the other side of this storm, we will have enough people to sell twice as much.” Both times it worked.

Muzamil asks the question he most wants young people to hear an answer to: what would Haider say to someone seeing economic uncertainty for the first time in their life? Haider’s answer is calm. The world goes through cycles. Pick a sector, it goes through cycles. Real estate, equities, everything. “There’s enough people on the planet — close to eight billion now. We’re not leaving this planet anytime soon. Things are going to be okay.” Patience and perseverance, he says, are what get you through.

He is also careful to push back on a particular Pakistani caricature of America. After twenty years in The US he says he never personally faced anti-Muslim hostility, not even immediately after 9/11. The neighbours in his first house — older retirees who had lived there since the year he was born — treated him and his young wife like their own children. Hollywood, he tells Muzamil, “really screwed it up” in terms of the image Pakistanis carry of the average American family. The average family he saw was hard-working, both parents working, value-driven, getting together for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Moving to Dubai in 2014 to take over a three-person Bayut

In 2014, with two young children and a well-established American life, Haider made the move. The reasons were partly family — Pakistan visits were down to two short windows a year because American jobs only give you two weeks of vacation to start with, and middle school in The US starts at grade six — and partly the suspicion that there was something larger he was supposed to do.

His two younger brothers, Zeeshan and Imran, had built their own arc. Both had studied in The UK and done engineering. Out of college during the 2001 downturn, Zeeshan had pitched their mother on taking a year to try something. The “something” started as a B2B wholesale directory in The UK — Alibaba-style — with a tech back office in Lahore. While running it, they noticed that property was always Pakistan’s investment of choice and that nothing existed online. They bought the domain Zameen.com. While passing through the UAE they noticed the same gap and grabbed a few more domains. Bayut was one of them. It sat as a side project for years.

By 2014, when Haider arrived to take it over, Bayut had two or three people in the office. Dubizzle owned the UAE classifieds market completely. Property Finder owned property. Haider had never sold anything in his life. “The first salesperson we had,” he remembers, “would call people and tell them, ‘Yes, we are Bayut, we are like Dubizzle.’ You had to use somebody else to explain who you are.”

The brothers had been clear with him about what he was walking into. “Nobody has ever displaced a number one in this industry,” they told him. Once a Craigslist or a Gumtree establishes itself in a market, number two is the only fight worth having. Number three, four, five do not matter. Did Haider imagine then that he would be sitting in front of Muzamil years later as CEO of a billion-dollar group? No. “We thought we’d do something,” he says. “We were not going to give up. But where it would end up was for God to decide.”

A business is a living organism — and the rent is due every day

One of the cleanest passages in the conversation is Haider’s framing of what running the early Bayut actually felt like. They had no money to burn. Whatever they earned in a month was what they could spend. Sales targets were monthly survival. “The lows were the lowest lows that I’ve ever felt,” he tells Muzamil, “and the highs were the highest highs.”

Muzamil asks the question many people are too polite to ask: did he ever regret it? Did he ever feel he had brought his family across the world for the wrong call? Haider says no. He gives credit to how he was wired and to his wife’s encouragement.

The framing he settles on is the one Muzamil keeps returning to in the episode. A business, Haider says, is a living organism. Every function has to work all the time, twenty-four-seven, and the moment you stop attending to it, one function breaks, then another, and eventually the whole organism collapses. There is no point in life when you have “made it” and the business will just keep running. “Success is built by the drops in the bucket, not by getting a full bucket. You have to pay the rent every day. The rent is due every day.”

He also pushes back, gently, on the popular advice to “burn your boats” when starting a venture. “Somebody told me when I left, burn your boats. The reality is, if your goal is to make it successful, you need to understand there are no shortcuts. It’s a machine that’s going to grind you. One day it’s going to chew you out. And that’s okay.”

Why Zameen had to build a logistics business before it could build a classifieds business

When Muzamil asks how the group went from a single Pakistani success story to the regional conglomerate it is today, Haider redirects part of the credit to Zeeshan and Imran, who ran Zameen. But the principle he draws out is one of the strongest ideas in the episode.

Zameen realised early that the Western classifieds playbook would not work in Pakistan. The agents they were trying to onboard did not have computers in their offices. They did not understand why they would list properties online when their business came through newspaper ads. They did not take pictures of the properties they were selling. So Zameen built, in Haider’s words, “almost a logistics business” underneath the classifieds business. People going door to door. Photographers shooting properties. WhatsApp registers being photographed and turned into listings.

Even after that, the business hit a ceiling because the primary market — new developments — sat outside the agent network entirely. So Zameen built the connection to developers, made new projects accessible to consumers, made them trustworthy, and eventually launched Zameen Development on the platform itself. Each new layer was forced by the next problem.

The key to all of it, Haider stresses, was monetisation from day one. Most startups today, he says, treat revenue as something that will come later. Zameen could not afford that posture. There was no money to raise. There was no startup ecosystem. There was no reason for anyone to put capital in. So sales focus has been there from the start, and every problem the technology team solved was solved in service of where the sales team needed to go next.

The Pakistani real estate problem, and the values that kept Zameen out of it

Muzamil presses on what he describes as a genuine nightmare. Real estate in Pakistan is enormous in volume — nothing else moves money on that scale — but the ecosystem around it is, as he puts it, “ripe with corruption, ripe with frauds, a legal nightmare.” Most stakeholders are not connected to tech in any way. Almost every successful real estate operator has a story behind them of someone they hurt to get there. Muzamil tells Haider that he himself has rarely had a real estate or builder figure on the show because of this.

Haider redirects the deep version of the answer to Zeeshan and Imran but offers the principle. “Our parents have given us very good values. We always strive to do the right thing by everyone, because the accounting that matters is the next one.” From day one, he says, Zameen would only onboard projects after a complete audit. All legal paperwork in place. All approvals in place. They would go down to the level of whether the cost of a nail was accounted for properly. Because the alternative was that someone’s life savings would end up trapped in a project that had no certificate to begin with.

He is honest that this does not eliminate the problem. Sometimes the developer’s intentions change halfway through. Sometimes construction stops. Some things are not in the platform’s control. But there is a layer of technology Zameen has built — invisible from outside — to track construction schedules, monitor installment flows, and check that what was promised is being delivered.

The Naspers deal, the EMPG rebrand, and the strategic retreat from Asia

By 2020, Bayut had cracked the harder problem. The Pakistan business under Zameen had figured out how to monetise emerging markets at scale — something Haider says other classifieds players had failed to do because they were following a Western formula book. Naspers, which owned OLX globally, came to the table. EMPG (the parent of Zameen, Bayut, and the other verticals) acquired OLX’s assets in MENA and Pakistan, and Naspers became a shareholder. A couple of years later the group was rebranded to Dubizzle Group, because in the Middle East, Dubizzle was the name people resonated with.

The flip side of that consolidation came in 2022. After the 2021 capital frenzy — “any model, any story, just put money in” — 2022 was the snap-back. Investors started asking hard questions about geographic footprint. “This is not the British empire,” Haider says. “The sun has to set somewhere.” The group sold off its Southeast Asia operations — Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Bangladesh, parts of Mexico — and focused on MENA and Pakistan. The point, he says, was that you only have so many cycles. Spread them everywhere and you do disservice to everything.

Emotions, ego, and the art of dealing with investors

Muzamil asks what it actually felt like for Zeeshan and Imran to give up the names they had built and accept that the merged group would carry Dubizzle’s name. Haider answers from a few feet back. The honest framing, he says, is that you treat the business as a problem to be solved and you disconnect the human aspect from it.

“In front of investors, in front of people, emotions are seen as a weakness,” he tells Muzamil. “But it’s a double-edged sword — if you don’t have emotions, that’s also seen as a weakness. He’s not emotional about the business. So how do you balance it?” The art, he says, is understanding human psychology. Reading the person across the table. Adjusting in real time. Staying honest while you do it. Never making things up. “People can call that out.”

The deeper lesson he wants to share is the one about scale itself. A business with multiple shareholders cannot be run as a single founder’s whim. The model Muzamil describes — Karachi Memon families splitting up factories across cousins each generation, restarting the thirty-year compounding clock every time — is the inverse of an institution. To institutionalise, Haider says, founders have to be honest about what they are good at, what they enjoy, what they are not good at, and what they do not want to do. Then they have to find partners with the right values, deliver on the small commitments year after year, and earn the trust that lets the other side trust them to make the right call. Trust is not granted because someone wires capital. It is earned in years.

The car business, the property business, and what Dubizzle has not yet solved

Muzamil shifts the conversation to product. The group’s property business runs on a pure ads model. The car business has begun to evolve into a managed service — list with us, and we will inspect the car, take the calls, show it to buyers, and surface the best price for a transparent success fee. There is also a dealer-auction layer for sellers who want speed. The principle, Haider says, is to serve the consumer wherever they actually are: someone who does not want to deal with a dealer at all, someone who wants a fast exit, and the layer of “middle people” who use the platform to make a living.

Muzamil is candid about a personal frustration. Coming to Dubai, the second-hand market on Dubizzle is excellent. But for a brand-new car the experience is poor — every brand portal asks for his email and runs lead fishing rather than showing him a price. He asks why Dubizzle is not the unified consumer surface for new and second-hand.

Haider is straight with him. It is something they are looking at. The first three years of his current run have gone into cleaning up other problems — verified accounts to cut scams, getting the foundations into shape, optimising the rest. Now this is on the roadmap. The pay-and-ship escrow model that works in geographically dispersed markets is also something they are studying. Muzamil makes the point that in Dubai it is not the payment that matters as much as the logistics layer — a willingness to pay a small shipping fee in exchange for not having to drive across the city. Haider agrees.

The startup pump, dollarised growth, and the Pakistani trap

By the one-hour-twenty-seven-minute mark, Muzamil pulls the conversation to a wider economic frame. In 2021 Pakistan was carried away by the idea that startups were going to save the economy. In 2022 the music stopped. Muzamil’s argument is that Pakistan as an economy drains roughly twenty billion dollars a year that it covers with loans because exports and remittances do not balance imports — and that telling investors that a company will be valued in dollars over a twenty-year horizon in that environment is a fantasy, because the dollarised growth trajectory does not show up.

Haider’s response is precise. The first problem is exactly the one Muzamil names. “You raise dollars, so the person giving you the money wants the returns in dollars. When the currency devalues against the dollar, all of your growth is wiped out, or most of it is.” He has seen this in many countries around the region. The second problem is that 2021 was, frankly, overdone. Belief in Pakistan as a 250-million-person young market kicked in too hard, money got spent and wasted, and that is not good for an ecosystem.

The fix, he argues, requires fixing the exit. Most funds run on five-to-seven-year cycles. The question Pakistan has not answered is how those funds get their money out. Listing more companies on the PSX would create some of that liquidity. More importantly, the country needs brain gain rather than brain drain. Pakistan needs people coming back, not leaving, and it needs a few good stories to come out.

He closes that section with an unvarnished piece of advice for Pakistani founders. “Don’t focus too much on the valuations. Don’t focus too much on the fact that you are a superstar. The founders need to be a bit more realistic. When founders show attitude, that’s where investors get ticked off.” It would be a fallacy, he adds, to think you can carry that same attitude into a US fundraise and succeed.

Where to list, and why Saudi and Dubai are not the top of a cycle

Muzamil raises the IPO question and the second-unicorn claim he has read about the group. Haider deflects on specifics but engages on the principle. When companies leave the region to list in The US or London, he says, they typically get neither the valuation nor the premium because they are unknown — the local audience does not have the context. The natural place to list is where people understand the brand. For the group’s geography, that is the regional stock markets, which are increasingly liquid and increasingly attractive to retail investors.

He is direct about Saudi. The group is already in the kingdom with Bayut. The regulatory landscape is opening up, including for foreign real estate investment. But they are in studying mode. Megaprojects of seventy thousand units in Mecca will eventually create a secondary market — the question is when, and how the cultural dynamics around housing actually evolve. “You don’t do something for the sake of doing it,” he says. “If you see an opportunity and put capital and manpower behind it, do it. If you don’t, look for another opportunity. Nobody has unlimited runway.”

Muzamil ends with his standard last question, retuned for the conversation. How does Haider see the Middle East — and Dubai specifically — in twenty-fifty, twenty-six years out, given the broader thesis that the centre of gravity is moving back to Asia? Haider laughs that he is more used to looking at next year’s numbers, but he engages.

“Twenty-fifty is a long way away. Even in the next ten years, you are going to see tremendous things happen here.” He cites the D33 initiative — Dubai aiming to double its economy in a decade — and the stat shared by the government that the current 60/40 split between unskilled and skilled labour will invert. That alone will pull in an enormous skilled workforce.

On the cyclical fear that the conflict-driven capital that came to Dubai in the last two years will leave once Russia-Ukraine resolves, Haider is firm that he does not agree. “There’s a hockey stick effect — an inflection point where you just grow exponentially. I feel that’s where we are. The slope is the slope. The trajectory is facing upwards.” Every market has ripples. The slope still matters more than the ripples.

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil thanks his guest for what he calls a phenomenal story. Haider returns the courtesy and tells Muzamil to keep doing what he does. The recording closes with Muzamil asking the audience, in the way he always does, to tell him in the comments what they make of using Dubizzle, Zameen, Bayut and OLX in their own lives — the good, the bad, and the ugly.