Pakistan has the largest Muslim diaspora in Silicon Valley

A CEO, a country manager, and one job

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming Arzish Azam to Thought Behind Things and stumbling, briefly, over his name — calling him “Ijad bhai” before catching himself. Arzish wears two titles. He is the CEO of Ijad Labs and the country manager for Startup Grind, the global founder community headquartered in Silicon Valley. Muzamil notes that the second of those names tends to overshadow the first; Ijad Labs, he says, has taken the back seat in public perception.

Arzish does not bristle. He frames both roles as a single project. “The work we do collectively, either through these organisations or in my personal role, is to build the IT industry or the startup industry,” he says. The thesis underneath is blunt and economic. The future of the country, in his reading, is in technology and digitisation, and the maths is unsentimental. “However much effort we put in — export more rice, double the mangoes — it will not make a significant difference. The ROI of a tech exporter, of a software engineer, for this country is twenty-five thousand dollars a year. A textile worker is not there. A farmer is not there.” He concedes that this is unfortunate. He also argues that policy should follow where the leverage actually is.

Skipping university, joining Founder Institute

Muzamil pulls the conversation back to the beginning. Arzish did his FSc in pre-engineering at Islamabad Model College for Boys, F-10/3. He took a gap year on the back of some early entrepreneurial ambition — he had been dabbling in e-commerce in high school. He intended to start university and never did. “I have never gone to university to this day,” he tells Muzamil. “I have visited. I never joined.”

Instead, in 2016, a month after FSc, he joined the Islamabad chapter of Founder Institute, an international pre-accelerator that had just opened its doors in the city. The first year was a struggle. The thing that began to click, eventually, was the realisation that community-building and events — the soft tissue around the tech industry — was a place he could be useful. He also tried, briefly, to build a price-comparison startup. After a year he killed it. “Sometimes it is okay to give up,” he says. “Otherwise you waste five years in the same thing.”

He took on the Startup Grind chapter around 2018, and the rest of the arc of his career has been built on that platform.

The super-connector role, and why it matters

Muzamil names what Arzish does without quite naming it himself. “You play the role of a super-connector,” he says. “Why do you think that is so important?”

Arzish’s answer is structural. Some people have talent. Some people have capital. They need to find each other, and on their own they usually do not. “Whether you are an incubator, an accelerator, an influencer on Facebook telling people to just do something — all of our roles are to connect these elements,” he says. “If I have a lot of money and I don’t know what to do with it, someone has to connect that to someone who does.” The person who connects everything to everything else, he says, is the super-connector. He attributes his own position to being in Islamabad at the right time, joining Founder Institute, and watching the network compound from there.

The model he points to is unambiguously Silicon Valley. Y Combinator, 500 Startups, Techstars, Startup Weekend — these are connector institutions that have built companies across the world. Pakistan, in his telling, has under-invested in the equivalent layer.

Norway, Turkey, and putting Pakistanis on planes

A practical version of that work is the international delegation. Arzish has taken Pakistani founders, government officials, bankers, and private-sector leaders to the Startup Grind global conference in Silicon Valley, to events in Norway, and most recently to Turkey. The Turkey trip was scheduled the moment the country dropped its quarantine requirement.

The pitch is unromantic. “Unless we go and meet these people, especially in Silicon Valley, how will we learn?” he says. “If you go to Norway’s annual event for three days, you will understand the crux of Norway. Otherwise it might take you six months living there.” Forced proximity also matters. Muzamil makes the point that relationships that never form in Islamabad — because everyone is too busy with their own builds — form quickly when the same group of people are stuck together at a foreign conference. Arzish agrees. The Startup Grind community now numbers over two hundred and fifty people across Pakistani institutions, and he describes it as a close-knit network that helps each other organically.

The diaspora Pakistan never claimed

The most pointed stretch of the conversation is about Pakistanis abroad. Muzamil makes the case that the country has historically diminished its own diaspora — partly because it never really owned the Pakistanis who left, and partly because the comparison to India, with its vastly larger numbers, is unflattering and discouraging.

Arzish corrects the framing. The Indian diaspora comparison, he argues, is unfair. India is a country of one and a four-tenths billion people, with the largest diaspora in the world and generations of immigration deep into American civic life. “When you isolate the Pakistanis,” he says, “Pakistan has the largest Muslim diaspora in Silicon Valley. Pakistanis overall are the third or fourth most influential diaspora — Chinese, Indians, then Pakistanis. Arabs are not at this number.” His point is that the diaspora is not small in any absolute sense. It has simply been undercounted, under-celebrated, and under-connected.

He lists names from a 2019 Startup Grind conference in Pakistan as evidence — Raghib Husain, an NED graduate who built a six-billion-dollar company; Saad Mashir, the chief technology officer of the city of Seattle; Deshan Ali, a vice-president at Salesforce in Canada. He mentions Fatima Karda. The argument is that these people exist, that they want to be connected back to Pakistan, and that the failure has been on the home side. “Who flies twenty-four hours to come here? They have been coming for the last twenty years. We just need to connect with them.”

A Pakistan Tech Summit in Silicon Valley is scheduled for the fourth and fifth of March. The last one was in February 2020 — the final pre-COVID edition.

Pakistan Future Festival, and a stadium

Before Silicon Valley, there is January. Arzish describes a ten-year initiative called Pakistan Future Festival, scheduled for the twenty-first to twenty-third of that month, running across roughly thirty topics — e-commerce, developers, startups, investment. The plan is to hold it in a stadium because the event is too big for a conference hall. More than a hundred international speakers are expected.

The structural choice he keeps returning to is who gets invited. Not just founders. Policymakers. Diplomatic missions. Bankers. Every stakeholder in the economy. “Technology influences everything,” he says. “Two founders cannot just sit alone and talk. Banking has a role. Every part of the economy has a role.” Muzamil, half-jokingly, points to a video he had watched earlier that day — Kamyab Jawan, a stadium full of people, the prime minister in attendance — and says he wishes the same crowd would gather for freelancers and IT. Arzish nods at the comparison. The January conference is, in part, his answer.

A national emergency that nobody declared

Muzamil brings up Arzish’s advisory role at the federal Ministry of Science and Technology. The exchange that follows is the most policy-direct stretch of the episode.

Arzish is careful with the ministry. The minister, the prime minister, every senior figure in government talks about technology, he says. The leadership understands the direction. His critique is about scale. “We are not doing enough,” he says. “There should be a national emergency that every university teaches software engineering or digital skills. Urdu is important. Public policy is important — we can read those five years later. Right now, there is crazy demand globally for software engineers. In Pakistan companies are offering to double the salary of engineers from other firms. Unlimited demand, very limited supply. Why are we not addressing it?”

He praises the KP government’s announced initiative to train one hundred thousand software engineers under Atif Khan. He flags BPO and call-centre investments. But the maths he draws out is the real argument. A population of two hundred and twenty million. One hundred thousand engineers is, on his count, basically nothing. The right target, he argues, is a million. “One million engineers at twenty thousand dollars each — that is twenty billion dollars. Per year. In five years that is a hundred billion dollars. What better business is there than this?”

Muzamil pushes a related concern: the gap between academia and industry. Around seventy-eight to eighty percent of university graduates, in his framing, are not employable. The fix, he suggests, may not come from the academic side at all. He references a major Pakistani IT company — Systems or Netsol — moving into the university space, and argues that industry-first training is the right shape. Arzish does not disagree. He treats it as one more reason the supply side is broken.

Remote work is the wave; the software houses are the boat that has sailed

The most forward-looking section of the conversation breaks down Pakistan’s IT sector into components. Muzamil counts three: exports, freelancing, and startups. Arzish adds a fourth. “Remote workers,” he says. “Not a freelancer, not a software house — someone sitting in a house in Islamabad doing a remote job for an American company and drawing an American salary.”

His read on each layer is candid. IT outsourcing — the legacy export model — is, in his words, a boat that has already sailed. The Philippines and India dominate. The Pakistani software houses that exist are working on a resource-augmentation model: build teams, sell them to startups. “Unless they evolve, they will die out,” he says. “Their resources will be picked up by the companies that put those engineers directly into remote jobs. There is more money, more career growth, more learning.”

Startups, he argues, will produce billion-dollar local-problem companies — grocery, B2B, the now-familiar shape of regional venture funding. But the most rapid growth, in his view, belongs to product companies built for global markets, and to the remote-work wave. He cites companies like Remote.base — Pakistani engineers placed directly into Silicon Valley jobs at full American salaries. “Three lakh per month here, three thousand dollars there — that is suddenly four or five lakh added.”

Muzamil sharpens the point. The first wave of outsourcing — structured back-office, data entry — was something Pakistan missed. The wave that is now arriving, where companies are willing to hire knowledge workers anywhere because the cost differential is decisive, is a wave the country cannot afford to miss too. In San Francisco, he points out, an individual engineer can cost three or four lakh dollars. The arbitrage is too large to ignore.

Freelancing as an on-ramp, not a destination

Arzish is careful not to dismiss freelancing. The on-ramp matters. A new entrant without an IT degree starts somewhere — Amazon FBA, basic Photoshop, low-value graphic design — because that is the only door open to them. “If you walk in on day one and hand them an AI course, they will say no thanks and leave,” he says. The discipline is to keep people moving up the value chain. After two or two-and-a-half years of freelancing, the right move is into neural networks, advanced analytics, machine learning — the skills that the remote-job market actually pays for.

He is bullish on the rest. Personal shoppers, social-media feed curators, every new category that digitisation is producing in the first world — these are jobs Pakistan can do from where it is. “The internet is not the physical world,” he says. “In Islamabad there are ten thousand jobs and seven hundred applications come for each one. On the internet, there is unlimited opportunity. You can freelance for someone in Tanzania. Work comes from Nigeria.”

The hundred and twenty million who are still offline

The injustice he keeps returning to is access. “One hundred and twenty million of our people do not have internet,” he says. “That is the biggest injustice of this moment.” He calls it a zulm — a wrong done — and he means it structurally.

Muzamil takes the point further. Capital, he argues, follows the same shape inside Pakistan as it does globally. From the developing world it flows out to London and Switzerland. Inside Pakistan it flows from small towns into Karachi and Lahore. Megacities of two crore and one-point-eight crore are environmentally and economically unsustainable. Lahore’s smog, in his framing, is the visible cost.

Freelancing — and more importantly remote work — breaks that pattern. It keeps the worker where they are and routes the capital into their own town. “Now new towns will be created. Now new cities will be,” Muzamil says. Arzish picks up the thread. The industrialised pattern, where a factory in one city pulls everyone into it, does not apply when the factory is in the cloud. “We should not bring people from Sargodha to Islamabad,” he says. “We should give them the digital opportunity in Sargodha.” Pakistan, in his view, has the chance to leapfrog the urbanisation curve that earlier industrial revolutions forced on every country that went through them.

Thirty years out

Muzamil closes with the question he asks every guest. Arzish is twenty-four. What does Pakistan look like when he is fifty-four?

Arzish leans into a global frame. “The concept of nation-states will have been challenged,” he says. “Countries will exist, but they may not have the importance they had fifty or a hundred years ago.” He describes himself as a hyper-optimistic person. The trend lines, in his reading, run his way. Power is shifting toward people who have an internet connection, regardless of which country they happen to live in. Pakistan benefits from being a long-standing destination for American outsourcing and from a diaspora that is, in real numbers, large and willing to give back. “Even if we do nothing as government or as influencers in this country, this will happen in five or ten years. If we make the effort, it might happen in two.”

The closing line is one he delivers without ornament. “All you need is an internet connection and a laptop, and the whole world is at your feet.”

Muzamil thanks him, signals that he will likely join the Silicon Valley delegation in March, and signs off the episode with a plug for The Pakistan Pivot, his new podcast on policy conversations. Thought Behind Things, episode 181.