Pakistanis think too small — and the language barrier is the smallest part

The opening frame: services, dollars, and a non-technical founder

The episode opens with Muzamil setting out a thesis he has been repeating for some time. Pakistan needs dollars. The fastest way for a young Pakistani to build a long, lucrative career is to service the global market. The default assumption inside the country is that this is a technical job — computer science, software, IT — and historically that has been true. But in the age of AI, Muzamil argues, the largest growth will come in non-technical domains: problem solving in marketing, in business, in strategy. For that argument to land, the audience needs to see operators who do not come from a technical background and have still cracked the international market.

That is why Qumber Hussain is on the show. Muzamil introduces him as the CEO and founder of Virtue Solutions, a marketing-technology company servicing Saudi Arabia, the US, Canada and Europe. Qumber’s own background is mass communication. Most of the people working with him are not engineers either. The company is roughly 175 headcount and growing. Muzamil mentions attending a recent Virtue event where the company launched one of its in-house chatbots for the marketing domain — the kind of cutting-edge product work, he notes, that usually arrives in Pakistan five to eight years late.

The conversation that follows is, in effect, a long answer to one question: how did a young man from a middle-class Karachi family, with no money and no business background, build that company?

A childhood in Karachi, a degree in mass communication, and a course correction at the last minute

Qumber was born and raised in Karachi. He went to ASF Public School, then to the NED Cadet College for FSc, and from there into mass communication at Karachi University, graduating in 2015. The route into mass communication, he tells Muzamil, was not preordained. He had been preparing for a media-sciences programme at another university and had already cleared the admissions test when a friend phoned to ask whether he still wanted to do mass communication proper. Karachi University admissions had closed, the friend told him, but there was an affiliated institution where the degree itself would come from Karachi University. Qumber, sitting ten minutes away, got on his bike, rode over, and switched tracks the same afternoon.

He stresses one thing about the choice. Mass communication, unlike media sciences, gave him international relations, journalism, public relations and advertising — and a faculty made up of working professionals who pushed students into real internships across television channels rather than just lecturing from textbooks. He eventually picked advertising as his major in the final two years. “The problem with universities,” he says, “is they all teach you just the books.” The reason mass communication worked for him was that the school did the opposite.

YPO at twenty-two: the apprenticeship that paid for everything that came later

The single most formative chunk of Qumber’s pre-founder life was a job he started while still a student. He spent three years as the chapter administrator for YPO — the Young Presidents Organization — in Karachi, working as the sole employee servicing the chapter’s thirty-two member CEOs. “At the age of twenty, 22,” he tells Muzamil, “I was working with the top thirty-two CEOs of Pakistan.”

The role was operational on paper — managing global communication between YPO Global and the chapter, organising networking dinners, hosting ambassadors and prime ministers, coordinating events. The role in practice was an apprenticeship. He sat inside the office of the Fancy Group, which ran the Nasra School education trust, because the chapter’s education chair, Amir Shoukat Fancy, ran his businesses from there. Late nights and quiet afternoons, Qumber watched how the business actually worked — and started spotting the loopholes.

The most consequential of those was in marketing. The school was running its campaigns through a string of vendors, each one selling a single line item — billboards, streamers, TV spots — and none of them selling the thought behind a campaign. The strategy team, the creative team, the brand thinking was missing. The vendors expected the design work for free because the client was already paying them for the billboards. Qumber, then the chapter’s de facto public relations officer, started telling the Fancy Group team how the campaign should actually be designed. That was where the company began.

He is also clear about a second kind of education he received in that office. He came from a middle-class family. The first time he was seated at a YPO event he had no idea how to use a knife and fork. Naz Fancy, his mentor’s wife, assigned the household butler to teach him. “They were grooming me a lot,” Qumber says. “They trained me. Not directly, but they kept me with them in all the meetings. That was really, really, really helpful for me to become who I am today.”

This is the section of the conversation where Muzamil makes one of his sharpest observations. “I have a lot of respect for you for two things,” he tells Qumber. “First, you gave YPO its due — you did not treat it as just a job, you used it as the source of the connections and the ideas that built the business. And second, you respected your mentors. People in Pakistan do not do this.” Qumber agrees and pushes the point further. “Whether it is direct teaching or indirect teaching — you idealise someone, you follow their footsteps, that is your mentor. In my case I had both. I had it from my family too. My father gave me the full confidence to go and do whatever I wanted. He told me the world is your oyster.”

The English question, and the bigger problem behind it

Muzamil uses Qumber’s story as the entry point into a critique he is careful to frame as a Pakistani-society problem rather than a personal one. The single biggest piece of feedback he receives from international employers hiring Pakistani talent, he tells Qumber, is not skill. It is communication. The young Pakistani candidate cannot communicate effectively with a global counterpart — and what they need, Muzamil stresses, is not IELTS-grade English. They need to be intelligible.

But the language problem, Qumber argues back, is downstream of a deeper one. In Pakistan, English has been turned into a marker of education itself rather than what it actually is — a language. A person who has not gone to an English-medium school is treated as uneducated. As a result, languages as a category of skill — German, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish — barely exist at the basic education level. There is no real language university worth the name. “There is no PhD in languages happening here,” Muzamil says. The problem is structural.

The deeper issue, both men agree, is the pond. “We never leave our small pond,” Qumber says. “Technically, our mindset is that of the frog in the small pond, even when there is a much bigger pond right next to it.” Young Pakistanis are surrounded by people who have only ever worked for someone else, have only ever taken whatever job came first, have never tested themselves against a global counterpart. The English barrier is the visible symptom. The real problem is that nobody around the young person has shown them what the bigger pond looks like.

Qumber adds a personal note that anchors the point. In his entire extended family, he was the first to take the initiative of starting a business. The conventional script was simple — graduate, get any job, earn a salary, marry, repeat. His father and brother pushed against that script for him. That, more than anything else, is what made the difference.

Starting the company with no capital and a rented DSLR

Qumber registered Virtue Solutions in May 2015, while still a student. The starting capital was nothing. His father had given him the best possible education on a salaried income but had no savings to invest. The relatives were sceptical — how would he run a business without money? The answer was the photography hobby he had built through college.

This was the era of the DSLR boom. Couples wanted blurred-background wedding photographs and were willing to pay four thousand rupees for an event shoot. Qumber did not own a camera. He rented one from a contact for a thousand rupees, kept three thousand for the shoot, and put that money back into the company. “I was gathering all that money and putting it in place to sustain my business,” he says.

The first real campaign came from Nasra School, where he already knew every stakeholder. The campaign included billboards and streamers — the same line items every other vendor was selling — but with the strategy and creative thinking the other vendors had refused to do for free. The team, at that point, was five or six university friends: a designer who already worked professionally, a video editor, a photographer-videographer, and Qumber himself.

He is honest about the price of starting that way. The team agreed to defer their own pay because they were earning elsewhere. Qumber was the only one who had resigned from his job — a resignation he describes as easier than he had expected, because Hanif Lakhani, the chapter president, did not try to hold him back. The bigger pain was that his first co-founders, the friends he started with, eventually left when the company began to look like a real company. They had joined a side project. They did not want a boss.

The cash-flow trap that pushed the company offshore

The conversation moves into the most operationally specific stretch of the episode — why Virtue eventually walked away from the Pakistani market for nearly seven years and rebuilt itself around international clients.

Qumber describes the local-services trap in concrete terms. The first big campaign delivered for Nasra School left him chasing his own client’s CFO, asking him to clear a cheque so payroll could be met. Salaries did not go out on time. Cash flow was a constant problem. “Salaries are not going out on time,” he says, “and even now sometimes it happens. When it does I am mad at that time, because the biggest issue for me is that we need to pay them.”

The resolutions available to a small Pakistani services business, he is direct, are non-existent. Private equity will not buy your equity because you are a small services business with no clean financials. Banks will not lend without those same financials. His own brother is a banker, and even with that access the answer is no — the bank’s small-and-medium-enterprise help is, in practice, a closed door. Informal lenders quote terms that do not make business sense. “Monthly ten percent,” Qumber says he was offered. A hundred thousand rupees in capital would cost ten thousand a month in return. “A good business generates thirty to thirty-five percent yearly. We have pushed ours to forty, forty-five, fifty. But there are people offering to double your money in a year. That is a scam.”

By 2015 or 2016 the team was already running US-market work in parallel. The decision to drop local clients altogether came from two pressures stacking on top of each other. The first was cash flow. The international client paid on time because the banking system in their market allowed chargebacks if work was not delivered — that built trust on both sides. The second was operational. The team worked through the night to service American clients, slept in the morning, and started missing the ten-a.m. calls from Pakistani clients. The miss was beginning to cost reputation. Qumber chose reputation. The local book was cut.

The company returned to Pakistan only in 2022, after the financial pressure had eased enough that local work could be done without bleeding the international side.

How Virtue actually sells into the West

How does a Karachi-based marketing company win a US, Canadian or Middle Eastern client? The answer Qumber gives is unglamorous and worth listening to in detail.

The early model was a hybrid of two things he had observed. A friend was running a small Karachi call centre selling duct-cleaning services into Canada — the operator dialled North American homeowners from Pakistan and pretended to be calling from down the street. At the same time, freelancing platforms like Upwork, Fiverr and Freelancer had become well known among young Pakistanis. Qumber’s read on Upwork was that it had a scalability ceiling for a real business — clients were hiring per hour, and you got stuck in a single jump. His call-centre friend’s model had reach but no scalability of its own. Combining the two — using outbound contact to open relationships, then platform-style flexibility to deliver — gave him an angle.

The team started cold-calling overseas Pakistani business owners — the so-called diaspora wealth pool — pulled from Google Maps and Yahoo directories. The pitch was honest: send your marketing work to Pakistan, save on cost, support the diaspora story. Almost every overseas Pakistani he called told him no on the face. The objection was not cost. It was disbelief. A Karachi agency would simply not be allowed to take their money, they said. Even when Qumber pointed out the basic mechanics — a Pakistani-American sending money to Pakistan is, by definition, a remittance — the answer was still no. The block was psychological.

The international clients who did say yes were not overseas Pakistanis. They were Western businesses where the cost arbitrage and the quality combination simply made sense. The work came in across web development, mobile applications, ERP systems, custom development on the tech side and on creative, strategy, design, animation, content and campaign execution on the non-tech side. The team that delivered it was deliberately structured to span both columns. By the time of this conversation Virtue has fourteen to fifteen departments, in-house heads of finance, legal, HR and creative, and active markets in Saudi Arabia, the US, Canada and Europe.

The structure trap: why founders should not hire a C-suite on day one

One of the cleaner pieces of operating advice in the episode comes when Muzamil asks Qumber how he scaled from a handful of friends to 175 people. He sets up the question by describing a tech company he met that day — seventy-five engineers, a CTO, CIO, CEO and chief information security officer, but no CFO and a single HR manager. The risk is obvious. Without HR and finance as real functions, the company hits a wall somewhere between 150 and 300 people.

Qumber agrees and gives a sharper version of the same point. The mistake young Pakistani founders make is the opposite of the one in the tech company — they design the full structure before there is any business to put inside it. “After watching Shark Tank, after watching the movies, the young founder spends the first day on the structure,” he says. “The structure is necessary, but you need it after some time. You build it along the way.” The visible-coat-of-arms version of this mistake — the LinkedIn page, the embossed business cards, the CEO title before the first client — he calls out by name.

His own approach was to delay the C-suite as long as possible. He did not put CEO on his card for the first six or seven years. Instead, he hired a managing director once the company needed to look real to international clients, and then he outsourced the senior heads of HR, finance and legal to people he already knew — people working full-time elsewhere who could moonlight on Virtue for a fraction of what an in-house hire would cost. The functions got built. The salary line did not balloon.

The real C-suite hires came once cash flow could carry them, and Qumber is direct about how careful he had to be in choosing them. He recounts one wrong hire that cost the company a generation of senior staff — people who had been with him for three or four years walked out because of one wrong choice at the top. “Companies, especially marketing and tech companies, run on culture,” he says. “When you give out a C-suite position, how that person behaves and reacts is what matters. Sorry, I told that person eventually, this is not going to work. You are killing the culture.” The leaders he has now are, with one exception, friends — people he and his wife Madiha worked alongside in earlier roles, who came back into Virtue once the company was a serious operation. The HR head he eventually hired came from PwC.

His description of how he runs the office captures the tone he is trying to protect. His own room is a clear glass box in the middle of the floor. Anyone can wave, anyone can open the door, anyone can walk in. “I am not building an atom bomb in there,” he says. “I am working. It is teamwork.”

The chatbot, AI, and the productivity argument

Towards the end of the episode the two come back to the chatbot Virtue had launched the previous week — a tool designed to let smaller clients design their own marketing campaigns. Qumber describes it as deliberately built for the segment of customers Virtue cannot serve at full agency price. The bot handles creative ideation, campaign structuring and execution from a single interface, so a small brand can run a credible campaign with a budget that would not otherwise reach the door of an agency.

Muzamil uses the chatbot as the way into a wider point about AI in services. The fear narrative being sold inside Pakistan, he says, is the usual one — AI will take jobs, AI will collapse the services industry. His own view is the opposite. AI is going to be less about cost cutting and more about productivity gain. The work that used to cost a million dollars and was therefore restricted to enterprise clients can now be done for ten thousand dollars and reaches small and medium businesses. The democratisation of those services is the actual story.

Qumber’s framing of the same point is more grounded. He walks through the history. Typewriters required a human proofreader sitting next to the typist. Early MS Word caught the obvious spelling mistakes. Modern Word autocorrects in real time. “AI is doing the same thing,” he says. “It is not that humans become useless. The work that took four people now takes one, and that one person becomes more valuable. The value moves to the human who can direct the tool.” He uses a sharper analogy on the same point. “A bot needs a human to run it. You have a car, not everyone can drive it. You have a plane, I can sit in it but I cannot fly it. Not everyone knows how to use AI. The person who does becomes more valuable, not less.”

For a services-business owner whose customers always show up fifteen days before they need a launch, the tool’s real promise is sanity. “I have seen my people working seventeen, eighteen hours a day,” he says. “They get drained. This will help them achieve the same outcome calmly, within the time.”

Pakistan in twenty-five years, and why services dollars build the middle class

Muzamil closes by asking Qumber the question he asks at the end of most of these conversations. Knowing what he knows, having gone through the cash crunches, the wrong hires, the political and economic cycles — how does Qumber see Pakistan twenty-five years from now, in 2050?

Qumber’s answer is conditional. If the country keeps doing what it is doing now, if government policy keeps moving in a direction that brings in international clients, if institutions like P at PASHA keep representing Pakistani talent at global conferences, then Pakistan is on a path to being meaningful inside global economies. He is, by his own admission, on the optimistic end of the spectrum. He is also clear that the bet is not on the government building anything. It is on Pakistani operators continuing to do what he has done — service the global market from a Karachi office and bring dollars back.

Muzamil closes by drawing the wider thesis around Qumber’s answer. Every dollar that a services business brings into the country is distributed almost immediately into wages, vendors and local consumption. Services exports are the fastest path the country has to a strong, globalised middle class — and a strong middle class is the foundation any real startup ecosystem will eventually sit on top of. “Until we have that vibrant, globalised middle class,” he says, “Pakistan cannot progress.”

It is also why Muzamil is honest about who this show is trying to talk to. He does not cover conventional engineering paths on the podcast. He covers the operators — the marketers, the creatives, the services founders, the people building dollar-earning businesses out of Pakistan without a Western passport or a Silicon Valley introduction. Qumber Hussain, in this conversation, is the cleanest case study for that thesis the show has put on record this year.