Pakistan's first Google Developer Expert on building things

A cadet college in Skardu and the making of discipline

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming back Saad Hamid, noting that Saad had appeared on the show in an earlier season. Before the conversation finds its stride, Saad offers a small piece of social proof: someone had recognised him at a café from the podcast. “It’s amazing impact that you are creating,” he tells Muzamil — and then pivots immediately to his own story.

The early years are unusual. Saad’s father moved the family to the Maldives when Saad was young, giving him an early international exposure that left a gap in his Urdu literacy. He returned to Islamabad, cycled through a couple of schools, and then — in what he describes as a family decision rooted in army culture — was sent to Cadet College Skardu as part of its pioneer batch around 2000–2001.

Four years in Skardu at sub-zero temperatures, writing letters home because phone communication was unreliable, watching wuzu water freeze mid-drip, and enduring what he calls “a lot of extra drills” — this is where Saad says the foundational trait of his adult life was formed. “I still think to this day that discipline is a trait of a person because of which that person can achieve anything in life. That’s what I learned from there.”

The college also gave him his first encounter with Pakistan’s sectarian and ethnic diversity. Coming from a Sunni family in Islamabad, he found himself living alongside students from very different backgrounds in the northern areas. “That was also my biggest learning at that time,” he says. He also faced significant bullying, which he attributes partly to being perceived as an outsider — an Islamabadi in a region with its own social codes. He left after tenth grade, citing the absence of computer studies, the bullying, and the relentless extra drills.

A 2.1 CGPA and the internet that changed everything

From Skardu, Saad moved to Army Public School Hamza in Islamabad, topped the school in his first term, and then enrolled in BAHRIA University to study electrical engineering with a specialisation in telecom. The academic trajectory did not hold. He graduated with fourteen D grades and a 2.1 CGPA — a number he volunteers without being pressed, noting there was apparently a clause introduced later that would have denied him his degree.

Muzamil, who had already sensed the shape of the story, names the inflection point directly: “Academic career में you were this kid who the parents would look at and be like ‘yaar Saad kyun?’ And the trajectory changed somewhere there.”

Saad’s explanation is the internet. He entered university in 2006, the year Steve Jobs announced the iPhone. By the time he graduated in 2010, the web 2.0 era was beginning. “I discovered new ideas, people doing amazing things, and this curiosity — which I think still remains a very integral part of me — came from somewhere.” He cannot trace its origin precisely, but he suspects it is the same quality that got him into trouble at cadet college: an inability to accept things without questioning them.

Muzamil notes a pattern he has observed across the podcast: youngest siblings tend to be the ones who talk about curiosity. Saad is the youngest of two. He partially credits an older sibling who would sit and answer even his most basic questions without dismissing them — but he insists the internet was the larger force.

Sizzlopedia, early blogging, and the exit that didn’t make sense

In 2006, while still at university, Saad started a blog called Sizzlopedia — a portmanteau of “sizzle” and “Wikipedia.” It covered tech news: new laptops, the iPhone launch, jailbreaks, web 2.0 tips. By 2010 he was, by his own account, one of the top tech bloggers worldwide. The blog made money in dollars, which for a university student in Pakistan was significant. “I became very independent. Parents wouldn’t even need to be asked.”

He then sold it — a decision that, from the outside, looked irrational. Peers like Taimur of Redmond Pie kept going and built lasting properties. Saad’s honest assessment of why he didn’t: “I lacked a lot of business acumen. For me it was a hustle. How to go from hustle to business — I didn’t know that.”

What followed was a sequence of roles that reads less like a career plan and more like a series of bets on interesting people. A digital media agency in Lahore called Bramers for six months. Then Jazz, where he joined to manage online reputation — a function so new that his VP, Jahanzeb Taj, was asking him to explain app business models in 2011, years before Jazz would eventually build any. He describes the telco alumni network as “the startup mafia of Pakistan” — people who absorbed technology culture early and then dispersed into startups, Careem, and international companies.

Nonprofits, accelerators, and the pivot to community

In 2012, Saad made the move that most people around him considered genuinely crazy: he left a full-time job at Jazz for a part-time contractual role at a nonprofit called Ilm Ideas, focused on education innovation and funding tech-driven initiatives for Pakistan’s out-of-school children. The reason, he says, was a combination of curiosity and the pull of a trusted colleague — Sehar — who made the opportunity sound worth exploring.

“For me it has always been about people,” Saad tells Muzamil. “It’s never about the role. What makes it amazing is the team that I work with.”

Eight months later he moved to Invest to Innovate (I2I), an accelerator run by Kalsoom Lakhani, where he stayed for three years. His role was effectively everything — community building, events, business modelling, working with startups through accelerator cycles. It was here that the idea of doing something himself began to crystallise. In 2016 he launched a digital-first consulting company called Demo, and separately a co-working space in Islamabad called KNCT, with university classmates Sofwan and Sadaf.

How Google happened — and why volunteering was the real MBA

Running parallel to all of this, Saad had been volunteering with Google. He founded the first Google Developer Group in Islamabad and became Pakistan’s first Google Developer Expert — both unpaid, both driven by curiosity. When a role opened up to work on Google’s South Asia Frontier markets — Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka — the volunteer track had already made him visible.

“I said, this is my MBA. I’ll go work at Google, see how people talk, how business is done, and eventually you learn that.” He describes the opportunity as a chance to “10x or 100x” his impact compared to what Demo could achieve at its scale in Pakistan.

Later in the discussion, Saad explains that joining Google required a deliberate emotional disconnection from his other ventures. “If you really want to focus on a job or a role, it’s not possible that you keep yourself connected to other things as well.” He phased out of KNCT and Demo over a couple of months, a process he describes as difficult but necessary.

His first Google role was on the engineering side, building the developer ecosystem in Pakistan. His current role at the time of recording sits on the business side — Growth Manager for Apps and Games — helping Pakistani developers and startups scale their products internationally, acquire users, and monetize across markets.

The Jadu career app: from cohort to companion

Muzamil brings up Jadu — a career-focused app that had been discussed on the show in a previous episode. At that point it was pre-launch. Now, Saad gives an update.

The original model was cohort-based: fellowship programs, mentors, live sessions. They ran four or five cycles and graduated 200 to 250 people, with roughly 50% getting placements. The model worked in principle but didn’t scale. Mentors were being asked the same basic questions repeatedly. Volunteer time was finite. The jump from 250 to 250,000 graduates wasn’t visible.

The pivot is to a self-serve app — a career companion rather than a structured program. “It’s like an assistant,” Saad explains. The beta version, launched a few days before the recording, has three features: a CV builder, a career aptitude test divided into general awareness, critical thinking, and mathematical reasoning, and a “career corner” with short daily tips. The aptitude test eventually tells users which job verticals suit their profile. The nudge mechanic — short prompts that arrive periodically — is central to the design philosophy.

Muzamil pushes on the vision: a high school student with no career counsellor, stumbling onto the internet, finding a hundred possible paths but no guidance. Could Jadu become that guidance layer? Saad is honest about the ambition: “I hope it goes towards that. It’s very ambitious what you just mentioned. This is just the dream.” The near-term goal is feedback — the app has a “contact / request a feature” button built into the left menu bar as one of its first features.

Pakistan’s IT talent gap and the coherence problem

The conversation’s most substantive stretch is a long exchange on Pakistan’s IT export ceiling. Muzamil opens it with a direct claim: the number-one problem facing Pakistan’s tech industry is not infrastructure, electricity, or ease of doing business — it is talent. The pool is too small, and the top of that pool is being cannibalized by companies bidding against each other rather than growing the base.

Saad agrees, and adds a structural diagnosis. Pakistan’s IT exports are concentrated at the top — a handful of large companies generating most of the revenue. What’s missing is the middle: mid-tier enterprises with 30 to 100 employees that can absorb talent, build culture, and create the kind of career paths that stop people from immediately jumping to the largest bidder or leaving the country.

On brain drain, both Muzamil and Saad push back against the conventional framing. “I think our biggest export is human capital, and that’s perfectly fine,” Muzamil says. Remittances already exceed total merchandise exports. The India comparison is instructive: Indian companies like Tata Consulting created positions senior enough that Microsoft engineers would return home for a few years before cycling back abroad. Pakistan lacks that gravitational pull.

Saad frames the scale of the problem arithmetically. India’s IT exports are roughly $150 billion. Pakistan’s population is about one-fifth of India’s. A proportional target would be $30 billion. Pakistan is currently at around $3 billion. Closing that gap requires approximately two million jobs over the next decade. “Every billion dollars of exports that you need to add, you need to add 75,000 workers in it,” Muzamil notes, citing the average revenue per user figure from Systems Limited.

The obstacle, Saad argues, is not any single missing policy — it is coherence. “It’s a lack of coherence and stability. Which is why everyone being on the same page becomes very difficult.” Private organisations are trying things. Universities are making attempts. HEC has its own initiatives. But the goal post keeps moving with each change of government. “When you want to go to the moon, you need to come on public television like John F. Kennedy did and just tell the country: we are going to the moon. Then motivation comes to everyone.”

Pakistan in 2050: pockets of excellence inside persistent incoherence

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Saad — as he does with all guests — for a view of Pakistan in 2050. Saad’s answer is carefully calibrated: neither pessimistic nor falsely optimistic.

“I see Pakistan in a very similar kind of situation, fortunately or unfortunately.” The national-level coherence will still be limited. But zoom in, and pockets of genuine excellence will be visible — industries, communities, and companies doing important work despite the surrounding noise. “When you zoom out, everyone is sad. When you zoom in, you go and see: actually, this industry is doing very well, this is happening.”

His closing argument is that Pakistan’s diversity — its provinces, languages, and people — is itself a kind of structural incoherence, but also a source of resilience. “There is a very committed group of people. That group is small, that group is sitting in different places. But there is a very strong and committed group of people who keep doing the work that needs to be done. And that is why, unfortunately, we are not like — yeah. And more such groups are coming.”

Muzamil wraps the episode at the one-hour-twenty-minute mark, thanking Saad for returning to the show. The conversation ends where it began: with the sense that the most durable careers — and perhaps the most durable countries — are built not on plans but on curiosity, discipline, and the right people in the room.