The coworking space that started with a sublet

A shared office, not a coworking space

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Saad Riaz as someone who traveled from Lahore to Islamabad specifically to oversee the opening of Kickstart’s newest location — the tenth in the network. Before getting into the business, Muzamil asks the simplest possible question: what is Kickstart?

“Basically Kickstart ek shared managed space hai,” Saad explains. “Isko aam taur par log coworking space kehte hain.” But the origin, he is quick to clarify, had nothing to do with the global coworking movement. His co-founder Hassan was running a small EdTech startup and needed a place to seat five or six people after graduating. The two of them went looking for a space, found one, and decided to share the cost. “Yeh humne nahin socha tha ke yeh coworking space hai — humein yeh bhi nahin maloom tha ke isko duniya mein coworking space kehte hain.”

At the time of recording, Kickstart was approaching five hundred active members across Lahore and the newly opened Islamabad facility.

From Jud to Government College Lahore

Saad was born in a village called Jud, roughly forty to forty-five kilometres outside Chakwal city in Punjab’s Potohar region. He describes the area plainly: two primary schools, a basic health unit seven or eight kilometres away, and a career landscape dominated by government jobs and the military. Agriculture was limited because the plateau geography made canal irrigation impossible. “Gaon ki mere khayal mein success stories jo reh gayi thi — specially Potohar ke gaon ki — woh yeh success story hua hai jo gaon se chala gaya.”

He completed primary school locally, then moved to a private school in the nearest town for middle and high school. Metric done, he left for Lahore and Government College — a move he now considers the most important of his life, more so than his subsequent university years.

“Woh jo barriers hain, mental barriers, woh pehli baar apne liye break hona shuru hue,” he tells Muzamil. Arriving from a small town, he expected to feel outclassed. A few months in, he realised he was as capable as anyone. But the shift was not only about confidence. In the college library, he picked up the Urdu novel Raja Gidh, large sections of which are set in Government College itself. It was the first time he had consumed any media — a book, a film, anything — in which the physical spaces he actually inhabited appeared. “Ek choti jagah se jab aap aa rahe hote hain toh aapka na koi media mein representation hai.” That absence of representation, and its sudden reversal, left a mark he still carries.

LUMS, economics, and a 2.47 CGPA

From Government College, Saad applied to LUMS on the strength of a notice board brochure and some guidance from a cousin. He got in. The economics major he had been advised to pursue turned out to be a poor fit — “board par ek banda aata hai aur equations likhta jaata hai aur aise aise sign banata jaata hai ke main toh kuch classes samajh raha tha ke drawing ki class ho rahi hai.” His economics grades were consistently poor.

LUMS’s credit structure saved him. With only forty-five to fifty credit hours required in the major out of a hundred and thirty total, he filled the rest with marketing, business, and whatever else made sense. He also started an event management company with a few friends during his university years. By graduation, his CGPA was 2.47 — a number he shares without embarrassment.

The sublet that taught him the subscription model

After graduating, Saad needed somewhere to live. He and Hassan were looking for a portion to rent near LUMS when a senior advised them to take a full house instead and sublet the half they didn’t need — landlords, the logic went, were less likely to harass tenants who occupied an entire property.

Hassan took the full house. When it came time to sublet the other portion, the incoming tenants made an unusual request: rather than pay a security deposit upfront, could they pay slightly higher monthly rent instead? “Yeh jo ek transaction thi, isse jo subscription model ki khoobsurti hai na, woh hum par yahan ho gayi.” The insight — that people will pay more per month to avoid a large upfront payment — stayed with both of them. Muzamil notes that this maps directly onto a liquidity problem that is structural in Pakistan: monthly cash flow is manageable, but lump-sum capital demands are not.

Jug-aad branding and the first Kickstart space

The residential experiment translated quickly into an office idea. Hassan was running his EdTech startup out of the same house and needed a proper workspace for his small team. The two of them found a floor in DHA Lahore, negotiated deferred rent from a brigadier they called “Waheed uncle” — “agar Waheed sahab sun rahe hain toh unka bahut bada contribution tha” — and furnished it with the cheapest tables they could find.

They had no money for branding. Saad called a friend who made intricate paper models of Lamborghinis and guns as a hobby. The friend came over, walked to a stationery shop, bought spray paint, styrofoam, and poster paint, and hand-stencilled the Kickstart name in black and yellow on the office wall. “Is tarah se bahut doston ke saath milkar humne us space ko jugaad ke upar live kar diya.”

The space held roughly thirty-five to forty people. They did not yet know the term “coworking space.” They learned it a few months in, after googling whether anyone else was doing something similar.

Community as the real product

The early members of that first DHA space included people who would go on to build recognisable companies. Saad mentions one early member who later founded Remote Base, a company that places Pakistani software engineers with Silicon Valley firms. Another was trying to build an anonymous social network alone.

What Saad took from watching these early members was something more durable than a business model. The space was basic — “bahut kum log hain jo kahenge ke yaar yeh ek achi space hai” — but people kept coming back. “Woh space se zyada logon ke liye aa rahe hain.” The lesson embedded itself in Kickstart’s culture: customer service and genuine care for members mattered more than the quality of the furniture.

Muzamil draws out the broader point — that freelancers in Pakistan frequently describe burnout from working alone, and that coworking spaces address a human need that goes beyond a desk and a Wi-Fi password. Saad agrees, and notes that while the value proposition has evolved significantly since 2016 — large corporates now use Kickstart spaces — the original insight still holds for anyone just starting out.

Scaling on space equity, not company equity

Later in the discussion, Saad walks through how Kickstart moved from two small shared halls to the Gulberg location — a three-floor independent building that could seat close to two hundred people and, crucially, included private offices for the first time. Private offices changed everything. Teams began taking them immediately, and Saad describes it as a genuine turning point for the business.

The expansion required capital they did not have. Rather than give away equity in Kickstart itself, they structured the fundraise around individual spaces: investors received equity in a specific location, not in the parent company. “Bajaay iske ke hum company ki equity dein, hum space ki equity de dete hain.” It was a model they arrived at through conversations with advisors and friends, and it allowed them to grow without permanently diluting the business.

Muzamil presses on the financial modelling behind each new location. Saad recalls that the Gulberg fundraise was the first time they built a proper projection — cost per square foot to set up, operational expenditure per month, expected revenue per seat. He also recalls, with some irony, that LUMS had required exactly this kind of model as a course project in his intro to finance class. He had let a group member do it and paid no attention. “Agar yeh us waqt banate toh shayad aaj — lekin khair, jab zaroorat padi toh maine dekha.”

What COVID confirmed

The COVID lockdowns of March 2020 emptied every Kickstart location within weeks. Saad describes the three to four months that followed as the hardest the business had faced. “Woh jo fixed cost kitna bada risk hoti hai business ke liye, woh humne wahan par li.” But no location closed, and no expense defaulted. The model held.

What COVID also did was accelerate a shift in how corporates think about office space. Saad traces the arc: companies in the eighties and nineties bought buildings outright; then they moved to long-term leases; now, as technology disrupts industries faster than lease cycles, the logic of agility has become impossible to ignore. “Jitni agility ho utni zyada behtar hai.” The pay-as-you-grow model — which Muzamil frames as the same logic behind Amazon Web Services and subscription software — is now the direction the entire market is moving.

Thirty years from now

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Saad the question he puts to every guest: how does he see Pakistan thirty years from now, when the country turns a hundred and Saad himself will be at the peak of his influence?

Saad’s answer is grounded rather than rhetorical. “Meri apni conviction yeh hai ke bahut si khoobsurat cheezein is waqt ho rahi hain. Young log jinhe technology ke access mila hai aur woh usse apne apne dimaag laga kar bahut amazing cheezein kar rahe hain.” He is not waiting for a political saviour. His argument is that the trajectory is positive regardless of governmental intervention — that the variables he can observe, the ones driven by young people with access to technology and the willingness to use it, point upward on their own.

Muzamil closes by noting that Saad’s own story — from Jud to Chakwal to Government College to LUMS to building a ten-location business — is itself evidence for that argument.