The ed-tech founder who started in a LUMS dorm room

The wrong exam can ruin your life

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Ammar Ali Ayub as someone he had tried to book a year earlier — and who had declined. The reason Ammar finally showed up, Muzamil notes, is a recent partnership with the Federal Board that is reshaping how Pakistani students sit public exams. That framing sets the tone for a conversation that keeps returning to a single uncomfortable idea: the system is not testing what students know; it is testing whether they were handed the right paper.

Ammar was born in Islamabad, the first child of a Sindhi father and a KPK mother who settled in the capital. His early schooling was, in his own word, “disturbing.” A failed interview at Beaconhouse — where he mispronounced Cinderella in front of the principal — was followed by a stint at a school where he did not perform well enough to be promoted. His parents moved him to John McDonald School in H-8, a smaller institution with only sixteen students per class, and there he began to find his footing.

The more consequential mistake came later. When filling out a form in class seven, Ammar ticked the matric stream rather than O levels. He sat the wrong exam. His younger brother, on the correct track, later scored three distinctions at O levels including two world-level distinctions. Ammar’s result at Hasan Abdal was poor — not because he lacked ability, but because the exam he sat bore no relation to the curriculum he had studied.

“It wasn’t an outcome of your intellect,” Muzamil observes during this exchange. “You were just given the wrong exam.” Ammar agrees immediately: “Trajectory change hogi.” The moment is not just biographical. It becomes the intellectual foundation for why Nearpeer exists.

GSIS and the value of being a big fish in a small pond

After the Hasan Abdal result, Ammar’s parents enrolled him at GSIS, the same college where his siblings were already studying. He describes it as probably the best decision his parents ever made — not because of academic prestige, but because of what the environment allowed him to become.

At a larger, more elite institution, he says, he would have been one more unremarkable student. At GSIS, the absence of established MUN circuits and co-curricular infrastructure meant that anyone willing to show up could lead. Ammar became the first president of Islamabad’s inter-school football competition, chaired sessions at the Pakistan Young Leaders Conference, and organized events at the Conventional Center. “It was the youngest chair in all of Islamabad,” he recalls.

The argument he makes is structural: sometimes it is better to be a big fish in a small pond. The extracurricular confidence he built at GSIS — the habit of never giving up, of trying one more thing — was what eventually made him someone who could walk into a World Bank office and pitch a solution to a problem nobody had asked him to solve.

Khan Academy, self-learning, and the LUMS acceptance letter

By class six, Ammar had a computer at home. By class seven, he had internet. He began teaching himself through Khan Academy — for his school exams, for his SAT, and eventually to survive university. “Khan Academy made me get the control of my own learning,” he says. “I had the privilege of selecting for myself what to learn, when to learn, how to learn, how much to learn and how fast to learn.”

The LUMS acceptance letter arrived on the morning of his A-level mathematics exam. His father, a professor at Allama Iqbal Open University, had mistaken it for a student assignment. Ammar opened the envelope, read the first line — “Congratulations, you have all the reasons to be proud of yourself” — closed it, posted a Facebook status, and went to sit his exam. He had not yet checked whether he met the minimum grade requirements.

He got in. His father’s reaction to the earlier Brown University acceptance — “Brown, pink, yellow, blue, nursery mein admission ho jaye, don’t care. Lums mein hua ke nahi, yeh batao” — had stung at the time. Ammar is generous about it in retrospect, but the story lands as a precise illustration of how Pakistani parents calibrate ambition: locally, not globally.

At LUMS, Ammar and his co-founder Shahrukh Sewati — who would become his roommate and best friend — made a deliberate decision to treat the four-year economics program as a platform for breadth rather than depth. They took philosophy, law, literature, coding, biology, and physics alongside their core courses. “Hum ne ek baat bhi padhi, hum ne falsafa bhi padha, hum ne computers bhi padhe, hum ne coding bhi seekhi.” The goal was to become people who could think across domains, not just pass exams.

How Ammar got to the World Bank without applying

Later in the discussion, Muzamil presses Ammar on how he ended up at the World Bank as a student — an institution his own sister had applied to repeatedly without success. The answer is a case study in the approach that runs through the entire conversation.

While his father worked at Allama Iqbal Open University — the second-largest university in the world by enrollment, with roughly 1.1 million students graduating annually — Ammar sat beside him as a child watching assignments arrive by post. He noticed that the distance-learning model was entirely offline: instructors traveled to workshops, assignments came in dark envelopes, and no one was using the internet to teach. As a teenager, he began suggesting to AIOU faculty that they could deliver workshops via Skype and screen-share PowerPoint slides. Most of them did not know this was possible.

The internet infrastructure at the time was too weak for video calls, so Ammar’s first prototype was a text-based chat system where instructors and students communicated by typing. “A, B, S, aise karke,” he says, miming slow two-finger typing. It was a start.

That work led to an internship at the Higher Education Commission on a World Bank-funded project called the Tertiary Education Support Program. From there, he talked his way into a working relationship with the World Bank itself. He was never formally recruited. He identified a gap, provided value, and the institution absorbed him.

Muzamil draws the lesson out explicitly: “Folks who can begin to solve problems and by proxy provide value to anyone — that’s the common theme in most of the people who actually end up going to the top.”

The hire who studied Nearpeer’s gaps before the interview

One of the sharpest passages in the conversation is Ammar’s account of how most job applicants approach his company. “Email karte hain jis mein subject line bhi nahi hoti. Andar jo email ki body hoti hai usme kuch likha nahi hota. Sirf CV attach karke no-subject email drop kar dete hain.” Those CVs go straight to the recycling bin.

The exception was a LUMS student who applied with a cover letter that demonstrated she had studied Nearpeer inside out, identified specific gaps in the company, and explained precisely how she would address them. Before the interview, Ammar and Shahrukh had already decided to hire her. She is still with the company, three or four years later, now at director level as sales director. Her salary jumped from 32,000 rupees to 100,000 rupees in a single step because she had made herself indispensable.

“Just be the problem solver,” Ammar says. “If you become a problem solver and if there is no problem that you can find in that company that you can solve, then don’t go to that company. Go to a place where you can actually solve problems for people.”

He adds a parallel story about a friend who, at the end of a Philip Morris interview, asked why the company’s stock price was declining despite consistent profits. The interviewer was visibly stunned. That friend received the highest starting salary of anyone in their graduating batch — 150,000 rupees.

Why Ammar applied for jobs he never intended to take

Muzamil asks a pointed question: if Ammar had already decided to build a startup, why was he applying for jobs at all? The answer reveals something important about how he thinks about family and persuasion.

Shahrukh came from a background where his family expected him to start earning immediately after graduation. Ammar’s parents were similarly cautious. Rather than simply proceeding without their blessing, Ammar collected offer letters — from Dolmen, RB, PSTF, Punjab School Development Fund, Huawei, and a Dubai-based firm paying around six lakh rupees — and laid them on the table in front of his parents. The message was: I can get these jobs. Now watch what I’m building instead.

“If you can’t convince your parents over something, you cannot convince anybody outside in the world,” Ammar says. “Start from home.” Muzamil connects this to a similar observation from a previous guest, the photographer and traveler Feroze Gujjar, who navigated a conservative family’s resistance to her nomadic life through the same slow, steady accumulation of evidence: money coming in, reputation building, their vision being fulfilled.

The vice chancellor of LUMS at the time, Sohail Naqvi, gave Ammar a line he still quotes: “If someone comes tomorrow with a microchip that someone can install in the brain and download the entire four-year education in four hours, I will be the first one to close down this university.” That endorsement from an institutional authority gave the founders the confidence to keep going.

Pakistan’s education crisis in numbers

By the time Nearpeer was taking shape, Ammar and Shahrukh had looked at the macro picture and found it alarming. Pakistan’s population is 220 million with a median age of 22 — meaning roughly half the country is under 22 years old. Seventy percent of students drop out when they move from class five to class six. Of those who stay in school and sit the matric exam, 50 percent still fail to score 33 percent — the minimum passing mark.

“Itne pathetic hain education ke haalaat,” Ammar says flatly.

He then makes a comparison that surprises Muzamil: when you combine federal and all provincial education budgets, Pakistan’s total education spend is roughly equal to its defense budget — around eight billion dollars each. Private sector spending on education adds another eight billion on top. The money is there. The outcomes are not.

His explanation for why for-profit companies are better placed to fix this than NGOs is rooted in incentive structures. An NGO hands out tablets and bags. A for-profit company with investors has to demonstrate that students actually learn. “Capitalism ne ek achhi cheez jo ki hai woh yeh ki hai ke usne competition banaye, usne achievement achieve karne ki ek justuju banai hai.”

Starting with the lowest-hanging fruit

Muzamil asks why Nearpeer began with chartered accountancy, ACCA, and CSS rather than primary or secondary school. Ammar’s answer is a clean piece of business logic.

The 19-to-30 age group already had smartphones, 3G and 4G connections, disposable income, and an existing concept of online education. They were the lowest-hanging fruit. “As a business, sabse pehle aap lowest hanging fruits ke paas jaate ho so that you can become sustainable. Jab aapki sustainability achieve ho jaati hai, uske baad aap kehte ho chalo yaar ab dream projects ki taraf jaana shuru karte hain.”

The strategy worked. In the CSS vertical, Nearpeer is now larger than the largest physical academy in Pakistan. In the CA vertical, the same. “Do teen saal tikke us par focus karna, uske upar kaam karna aur usko bada banana before you get to the next thing.”

The company has around 100 employees, a tech team of 25, and more than 500,000 students. It raised a pre-seed round of approximately $250,000 and, at the time of recording, was about to announce a larger funding round.

The brain learns best when forced to imagine

The conversation’s most intellectually interesting passage comes when Muzamil pushes on the future of content — interactive animations, VR, gamification — and Ammar describes an experiment Nearpeer ran in-house.

Two groups of students were taught the anatomy of the heart. One group watched an animated video on a projector. The other group sat in a traditional classroom setting and were asked to visualize and reconstruct the diagram themselves. Muzamil guesses the animation group performed better. He is wrong.

“Hamara brain jo hai na woh best learn tab karta hai jab when we force it to become curious, when we force it to imagine the things. Jab imagination start hoti hai tab learning ka process start hota hai.” The group that was forced to imagine outperformed the group that was shown the finished picture. Ammar draws the analogy to Harry Potter: reading the book was always better than watching the film.

This does not mean Nearpeer is against interactive content. It means the company is cautious about assuming that more visual stimulation equals more learning. The real future, Ammar argues, is a feedback loop: collect data on how each student learns, feed it back into the platform, and let the system optimize content delivery over time. Human instructors remain in the ecosystem — Nearpeer’s live sessions and Q&A threads are staffed by people — but the goal is to reduce response times from two or three hours to five minutes as funding scales the operation.

Pakistan as the next Indonesia

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Ammar for his read on Pakistan’s long-term trajectory. The answer is unambiguously bullish.

Indonesia’s economy was roughly $300 billion a decade ago — approximately where Pakistan is today. It is now $1.2 trillion. Indonesia’s middle class at that point was roughly the size of Pakistan’s current middle class. Pakistan’s middle class is currently around 85 million people; Ammar projects it will reach 150 million by 2025 or 2026. IT exports are around two billion dollars and rising. Startups are attracting capital. “Pakistan is going to be one of the highest fastest growing economies. If not today, I think 2025 ke baad jo hai kaafi saari cheezein jo hai turnaround hone shuru ho jaengi.”

The youth bulge that most commentators treat as a liability is, in Ammar’s framing, the entire point. “There’s more fun in creating the right — in changing how billions think and learn,” he says in the episode’s closing exchange with Muzamil. It is the clearest statement of what Nearpeer is actually for.