The man building Pakistan's electric mobility revolution

From Kuwait to Peshawar to Islamabad: a childhood between worlds

The episode opens with Muzamil asking Mohammad Hadi about his early life — a question that turns out to matter more than it first appears. Hadi was born in Kuwait, moved to Peshawar, returned to Kuwait, and finally settled in Islamabad at age six. His father’s family is from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa; his mother is English. He grew up speaking Pashto, Urdu, and English, spending summers in England with cousins who knew nothing about Pakistan, and cycling through F-11 when it was still empty roads and no houses.

That layered upbringing, Hadi argues, is an advantage rather than a confusion. “I think when you have those different influences, especially as a kid, you kinda have to deliberately choose a path,” he tells Muzamil. “It’s not just laid out for you — which is cool in a way, because you get to pick from a menu of ways of life.” The identity question resolved itself during one extended stay in England as a teenager. He found himself missing Islamabad with an intensity that surprised him. “I realized that I belong to Islamabad. I think Islamabad belongs to me. And that’s never gone away.”

Fifteen years on Wall Street: the cowboy culture of investment banking

After a liberal arts degree in Minnesota — where, memorably, the moisture in his eyes froze on a two-minute walk to the gym — Hadi moved to London post-9/11 and found a back-office job at Credit Suisse First Boston. The role was unglamorous: chasing unsigned derivatives contracts by phone. But he spotted an inefficiency, built a risk-weighting model to prioritise which trades to chase, presented it to management, and moved into a training program. That instinct — find the broken process, fix it, present the fix — would define the next decade and a half.

He stayed at Credit Suisse for fifteen years, moving from London to New York, eventually working on the trading floor during what he calls its heyday. Muzamil asks whether it is like the movies. “Yes,” Hadi says. “Big Short — I watched it recently and it actually reminds me of my work. People are like that: eccentric, aggressive. It’s a cowboy culture.” The rule was simple: perform or leave. “If you mess up, you’re toast. And if you do well, you’re king.” He is careful, though, not to caricature the industry. Wall Street, he argues, does real things — it raises capital for medical device companies, it finances growth, it moves economies. But greed is also genuinely present, and some of what happens on trading floors is pure betting with no social value attached.

The decision to leave: values over trajectory

By 2017, Hadi was on a clear path to managing director at Credit Suisse — the house in Connecticut, the two-car garage, what he calls “the plan.” He left anyway. He was 36. Muzamil presses him on why, and Hadi gives two answers. The professional one: he wanted higher risk and higher returns, something entrepreneurial. The personal one: “My plan was always that I would come back to Pakistan.” He had gone to the United States thinking he would stay four years. He stayed much longer because it was worth it. But settling there permanently was never on the table.

He moved to Citibank in Dubai — closer to home, at least within a flight’s distance — and switched from investment banking to private banking, working with ultra-high-net-worth individuals. His wife, American-born and raised, had never lived outside the United States before. The move was not easy. “Living in Pakistan was never part of the plan for her, nor was necessarily living in Dubai,” Hadi acknowledges. But she supported the decision, and the family — eventually three children — made it work across Dubai and Islamabad.

The first startup: Roamer, and what COVID forced

Back in Pakistan, Hadi reconnected with Ali Moin, a former Beaconhouse classmate who had been running a software development company and experimenting with fleet-tracking tools. The two had been talking about business ideas since around 2014 or 2015 — farm-to-table, financial models, various others — without making the leap. What finally moved them was Hadi’s observation, while still in Dubai, of a second wave of mobility disruption happening across Asia: beyond ride-hailing, using shared economy models and technology to solve the movement problem in densely populated, low-income urban markets.

They launched Roamer, a peer-to-peer car rental service. It grew to roughly 1,500 cars and 75,000 users. Crucially, it had positive unit economics — something Hadi is proud of, because most mobility companies, including Uber and Careem, lose money on every ride. Then COVID hit, and volumes dropped to 20% of peak. Hadi and Ali sat down in the second week of March 2020 and made a decision quickly: if this lasts three months, ride it out; if this lasts three years, pivot. They chose to pivot. Roamer was put on auto-drive and eventually wound down. All capital and energy went into launching a scooter-sharing service — EzBike — in October 2020.

Why ride-hailing is broken, and why owning the fleet fixes it

This is the intellectual core of the conversation, and Muzamil gives it room to breathe. Hadi’s argument is structural. Ride-hailing — Uber, Careem, and Roamer in its own way — faces an unsolvable supply-side problem in Pakistan. “You can’t price a ride for the common consumer in Pakistan whereby you could actually pay someone for their time and their car,” he says. “It’s not possible. So you will either make a loss or make it too expensive for the common consumer.” Uber’s bet in the United States is that automation will eventually eliminate the driver cost. That is a long way out, and Pakistan is further still.

EzBike’s answer is to own the fleet. Yes, it is capital-intensive. But the cost of providing a ride on a company-owned electric scooter is a fraction of what a two-wheel ride-hailing service must pay its driver. “We beat them on price and make a profit doing it,” Hadi says. The model is binary, he adds — globally, scooter-sharing companies either get operations and maintenance right and become profitable, or they do not and go out of business. The ones that failed did so because shared scooters take a beating and the operational complexity of keeping a fleet running is underestimated. EzBike spent a long period testing at small volumes, building proprietary software and hardware, learning battery swapping, and developing the analytics to redeploy scooters dynamically to where demand is. That learning, Hadi argues, is now the moat.

Battery swapping as the EV unlock

Later in the discussion, Hadi explains the three-pronged solution EzBike is building for its consumer and B2B delivery product. The first problem with EV adoption is price. The second is range anxiety. Battery swapping addresses both.

The model works like this: EzBike sources lithium-ion battery cells externally — mining and cell production are not indigenisable in the short term — but assembles battery packs locally, which is comparable in complexity to assembling a mobile phone. Those packs are deployed at battery swapping stations. A delivery rider or consumer books a swap on the app, pulls up, and is back on the road in two minutes. “There is no range anxiety,” Hadi says. “We will have a ubiquitous battery swapping network. Wherever you go, you will find our battery. And it will cost you half of what petrol costs.”

The consumer scooter EzBike is preparing to launch will sell at roughly 70 to 80% of the price of a leading motorcycle brand, and operating costs will be about 50% of a petrol equivalent. For a delivery rider doing high daily mileage, the fuel savings alone cover the installment payment. “Basically, it’s costing you zero,” Hadi tells Muzamil. The battery swapping revenue cross-subsidises the consumer scooter price, and the whole system — scooter, battery, swap station — has to be built together. “You can’t build one part of the tripod without the other.”

The air pollution emergency and the two-wheeler opportunity

Muzamil raises the question of scale and impact, and Hadi pivots to a number that reframes the entire conversation. Pakistan has 22 million motorcycles and 4 million cars. Sixty-five percent of the country’s air pollution comes from transport. Within transport, two-wheelers and three-wheelers have lower emission standards than cars, and some studies find they emit up to four times the toxic chemicals per urban kilometre. “We’re basically poisoning our air,” Hadi says. “It’s an emergency — second worst air quality in the world.”

The implication for policy is direct: if the goal is cleaner air, the EV transition must happen on two wheels, not four. Incentivising the purchase of electric scooters through interest-free refinancing, reducing import duty on motors and batteries to 1% (which the current EV policy already does for those components), and building out registration clarity would move the needle far more than subsidising electric cars for a much smaller ownership base. Hadi would support a revised policy that cuts incentives for large imported EVs — which drain the current account — and concentrates them on mass-market two- and three-wheelers.

Talent, professional culture, and the shared vision Pakistan lacks

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Hadi to assess the talent pipeline he has encountered building EzBike. The answer is candid and uncomfortable. “The biggest challenge we have right now is not political, it’s not economic, it’s not regulation — it’s literally the talent and the culture around the talent.” Technical skills are not the primary gap. What is missing is professional culture: showing up to meetings on time, knowing how to present yourself in an interview, prioritising your time, and sustaining the drive to improve. “That unrelenting drive — that’s something we don’t have yet.”

At the company level, Hadi believes you can change individuals — motivate them, get into their minds, make them want something more. At the macro level, structural change is needed at the university level. But the deeper issue, he argues, is the absence of a shared national vision. “If you have a vision as a nation, you have one way in which you’re all going, you can go there very fast.” He points to IT exports as an example: if Pakistan decided collectively to build an export industry that rivals India’s, and universities, government, and companies all moved in that direction, it could happen. The decision has not been made. “We have to decide who we really want to be.”

He closes with something closer to philosophy than strategy. He believes in manifestation — not in a mystical sense, but in the sense that what you focus on is what you build. A nation that focuses on its problems will let its opportunities pass. “This is a really, really powerful nation, and I don’t think Pakistanis realise that.” Muzamil wraps the conversation there, noting it has run to an hour and a half, and tells Hadi he is looking forward to riding one of the new scooters when they launch.