Pakistan has no worthy number two to Systems Limited

Running away from Cadet College — and being taken back

The episode opens with Muzamil asking Kashif Manzoor where he came from, and the answer is more eventful than most. Born in Multan, Kashif was sent to Cadet College Hasan Abdal in eighth grade after Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamization drive began converting the city’s only good missionary school to Urdu medium. His mother — a master’s graduate in Urdu at a time when women’s education was rare — drew the line at imposition rather than choice. Cadet College was the alternative.

He hated it. In ninth grade, he climbed the wall at night, caught a bus to Rawalpindi, and after roughly eighteen hours arrived home in Multan. The college had already called his parents. His mother’s first reaction was relief; within twenty-four hours, she had changed her mind. He was sent back.

What happened next shaped him more than the escape itself. The college board, in an unusual move, decided to readmit him — a violation of their own rules — on the condition that he now had to make them proud. “I feel that I owe it to everyone now,” Kashif recalls. “I hate this place. I can’t run away. I have no other option.” He became deeply introverted, finished FSC with a board position, and carries what he calls an “ambivalent feeling” about that period to this day. “Even now,” he tells Muzamil, “I’m inherently introvert, caught in an extrovert body.”

The GIK gamble — first batch, no map

After FSC, the conventional path was UET Lahore — but UET’s engineering program took seven years, a deal-breaker for someone already thinking about a PhD in physics. EME College (now NUST) rejected him despite his board ranking, citing an unwritten rule that private seats were reserved for sons of army officers. GIK had just opened.

Kashif and a friend — the same friend who had seen him off over the Cadet College wall — could not even find a bus to GIK. They tracked down the address of SOPREST in Islamabad’s F-8, knocked on the door, and were told to find a white wagon at Faizabad marked “To GIK.” They went, liked what they saw, dropped out of UET, and enrolled as part of GIK’s first-ever batch.

He had intended to study maths and applied physics toward a physics PhD. A B grade in maths in the first semester ended that. On the advice of faculty, he transferred to electronics and computer science. “At that time, we had no idea that computer science is the future,” he says. “It was just a toss of a coin.” He graduated in 1997, finishing third overall and second in computer science — close to, but not quite, the perfect GPA he had set as a target.

The GIK experience itself was formative in a way that had nothing to do with curriculum. One hundred and fifty students, a single canteen, no Uber, no connectivity to civilization — and teachers who had chosen to be there. “We found excitement in the fact that you feel that you are pioneering something,” Kashif tells Muzamil. “The teachers are passionate, the students are passionate, and now suddenly you’ve put them away from civilization and given them the independence to really do whatever they want to do.”

Schlumberger, Qatar, and the first time abroad

Graduating in 1997 into a Pakistan where IT was just beginning to pick up, Kashif’s immediate goal was simple: find the fastest legal route to enough money to self-fund a master’s degree without burdening his parents. Schlumberger, the French oil services company, was recruiting two to four people from Pakistan annually. GIK had become a brand name, and top resumes were being passed directly to companies. He was selected for wireline and testing — the division that lowers sophisticated equipment into drilled wells to determine whether oil is present.

The process began with five days in Dubai and a thousand dollars to decide whether to sign. Some of his cohort spent the money, enjoyed themselves, and declined. Kashif joined. He spent his first month as an operator — cleaning floors, doing manual work — before being sent to training school in Indonesia for four months, then returning to Qatar as an engineer. Three years in total, traveling on a rotation of two and a half months on, two to four weeks off, always returning to Multan.

Beijing in 2003 — setting up an office nobody else wanted

After Schlumberger, Kashif joined Technologics — a company co-founded by two MIT graduates — as director of professional services. Then came an offer nobody senior wanted to take: set up an offshore development center in Beijing. Post-9/11 sentiment had made some of Technologics’ US clients nervous about Pakistan-based delivery, and General Electric, a major customer, was considering a corporate policy against Pakistan-based vendors.

“Because I’ve been taking these ridiculous decisions all my life — Cadet College and then GIK — it’s in my nature to kind of not go where everyone is going,” Kashif explains. He took the role.

Beijing in 2003 was pre-Olympic, pre-mass tourism, and genuinely foreign to Pakistanis. Kashif had done a two-month Chinese language course before leaving. He learned quickly that saying “I don’t know Chinese” in fluent-sounding Mandarin caused more confusion than it solved — native speakers assumed he was mocking them. He switched to saying “I know very little Chinese,” which prompted the response: “No, no, your Chinese is very good, keep speaking.” There was no easy exit.

Hiring was its own puzzle. He tried Microsoft-style analytical interview questions — including the classic “why are manhole covers round?” — before realizing his candidates had no idea what a manhole was. The team he eventually built stayed with Technologics for years.

Oracle Asia Pacific, five years of travel, and the decision to come back

By 2008, Kashif had concluded that Technologics, despite its brilliant founders, was not going to become a billion-dollar Pakistani company. He wanted to understand what scale actually looked like from the inside before trying to contribute to it. He joined Oracle’s Asia Pacific division, working across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Australia — based out of Kuala Lumpur but rarely there.

His wife eventually returned to Pakistan with their two children, choosing to live with his mother in Multan. “I did not put any compulsion on her because it’s my mother, my responsibility, not hers,” Kashif says. He stayed in Asia for another three years, his boss allowing him two weeks every quarter to work from Pakistan — unusual well before remote work became normalized.

He completed a master’s at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign during a sabbatical from Technologics, achieving the perfect 4.0 GPA he had always wanted, at the cost of most of his time with his family. A PhD was within reach, but his mother’s Parkinsonism was worsening and he was the only son. He came back.

In December 2013, he returned to Pakistan for good, this time with all the loose ends tightened. He joined Confiz — co-founded by a LUMS graduate and his professor — as the person effectively running the business while the CEO, also the co-founder of PakWheels, focused on his entrepreneurial interests. Over eight years, Confiz grew from $1.5 million to $25 million in annual revenue.

Why Systems, and what actually changed after 2018

Later in the discussion, Muzamil walks through what he observed from the outside: a stable but unremarkable Systems Limited up to around 2018, then a sudden acceleration — new buildings, STZA partnerships, a stock price that went vertical, and friends from the Teradata and IBM world all picking up calls from Systems recruiters. What changed?

Kashif’s answer is structural. IT services is a human-intensive business with a direct equation: headcount, billability, rate. COVID shocked every industry, and companies that had deprioritized IT spending suddenly made it their top priority. Demand spiked. Supply — people — cannot be turned on like a tap. Pakistan had a large, pent-up talent pool, improving university quality, and almost no large offshore centers from international companies, partly because of security concerns in earlier years. “It is inexplicable why you aren’t that big in Pakistan,” Kashif says of the global IT majors.

Systems was already listed, which forced management maturity. It had institutional memory going back to 1977, veterans who had survived Y2K and its aftermath, and leadership — including Asif Peer — at exactly the age and experience level to recognize and move on the opportunity. Other companies were run by founder-CEOs for whom this was their first job. “They know how to sell the service,” Kashif observes, “but they get stuck in this sort of local maxima and are unable to go beyond that.”

He is direct about the limits of the current boom: “The party is not gonna last for too long.” The supply-demand imbalance will stabilize, probably within a couple of years. What survives will be companies that focused on excellence rather than piggybacking the wave.

Culture, internal comms, and chewing gum while running

Muzamil raises the tension that Kashif clearly thinks about: rapid growth from roughly a thousand to thirty-five hundred people, late nights, burnout, and the risk of growing faster than the organization can absorb. Kashif’s response draws on a conversation with Kamran Uzair, a co-founder of MineTree and head of engineering in the US: “We have to learn to chew the gum while running.” You do not stop to fix what is broken and then resume growth. You fix it while growing, and that requires a different set of skills.

The deeper problem, he argues, is internal communication. An employee working late nights and quietly looking for another job is not being told the stakes. Kashif lays them out plainly: in IT services, a single person generates roughly $50,000 to $52,000 in annual revenue. A billion-dollar Systems Limited means more than twenty thousand middle-to-upper-middle-class jobs — not five or ten millionaires, but twenty thousand families. India’s four largest IT companies combined generate around $60 billion in revenue and have created roughly a million such jobs. “Our jihad — the reason why we are working day and night — is because we are seeing an opportunity, and we want to capitalize it to grow to that level.”

On values, he is equally direct. Systems’ stated values include integrity, innovation, and dedication. “Why is integrity even a value?” he asks. “It’s a prerequisite.” The real work is articulating values the company actually believes in — curiosity, empathy, a mission that is genuinely audacious — and communicating them to people who are currently just experiencing the grind.

IT services, startups, and the export-first imperative

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil and Kashif have moved into the relationship between IT services growth and the startup boom — over $400 million invested in Pakistani startups in 2021 alone. Kashif is enthusiastic about startups but precise about the mechanism. When a startup scales, it needs professional C-level executives who have done it before. In Pakistan, those executives come from services companies. “Where are the startups going to get those professional C-level executives? In services companies.” He cites the Google playbook — Larry Page and Sergey Brin being told by their board to bring in Eric Schmidt as “adult supervision” — as the standard pattern that Pakistani startups will eventually follow.

On the broader economic question, both agree: consumption-based growth is a dead end. Export-led wealth creation has to come first. “Pehle toh aap bahar se paisa toh lekar aayein Pakistan” — bring the dollars in first, and domestic consumption follows automatically. IT services is one of the clearest paths to doing that at scale.

Pakistan in 2050 — and the one thing that worries him most

Muzamil closes with the question he asks every guest: how do you see Pakistan thirty years from now? Kashif’s answer is careful. “What Pakistan would be thirty years from now would be determined in the next five to seven years.” If Systems reaches half a billion dollars in revenue within that window — and he says targets exist and are being chased — then the trajectory from that point mirrors what India’s IT industry achieved from a similar inflection point onward. The best-case scenario: IT exports that rival Saudi Arabia’s oil revenues, as India has now achieved.

But there is one thing that worries him more than anything else. “If I look at IT services industry, there is no worthy second or third to Systems. That’s not good for us.” A market leader without a credible challenger gets complacent. He references the YouTube CEO making exactly this point: you need a smart number two chasing you to bring the best out of yourself. Pakistan’s other IT services companies, he argues, have become comfortable at $20 to $25 million in annual revenue and are reinvesting in startups rather than their own growth. “If I have to bet on Muzamil or Kashif, and I’m betting on Muzamil, what does this tell you about me?” he says, turning the logic directly on the host. “That’s the problem.”

The hope, he says, is that those companies stop taking the easy way out. One company cannot shoulder the burden of building an industry.