The American who moved to Pakistan to build a unicorn

From New Mexico to Karachi: a background with no shortcuts

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Jordan Olivas as someone who defies the easy narrative about foreign founders in Pakistan. Jordan is not a rich kid with spare capital looking for an exotic bet. He grew up in a town of three to four thousand people in New Mexico, in a household that ran paycheck to paycheck. His idea of a vacation was staying in a hotel an hour away. His idea of success, at the time, was becoming the manager of a retail store.

“I don’t come from a lot of money. I never went to Harvard or Stanford or worked at Facebook or Apple or Google. My startup that I worked at went — I had none of that. Nothing fancy.”

That context matters because it shapes how Jordan reads Pakistan. When he looks at talented, passionate people stuck inside a limiting bubble, he recognises something. He was that person. The difference, he argues, is not intelligence or work ethic — it is the circle of influence you happen to be born into.

He started early. With no allowance from his parents, he bought gum and candy from a store and resold it at school. That instinct — find a gap, move product, connect buyer and seller — ran through every job he held afterward.

A fintech career built from the ground up

Jordan’s professional path was entirely in financial technology, though he arrived there through hustle rather than pedigree. He worked at ARI Fleet managing fuel cards, then sold electronic bill payment systems for a Canadian company called CUBRA to government entities and utility companies. From there he joined RSS Software, a payment systems house where he was promoted to director of sales within seven months, at age 26.

The pivotal moment came when he joined Klarna — at the time a Swedish buy now, pay later company worth around three billion dollars. Jordan was there when they launched their pay-in-four installment product in the US, a format the market had barely seen before. By the time he left the broader BNPL space, Klarna was worth forty-five billion dollars. He then moved to ChargeAfter, a BNPL aggregator, as vice president of sales, where he built out the sales team and got a wider view of how the entire ecosystem worked across multiple providers.

That accumulation — fleet cards, bill payments, payment gateways, EMV certifications, card issuing, BNPL origination, BNPL aggregation — gave Jordan a rare end-to-end picture of how payments infrastructure actually functions. It also gave him the pattern recognition to spot a gap when he visited Pakistan.

The Fiverr message that started Kistpay

Alongside his corporate career, Jordan had been looking to build something of his own. He decided to open a software house focused on ecommerce and fintech. To find a co-founder, he sent a cold message to someone on Fiverr.

That person was Saad, who is now his co-founder at Kistpay.

“I literally messaged a random person on Fiverr three years ago. I was like, hey. You wanna start a software house together? Focus on ecommerce and fintech. And he’s like, sure.”

The software house grew to fifteen or twenty people. When Jordan came to Pakistan in person, he started asking basic questions about how payments worked — credit cards, debit cards, installments. He asked whether anything like Klarna existed. Nothing did. He looked at the landscape: fifth largest population in the world, over 220 million people, an extremely young demographic, a bubble of investment pressure that had been building for years. He could not understand why no one had done this yet.

Within weeks of deciding to move forward, Kistpay raised a million dollars. The first conversation to close took six weeks. The actual close took three weeks. The pre-money valuation was four and a half million dollars — high, Jordan notes, for Pakistan at the time.

How the product actually works

Muzamil pauses the origin story to make sure the audience understands what buy now, pay later means in practice, and Jordan walks through the mechanics carefully.

A consumer buys a product and pays in four equal monthly installments. There is no interest. There are no fees. There are no late charges. The product works on both credit and debit cards — which is the key technical distinction from how banks currently handle installment plans in Pakistan.

“With our solution, we don’t hold the full amount. We only authorize and settle the installment amount. So if it’s a 10,000 rupee transaction, time of purchase, we take 2,500 rupees. Thirty days later, we take another 2,500.”

On a credit card, the bank’s existing installment system holds the full amount upfront and settles monthly — which works because a credit card is a line of credit, not the consumer’s own money. On a debit card, that approach would drain the account immediately. Kistpay’s model only touches the installment amount at each interval, making it genuinely usable for the vast majority of Pakistani consumers who do not hold credit cards.

The revenue model sits entirely on the retailer side. Merchants pay Kistpay for the ability to offer a differentiated checkout experience. The consumer pays nothing extra.

Kistpay was also moving into in-store payments at the time of recording, with Philips and Costs among the first brands to pilot the physical point-of-sale integration. Other signed retailers included Uniworth, Xiaomi, and several celebrity fashion brands.

Becoming a trust authority without planning to

One of the more striking moments in the conversation is a story Jordan tells about an unexpected development. A consumer emailed Kistpay’s support line complaining about a defective product and demanding a refund. Jordan responded, assured them that Kistpay would cover a full refund if the retailer failed to honour its own policy, and invited them to visit the office.

It turned out the consumer had not purchased through Kistpay at all. They had paid cash on delivery. They had simply seen the Kistpay logo at checkout and assumed it meant the brand was vetted.

“A consumer didn’t even purchase with Kistpay, saw Kistpay at the point of checkout, and they said Kistpay is a trusted brand. They never even purchased with Kistpay. But consumers already trust us.”

Jordan had not planned for Kistpay to become a trust authority. The value proposition to retailers was about checkout optimisation and cost reduction. But something else was happening organically: consumers were reading the presence of Kistpay as a signal that the retailer had been screened. In a market where consumer protection infrastructure is thin and cash on delivery remains dominant precisely because of trust deficits, this was a significant and unplanned asset.

The credit problem and the proprietary underwriting model

Muzamil raises a question that sits at the heart of any BNPL business in a market like Pakistan: how do you decide who gets credit when there is no functioning credit score system?

Jordan is careful not to give away the specifics — “that’s kind of the secret sauce” — but confirms that Kistpay has built a proprietary underwriting algorithm developed entirely in-house, drawing on his own experience, his co-founder’s experience, and the team’s collective knowledge. Critically, Kistpay does not use the CNIC (national identity card number) as a primary underwriting input. Jordan considers it an irrelevant signal for their purposes.

He also addresses the fraud question directly. Loss rates are higher than global benchmarks, he acknowledges, but lower than the team expected. The model is being tightened continuously as transaction volume grows. The approach is iterative: transact, observe, adjust.

On the broader credit infrastructure question, Jordan is sympathetic to the banks’ risk aversion — Pakistan is a genuinely difficult operating environment — but argues that technology makes it possible to underwrite consumers in ways that do not require the excruciating documentation processes that currently exist. The goal is to use data, not paperwork.

Product iteration as competitive advantage

Later in the discussion, Muzamil raises a pattern he has observed across Pakistani fintech: heavy marketing spend, weak product. Apps that crash. Onboarding flows that lock users to a single SIM card permanently. Basic UX failures that go unfixed for years because the teams building them are too bureaucratic to move.

Jordan’s response is to describe Kistpay’s operating rhythm. Seven product iterations in a single week. App reviews checked every two hours. A 4.3-star rating with over 70 reviews within weeks of launch. When users complained that the absence of a password felt like a security flaw, Jordan’s team did not argue — they added a screen explaining that the one-time PIN was the security mechanism. When a reviewer asked for in-app browsing instead of external redirects, the team built it.

He also describes a real case where a user had switched phone numbers and needed their account history transferred — the exact scenario Muzamil had personally experienced with a food delivery app and been told was impossible. Kistpay resolved it with an OTP verification on the new number and a single document check. No branch visit required.

“Using technology to ease a consumer burden and manage risk appropriately. That’s what we’re doing.”

The contrast Jordan draws is between companies that design a product once and defend it, and companies that treat every piece of user feedback as a product brief.

Pakistan’s Gen Z and the talent question

Muzamil asks Jordan how he finds Pakistan’s young workforce compared to what he has seen in the US. Jordan’s answer is direct: Pakistan’s Gen Z is more impressive.

He attributes this to the same bubble dynamic he described earlier. A generation that grew up watching their parents navigate economic hardship, then stability, is now entering the workforce with something to prove and a clear sense of what it is working toward. He points to one employee, Zara, as an example — someone whose output and instincts far exceed what her years of experience would suggest.

Jordan also speaks at length about the women on his team. Three of his directors are female. He pushes back against the image of Pakistani women as quiet and reserved — in his office, he says, the women are among his strongest employees. He connects this to a structural dynamic: men in Pakistan often carry the pressure of being the household breadwinner, which can make them anxious about job security in ways that distort their focus. Women who are working, particularly those who fought family resistance to do so, tend to be working for the problem itself.

Kistpay runs an annual scholarship covering 50% of tuition for a female employee still completing their degree. Jordan frames it not as a grand gesture but as a small, concrete thing a startup can do.

The unicorn thesis and why Pakistan specifically

Muzamil asks Jordan to explain the unicorn claim — not the statistics, but the actual reasoning behind choosing Pakistan over Mexico, South America, or anywhere else that might have made more obvious sense for a Latinx founder.

Jordan’s answer is about problems. The US is a developed country with very few unsolved problems at scale. Pakistan has many. That is not a reason to avoid it — it is the reason to be there.

“The fact that there are problems is what excites me, that I can solve them and make money out of it, not just for myself, but for the economy.”

He also makes a specific definitional point about what a Pakistani unicorn would mean. Companies like Careem, he notes, were not made in Pakistan — they were headquartered elsewhere. The goal is a company that is made in Pakistan, by Pakistanis, for Pakistanis, and that scales globally while keeping its core team and operations in the country.

On the global expansion question, Jordan argues there is no reason to hire separate development teams in other markets. Pakistan has the development talent, the project management talent, the sales talent, and the marketing talent to support international operations from a single base. The failure mode he has seen is not Pakistani talent underdelivering — it is foreign clients giving unclear requirements and blaming the output.

By the end of the conversation, Jordan describes a best-case Pakistan in twenty-five to thirty years that looks something like Dubai in infrastructure terms, but retains its own culture. He is careful to say he hopes Pakistan does not lose what makes it distinct — the hospitality, the organised chaos of the roads, the way strangers treat each other. He attended his first Pakistani wedding the weekend before the recording and was, by his account, genuinely blown away.

Muzamil closes by thanking Jordan for bringing that perspective back to an audience that has, in his words, been in an echo chamber for too long — and for being willing to take the conversation back to the US as well.