The founder who built a company from a cold Upwork message

From Lodhran to Lahore: a small-city upbringing

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Umair Majeed Rana as someone originally from Lodhran — a district in South Punjab that Umair describes as a peaceful but small city, without major universities or the kind of infrastructure that draws attention. What it does have, Umair says, is people who have gone on to do significant things: he mentions the current IG Punjab and a few other public figures as examples of Lodhran producing people who try to give back to the region.

Umair’s early schooling was at a semi-government school operated by the district commissioner — a large institution with proper cricket and football grounds, the kind of infrastructure that private schools in smaller cities rarely matched at the time. He credits that environment with building something more important than academic results: confidence. Performances in front of crowds, inter-class cricket matches that required formal applications, and the general structure of a large institution gave him a foundation he only recognised in retrospect.

By class eight, the quality of teachers had declined and he moved to a different school before eventually making his way to FAST Lahore for his undergraduate degree in computer science.

Arriving at FAST: the eye-opener

Muzamil asks what it was like to arrive in a large city for the first time. Umair is direct about the difficulty. The teaching style at FAST was conceptual rather than rote, and he was not prepared for it. He also found himself surrounded by people who were, in his words, already at a different level — board toppers, students from bigger cities, people whose numbers in assessments made it clear that the comfortable position he had held back home meant very little here.

“University mein zahir hai par everybody is like you as well,” he says. It was an eye-opener, and the adjustment took time. His GPA suffered in the first few semesters. His proudest claim about his undergraduate years is not a grade but a fact: he graduated in four years without a single F on his record.

Later in the discussion, Muzamil and Umair spend time on what a degree is actually for. Umair’s view is that degrees are not primarily about skills — they are about fundamentals, about learning how to operate inside a system. “The difference between a person with a degree and a person with just a skill set will be huge,” he says. “Aapko shayad front par nazar na aaye but chahe woh jis tarah client se communicate karega, woh apni teams mein kis tarah se kaam karega — woh management skills uski kaisi hongi?” Fast also made him take courses in management science and marketing alongside computer science, which he now sees as quietly formative.

Systems Limited, a masters left unfinished, and Addo AI

After graduating, Umair joined Systems Limited in their big data team — one of twelve new hires, and one of only eleven who had listed big data as their first preference. The work involved Power BI, SQL Server, and Microsoft’s broader tooling ecosystem, with consultants connecting from a US-based partner company called Visionate. He describes it as fast-paced, high-pressure, and genuinely engaging.

He then attempted a masters at FAST, where his first semester GPA was 3.9. The problem was not the coursework — it was the nature of research itself. “Jis pandra ka background ho, jo coding mein maza aata, uske liye research is very boring kind of a thing,” he says. The research environment felt, in his words, like a government job compared to the pace of Systems Limited. He left the masters unfinished after three semesters.

From there he moved briefly to Addo AI, where he worked on automation rules engines for airline clients in Singapore — systems that determined which rule should fire when specific conditions were met. His time there was short, but it connected him to people who would matter later.

The Upwork message that started Datics AI

The company’s origin story is almost accidental. Umair had created an Upwork profile years earlier and had barely used it. One day, out of nowhere, he opened it and sent a proposal. The client responded the same day and said he would hire him on Monday. There had been no prior relationship, no warm introduction — just a template proposal and a response.

The initial contract was $40 an hour for one resource. The client then asked for two more machine learning engineers. Umair sourced them, sent their CVs, and the client hired them. A company had begun, almost without a formal decision to start one.

Datics AI was incorporated on October 8. Within the first two to three months, the team had grown to around twenty people. But the early period was hard. The work involved screen tracking and productivity monitoring, which meant that eight productive hours required twelve hours of actual presence. Umair’s co-founder was simultaneously managing a job crossover. The masters had to go.

Specialisation as the only viable strategy

One of the sharpest arguments Umair makes is about focus. Early on, Datics AI committed to working only on AI and machine learning — no backend, no frontend, nothing else. He eventually concluded that this was not sustainable as a growth strategy, but the principle behind it remained: you cannot charge premium rates without a specific grip on a specific problem.

“Aapki jo rates hain — rates wahi wahi hai. For example eight se chalis par gaya lekin chunke chalis woh niche ka kaam tha.” The rate increase was not random — it came from owning a niche deeply enough that clients had no obvious alternative.

He is equally direct about the trap of offering too many services. “Aap dekhenge service providing company pachas services de rahi hain. Toh aap kabhi jab tak aap special nahin hain, aapki specialty uske upar nahin hai toh aap uske upar grow nahin kar sakte.”

The company eventually expanded beyond pure AI work because the market reality demanded it. Most clients need must-haves, not nice-to-haves. AI and ML are, for the majority of businesses, still in the nice-to-have category. Datics built out a full product development capability — business analysts, UI/UX, development, QA, HR, marketing, sales — and positioned itself as an end-to-end product house rather than a resource outsourcing firm.

By the time of this conversation, Datics had reached Expert Vetted status on Upwork — which Umair describes as the top one percent of talent on the platform, with a rigorous screening process. He notes it is, to his knowledge, the only Expert Vetted agency on Upwork in Pakistan.

The structural problem with Pakistan’s IT industry

This is where the conversation becomes most substantive. Muzamil raises the gap between Pakistan’s stated IT export ambitions — the prime minister had recently mentioned a $50 billion target — and the ground reality. Umair does not soften his response.

His diagnosis is structural. Pakistan’s tech workforce is split between a low-value bottom — graphic designers, basic WordPress developers, entry-level freelancers earning $2 to $5 an hour — and a high-value top doing deep learning, data consulting, and enterprise software at $100 to $200 an hour. Between these two ends, there is almost nothing. No middle layer. No pipeline connecting one to the other.

“Hum bahut baat kar rahe hain $5 billion ki, $10 billion ki. Kal toh prime minister aur woh Shaukat Tarin sahab ne pachas billion dollars ki bhi baat kar di.” His response is to do the arithmetic. To reach $15 billion — a figure he considers ambitious but not impossible — Pakistan would need roughly 600,000 high-value resources. High-value meaning people who can work inside organisations like Systems Limited, in data consulting, ML/AI, or enterprise UI/UX. The current employable rate, by his estimate, is around 12 to 15 percent of graduates. The remaining 85 percent are, in his word, wasted.

“Number kehta hai ki baarah percent — agar mein liberal ho jaoon toh pandrah percent ke upar mera employable hai. Baaki pachaasi percent jo hai na woh basically waste ho raha hai.”

The $50 billion target he considers unrealistic. A credible best case, he says, is somewhere between $20 and $25 billion. A realistic near-term target — the one presented at the Bahawalpur conference he organised — was $3 to $3.5 billion by end of year, and $5 billion by 2025.

Freelancing culture: credit and critique

Muzamil and Umair spend time on the freelancing ecosystem, and Umair’s position is nuanced. He gives the freelancing influencer culture genuine credit: it made the tech industry aspirational and brought people into the space who might never have considered it. “Unhon ne na is poori space ko aur industry ko sexy kar diya hai.”

But the ceiling is real. A freelancer working alone, doing redundant work, billing eighteen to twenty hours a day to reach $5,000 or $10,000 a month, is not building anything that scales. “Aap freelancing karke aap aaraam se apne paanchwai dollar ke logon toh bana sakte hain akele baith kar apne kamre ke andar but agar aapne ek bade vision mein kaam karna hai toh that becomes increasingly impossible.”

The deeper problem, he argues, is that freelancing culture has produced a success metric — monthly dollar earnings — that stops making sense above a certain threshold. The influencers selling courses are reaching a real audience, but that audience has a maximum ceiling. “Paanch hazaar dollar se woh upar ja hi nahin sakta.”

His initiative, Tech Nation, is a direct response to this. Its goal is to shift the narrative: three to five years inside a structured job is not slavery, it is the education that makes everything else possible. “Job is not a slavery. Balki hum kehte hain bade toh yeh kehte hain hamare paas within Pakistan jo yeh wali voice generate ho rahi hai ki job is a slavery — it’s not.”

Policy, repatriation, and the money that doesn’t come back

One of the more specific points Umair raises is about repatriation. He believes Pakistan’s actual IT revenue is likely double the official figure — because professionals are not bringing money back into the country. The reason is policy anxiety. He cites a specific example: a 1% withholding tax was imposed on tech companies with a promise of cashback, but the FBR portal for processing that cashback was not ready when the tax began. The result was a loss of confidence.

“IT ko flexibility deni padegi. Nahin denge toh IT chalegi — yeh nahin hoga rukegi — lekin paisa nahin aayega Pakistan mein.”

The Pakistan Software Export Board and the Ministry of IT are, he says, doing meaningful work — boot camps, industry training programmes, companies going to Bahawalpur. But the policy environment needs to match the ambition. Flexibility for the IT sector is not a favour; it is a precondition for the money to actually arrive.

Tech Nation and the content gap

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Umair about the next five to ten years and about his vision for Pakistan in 2050. Umair’s answer circles back to the same theme: the missing content layer. There is almost no publicly available documentation of how Pakistani tech companies were actually built — the real journeys, the failures, the processes. Without that, young people have no models to follow except the freelancing influencer.

“Jis company ke CEO ne apni journey ko bataya is tarah se logon ko ki woh usko sune. Jab woh apni journey hi nahin share kar rahe hain toh aap youth ko nahin blame kar sakte asal mein.”

Tech Nation’s goal is to fill that gap — to create professionals rather than freelancers, to document real company journeys, and to give the next generation a longer time horizon. Umair is optimistic about 2050, not because the problems are small but because he believes the generation coming up has a different relationship to pain and to possibility than the one before it.

Muzamil closes by noting what struck him most across the conversation: a consistency of ethics and work ethic that he attributes, at least in part, to how Umair was raised. He says he would like to meet the man who raised him. It is a small moment, but it lands — because the whole conversation has been, underneath the industry analysis, a story about where values come from and what they make possible.