The COO who took a 85% pay cut to join Careem

Three Ds and a scholarship to Washington College

The episode opens with Fatima Mazhar explaining that her childhood was defined by constant movement. Her father was an army officer, which meant a new city every two years — Quetta, Gujranwala, Lahore, Bahawalpur. Beacon House followed her everywhere. When she sat her A-levels in 1999, she got three Ds and a C. “My parents thought that, buss, I’m done for,” she recalls.

What followed was a sequence of unlikely pivots. She enrolled at NUST’s business school — the second-ever batch of what was then called NIMS — and worked hard enough to finish with a 3.96 GPA. Her father was posted to the US as a defence attaché around the time of 9/11, and the posting was eventually cancelled. But by then Fatima had applied to Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland — on the suggestion of her father’s dentist’s brother-in-law, as a joke — and received a partial scholarship. She transferred her NUST credits, picked up a second major in international relations, added a minor in finance, and spent semesters at Bogazici University in Istanbul and the London School of Economics. She finished in three and a half years.

Graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh followed immediately. Her father was in the ISI at the time, and she was fascinated by intelligence services. She enrolled in a Security and Intelligence Studies program, minored in it, and majored in international finance. She got as far as a CIA office visit before a background check revealed her father’s ISI connection. “They said there’s no way you can. Goodbye.” She was, she says, very naive.

Investment banking, redundancy, and the first lesson about gender

After graduating in 2006, Fatima tried to find work in the US. She landed a role at E-Trade but never received an H-1B visa. Within fifteen days of finding out, she left for Dubai, where her parents had relocated. She joined Millennium Finance Corporation, a boutique investment bank founded by former BNP Paribas bankers, as a financial analyst working on mergers and acquisitions. The Saudi Cargo deal took six months of intense work. In 2009, the financial crisis caught up with Dubai and she was made redundant.

What stayed with her was not the redundancy itself but the reasoning given. Sixteen women were let go in the first wave, and one man. She was told that her father and brother could support her, so it was fine. “My parents raised us very equal,” she tells Muzamil. “My parents never said that if my brother can come at ten, you have to come at eight.” It was the first time she encountered that logic professionally, and it left a mark.

From parking lots to COO: the Dubai events years

After a year of odd jobs and a stint at a shady three-person private equity firm that never paid her, Fatima’s father connected her with a logistics startup called iMan — Integrated Management, a play on iPhone. The founder told her within two weeks that she was not a finance person, she was an operations person. She was offended. “That’s exactly what I thought, and it serves me right,” she says now, “because this many years later I can’t imagine doing anything but operations.”

She ended up managing transportation for large Dubai events — manually dispatching cars from parking lots, standing for fourteen-hour shifts. The company won the transportation contract for the Dubai World Cup, the most expensive horse race in the world, which meant coordinating 100 BMWs for 500 guests of Sheikh Mohammed. Formula One guest transportation followed. Coldplay’s New Year’s concert. She became known in the events circuit as “bus lady.” She worked her way from unpaid trainee to COO in three years. When disagreements with the CEO over how employees were being treated became irreconcilable, she left.

The server room interview and the 85% pay cut

In 2013, Fatima was earning 40,000 dirhams a month — roughly one million Pakistani rupees at the time — with a company car, a secretary, and her own office. She was 28. She had been preparing to interview at Uber when Careem kept appearing in her searches. She sent them an informal email. They called her in within a week.

The interview with Magnus Olsson happened in a server room, surrounded by stacked boxes. “His eyes were shining,” she tells Muzamil, “and I sat there and I thought, I have never felt this way about work. I have never felt in my life that I am this happy that I have built something. I wanna do this.” A meeting with Mudassir Sheikha followed. By the time she reached the ground floor in the lift, Magnus called. The offer: a position in the call center, taking driver calls, for 6,000 dirhams a month. Equity included. No guarantee of when the salary would recover.

She took it. She moved out of her apartment because she could no longer afford it. Three days later she joined Careem. “I lied to my parents about how much I was gonna be making,” she says. “They heard me in an interview somewhere, and that’s when they realized.”

Careem at that point had not yet raised its first round. The app was still in testing. Their only customer was McKinsey, a test pilot. The seed investment arrived two months after she joined.

Four years, ten months: fleet manager to head of expansion

Muzamil asks Fatima to walk through what she actually did at Careem. She started in the call center, moved to fleet manager — responsible for payroll, hiring, and training for an entire city’s driver base — then slid into product management for the internal dispatch system when no one else was available. When Mudassir needed someone for the GCC, she went. When Doha’s ride numbers were stagnant, she was sent for a month and produced the highest growth the city had seen. Kuwait was next, until visa restrictions on Pakistanis blocked the move.

Mudassir then told her to go to Pakistan. She had been out of the country for seventeen years. She refused. He hired someone else. That didn’t work. He sent her to assess the problem. She came back after two months and told him they needed a relaunch. He said: stay and launch Pakistan. That became the start of her role as Head of Expansion.

She launched Lahore, then Karachi, then Islamabad, then moved to Turkey, Egypt, and Morocco, opening cities across the region. “The longest I have stayed anywhere is the last two years,” she tells Muzamil. “In Lahore. Because of the pandemic. I don’t even know what home is.” After four years and ten months, with expansion processes fully documented and no new role that excited her, she took a sabbatical that Mudassir offered rather than accepting her resignation. She used it to go to MIT for the MBA she had wanted since her twenties.

While she was there, Uber acquired Careem. She resigned two days after hearing the news. “It made all of us very affluent, very rich. Everyone made a lot of money. But I felt it was not the right move.” She does not elaborate further, but the decision was immediate.

KeepTruckin: building a 1,500-person team in Pakistan

A former Careem colleague reached out about KeepTruckin, a US-based fleet management company looking for a Head of Pakistan. Fatima had initially said no, but after resigning from Careem she called back. She joined on July 1, 2019, when the Pakistan team was 35 people. By the time she left, it was approximately 1,500.

She pushes back on how KeepTruckin’s Pakistan operation is perceived. “I told them, don’t call us the back office. Call us the front office. Because 70% of KeepTruckin’s revenue is generated out of Pakistan.” The sales team generates revenue in dollars but is paid in rupees. Customer service runs twenty-four hours a day out of Pakistan. The R&D team — which Fatima says has developed AI-based camera technology that can predict accidents before they happen based on driving patterns — sits exclusively in Pakistan. “Nobody knows this,” she says.

The pandemic made the distance from US leadership harder to manage. Fatima was the only manager based in Pakistan; everyone else was in San Francisco. After fixing processes, expanding the team, and then finding herself with little left to do, she spent three months convincing her CEO to let her leave. She was finally out.

The Dukan.pk episode: ego, peer pressure, and a public failure

Between KeepTruckin and COLABS came Dukan.pk. Fatima is direct about how it happened and why it was a mistake.

Investors approached her with a pre-seed offer and connected her with Monas Rehman, who had an idea and needed an execution partner. She was leaving KeepTruckin. Former Careem colleagues were raising money. People kept asking her why she hadn’t started something of her own. “My biggest mistake was jumping into something not because my gut told me to do it but because I was concerned about what people would say if I didn’t,” she tells Muzamil. “Peer pressure. Ego.”

She joined as cofounder and COO. Made it public. Got the press release. Four months of difficult conversations followed — difficult for her, for Monas, and for the team caught in the middle. She left. “I knew in my mind it was sooner. But then I had to face the consequences.”

The lesson she took from it was about timing and public disclosure. “I joined COLABS in July. I didn’t make it public till October. And if I’m ever a cofounder again, you wouldn’t know, because I won’t make it public till I know for sure.” She also marks 2020 as the year she stopped making decisions based on what people would say. “It took me forty years of my life to reach that point.”

COLABS and the coworking thesis

After Dukan.pk, Fatima took a desk at COLABS to decompress. Omar Shah, the founder, had worked with her father and brother at Abraj. In conversation, she started giving him advice — raise money, fix the HR structure, think about expansion. He offered her a significant equity stake and asked her to join. She did.

Later in the discussion, Muzamil raises the WeWork question directly. Fatima’s answer is structural: “Where WeWork went wrong was they bought assets. Here, at least at COLABS, we’re leasing — long-term leases, ten-year leases, with minimal rental payments.” The model is not about owning real estate; it is about removing operational overhead for companies that do not want to manage offices, internet, generators, and facilities teams.

She describes the demand shift: remote work has made people realise how expensive and impractical home working is in Pakistan, where middle-class households are crowded and internet is unreliable. Companies that went remote during COVID discovered they were paying for empty offices; startups that need to grow fast do not want to hire a workplace team. COLABS charges roughly 50 rupees per square foot against a standalone office cost of around 150. The collaboration angle is real too — seven fintech CEOs ended up in the same space on the same day without planning it.

Her expansion vision is to reach the top 12 to 15 cities in Pakistan so that companies like Bazaar, Tazah Technologies, and GA Technologies, which are already moving into Multan, Quetta, and Rahimyar Khan, have somewhere to put their people without relocating them to Lahore. COLABS is at 1,000 seats and aims to reach 3,000 by the end of 2022.

Last mile, Airlift, and who is actually controlling whom

The conversation’s sharpest exchange comes when Muzamil asks about last-mile delivery. Fatima is sceptical. “Why is so much money being pumped to subsidise the delivery of a cold Coke to my house? It makes no sense to me.” She argues that in a low-labour-cost country, the autonomous vehicle technology that makes last-mile economics work in the US does not exist, and the only outcome she can see is an abusive workplace environment for riders earning fifteen to thirty rupees per delivery.

Her read on Airlift specifically is that the scale and international expansion — into Africa before fully covering Pakistan — only makes sense as a setup for acquisition. “I think they want Amazon to acquire them. They’ve got a last mile. They’ve got a platform. Amazon buys them.” She is honest that this confuses her and that she may be missing something. But she is also clear that if Airlift collapses, it poisons the well for the entire next generation of Pakistani startups the way a first-generation failure would.

By contrast, she is straightforward about what she does understand: fintech addresses an essential problem in a low-banked population with a friendly regulator; retail digitisation is fixing a genuinely broken distribution system; logistics infrastructure like Truck It In solves a real pain point she experienced herself running a small e-commerce business.

The conversation then shifts to something Muzamil frames as the more important question. He argues that the IT sector’s growth — export revenues rising, freelancing booming, dollar earnings compounding — means the people generating foreign exchange are now setting policy rather than being subject to it. “The action is controlling the government,” Fatima says, picking up the thread. “That’s right. Perfectly said.”

She adds a note of caution: the startup and tech sector is still a small fraction of the overall economy, and most of the people she sits with in startup conversations have never once discussed where Pakistan’s political scene is going. “This is the first time I’ve been asked this question,” she tells Muzamil, “and I’ve been on so many podcasts in the last year.” By the end of the conversation, she is asking him to bring more people who think this way into COLABS.