Founders & Startups

Jun 3, 2026

The YouTubeification of software

Muzamil Hasan on why AI is doing to software what YouTube did to media — deflating costs, removing gatekeepers, and shifting the moat to ideas, taste, and distribution.

May 16, 2026

Pakistan's first giga factory bets on a new kind of rider

with Saad Farrukh

EVEE CEO Saad Farrukh on why he refuses to compete with the Honda CD 70, what 50,000 scooters on Pakistani roads have taught him about batteries and after-sales, and why a 250,000-unit giga factory in Karachi is a pitch to Chinese component makers as much as it is to consumers.

May 15, 2026

Pakistan's startup space has become practically meaningless

with Mutaher Khan

Mutaher Khan, founder of Data Darbar, joins Muzamil to dissect why Pakistan's startup narrative collapsed, what VCs got wrong, why local business journalism never matured, and where AI leaves an emerging-market services economy.

Dec 11, 2025

How Daari Mooch turned a beard-oil bottle into a 3M brand

with Ibrahim Shaukat

Ibrahim Shaukat, founder of Daari Mooch, walks through how a Faisalabad business kid started a beard-oil brand from a UK dorm, survived a near-fatal agency hire, restructured the company, hired a CEO, and is now opening salons and pushing into 2,000 trade shops.

Nov 28, 2025

Six billion dollars a year already runs through Salesflo

with Yasir Suleman Memon

Yasir Suleman Memon, founder of Salesflo, on growing up in Sindh's university towns, eight years inside Unilever, the shutter-shop garage where the company started, the closure of Jugnu, why pricing isn't the moat in enterprise SaaS, and why he is convinced Pakistan can produce a hundred-million-dollar SaaS company.

Oct 20, 2025

Why Kickstart stopped buying buildings and let landlords pay instead

with Saad Riaz

Saad Riaz on how Kickstart went from forty desks in a scrappy room to over six thousand desks across three cities, why the entire growth model now runs on landlord partnerships, and why corporates — not startups — are the customer that built this industry.

Oct 17, 2025

How Dipitt got onto shelves in 33 countries

with Syed Zeeshan Haider

Dipitt founder Syed Zeeshan Haider walks Muzamil through leaving Philip Morris on a hunch, selling out at Karachi Eat, building a national sauce brand from a Karachi kitchen, and using the COVID supply-chain gap to land Dipitt in Tesco, Asda and 33 other export markets.

Oct 3, 2025

Why Pakistan's next unicorn ships from a warehouse, not a website

with Arif Iqbal

Arif Iqbal, founder and CEO of LAM, returns to break down how a Pakistani fashion marketplace ships to 7,500 cities in 100 countries — and why the real product underneath is logistics, warehousing, and an e-commerce infrastructure called Octane that any small Pakistani business can plug into.

Sep 29, 2025

If you're mega ambitious, stay home and build

with Omar Shah

Colabs CEO Omar Shah on why coworking quietly works in Pakistan even as WeWork collapsed globally, what Abraaj actually taught him about scaling, why Saudi is now the bigger prize, and where the local consumer wall really sits.

Sep 26, 2025

Why Pakistan's western wear market is the next $5B prize

with Muneeb Zafar

Fitted founder Muneeb Zafar walks through eight years of bootstrapping a dress-shirt brand from a 500,000-rupee start to 1,500 products a day — and why the western wear market in Pakistan is about to do something it has never done before.

Sep 22, 2025

Pakistan's electric scooter winner isn't selling to bike owners

with Saad Farrukh

Saad Farrukh, CEO of Evee, walks Muzamil through the journey from a 200-square-foot McLeod Road spare-parts shop to leading Pakistan's electric two-wheeler market — why scooters and not bikes, why women and the elderly are the real growth, and why every major VC in the country said no.

Sep 19, 2025

How a Sahiwal kid built Pakistan's largest e-commerce logistics company

with Omer Khan

PostEx co-founder Omer Khan walks Muzamil through the chartered-accountancy-to-Dubai-sales journey that led to PostEx, why the company runs its own logistics rather than outsourcing, how its hybrid fintech model actually works, and why he refuses to set a ceiling at "regional leader".

Sep 17, 2025

Why PriceOye sells you a $500 phone before a $5 t-shirt

with Adnan Shaffi

PriceOye co-founder Adnan Shaffi on selling web hosting in the seventh grade, why e-commerce in Pakistan had to start with the hardest category, what a managed marketplace actually fixes, and why he is still building on a Pakistani passport.

Sep 8, 2025

Why Yango bet on Pakistan when everyone else was leaving

with Miral Sharif

Miral Sharif, general manager of Yango Pakistan, on launching a ride-hailing business two days before May 9, why sustainable growth from day one was the brief, and how mobility quietly stopped being a luxury and became infrastructure.

Jul 2, 2025

Why Netflix isn't really competing for Pakistan

with Jonathan Mark

Jonathan Mark, co-founder of begin.watch, explains why the big global streamers have left Pakistan as a dark market, how he locked premium Hollywood deals at a tenth of the price, and why sports — not dramas — is the wedge to build a streaming business in a piracy-heavy economy.

Jun 11, 2025

Pakistanis think too small — and the language barrier is the smallest part

with Qumber Hussain

Qumber Hussain, founder of Virtue Solutions, walks Muzamil through how a mass-communication graduate with no money and no business background built a 175-person marketing-technology company servicing Saudi, the US, Canada and Europe — and why the real barrier for Pakistani talent going global is not English, it is the size of the pond they were raised in.

May 12, 2025

AI will not kill jobs. It will kill the people who don't use AI

with Zeeshan Sikandar

Software agency founder Zeeshan Sikandar walks Muzamil through the climb from a 6,000-rupee filing job to a million-dollar ARR services company — and why the next leg requires sitting in San Francisco, not refreshing Fiverr.

Mar 10, 2025

Why Ronin's founder bet on a Pakistan-built consumer brand

with Jahangir Munawar

Jahangir Munawar, founder and CEO of Ronin, walks Muzamil through the journey from a CA dropout running a mobile shop to manufacturing six million consumer electronics devices a year in Pakistan — and why he refuses to move the business abroad.

Feb 26, 2025

Why NSTP is the only science park in Pakistan that actually works

with Yaruq Nadeem

Yaruq Nadeem of the National Science and Technology Park at NUST explains what a science park actually is, why it is different from an incubator or an IT park, the startups inside that are scaling internationally, and where Pakistani founders consistently fail at commercialisation.

Jan 31, 2025

Why most Pakistani real estate is a dead investment

with Fahad Lone

Fahad Lone is building Pakistan's first large-scale resort in the Galyat. He walks Muzamil through why horizontal land plots are not productive real estate, how he engineered heating and water systems for a building that has to work in snowfall, and the financial model that pays apartment owners off the entire pool of revenue — not just room rent.

Nov 13, 2024

Pakistan is still stuck in primary school on its economy

with Muhammad Ali Tabba

Muhammad Ali Tabba, chairman of Lucky Cement and one of the senior figures behind the Lucky Group, walks Muzamil through how a 1962 trading house in Karachi became one of the largest industrial conglomerates in Pakistan, and why he thinks the country's economic problems are simple but politically uncomfortable to fix.

Oct 2, 2024

Pakistan is stuck in cotton while the world has moved on

with Mussadiq Zulqarnain

Interloop chairman Mussadiq Zulqarnain on raising 9.35 million rupees in 1992 to start a socks factory, becoming the world's number one sock manufacturer, why Pakistan confuses textiles with apparel, and what a deindustrialising country still has going for it.

Aug 2, 2024

How Avanceon now charges a premium for being in Pakistan

with Bakhtiar Wain

Bakhtiar Wain, founder and CEO of Avanceon, walks Muzamil through thirty years of building a Pakistani industrial automation business — from importing IBM-compatible computers in the late eighties to a $100 million order target across Pakistan, the Middle East, Africa, and the US.

Apr 19, 2024

Pakistan's exports lose at the shelf, not the field

with Ehtesham Maqbool Elahi

MacPac Films managing director Ehtesham Maqbool Elahi on a forty-year packaging journey, surviving a fire that wiped out thirty years of work, the patent that killed bioplastic, and why Pakistani exports keep losing on the shelf instead of the field.

Jan 19, 2024

Why a banker of twenty years built a landscaping company and a fashion label

with Mohsin Ahsan

After two decades in investment and hardcore banking, Mohsin Ahsan runs a Dubai-based landscaping and swimming-pool construction business and a Lahore-born fashion label called Nooriya. He explains why he refused the easy path of advisory, why he keeps building for Pakistan from Dubai, and why customer trust is the only moat that matters.

Jan 17, 2024

Nobody had ever displaced a number one in classifieds

with Haider Ali Khan

Dubizzle Group CEO Haider Ali Khan on coming home from fifteen years of hardware engineering in Austin, walking into a three-person Bayut office while Dubizzle owned the market, why Zameen had to build a logistics business before it could build a classifieds business, and why he believes the next decade in this region looks like a hockey-stick — not a capital flight.

Jan 10, 2024

Why Pakistan's web series can't get past the campaign cycle

with Sami Rehman

Bekaar Films co-founder Sami Rehman on the medical-to-film detour, why a Ferrell Williams cover got them their first viral hit before the wines did, what brands keep getting wrong about long-form content, and why 2022–2023 was a free fall for the Pakistani creator economy.

Dec 22, 2023

Pakistan does not have 240 million customers — and we made that number up

with Raza Matin

Raza Matin — founder of PayPro, Brandverse, and Chikoo, and the man who helped get YouTube unbanned in Pakistan — on why the 240 million people pitch was deliberately constructed at Google, why technology in Pakistan is mostly parasitic, and what it actually takes to digitize a small retailer's business.

Dec 13, 2023

Mina Salman built Bagallery from her couch — then learned how funding really works

with Mina Salman

Bagallery founder Mina Salman walks through the unglamorous middle of her story — a Wix site she calls pathetic, a one-day exhibition that lost money, two funding rounds totalling five million dollars, and the moment the Pakistani startup bubble burst and forced her to relearn what a business is for.

Dec 1, 2023

Why Pakistani founders glamorise the wrong half of a startup

with Awais Shafique

Awais Shafique sold his Munich startup Precise to Meta — the first Pakistani-founded acquisition for the company, and the seed of its German engineering hub. He walks Muzamil through a viral Stanford win that ended in depression, a borrowed plane ticket to Germany, the institute that gave him his co-founders, and why he thinks Pakistan's startup scene keeps optimising for the wrong things.

Nov 29, 2023

Why Jaffer Haider never took the VC money for PosterMyWall

with Jaffer Haider

Jaffer Haider, founder of PosterMyWall, on building a profitable product company out of Lahore that serves 20 million users globally — without venture capital, without an iOS app for years, and without ever leaving the city he grew up in.

Nov 22, 2023

The only startups worth funding solve a problem that already exists

with Aleena Nadeem

Aleena Nadeem left Goldman and London venture capital to build Edufy, Pakistan's first student-loan fintech, after a decade of family charity work convinced her giving money away would never scale. She explains why a startup only fails when there's no real demand, and why education credit is the one product she'd bet the country on.

Nov 15, 2023

Why smart money came into Pakistani startups when everyone left

with Faisal Aftab

Faisal Aftab closed a large foreign-backed round into Pakistani startups at the exact moment the ecosystem was being written off as dead. He walks Muzamil through why he went bearish in early 2022, why he thinks April–June 2023 was the bottom, and why the next cycle won't look like the 2021 bubble.

Nov 8, 2023

Why she left a global Cisco role to rebuild Pakistani charity

with Kanwal Cheema

Kanwal Cheema spent sixteen years climbing Cisco — the only woman engineer in its Middle East and Africa region, then a global account director. She tells Muzamil why she left, moved back to Pakistan, and built My Impact Meter to put traceability behind every rupee of charity.

Nov 1, 2023

From copy-pasted Kindle books to a $16.5M Amazon exit

with Muhammad Naeem Sikandar

Naeem Sikandar built well over $30 million selling and flipping Amazon brands — but he started by copy-pasting recipes into Kindle books from a one-room house in Peshawar. He walks Muzamil through the whole arc, then defends and dismantles Pakistan's Amazon-course industry.

Oct 27, 2023

What a metric-pass businessman taught a PhD about education

with Dr. Shahid Qureshi

Dr. Shahid Qureshi spent five degrees memorising answers before a businessman with no college admission taught him what education was for. He walks Muzamil through Taxila, Bangkok, a British power plant, LUMS, a German PhD, and twelve years at IBA — and lands on a quieter case for entrepreneurship than the one Pakistan keeps importing.

Oct 6, 2023

The anger that built a Dubai hospitality business

with Mahwussh Alam

Mahwussh Alam went from a single Airbnb unit in Dubai Marina to managing hundreds of properties under One Perfect Group. She walks Muzamil through a Karachi childhood, a computer science degree she took without ever having touched a computer, a 2008 layoff, the lonely identity-loss of new motherhood, and the science she now applies to Dubai real estate.

Oct 4, 2023

Why a Facebook engineer left Seattle to digitise Pakistani fashion

with Arif Iqbal

Arif Iqbal spent fifteen years building recommendation engines at Microsoft Bing, eBay, Pinterest and Facebook — then left a comfortable Seattle life to start LAAM, a fashion marketplace shipping Pakistani clothing to a hundred countries. He explains why South Asian fashion is a multi-billion-dollar export hiding behind broken logistics.

Sep 22, 2023

Why a brand is a story you agree to believe

with Atiya Zaidi

Atiya Zaidi runs BBDO Pakistan — Pepsi, Shan, MG Motors — and a Cannes Lion to show for it. She walks Muzamil through what advertising actually does, a father who survived 80% burns, a path into the industry she only ever stumbled into, and why Pakistani brands keep mistaking risk-aversion for strategy.

Aug 30, 2023

How Dawlance became a Pakistani engineering story

with Umar Ahsan Khan

Umar Ahsan Khan walked into Dawlance's head office for a two-and-a-half-hour meeting and never really left. He tells Muzamil how a local fridge brand built from scratch in 1980 was sold to a Turkish giant on one condition — keep the name — and what it takes to actually manufacture, not just assemble, in Pakistan.

Jul 5, 2023

Why AI rewards problem solvers and could bring women back to work

with Mahe Zehra Husain

Mahe Zehra Husain runs one of the few woman-led tech firms Muzamil has come across in Pakistan. She argues the age of AI will erase mediocrity and reward ideas, problem solving and storytelling — and that it could finally pull Pakistani women back into the workforce.

Ep 288 · Nov 28, 2022

Abdul Razak Dawood: a Memon village, Columbia, and building DESCON

with Abdul Razak Dawood

Abdul Razak Dawood traces a life from a Memon village with no electricity to Columbia, the Lawrencepur mill, the loss of East Pakistan, and the founding of DESCON, then explains his bet on Africa, exports, and sports.

Jun 22, 2022

How FAST-NUCES built a university on 10 crore rupees

with Dr. Aftab Maroof

Dr. Aftab Maroof, Rector of FAST-NUCES, traces the university's unlikely origin — a single donation from Aga Khan in 1986 — and explains how dedication, zero politics, and one rupee at a time built five campuses, 14,000 students, and a research culture from scratch.

Jun 20, 2022

Pakistan's farms are top 10 in output, bottom 50 in yield

with Muhammed Bukhari

Muhammed Bukhari left a GM role at British Telecom to build Farmdar, a GeoAI startup using satellite imagery to fix Pakistan's agriculture from the inside. The conversation covers why supply chain is not the answer, how 21 bands of light can replace soil sensors, and why Pakistan's unfair advantage is farming.

Jun 17, 2022

Pakistan's first Google Developer Expert on building things

with Saad Hamid

Saad Hamid — Google's Regional Lead for Developer Community Programs and Pakistan's first Google Developer Expert — traces a winding path from a cadet college in Skardu to Singapore, through blogging, nonprofits, accelerators, and a career app called Jadu. The conversation covers discipline, curiosity, Pakistan's IT talent gap, and what coherence would actually take.

Jun 15, 2022

Jazz's CEO on why 4G for all beats 5G for a few

with Aamir Ibrahim

Aamir Ibrahim, CEO of Jazz, and Saif Ali of Dastgyr join Muzamil to unpack Pakistan's largest Series A equity round, the real barriers to fintech adoption, and why the telecom industry may be heading toward digital dark ages if ARPU doesn't rise.

Jun 10, 2022

Why Haseeb Khan quit fashion photography for a product brand

with Haseeb S Khan

Designer, photographer, and mytype.store founder Haseeb S Khan on leaving fashion shoots behind, building a quality-first product brand in Pakistan, and why every business needs to price in at least 20% for marketing.

Jun 8, 2022

Why Krave Mart won't lay off anyone for 18 months

with Haziq Ahmed

Haziq Ahmed, COO of Krave Mart, traces a winding path from Karachi's army schools to Manchester's textile program to food delivery logistics — and explains why quick commerce's real product is warehousing infrastructure, not groceries.

Jun 6, 2022

The 19-year-old who self-funded a Spider-Man film in Pakistan

with Saboor Akram

Saboor Akram made a thirteen-minute Spider-Man fan film on a shoestring budget, got it past the censor board, and screened it in a cinema — all before finishing his A levels. He talks about how it happened, where Pakistan's film industry actually fails, and why he chose Turkey over New York as his next step.

Jun 3, 2022

The EdTech founder who left Nestle for a scholarship

with Muhammad Fahad Tanveer

Muhammad Fahad Tanveer walked away from a brand manager role at Nestle, followed his wife to the US on a Fulbright, and came back to build Edkasa — a high school edtech platform trying to reach the one crore Pakistani students sitting board exams every year.

May 30, 2022

The designer who deleted Pinterest to find originality

with Areeb Tariq

Areeb Tariq grew up in Dubai and Saudi Arabia, studied design in North Cyprus, and came back to Pakistan with no blueprint and no job plan. Now he runs a brand studio, a fashion collective, and an e-learning platform — and he has a clear theory about why most Pakistani designers stay stuck at five-dollar logos.

May 16, 2022

The FAST grad who nearly died and found the spirit world

with Syed Muneeb Hasan Zaidi

Syed Muneeb Hasan Zaidi grew up in Saudi Arabia, scraped through FAST with a 2.74 GPA, and built a career spanning Belgium, Dubai, Qatar, South Africa, and Switzerland before settling in Atlanta. Then, alone in a Los Angeles hotel room, his heart nearly stopped — and what he saw changed everything.

May 13, 2022

The man building Pakistan's electric mobility revolution

with Mohammad Hadi

Mohammad Hadi left fifteen years at Credit Suisse and Citibank to return to Pakistan and build EzBike — the country's first electric scooter-sharing startup. He talks about Wall Street's cowboy culture, why ride-hailing is fundamentally broken, and what it will take to put 22 million motorcycles on electric power.

Apr 29, 2022

Why Pakistan's BPO industry never scaled like India's

with Salman Wajid Mian

Salman Wajid Mian, Chief Process Outsourcing Officer at Systems Limited, traces his journey from genetic engineering at Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission to building 2,700-seat contact centers — and explains why Pakistan's BPO sector squandered its early lead while India and the Philippines pulled ahead.

Apr 27, 2022

The Pakistani gamer who turned down scholarships for PUBG

with Khan PUBG (Temour Ali Khan)

Khan PUBG walked away from first-class honours, scholarship offers from Germany and Norway, and a clear path into the foreign service — to become a professional PUBG Mobile athlete. This is the story of how he got there, and what the esports industry in Pakistan actually looks like from the inside.

Apr 25, 2022

Pakistan's cash economy and the fintech fixing it

with Omar Moeen Malik, Omar Aftab, Huzaifa Ahmed

Omar Moeen Malik of Easypaisa, Omar Aftab of Pink Ribbon, and Huzaifa Ahmed of RIZQ sit down with Muzamil to talk mobile wallets, breast cancer taboos, food wastage, and why Pakistan's next decade might be its most transformative.

Apr 22, 2022

The ed-tech founder who started in a LUMS dorm room

with Ammar Ali Ayub

Ammar Ali Ayub, co-founder of Nearpeer, traces a winding path from failing class three at Beaconhouse to building Pakistan's largest online CSS and CA prep platform — and explains why the country's youth bulge is either its greatest asset or its greatest liability.

Apr 18, 2022

Why Tabish Hashmi quit TBH to go to Geo News

with Tabish Hashmi

Tabish Hashmi traces the full arc — from a family that migrated from India in 1984, to engineering, to supply chain at Maersk and 3M, to stand-up comedy, to TBH, to quitting TBH for prime-time television on Geo. A rare, unguarded account of how someone builds a career by waiting for the right moment.

Apr 13, 2022

The coworking space that started with a sublet

with Saad Riaz

Saad Riaz didn't set out to build Pakistan's first flexible coworking network. He just needed somewhere to put five people. Eight years and ten locations later, the accident has a name: Kickstart.

Apr 11, 2022

The startup trying to plan your wedding in three minutes

with Izzah Zaman and Neelam Shreyas

Izzah Zaman and Neelam Shreyas, co-founders of Shadiyana, walk through how two software engineers turned 300 brainstormed ideas into a wedding vendor marketplace — and why they chose subscriptions over commissions.

Apr 8, 2022

The founder who built a company from a cold Upwork message

with Umair Majeed Rana

Umair Majeed Rana went from a small city in South Punjab to founding Datics AI and Tech Nation. This conversation traces that journey — and makes a sharp argument about why Pakistan's IT ambitions are structurally broken.

Apr 6, 2022

The food YouTuber who started with a phone and no camera

with Rana Hamza Saif

Rana Hamza Saif grew up in Bahawal Nagar, weighed 140 kg in school, and built Pakistan's most recognisable food YouTube channel with nothing but an iPhone and a drone. He talks about the slow grind from 8,000 subscribers to viral millions, why he refuses to let YouTube be his only business, and what he saw in Pakistan's north that worried him.

Apr 4, 2022

PakWheels wasn't revenue positive until 2022

with Suneel Sarfraz Munj

Suneel Munj built Pakistan's dominant automotive marketplace over nearly two decades without turning a profit — and he's fine with that. A conversation about classified platforms, car inspections, electric vehicles, and what success actually means.

Mar 23, 2022

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

with Fatima Mazhar

Fatima Mazhar went from earning 40,000 dirhams a month to 6,000 to join a startup with no app and no funding. That bet defined everything that followed — Careem, KeepTruckin, a very public cofounder failure, and eventually COLABS.

Mar 18, 2022

Why Meenah Tariq raised exactly $900,000 — not more

with Meenah Tariq

Meenah Tariq and Omar Parvez Khan return to TBT to talk about Metric, their new accounting app for SMEs, a $900,000 pre-seed raise, and why Pakistan's startup boom may have already tipped into frenzy.

Mar 11, 2022

The digital road to property ownership in Pakistan

with Jawad Nayyar & Abdullah Khan

Jawad Nayyar and Abdullah Khan of DAO PropTech walk through why Pakistan's real estate market is broken, how blockchain can fix it, and what it actually costs to buy a flat through their platform.

Mar 2, 2022

Pakistan's first payment gateway wants to kill COD

with Adnan Ali

Adnan Ali left a 16-year banking career — including a stint as EVP at 35 — to build PayFast, Pakistan's first State Bank-licensed digital payment gateway. In this conversation, he explains why 85% of e-commerce still runs on cash-on-delivery, what Raast actually changes, and what Pakistan's youth bulge means for the country's economic future.

Feb 28, 2022

Pakistan's first IT stock listing isn't really an IPO

with Ali Naqi Shaheen

Ali Naqi Shaheen, co-founder of Coeus Solutions, walks through the company's journey from a Lahore frat house to a GEM board listing on the Pakistan Stock Exchange — and explains why market cap, not capital, was the real reason to go public.

Feb 25, 2022

The Pakistani startup designing EVs from scratch

with Shah Talha & Syed Najeebullah

Shah Talha and Syed Najeebullah of Mode Mobility sit down with Muzamil to explain why they chose to design and manufacture electric two-wheelers in Pakistan rather than slap a local brand on a Chinese OEM — and what it will take to make EVs accessible to the half of the population that currently has no viable way to get around.

Feb 21, 2022

The CEO who took a demotion to join Unilever

with Amir R. Paracha

Amir Paracha, CEO of Unilever Pakistan, traces a winding path from a failed air force medical, a ditched engineering degree, and a deliberate step down in title to eventually leading one of Pakistan's largest companies through its first weeks of COVID-19.

Jan 17, 2022

Why an ex-Morgan Stanley PM left New York to build Abhi in Karachi

with Omair Ansari

Omair Ansari, CEO of Abhi, on growing up in nine countries, watching emerging-market banks miss financial inclusion, leaving a Morgan Stanley portfolio manager seat for Karachi, and why his real competition is not other fintechs — it's cash.

Jan 12, 2022

Why Pakistan's freelancers will be dead in three years if they don't transform

with Syed Arsalan Ali Shah

Syed Arsalan Ali Shah, the founder of Connected Pakistan and the only Pakistani featured as a success story on Payoneer, talks through how he built a 70-person freelancing agency from four lakh rupees, why he believes freelancers will be dead in three years if they don't upskill, and where the conversation between freelancers, software houses, startups, and the government keeps breaking down.

Jan 7, 2022

Pakistan has 1,200 publishers for 200 million people

with Syed Umar Ameer

Syed Umar Ameer, founder of Dastaan, walks Muzamil through a decade of trying to revive Pakistan's publishing industry: from a banned magazine chapter and a rejected meeting with literary heads, to a self-publishing platform, a content business, and a print operation built because no one else would do the quality control.

Dec 29, 2021

Success without fulfilment is the ultimate failure

with Fahad Khan

Pakistani-Canadian entrepreneur Fahad Khan, CEO of Canada Prime Marketing, on selling credit cards in minus-40 weather, getting stiffed on commissions, why 98% of people shouldn't be entrepreneurs, and the line he wrote with Tony Robbins that reset his definition of winning.

Dec 27, 2021

Luck favours the brave: how Shayan Mahmud built three companies

with Shayan Mahmud

Shayan Mahmud runs a creative agency, Alibaba's Pakistan channel partner, and a publishing house with a million-plus readers. He talks to Muzamil about luck, timing, frugal monetisation, and why Pakistan's exporters are sitting on a goldmine they refuse to talk about.

Dec 22, 2021

How Bookme quietly digitised Pakistan's bus market

with Faizan Aslam

Faizan Aslam, founder and CEO of Bookme.pk, walks Muzamil through the eight-year arc of building Pakistan's ticketing infrastructure — from a Sahiwal software house to winning the PSL contract — and explains why he hid the bus business behind a cinema front for three full years.

Dec 13, 2021

Pakistan's insurance penetration is less than 1% of GDP

with Siftain Jiwani and Hunain Kabaria

Siftain Jiwani and Hunain Kabaria, the CEO and CTO of Smart Choice, walk through how Pakistan's insurance value chain is broken — from claims and OPD coverage to product design — and what they are building to fix it.

Nov 26, 2021

Talha Ahad on building Asia's first video-only newsroom

with Talha Ahad

Talha Ahad, founder and CEO of The Centrum Media, talks to Muzamil about building a video-first newsroom in Pakistan with no funding, the line between journalism and activism, and why he refuses to take political money to push a narrative.

Nov 22, 2021

Why Retailo is betting on Maksud bhai instead of dark stores

with Naukhez Sarwar

Retailo co-founder Naukhez Sarwar on going from boarding school in Hasan Abdal to a $10M seed round, what's actually broken in Pakistan's agriculture supply chain, and why empowering the corner shop is a better long-term bet than building dark stores on top of it.

Nov 5, 2021

Pakistan is the largest underserved retail market in the world

with Kamran Shaukat

Kamran Shaukat walks through a career that ran from Alcatel and McDonald's to Shell, Walmart and finally EZBuy Pakistan — and explains why a former global sourcing director walked away from corporate security to bet on a country with 220 million underserved consumers.

Nov 1, 2021

How to own a piece of an F-6 plot for one lakh rupees

with Asif and Altamash

The co-founders of Xstate explain how fractional ownership and an in-house property exchange could let an average Pakistani buy into premium Islamabad real estate, why the holding problem matters more than the price problem, and why blockchain is on the roadmap but not yet.

Oct 20, 2021

Why Monis Rahman won't charge sellers on Dukan

with Monis Rahman

Monis Rahman walks through the arc from Intel and the dot-com boom to Rozee, Finja, and Dukan — and explains why he will never charge a transaction fee to the small sellers his new platform is built for.

Oct 11, 2021

Why Pakistan's startup boom is a watershed, not a victory lap

with Zohaib Ali

Dastgyr's co-founder returns to Thought Behind Things to explain why September 2021 is an inflection point for Pakistan's startup ecosystem, why fintech and B2B commerce are absorbing most of the venture dollars, and why the real product everyone is racing to build is a credit score.

Sep 15, 2021

The mobile phone that ended a PMA career and started Bedaar

with Ijlal Khattak

Ijlal Khattak walks through the disciplinary lapse that cost him an army commission, the call-centre and football years that followed, the King Edwards trip that lost three and a half lakh rupees, and the contrarian quality bet that built Bedaar Travels into one of Pakistan's better-known tour operators.

Sep 3, 2021

Why Finja lends to the kiryana store the banks won't touch

with Umer Munawar and Zain Bhatti

Finja's Umer Munawar and Zain Bhatti walk through how a fintech licensed three times over decided that the most underserved part of Pakistan's economy was not the unbanked saver but the kiryana store with no access to credit — and how a co-lending model with banks scales that bet.

Aug 23, 2021

Pakistan's kiryana dukan is the real disruption opportunity

with Saif Ali

Saif Ali walks through a winding decade in agencies, a long argument with brand teams about TikTok and data, and the B2B e-commerce thesis behind Dastgyr — empowering two million underserved kiryana retailers who quietly run Pakistan's economy.

Aug 13, 2021

Why Pakistan builds boring buildings and how Danyal Shiekh wants to fix it

with Danyal Shiekh

Danyal Shiekh on leaving a family textile business to build an experiential-living apartment project on the Murree Expressway, why 3D-printed homes belong to the middle class, and why Pakistani real estate keeps mistaking ninety percent for one hundred.

Jul 26, 2021

The American who moved to Pakistan to build a unicorn

with Jordan Olivas

Jordan Olivas grew up poor in New Mexico, sold candy at school to make pocket money, and ended up as VP of Sales at a buy now, pay later company worth $45 billion. Then he moved to Pakistan to build the country's first BNPL platform — and he thinks it could be Pakistan's first homegrown unicorn.

Jun 23, 2021

Pakistan's hologram industry is eight months of demos and no takers

with Oztech (Zabarthus & Yavar Khan)

Oztech's co-founders on bootstrapping immersive display technology in Pakistan — from projection mapping to drone light shows — and why the country's biggest brands still won't be first.

Jun 16, 2021

How Bilal Munir built VideoWaliSarkar from scratch

with Bilal Munir

Bilal Munir, founder of VideoWaliSarkar, traces the full arc: dropping out of university, starting an Urdu-language tech channel nobody believed in, and building toward a vertically integrated media and product business in Pakistan.

Apr 28, 2021

Naba Khalid on switching to architecture in week one, building a wedding-photography business by 22, and what the people about to inherit Pakistan actually think

with Naba Khalid

A NUST architecture student turned wedding photographer talks with Muzamil about the week-one pivot from engineering, the business she started in the hardest year of her degree, why Pakistani houses are built to be resold, and why she thinks young entrepreneurs are about to run the country.