Why Iffi Wala is killing the BPO model for Pakistani talent

A company built in the gap between Silicon Valley and everyone else

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the unusual shape of the conversation. His guest has built a company that, in the space of roughly two and a half years, has put close to a hundred people on its own payroll and routed direct employment to nearly two thousand more, the bulk of them in Pakistan. The context matters. “While everybody was being a negative Nancy, these guys came in and actually created value, and by proxy of that were able to create a very successful business.”

Iffi Wala joins from Northern California, an hour and a half outside Silicon Valley. Muzamil flags the small concession the audience will have to make: the conversation is in English, because Iffi has been in the United States since 1991 and is more comfortable in it. Iffi acknowledges the trade-off and the show begins.

From a village near Sargodha to a Sacramento State business degree

Iffi walks Muzamil through the early years in unhurried strokes. Born in a small village near Sargodha, mother from Bhalwal, moved to Sargodha proper at one or two, then to Northern California with the family at seven or eight. The year was 1991. There was no internet. His mother wrote letters home and a month later news of a wedding or a death would arrive in reply. The family had come because his uncle, already in California, was starting a company and needed employees. Three or four weeks after they landed, his uncle was killed in a car accident. The family was on its own.

He is candid about his education. Sacramento State University, a stretch of pre-med that did not stick, a landing in business “because they said back in the day that, you know, that’s the easiest.” A few years of government work, then a couple of banks. “Star student, definitely not.”

The turn into entrepreneurship was not chosen. He was laid off. The advice that has stuck with him since, he tells Muzamil, is the oldest one in the book and one his mother used to repeat: you are defined by the people you spend time with. His friend group in Northern California was almost entirely made of business owners who had started years before him. When the layoff happened, the path was already drawn in the room around him. “If you remember one thing, just remember it’s all about your circle.”

The first company: insurance, and the discipline of picking a boring sector

The first business launched in 2013 or 2014, sitting in the long shadow of the 2008 financial crisis. Iffi is direct about why he picked it. “I was looking for something that was stable. Super old school. That didn’t necessarily have to be exciting, but something I can slowly build towards.”

He picked risk management and insurance. He brought a tech mindset to a sales-driven, paper-heavy industry, built integrations and partnerships, made the operation efficient, ran a few acquisitions, repackaged the lot under a single brand, and sold to an insurtech buyer in 2021. That was his first exit and, by his own framing, his first real education in running a business.

The detail Muzamil pulls on is not the exit. It is the framework Iffi took out of it. “If we’re being honest, nobody else cared. It didn’t have any real impact in the world outside of my life.”

Three rules for the second company

The post-exit conversations Iffi describes are unusually precise. He went to founder friends in Silicon Valley, sat down with a pen and paper, and wrote three rules for whatever came next. One: it had to be tech-enabled, for scale. Two: it had to have a global footprint, because he had been to more than forty countries and wanted to keep working at that altitude. Three: it had to be a business of real impact. The last rule was the one his first company had failed.

The wedge surfaced inside those conversations. Tech companies, he realised, have been hiring globally for decades. Engineers in Beijing, Islamabad, Latin America, London — frictionless hires for any startup with a GitHub repository. But ninety-five percent of businesses globally are not tech-enabled, and ninety-five percent of talent globally is not engineers. The non-tech world had been left out of the global hiring revolution entirely. By 2030, he tells Muzamil, there will be three hundred million university graduates worldwide, the vast majority of them in emerging markets and the vast majority of them in non-tech disciplines. That is the population Edge is built for.

Edge in plain English

Muzamil presses for the simplest possible version of what the platform does. Iffi confirms it. A graduate sitting in Lahore puts their qualifications on Edge. A US company posts a role. Edge matches the two. The CTO, Iffi notes, is a PhD in AI and machine learning, and the matching layer is the technical core of the company.

But the matching is the easy part to describe. The harder part is what Edge owns around it. “We can’t be just another payroll company. We really have to own every part of the ecosystem — infrastructure, logistics, salary data, equipment procurement, the talent marketplace, all those things.” The global head of HR reports, in her previous life, to the founder of Uber, where she helped scale to three thousand employees across twenty countries. She is the source of much of the salary data the platform is built on.

The rule Iffi cites for compensation is specific. Edge targets the seventieth to ninetieth percentile of the local market in each country it operates in. The benefit for the local employee is a direct global employment relationship, a serious salary band, and dollar-pegged pay. The benefit for the US customer is still significant savings against a local hire.

Killing the word “outsourcing”

This is the section Muzamil presses on hardest, and Iffi is at his most insistent. The historical category for what Edge is doing is BPO — business process outsourcing — and Iffi refuses the label entirely.

“We never use the word outsource. The whole BPO model has been decades old. It’s never a good experience for either side. For talent in a lot of emerging markets, it’s bottom-of-the-barrel jobs. For customers, it’s been the only option, and it’s always a poor experience.” His framing is that when a Silicon Valley founder hires an engineer in Brazil, no one calls that outsourcing. The engineer is an employee. Edge is trying to do for non-tech roles what Silicon Valley already did for engineers.

The mechanical consequence is that the Edge employee is the customer’s employee. The customer integrates the hire into their own HR system — Workday, BambooHR, whatever they run — and the person appears alongside their other staff. Edge is the facilitator. There is no agency layer, no per-seat outsourcing contract, no plausible deniability. The customer hires and fires directly. Edge recently launched a programme called Edge Mobility to help that talent get visas to attend offsites and kickoffs, on the principle that an employee is an employee.

The gray-market alternative, and what trust actually costs

Muzamil raises the issue that has been hovering over Pakistan’s remote-work scene for years: the boutique software houses that route non-tech work through grey-area arrangements, with US-side identity workarounds and informal payment structures. He is careful in his framing. Many of these companies have rationalised the practice on the basis that the formal route is too regulatory-heavy to scale.

Iffi treats it as an emerging-market pattern, not a Pakistan pattern. His framing is Uber and Airbnb. Before those platforms, asking a family member to get into a stranger’s car or stay in a stranger’s apartment was unthinkable. The platforms built trust over years and the entire market reordered itself around what trust made possible. Edge, in his telling, is building the trust layer for non-tech global hiring. The compliance officer, the sales enablement lead who spent ten years at Tesla, the CFO who came out of SAP — these are the hires that signal the standard the platform is committing to.

He tells Muzamil about a customer in Nashville with somewhere between eighty and ninety people hired through Edge, all of whom the CEO knows by name. “Man, I never dreamed in a million years that I’d have this whole incredible team in Latin America or in Pakistan.” That, Iffi argues, is what kills the grey market over time. Not regulation. Standard.

Why insurance, healthcare, and dentistry — the hardest categories first

Muzamil asks the obvious question about category choice. Why customer service, in medical, dental, and insurance, when accounting or law would seem more obviously underserved?

Iffi reframes the logic. The strategy is not to pick easy categories. It is to pick the hardest categories first. Risk management and insurance are among the highest-compliance industries in the United States. Healthcare requires HIPAA, GDPR, ISO. These are the categories that, before COVID, would not have hired globally at all — and in many cases would not have hired remotely. If Edge can win there, the rest is downhill.

Inside each category, the strategy is the same. Four or five roles to start. Build the certification layer for those roles. Win them. Then expand. He cites Upwork as the cautionary example — launched in four categories, now in five hundred — and Uber as the model: F-11 before Islamabad, Islamabad before Pakistan. “If you want to build something big, you have to think very small.”

The next categories on the list are the ones customers have been asking for: accounting, where Edge is already exploring Middle Eastern markets, then law (with the AI caveat), then design, then IT.

The Pakistan numbers, and what fourteen million dollars actually does

Muzamil moves to scale. Edge has just under a hundred internal employees, roughly thirty percent of whom are based in the United States. The remainder is spread across the UK, Dubai, Latin America, and Pakistan, where most of the engineering team sits. Through the platform, the company is currently routing employment to several thousand people, with close to a thousand of them in Pakistan, primarily in Islamabad and Lahore.

The infrastructure layer for that workforce is what Edge calls Edge Centres — community work spaces that any platform employee can use, with the first one already operating in Islamabad and Lahore launching soon. The centres are not mandatory. About twenty percent of the Pakistani workforce uses them on any given day, with the rest working remotely under whatever arrangement the employer prefers.

The number Muzamil ultimately pushes for is the salary inflow. Iffi gives it directly. Last year, roughly fourteen million dollars in salaries flowed into Pakistan through the platform, growing at five to ten percent month-on-month. Total economic contribution to the local economy, factoring in second-order effects, is estimated between twenty and twenty-five million dollars.

The internet shutdowns, the VPNs, and the cost of being in the gray

The interruptions Pakistan has lived through over the last two years — internet shutdowns, power outages, political unrest — come up explicitly. Iffi does not soften the impact. “It’s more than just a monetary impact in the business. There’s an impact on trust. And in a lot of cases, that loss of trust is harder to get back.”

Edge built its own VPN systems overnight to keep talent live during the outages. The platform requires every employee to be within thirty or forty minutes of an Edge Centre to remain active, on the Uber model. None of this comes free. In board meetings, Iffi tells Muzamil, the question is now openly on the table: do we invest further in markets that continue to have these issues, or do we shift growth toward countries where the infrastructure is more reliable. He does not pretend the answer is fixed.

Brain drain, and the salary number that actually keeps people home

The conversation moves to churn. Muzamil walks through the pattern: rupee-pegged salaries collapsing in dollar terms, the most talented people quietly applying for jobs in Dubai or the UK, the country losing the cohort that should have been building it.

Iffi’s response is structural rather than sentimental. Edge’s number one customer, in the way the company describes itself internally, is not the US business — it is the talent. The salary band is set at the seventieth-to-ninetieth percentile of the local market, the salaries are pegged to and paid in dollars, and the platform is now building its own fintech layer to function as the bank for talent on the platform. The arithmetic is deliberate. Pay enough, dollar-pegged, and the only reason for the Pakistani professional to leave is no longer financial.

His case study is his own COO. The man was a flight away from moving to the UK permanently with his wife. He had his degree there, the move was logistically locked in. The job at Edge was the reason he stayed. “Even if it’s ten percent, it’s a start.” Iffi gestures at the Taiwanese and South Korean comparisons — GDP per capita at two hundred dollars forty years ago, government programmes that brought talent home — but he does not pretend Pakistan is on that arc yet. He simply argues that Edge can play a small role in slowing the outflow.

Muzamil pushes him to defend the model against the older offshore arithmetic, where a US-side engineer at one hundred and twenty thousand dollars becomes a Pakistan-side engineer at thirty, with the agency keeping the spread. Iffi confirms Edge does not work that way. The customer pays the talent’s full dollar-denominated salary, and Edge takes a flat platform fee on top. The arrangement is transparent and the talent is paid directly. “It’s a lot more democratized.”

The Upwork lesson, and the missing certification layer

The Upwork comparison runs through the back half of the conversation. Iffi met the former CEO of Upwork in 2021 when he was first thinking about Edge, and the Edge VP of customer success is herself a former Upwork executive. He is generous about the brand — Upwork was the first centralised place to hire freelancers and that was a real contribution. But the business model, in his reading, does not work for the talent. Ninety-three percent of people who create a profile on Upwork never make a dollar. Thirty percent of Edge’s own internal team has previously taken work on Upwork, and the testimony is consistent: the income is too volatile to build a life on.

Edge’s answer is the certification layer. The platform is not a free marketplace. Talent has to pass a certification specific to the role before going live, and the certification is what the matching algorithm draws on. This, Iffi argues, is the only way to scale into the millions of users while keeping the customer experience intact. The free-market shape is what produced Upwork’s ninety-three percent failure rate. The curated shape is what avoids it.

The readiness problem, and what is actually missing

Muzamil names the gap that the entire Pakistani IT-services industry has been quietly working around for a decade. Human capital is large. Talent, in the sense of people who can be dropped into a global role and perform, is small. An accountant with twenty years of Pakistani experience cannot simply walk into a US accounting role. The vocabulary, the cultural expectations, the soft skills — none of it transfers without an explicit upskilling layer.

Iffi agrees. His framing is that every country has cultivated certain roles well and others poorly. Customer success is a strong role in San Francisco because every tech company hires customer success. The Jordanian accounting style maps closely to the US accounting style and is therefore an obvious early expansion market for that category. The platform has to pick countries and roles where the cultural overlap is high to start, then layer certification on top.

He acknowledges the limit of the analogy. The same problem exists, he says, even inside the United States — graduates emerging not employable, with internships filling the gap. The Edge bet is that the certification layer it builds inside the four or five roles it currently covers can be the floor that scales out as the category list grows. “Why we’re in best position to do that is because, again, we’re only focused on four or five roles in each category for now.”

A small role in a long arc

Muzamil closes by asking the standard Thought Behind Things question. What does Pakistan look like over the next decade?

Iffi’s answer is the one a founder is required to give, but he gives it without bravado. Youth unemployment, political instability, the cycle of legal action against political leaders, the erosion of media freedom — he names the headwinds plainly. Then he names the work. He has been partnering with the consul general in the United States on webinars aimed at convincing other founders to invest in Pakistan. He has personally talked friends out of building engineering teams in India or Latin America and into building them in Pakistan instead. “Why can’t we be the next Taiwan? Why can’t we be the next South Korea?”

He leaves the line that Muzamil picks up at the close. If Edge can take its current thousand-person Pakistani workforce and grow it to ten thousand, that is the proof point. The country has had no shortage of stories about leaving. It needs more about staying.

Muzamil ends the conversation there. Thank Iffi, thank the audience, and a final note: he hopes the next time they sit down, the number is ten thousand.