Why Pakistani founders glamorise the wrong half of a startup

A humble Islamabad upbringing and an unplanned engineering degree

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the story the way most listeners will first hear it — a Pakistani founder who built a startup in Germany, sold it to Meta, and seeded what is now the company’s German engineering hub. It is, by Muzamil’s account, the first acquisition Meta has made of a Pakistani-founded company. But before any of that, the conversation winds back to Faisalabad, then to Islamabad, then to a series of schools that Awais Shafique did not choose for himself.

Awais was born in Faisalabad and grew up in Islamabad, moving between Pak-Turk International School, a model college in JET-4, and Bahria College for FSc. Each move came from the same place — someone, often a neighbour or a relative, telling his father that a particular school was good and his father acting on the recommendation. The family was, as he puts it bluntly, “very humble.” His father was the only one in the family who had studied — mechanical engineering at UET — and the rest of the household was carrying debt.

He admits a pattern that becomes important later in the conversation: “Wherever I was sent, I did not go happily. But I have loved that place once I went there.” Pak-Turk to model college was, in his telling, the moment he first stepped out of a bubble and met what he calls “the 99%” — a phrase Muzamil picks up and repeats, framing the international and private-school crowd as one-percenters disconnected from the country they grew up in.

The acceptance that broke imposter syndrome at NUST

Awais ended up at NUST SEECS doing electrical engineering — a choice he describes as semi-accidental. His father was a mechanical engineer, electrical engineering had a high merit cutoff, and someone had told the family it was the right move. He admits in hindsight he would have gone straight into software, but he is careful with the regret. “I don’t think there was any other way to get here,” he says. “The individual experiences I have are what have made me the person I am today, and I wouldn’t do it differently.”

At NUST the imposter syndrome arrived on schedule. He had always been a good student. Suddenly he was an average of the best students from across Pakistan. His response was unusual. “Maybe okay, I am not good at studying,” he tells Muzamil. “There was acceptance. It wasn’t going to depression or whatever.” He decided he could not be a top student in that room, but he could be a good engineer — someone who learned how things worked, tinkered, and built. That reframe, he says, is what carried him through the degree.

A Parkinson’s wearable, a viral Stanford win, and the dip that followed

Muzamil pushes Awais into the part of the story that is best known publicly: the medical device he built as an undergraduate at SEECS. It came from a single moment of seeing one of his professors — Sir Majid Magool, who taught entrepreneurship — living with essential tremors. The professor was successful, admired, financially secure, and could not hold a cup of tea steady. Awais wanted to fix that.

The device he and his co-founders built was a wearable that detected the rhythmic tremor in the hand and applied electrical stimulation to the muscle groups that flex it, counteracting the motion just enough that a person could button a shirt or drink a glass of water. He is honest about the prototype — it was “super MVP,” circuits and exposed wires, and his professor still jokes that he was the patient zero who let students attach current to his arm.

The team began entering pitch competitions, won every Pakistani one they entered, and got invited to the Stanford Health Longevity competition in 2017. They flew to Stanford with a prototype that looked, in his own description, like a watch wired to a circuit board with exposed leads. They were the only Asian team in a room of MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley. They won. Awais pulled a Pakistani flag out of his jacket pocket on stage, a photographer caught it, and someone said a line he tells Muzamil he will never forget: “This shows that innovation is not limited to any geographical region.”

The picture went viral. The next day his university and Pakistani news channels were calling. And then nothing happened.

“Somewhere in the middle I believe we got lost,” he says. The team had no idea how to convert fame into a product. Pakistan had no functioning mechanism to commercialise a medical device. American doctors who had been interested at Stanford lost interest when they learned the work would be done from Pakistan. The friends in the original group quietly drifted to other things once the publicity ran out. Awais slid into what he describes plainly as depression — a feeling of having failed his professor, his patients, and his parents.

Muzamil sharpens the reading of what happened. Awais had been pursuing what looked like an ordinary undergraduate opportunity. The media turned it into a story about a kid who was going to change the world. “And you start believing that,” Muzamil says. “And a point out there is jab aapko further answers nahi aa rahe hote, you are already trapped in your own net.” Awais accepts the framing without resistance. “All of the support turned into expectations which turned into me feeling that I was the biggest failure.”

Borrowing a plane ticket to Munich

The next decision is the one that quietly sets up everything that follows. Awais decided he had to leave Pakistan. He did not have the money. A friend’s mother lent him the airfare and told no one. “Agar paise ki wajah se yeh bachcha zindagi mein peechhe reh gaya, toh iske saath bahut badi zyaadati hogi,” she told him. A relative in Canada — an entrepreneur — added more. He applied to Technical University of Munich on the last day, into a computer science programme with a biomedical computing focus, and got in.

The first thing he did in Munich was pick up a working-student job. The job paid roughly 1,200 to 1,500 euros a month. He realised he could pay his hostel rent, eat, and still send money home. “When I realised that earning money is not that difficult,” he says, “I could focus on something else.”

That something else was a Munich institute called CDTM — the Center for Digital Technology Management. A friend had told him it took twenty-five students at a time and was structured not around developing ideas but around developing people. Awais got in within three months. He is unsparing about what it gave him: “CDTM has the highest unicorn-to-alumni ratio. Out of the twenty-five people in my class, eighteen are founders.” He calls himself “indebted to that institute for my life.”

Why an institute that doesn’t teach ideas produces founders

Muzamil presses Awais on what made CDTM different — and the answer reframes how Pakistani readers should think about their own startup pipeline. CDTM did not teach Awais what to build. It put him in a cross-functional cohort with a technologist, a designer, and a business student, ran them through eighteen months of working with real industry clients on real problems, and let them find both an idea and a set of co-founders along the way.

“The best thing,” Awais says, “is that if today you have to start a company, how do you know who to start it with? You know someone is a good technical person, a good business person, but you haven’t seen their work ethics unless you’ve worked with them.” CDTM let him work alongside the people who would later become his co-founders for long enough to judge them. He met his eventual CTO on day one — “super obnoxious guy, I was like, yaar kidhar se aa gaya?” — and only agreed to start a company with him months later, after watching how he worked.

The PPE problem that turned into Precise

The conversation moves into how Precise itself began. The institute paired teams with industry partners; Awais’s team got matched with a European leader in personal protective equipment whose head of innovation was a CDTM alumnus. The brief was unromantic: BMW workshops in Munich were losing days of productivity to PPE fittings that did not fit. Workers had to stop work, queue up, try on gloves and jackets and safety shoes, and start again — sometimes monthly as their bodies changed. The cost was real and the buyer was visible.

Awais’s CTO had patents around AI body modelling. Awais had read about the underlying techniques in medical school. They built a software product that, from any smartphone camera, generated an accurate 3D replica of a person’s body in a few seconds. The PPE company became their first paying customer. The product was 2018.

The pivot from PPE to fast fashion came when his CTO pushed for a larger market. Awais resisted at first — he had come into medicine wanting to help people, and shirts on H&M felt like a step backwards. But he was convinced. By the time Precise hit its stride, the product was a single button on a fashion retailer’s website that read “find me the right size.” The customer would put their phone on the floor, step back, and turn around once. Ten seconds later, Precise returned the right size and surfaced products fitted to that body across the catalogue.

The commercial model was the part Awais is proudest of explaining. “We would just tell you: put this button on your website. We put it for you. You don’t need to do anything technical. And you would make 10% more money.” Precise took a share of the incremental revenue. They got to two million monthly active users and a hundred million recommendations across clients that included H&M.

How Meta actually acquired Precise

Later in the discussion Muzamil asks for the part listeners came for: how Meta ended up buying them. Awais’s account is more interesting than the headline. Precise had hit product-market fit and was publishing aggressive data on how much revenue clients gained per button install. Meta noticed. The first approach, around 2021, was a cold outreach Awais initially ignored — he describes weighing whether to talk to them at all as “this is either a dumb move or it’s going to pay off.” Meta signed an NDA and asked to license the service, framed vaguely as something for Instagram.

What followed was months of negotiation that Awais frames in plainly emotional terms. Meta’s pitch was strategic: Precise would become part of an e-commerce experience Meta was building inside its own ecosystem — a counter-bet, Awais hints, against Apple. Acquisition came with a condition that he initially resisted. Precise would have to stop selling to its existing third-party customers entirely.

The work of unwinding those customer relationships fell on him. “I had to be the matchmaker in the middle,” he says. For every existing client, he had to understand what they actually needed, study every competitor that might fit them, and personally hand the customer over before walking away. “My argument was: yaar Muzamil, we are stopping for strategic reasons, but I found the perfect match for you.” He spent the back half of the negotiation persuading customers to accept their replacement before he could close the deal with Meta.

Precise was absorbed. Awais became a product manager inside Meta’s core monetisation org, working on integrating the Precise technology and on what he describes as “a bigger bet against Apple.” The Precise office became the anchor of Meta’s German engineering presence — the building has since expanded, and Meta has started incubating other startups out of it. He has since left.

Why Pakistani startups optimise for the wrong things

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil shifts the camera. He asks Awais to take off the German hat and put back on the Pakistani one — to look honestly at why one country’s founders keep getting stuck while another’s keep shipping. The answers Awais gives are uncomfortable, and Muzamil largely agrees with them.

The first problem, Awais argues, is glamour. Pakistani startup culture rewards the appearance of being a founder more than the work of being one. “The glamorisation is, you don’t show the hard truth, the real realities — that ninety-five percent of startups fail.” The viral pitch-competition founder gets to skip the unromantic middle.

The second is the obsession with B2C consumer ideas. Pakistan, Awais argues, has trained its founders to chase ideas every single person can use — the largest possible imagined market — because B2B sits behind what he calls “an iron curtain.” Selling to a business requires you to know which business has the problem, who the buyer is inside it, what their timeline is, and whether they have a budget. That research is invisible from the outside. Consumer ideas feel knowable because everyone is a consumer. They are also where capital, distribution, and survival are hardest. Muzamil concurs from his own observations: “We tend to think the businesses are not buying things, so we tend to go to consumers — but actually selling to consumers is harder than selling to businesses.”

The third, and the one Awais returns to most often, is that most Pakistani startups die at the problem-discovery stage, not at the execution stage. “Most companies fail because we are selling to someone who doesn’t even know what their problem is. They haven’t realised the problem, they don’t have a timeline, they don’t have a budget.” A founder who skips those three checks is building a product no one is positioned to buy, regardless of how clever the idea is.

The Stanford lesson, applied backwards

The conversation closes with Muzamil and Awais comparing notes on a young NUST founder building computer-vision automation for traffic signals — a story that, in shape, looks a lot like Awais’s first Pakistani startup. Muzamil’s worry is that the founder will hit the same wall: clear product, no clear buyer with budget and timeline, and a Pakistani ecosystem that congratulates him for the demo before disappearing when the work of selling begins.

Awais’s advice is not about the technology. It is about the question that should come before the technology. Who, specifically, is buying this? What is their thought process? Do they know they have this problem? Until those answers exist, the rest is — in his telling — premature.

Muzamil closes the conversation at the two-hour mark with a quiet observation that Awais has earned the right to make these arguments: he is, after all, the Pakistani founder who actually shipped, sold to Meta, and seeded the company’s German engineering hub. The fact that his advice for the next Pakistani founder is “do the unglamorous customer research first” is, in itself, the most useful thing he says all episode.