Why Yango bet on Pakistan when everyone else was leaving

A general manager who never planned to have a career

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the conversation around an industry he has watched closely. Pakistan’s ride-hailing sector was the first part of the economy to be properly disrupted by a startup, and then the first to lose the company that did the disrupting. He wants to understand where the industry stands now, and why a new entrant — one he kept seeing while he was living in the UAE, and one his own Pakistan team is currently using to move between Lahore and Karachi — has been able to grow into the vacuum. To answer that, he invites in Miral Sharif, the general manager of Yango Pakistan.

Before any of the Yango questions, Muzamil pulls the conversation back into Miral’s biography, and she answers honestly. She was born in Lahore, moved as a child to Rahim Yar Khan for her father’s work, then to Islamabad in 1998. She returned to Lahore for six years at LUMS — a bachelor’s in political science and mathematics, then an MBA — and treats the city as a second home. She also describes a family shape that has clearly defined how she moves through the world: a sister eleven years older (“you can say that I have two sets of parents”), and two brothers in between whom the family lost. “I think that has sort of shaped the way I look at life,” she tells Muzamil. “Growing up there was a heightened sense of responsibility, a heightened sense of making sure that everyone around you is happy and you’re doing the right thing.”

That responsibility came alongside a household that was, she admits when Muzamil pushes, “200%” overprotective. She offers a recent example: a team trip to Skardu that took serious work to get her parents to agree to, and a grandmother who deliberately did not message her so that Miral would believe she was being missed. The pattern matters for what comes next — because Miral is open that she never imagined herself as a career woman. Her sister was engaged at 19, married at 23, and that was the timeline Miral had in her head too. “In a lot of ways the opportunities that I got or things that happened in my life were not because I was pursuing them,” she says. “I have a very external locus of control in that sense.” What she will give herself credit for is the work she put in once the direction was set.

The LUMS GPA, and the case for foreign management

The most useful section of Miral’s professional origin story is one she has clearly told before but does not soften. Her first semester GPA at LUMS, despite being the kind of student who lived in the library, was 2.21 — putting her on probation. The cause was not partying; the cause was that she had been pulled out of her comfort zone while serious things were happening at home with her father’s and sister’s health. “Two point two one — and 2.2 ke ooper probation thi, and that hit me like a boulder,” she says. She graduated with a 3.2, which she is proud of for a specific structural reason: a low first semester compresses every subsequent average, and pulling it back up requires sustained work.

The same passage closes a loop that comes back later in the conversation. Miral says clearly that her growth was not because Pakistan’s corporate world handed her opportunities — it was because the people around her, particularly when she started working with foreign teams and foreign management, did not carry the gender bias of the local default. “That bias hatana jo hai na, woh ek bahut important cheez hai,” she tells Muzamil. With that bias absent, the evaluation became impartial. With evaluation impartial, the growth followed.

Telco, then a startup, then the 2021 crash

Miral’s first proper job after her MBA was in pricing, marketing, and segments at a telco — what she calls one of the “hardcore” teams, where you carry portfolio ownership and revenue. She had two offers in front of her: a telco famous for its culture, and one famous for its ragda — the relentless grind. She picked the grind, because she felt she had everything to learn. Two or three years later, an industry veteran interviewed her, ran her through a long and demanding session, and at the end told her, “Dekh ke pata chal raha hai ke ragra laga hua hai.” She offers that to Muzamil as the moment her early career was retroactively validated.

Then she moved out of telco and into a transportation startup — and walked straight into the 2021 layoff cycle. This is the most morally serious section of the conversation, and Miral does not flinch. She describes sitting in a chair while ninety percent of her team was being let go, surrounded by people whose hands were on her shoulder while their own jobs were being ended. One man, earning fifty or sixty thousand rupees, came to her with a single sentence she has not forgotten: his mother was in chemo, one session cost thirty-five thousand, and he was the only earner for a family of six. “I came back home and I was completely like torn apart,” she says.

Muzamil then asks the question that defines a lot of how Pakistan still talks about that period — were those businesses simply mindless with their spending? Miral disagrees with that framing, and the disagreement is precise. Every business with outside investment, she points out, operates under a commitment that has been agreed at the time of the round. If a business is at minus seventy percent EBITDA today, you cannot ask it to be neutral tomorrow — the processes, the market tone, and the cost base have all been built around the agreed glide path. “However unfortunate the situation was, and one can say that our businesses were mindless in terms of spending — agreed, I understand,” she says, “but I feel they were caught in the wrong at the wrong time.” Had investor confidence held for even a little longer, she argues, the story of which businesses survived might look different.

Why she said yes to mobility a second time

After her first transportation startup exited, Miral had decided one thing with certainty: she was done with mobility. She had lined up a role at an e-commerce platform, and was in the process of leaving when a colleague added her to a group chat with a single word — Yango. At the time, the brand was almost unknown in Pakistan; only people who had recently travelled to Dubai knew it. She agreed to meet the team for coffee in Islamabad, listened to the pitch, and politely refused. They suggested she fly out with them to one of their markets to see the operation before deciding. “Allah ji, this is definitely shady,” she remembers thinking — “a company is offering someone who is not even a part of their company to take a trip with them.”

She joined the e-commerce business in the meantime, found that her growth there would not look the way she had wanted, and finally said yes to Yango — giving herself, she says, six to nine months before the company would inevitably shut down and she would move on. That window came and went. Then she was handed the general manager role, P&L responsibility, a seat in the board-room conversations. The thing she noticed at that point is the centre of why she is still there.

“At no point were they pulling out on their investments — or the incentives — was there a compromise on scale,” she tells Muzamil. The startups she had seen before always framed the choice as scale versus bottom line: grow first, fix unit economics later. Yango’s framing from day one was different: invest, grow, and do it sustainably, and do not treat those as a sequence. That, she says, is the moment she began to believe in the company.

A two-day-old launch and a city on fire

Yango is headquartered in Dubai, operates across more than thirty countries spanning the CIS region, the UAE, Latin America, and a strong footprint across Africa, and runs more than twenty businesses under its umbrella — its own maps, its own Yango Play, its own Spotify-equivalent, Yango Drive, and so on — clustered around the core ride-hailing business. Pakistan launched in May 2023, and the first city was Lahore. Two days later was May 9, and Lahore was burning down.

“It was difficult,” Miral says, “and because we had come from an experience where mobility had suffered, this was like an added panic mode.” Then she offers the inverse reading, which she returns to several times in the conversation: if a business could survive that period — one of the lowest in living memory — most likely it would be sustainable from there forward. Rawalpindi-Islamabad and Faisalabad followed within a month or two. Karachi opened in November 2023. Multan came in 2025, alongside delivery, cargo, and a Yango Shops integration with Dealcart. The core operations team in Pakistan is under thirty people; including functional roles and excluding driver support, under thirty-five.

The portfolio logic, and why low prices are not a bug

Muzamil presses on a thread he has been thinking about himself: the per-trip economics in Dubai are simply not the per-trip economics in Pakistan, and any operator headquartered in a high-AOV market will always be tempted to deprioritise the low-AOV one. Miral’s answer is genuinely the cleanest piece of strategy in the episode.

A company managing a global portfolio, she explains, is doing the same thing an investor does with a blend of stocks and mutual funds. Some markets deliver top line, some deliver bottom line, some deliver pure scale, and some are a longer compounding bet. The mistake is to demand all four from one market. Yango’s leadership, in her telling, sets the right expectation for each — and the expectation for Pakistan was never that it would carry the global top line. What it carries is scale, and the path to its own sustainability. The product reflects that calibration directly: in Dubai, premium Yango sends a Lexus; in Pakistan, the car is basic, because that is what the market’s appetite and the competitive landscape make sense to operate against.

She is also frank about an internal tension. Yango’s low prices are not universally loved inside the building. “Every operations and head of supply has had this issue,” she says — her own head of operations told her recently he was going out into the field and would just drive for the day, and she told him, “Baqi sab kar lena, bas protest na karna.” Despite the internal frustration, she is convinced the top-level strategy has been steady. “Major level pe, top level pe, their strategy has been very same — they know they have control over the ship that they are on.”

Mobility as quiet infrastructure

The next stretch of the conversation is where the episode opens up. Muzamil reframes ride-hailing not as a fallback option for when your car is unavailable, but as a lifestyle layer that lets a person do things they otherwise could not. He grounds this in his own UAE experience — daily school drop-offs by taxi for a year — and Miral builds on it with a frame she returns to twice: a single persona, multiple use cases. The same person needs a basic car for the office, a bigger car for family outings, a rickshaw for a fast school run, a bike when they are late for work and the priority is getting through traffic.

The deeper claim she makes is about who this unlocks. The mother who can now manage tuition runs and extracurriculars without owning a car or hiring a driver. The teenager bound to the house because the family car is with the father. The woman who wants to take classes, go to lunch, or start her own small business but cannot do any of it without independent mobility. “Woh jo ek tension thi back in the day — yaar koi chhorne jayega, koi lene jayega, tuition pe jaana hai kaise hai — that doesn’t exist anymore,” she says. “That is a stress that we have taken out of people’s lives.”

Muzamil then adds the piece that most Pakistani buyers do not think through: a car, valued in dollars rather than rupees, depreciates exactly the way cars depreciate everywhere else. He had recently sold his own car at what looked like fifty percent rupee depreciation; in dollar terms, the depreciation was twenty percent over three years — roughly the global ten-percent-a-year curve. Once you add maintenance, fuel, and a driver, the unit economics for an average user often favour ride-hailing. Miral’s addition is sharper: Yango’s KPI is not about extracting a higher share of someone’s disposable income through price. The share grows by virtue of scale — the person who used to leave the house once a day now leaves three or four times — because they can.

Trust as the actual product

Muzamil makes the cleanest argument of the conversation when he points out that the top line of a ride-hailing business is directly connected to trust, and that trust is hardest to build in a developing-country marketplace where the operator cannot fully control either side. Miral’s answer is a layered one, and worth walking through in order.

The first layer is operational reliability — ETAs, supply density, the basics of whether the car shows up. The second is supply quality: a full verification process for drivers, managed through an on-ground partner network. The third is product-level safety. Her favourite feature is the SOS button in the Yango app, which connects directly to 15. “I actually, in the early days, I checked that this is not just being said — that this actually works,” she tells Muzamil. She also walks through Yango’s trusted-contact and route-sharing system, where a contact like her father is permanently registered, so a single tap shares the live ride.

The fourth layer is the one most operators talk about least and Miral talks about most: public-private partnerships. Yango has signed with the Punjab Safe City Authority — covering every city in Punjab — and is actively working with the Islamabad Police so that each ride has a QR code a passenger can scan to confirm that driver, car, and ride are verified. “Of course it’s a process,” she says. “It takes time. It cannot happen overnight.” The summary she lands on is two words: operational excellence, and trust and safety. Either alone is insufficient.

Delivery, cargo, and the SMB bet

Yango’s delivery business in Pakistan, Miral clarifies, is structurally a subsidiary of the taxi business — the same supply that runs rides is being better utilised for parcels. That is a deliberate choice. The standard delivery model in Pakistan demands fleet ownership, salaried drivers, and a separate P&L that, in her words, often “comes and topples the overall P&L” of even otherwise healthy e-commerce businesses. Yango’s pitch to SMBs is that they should not have to build that ecosystem themselves.

She is honest about where the product currently sits. Muzamil presses on whether this is open-ended e-commerce — Islamabad to Karachi — or brick-and-mortar businesses extending into delivery within a city. Miral confirms the latter, for now. The first version is built around intra-city last-mile, with delivery by car or rickshaw for cartons that will not fit on a bike, and cargo for larger moves. Whether the long-distance version comes through partnerships or in-house build is still open.

Yango Ventures and the super-app question

Muzamil brings the conversation to one of the more interesting recent developments — Yango Ventures’ investment in Trukker — and to the larger question of whether the China-style super app, once imagined and then quietly written off, is still possible in Pakistan. Miral’s answer separates the two cleanly.

The Trukker investment, she says, is not a thematic doubling-down on logistics. Yango Ventures had been reviewing businesses for almost a year against its own criteria — size, stage, prior rounds — and the criteria, not the category, drove the decision. They found a good business and they invested in it.

On super apps, she is candid about the limits of the prediction. She does not think Pakistan will reach China’s level any time soon. But she has seen the Yango super app already exist in other markets, with the tech, the product, and the operating expertise already inside the group. The question is product-market fit, market by market, business by business. Yango Drive — short-term car rental — works beautifully in the UAE; she is unconvinced it belongs in Pakistan. “I know that I am maybe over-committing,” she tells Muzamil, “because we’ve seen other very strong businesses, names, brands, players who have given it a shot.” Her belief is that the difference will be in localisation rather than force-fit, and that the timeline is one to two years rather than five.

A female-driver category that works elsewhere — and the social fabric that has to move first

Muzamil’s last substantive question is the one closest to him: are there products specifically for women, or for safety-conscious users, where a premium price point could buy higher trust? Miral starts with a sober disclaimer — security, in her view, is a societal and cultural problem that no single business, Yango included, can fix. What an operator can do is build process, structure, and accountability to mitigate the risk.

Then she offers the most concrete answer in the episode. In Oman — a market Yango entered last year — there is a category running entirely on female drivers matched to female customers. Technically, the app does not even ask gender at registration; the category is held together by an unsaid social rule that men do not order from female drivers, and women do. “The category is growing so well, and that is so empowering and so liberating to see,” she says.

The product, she would love to bring to Pakistan. The block is not the app — it is supply density. For the category to launch, she needs enough female drivers that a female rider’s request will actually be filled, and enough female riders that the drivers’ earnings make sense. Pakistan does not yet have that density, and building it means moving the social fabric, not just the product. She is careful: “I’m not saying it’s not possible. It’s very possible.” But it will take time.

She also walks Muzamil through a separate B2B product Yango has already launched in Pakistan — fixed-route corporate transportation, where a company outsources pick-and-drop for its employees to Yango, and pays per the route rather than per the trip. This particular fixed-route product is, she confirms, specific to Pakistan; the more standard Yango B2B model is still under feasibility study locally.

A 25-year extrapolation, and a generation between two eras

Muzamil closes the conversation with the question he asks every guest: take what you can see right now, and extrapolate twenty-five years out. Miral borrows the frame she opened with — that millennials are the in-between generation — and uses it as the answer. “We are a generation that are actually thoray thoray phans gaye hain,” she says. “We are trying to unshackle ourselves from the older thought processes — which were a little restrictive — and we have also been exposed to a completely different era. What we are trying to do is balance both.”

Her case for optimism is structural rather than wishful. She sees an appetite for experimentation in millennials and the generations that follow, and her own conviction is that an idea — even a bad one — can only be tested by being executed. Exposure, particularly digital exposure, has flattened the gap between generations: her own mother, at 71, and her father, at 79, are now getting that exposure, and their thinking is moving with it. The Pakistan that surfaces from her extrapolation is not unrecognisable — the bottlenecks will still be bottlenecks — but it is “considerably different,” more open and more inclusive than the one she and Muzamil are sitting in.

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil thanks Miral at the one hour forty-five minute mark, notes that the foundation of Pakistan’s startup industry now feels rebuilt rather than broken, and signs off the episode with a personal endorsement for Yango’s back-to-school service — the one that was closest to his own UAE life with his son.