Starting up for Pakistan!

 The year was 2001. I had just finished my internship, which was mandatory for my undergrad degree. I had been working as a network administrator at one of the largest institutional LANs in Pakistan, succeeded by the great Imran Ali Rashid (my great mentor). I had also been planning out the ground breaking all Pakistan software competition at GIK Institute, ideated by Adeel Hashmi, and lead by Bilal Ahmad Raza. Both of these entrepreneurship ventures had been partially run like a social enterprise. GIK Institute’s LAN had an mIRC server, which was the only channel from hostels to communicate with external world, as internet had been restricted for all students, essentially due to speed issues in the labs. The students, who had been using this LAN had a messaging software called ‘NetPopup’, designed and developed by a brilliant undergrad student, the late Habib Ahmad, as a voluntary project. The software could be used to send broadcast and private messages to all users in the hostels, as well as list down current LAN users and access their shared folders.

I had a wild idea, and tried to work out a web based alternative of students’ community and profiles, which could have a chat feature, file-sharing support, social groups, and a marketplace. As I already had a lot on my plate, I tried to convince my friends, whom I deemed programming gurus, to help me develop such a solution, which actually would have been a platform independent and user friendly one-stop-solution for all the communication software mentioned above. After a month, I had noticed that the progress was quite slow, due to the fact that none of the gurus had enough bandwidth to work as much hours as actually required to complete such a product, primarily due to some study issues, and the fact that none of them had any experience with implementing such a solution for web. I realized I’d needed trained programmers and some cash flow to keep them, which unfortunately I could not afford at that time. I had heard about people investing on product ideas in the western countries, but I had no contacts in Pakistan, who could help me out with such a venture, as it used to be very hard to convince people about technology during those days, when GIK campus did not usually have any mobile phones, or even cars.

One of my good friends’ Kamran Nisar found an overseas funding opportunity, and hesitantly we had applied for gaming café and professional video editing business in Pakistan, which did get rejected. Many unpredictable events in 2002 finally landed me a full time job at a leading workflow solution software company (although, I had planned to pursue a Ph.D.), and simultaneously taking a couple of courses to graduate from GIK Institute. I had been trying to work out the video shop chain idea with my friend Rehan Yousuf at that time, and thanks to my good friend from high school, Zulfiqar Jabbar Khan (Xulfi: EP, The Call, Nescafe Basement), we could even connect to Vasay Chaudhry, via Ahmad Butt, to learn more about the nitty-gritty of the business. Consequently, the ideas of social networking web portal and video shop was side lined due to unfeasible circumstances, although the gaming café model had been pursued by another friend during 2004 in Islamabad after his graduation together with his another family member. I remember I were happy that they could pursue the idea by bootstrapping, as I had great confidence that this business has a great potential for hypergrowth, and it did succeed to gain substantial attention from masses.

The same year, i.e. 2004, my other idea was also launched, though not by myself again, but as orkut.com, named after a Google.com’s engineer named Orkut. I had mixed feelings about the launch of orkut.com, as it actually validated I had a great idea, which does work out well, but felt bad that Pakistan had not been ready for making such an innovation possible at that time. This experience taught me some valuable lessons.

1. Although there are some 8 billion humans on this planet, there is no idea which is unique.
2. World doesn’t end if you see others prosper with the idea you had, or even shared with them. An innovative mind can find new and bigger venues.
3. My illiteracy to patent laws and lack of certain intellectual property and copyright protection law enforcement in Pakistan had been the key factors behind such misses that I had experienced.
4. One person cannot do everything.
5. It requires international exposure to learn and understand how to overcome my mental/intellectual limitations.

Hence, I planned to focus on my shortcomings and eventually left Pakistan to join Masters program in South Korea, as a first step to attain my dream of acquiring a Ph.D (originally suggested by Xulfi during our school days). Life in the greatest universities of far east and later Malaysia taught and groomed me a lot. I learned about the basic principles Pakistan fails to lead in any and all fields even though immense talent is present in homeland. I had been blessed with great opportunities to learn from the greatest of the greatest in the business, for instance, I have learned about data science and entrepreneurship from Open Data Institute, lead by the inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, and wisdom form the honorary lectures of then Chancellor at Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS and former prime minister of Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad. I had been blessed with the chance to witness the growth of China and observe the factors that uplifted China from poverty and its fascination with rapidly growing infrastructure and technology. I could understand the issues Pakistan is facing, and how the far east and China successfully got over them. I learned how the big economies of the world invest in education, research, and technological innovation. I realized why SAARC has lesser impact than ASEAN. Although, east started to develop later, but I can tell why the east has a better infrastructure and technology in the developed countries as compared with the western powers. What keeps United States as the leader in novel innovations and technology. And finally, why China, Japan, ASEAN, and New Zealand could handle COVID-19 better than the west.

I have been associated with a startup in Malaysia, who could get angel investor to create the MVP after some frequent pitching. I had to learn many things business administration students are taught and realized how engineering students are kept away from such information related with business planning and value proposition, which, I reckoned, had been the main reason of missing funding opportunities during my undergrad at GIK Institute. I came to know about intellectual property (IP) filing when I filed my patent application related with my Ph.D. research. I came to know how much of a role marketing plays, and to what level, when I repeatedly appeared at the international innovation exhibitions with my own research prototypes, and while presenting as a group effort when I were a research scientist looking over a dozen projects at the nationally recognized center of excellence in neuroimaging in Malaysia.

I landed in the US few months before the world was hit by the pandemic, when my wife, Dr. Mehwish Saba Bhatti, started working as a postdoc at University of California Irvine, and I had some time to compare the funding culture at big names such as the Y Combinator and Techstars, against the startup and entrepreneurship opportunities in the far east. Eventually, I could recognize the deficiencies and gaps that exist in Pakistan as compared with far east and far west. Although, I believe that Pakistan has immense unchallenged, unchannelized, and raw talent, there is much to be done to create a progressive and conducive culture for continuous improvement. Let me list down some of my inferences.

1. I can observe the emergence of VC culture in Pakistan since 2014, but due to very specific market needs, much of the innovation at par with the developed world lies out of scope.
2. Startup team requires rapid prototyping, but it is very hard to find such motivated individuals at early careers, as the talented ones either prefer working for a large corporate due to higher paychecks, or leave the country. What stays behind are those, who had been trained to work for 9 – 5 paycheck-to-paycheck jobs, and who are not motivated to take the risks associated with a startup, as the risk of failure always exists throughout the startup life-cycle.
3. Again, due to the risk of failure, as only marginal startups end up being successful, lack of economic stability in Pakistan multiplies the risk, and therefore, disruptive innovations are rarely possible. If a model passes the market testing and adoption barrier in the rest of the world, only then it can be replicated in Pakistan, if-and-only-if, there is a high public sentiment for it, or there is a good marketing budget to drive public sentiment for it. For instance, Uber was a hit, and hence, Pakistan got Careem.
4. The lack of legal support and inability to understand the overly complicated laws makes it difficult for any entrepreneur to work out a sustainable startup culture.
5. As less people go the startup way and the startup culture in Pakistan is still quite young, there is a great lack of mentors; even in the presence of some incubators, who are certainly trying their best to assist their associates, there exists a big gap between what the startup offers, and what the investor demands. Only the right mentors may be able to make these ends meet, and hence, match the supply with demand.
6. Culturally, real estate and gold are the top investments for Pakistanis, rich or poor, therefore, any investment other than these areas seem risky for the investors.
7. Suppressing creative thoughts and imposing a very limited scope of growth snatches away the true potential of individuals at school. Such a policy restricts out-of-the-box thinking, risk taking, and creativity, and eventually, results in low quality masses that do not comply or able to challenge international challenges.
8. With a population under quarter of a billion, lack of basic facilities, such as inability to use PayPal, and few other standard gateways, market is already limited by restricted growth; primarily to the big cities (KLIMFP: Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Multan, Faisalabad, and Peshawar).

I believe the emergence of big names such as Fatima-Gobi Ventures, Lakson VC, i2i, and Sarmayacar, followed by new and notable additions like Indus Valley Capital are gradually evolving the startup ecosystem in the right sustainable direction. However, for a fact check, India has 35 unicorns as compared with only one from Pakistan, i.e. zameen.com. The advent of Indus Valley Capital’s Wapistanis program and Pakistani talent support network, Paklaunch.com and Startup Pakistan, seem to drive and grow the startup ecosystem, while gradually filling the foundation gaps in the knowledge, infrastructure, and technological advantage; yet, there remains a very long and strenuous way to go!

Note: Some information has been kept confidential in order to comply with non-disclosure agreements, and to refrain from maligning the focus of this article.