The VC who writes the first check in Pakistan

From Rawalpindi to IBA to an Islamic economics detour

The episode opens with Muzamil asking Shehryar Hydri to walk through his early life — a question that turns out to matter more than it seems. Born in Rawalpindi to an army family, Hydri moved to Islamabad, did his O and A levels at ISAS as part of its first-ever batch in the early nineties, and then went to IBA Karachi for a combined bachelor’s and master’s in marketing.

He had wanted to go to NCA for graphic design. The deal-breaker was simple: NCA did not offer a bachelor’s degree at the time. “Four years you are here and you will not get a bachelor’s degree and then after that you start your career as a junior designer at six thousand rupees,” he recalls. So IBA it was — though he never fully bought into the corporate track his classmates pursued.

After graduating, Hydri returned to Islamabad and enrolled in an M.Phil program in Islamic economics at the International Islamic University. He was genuinely interested in micro-lending and development economics. The reality check came fast. When he interviewed at Faysal Bank — then the only Islamic bank in Pakistan — the regional head pulled him aside before he met the country head: “Don’t tell him that you are a mullah and you are interested in Islamic finance because he is not going to hire you.” Hydri was stunned. He had come specifically for Islamic banking. He stayed a little over a year and left.

The Islamabad versus Karachi DNA

This early career detour prompts one of the more candid exchanges in the conversation. Muzamil raises the observation that Islamabad-raised professionals tend to be more idealistic and value-driven, while Karachi produces people who are commercially sharper and more street-smart. Hydri does not dismiss it.

“Karachi — commercial, dhanda, street smart,” he says. “And that impacts the power dynamic of the society and therefore growing up you realize what’s important, what’s not important, what do you need to survive.” He places the cities in order of commercial savviness: Karachi, then Lahore, then Islamabad. The point is not that one is better but that the environment you grow up in shapes your defaults — your neighbor at the stock exchange, your neighbor with a textile mill, your neighbor at a bank on I.I. Chundrigar Road.

Muzamil connects this to a broader pattern he has noticed: a permission-based culture that runs through Pakistani society at every level. Hydri agrees and sharpens the point. “We are a permission-driven culture. You have to take permission for everything — from your parents, from elders, from the government, from the police, from the bureaucrat.” That permission-seeking, he argues, creates a mental block that permeates into how people think about risk, ambition, and what they believe they are allowed to attempt.

Trango Interactive and the game that almost was

After leaving banking, Hydri joined Elixir Technologies, a US-based Pakistani-American product company, working on the strategic and marketing side. Three years there gave him a foundation in tech without being a technician — a combination that would define the rest of his career.

Then came the pivot that surprises most people who meet him. Watching a Warcraft cinematic in the office one evening — the three-dimensional battle scenes, the grass moving, the orcs — something clicked. “I had no idea how they were made but you just see something and something clicks and you’re like, I want to do this.” He started a small production studio called Mystic Media doing post-production, animation, and music videos, including early work for Abbas Ali Khan.

That studio caught the attention of Traverse Software, a company later acquired by Bentley Systems. They wanted to get into game development and needed someone who understood content and marketing. The result was Trango Interactive, a game development and CGI studio launched as a subsidiary. Their first IP was a third-person hack-and-slash game called Shehra Jatt — a satirical take on Punjabi film culture, built on a proprietary engine that Hydri says was technically comparable to early Unreal Engine builds.

The game got to ninety percent completion. A telecom company had agreed to back it. The contract was due to be signed the following week. Then the brand manager changed. “The new brand manager came in, scratched all previous campaigns, said no to us, backed out at the eleventh hour.” The game was never released. Trango shifted to services to survive, working for nine years with clients including LucasArts, on Tomb Raider content, and for brands like Nike, FedEx, and Discovery Channel.

What Trango left behind was a generation. Quixel — acquired by Epic Games — was founded by Trango alumni. Third World Studios, the first studio in the world to make a feature film using Unreal Engine real-time rendering, came from Trango alumni. Half a dozen other studios across Pakistan trace their lineage there. “We did something crazy when people thought we were nuts,” Hydri says. “Fifty, sixty-plus people at that time doing international projects for Fortune 500 companies.”

P@SHA, public policy, and the limits of government

After Trango wound down in 2013, Hydri joined Convo — a SaaS collaboration platform he describes as a precursor to Slack — heading Pakistan operations and helping raise around fifteen million dollars, including investment from Adobe and Morgenthaler Ventures, one of the oldest Sand Hill Road firms. He left in 2017 and joined P@SHA as Secretary General in late 2018, a paid full-time position equivalent to being the CEO of the association.

The experience gave him a front-row seat to how government actually works — and how different it is from the outside view. He saw two federal governments change, watched provincial policy shift across KP, Punjab, and Sindh, and sat through four-hour government meetings trying to move policy. “You have a seat at the table and they are listening to you. You are the representative of the entire tech industry. Obviously out of ten things they don’t agree with five, but getting those five done is a massive feeling of achievement.”

Later in the discussion, Muzamil asks about STZA — the Special Technology Zones Authority — and whether it delivered on its early promise. Hydri is measured. The structure was right, he says: you need separate laws, a bubble that protects the zone from existing bureaucratic damage. But the execution had two problems. First, government change disrupted continuity — the same brand-manager problem that killed Shehra Jatt, now at a national policy level. Second, STZA aimed outward, hoping to attract Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, when the more organic path would have been to first build up existing local companies with affordable, functional, twenty-four-seven office space, reliable connectivity, and freedom from tax harassment. “You can keep waiting for the big boys to parachute into Pakistan and have a Bangalore-style campus inside the STZA, or you can do a ground-up approach.”

The single biggest ask from any foreign investor or company, he says, is not a specific incentive rate. It is predictability. “Make a decision, tell us that you will stick to it for the next five years so that we can plan accordingly.”

The talent supply problem nobody is solving

Muzamil raises the talent question directly: even with favorable market conditions, if you do not have enough trained workers, nothing happens. Hydri’s answer is blunt.

Of roughly 25,000 IT graduates Pakistan produces each year, he estimates only about 5,000 are ready for international work — and even those need on-the-job training first. The rest face a curriculum that is disconnected from industry, built on weak mathematics foundations that go all the way back to FSc and matric. Meanwhile, the market has been in a poaching cycle rather than a training cycle. “Everybody was busy — I’ll just double their salary and bring them over. Nobody was busy making talent.”

The solution he points to is already happening at small scale: groups of ten companies pooling resources to build a shared curriculum, train two hundred people, hire half, and release the rest to the market. Boot camps and short courses — three to six months — are the only realistic near-term fix. “You can’t wait for your universities to turn around over the next ten years.”

He also pushes back on the tendency to frame the entire talent conversation around AI and machine learning. “Not everyone needs to do AI or computer vision. That’s for the cream.” The real gap is in the middle: DevOps, QA, Salesforce, Oracle, BPO, back-office accounting. Pakistan has no polytechnic culture. It has a four-year degree culture that often produces graduates who know less than someone who spent one year learning a specific technical skill.

Why Deosai exists: the gap nobody was filling

By the time Muzamil steers the conversation toward venture capital, the context is fully set. Hydri explains that the traditional IT services sector — the world of P@SHA, offshore development, body shopping — is a fundamentally different universe from the funded startup ecosystem. They share a tech label but almost nothing else.

When Deosai launched, about two years before the recording, the gap Hydri and his partners saw was specific. VCs operating in Pakistan were calling themselves early-stage investors, but in practice they were seed and pre-Series A at the earliest. Founders who were pre-product, pre-revenue, and pre-product-market-fit — the people who most needed a first check — were being told to come back in six to twelve months with traction. “90% of startups implode in the first year because that’s where you’re trying to find product-market fit, and you can’t bootstrap everything.”

The other half of the gap was angel networks. In mature markets, angels fill the space between friends-and-family money and institutional seed rounds. In Pakistan, the people with money — successful services company founders — had never taken VC funding themselves and were not in the habit of betting on product founders. What passed for angel investing was closer to charity: a ten-thousand-dollar check at a competition, handed over in an envelope, with no expectation of return.

Deosai’s answer was to be genuinely early, genuinely hands-on, and run by operators. “We are ex-founders or current founders. We have built startups in Pakistan, we have destroyed startups in Pakistan, we have closed doors, we have sold startups.” That operator background, Hydri argues, is what separates useful early-stage capital from money that just sits on a cap table.

The portfolio: Roomie to Farmdar

Muzamil asks Hydri to walk through Deosai’s investments. Ten companies over eighteen months of active investing, sector-agnostic, with ticket sizes capped to allow deployment across multiple companies rather than concentrating in one.

Roomie came first — a hospitality chain that Hydri describes as now the second-largest in Pakistan by number of rooms after the Hashwani group, and the largest in northern Pakistan. The model is straightforward: take existing properties, upgrade them to a consistent standard, put them on a tech booking platform, and scale. “A very basic need — when we go to Naran, we just want a clean room, hot water, a clean bathroom, and we don’t want to pay forty thousand rupees for it.”

Truck It In followed — a trucking marketplace connecting shippers with truckers, which Hydri describes as a Careem for trucks. Deosai was the first check in before the round leads came. The company raised thirteen million dollars in its last round and is now focused on reaching sustainability.

In fintech, there is CreditPer (formerly CreditFix), a Sharia-compliant micro-lender targeting unbanked borrowers — riders, loaders, people who need a phone or a motorbike to generate income. The logic is that lending for revenue-generating assets produces better repayment behavior than consumer lending.

On the SaaS side, Metric — a bookkeeping and accounting app for SMEs and solopreneurs — gets a warm mention. Muzamil pauses to make a direct request to the founders, Meena and Umar, for an iPhone version. Pattern is a restaurant loyalty app built by an ex-Dastagrr, ex-Airlift team in Lahore, using behavioral data to deliver personalized discounts rather than blanket percentage-off offers. InventHub is a GitHub for hardware design, backed by Tim Draper, built by a founder who left Stanford to return to Pakistan. RemoteE is a Slack add-on for remote team management.

In agri-tech, Deosai has two plays: EasyFresh, a farm-to-retail supply chain company, and Farmdar — which Muzamil describes as one of his favorite conversations on the channel. Farmdar uses satellite imagery and soil data to generate actionable insights for farmers. “When you begin to explain what they are doing and how they are doing it, it starts with ‘what are they trying to do?’ and ends with ‘that’s a no-brainer, why did nobody think of this before?’” The regional ambition is clear: a deep-tech product validated on one of the world’s largest agricultural markets, then taken to Africa, MENA, and beyond.

What a venture deal actually is — and what it is not

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Hydri to give founders a practical filter: what should someone have before reaching out? And more fundamentally, what is a VC actually for?

Hydri’s answer on the filter is simple: make a pitch deck. Not because it needs to be polished, but because the act of writing one forces you to test whether the idea holds together. “If the founder has enough sense to Google that and download a template, they are already in the top ten percent.”

On the deeper question, he is direct. “Capital is the least valuable part of the equation.” What matters is the VC’s network, their domain knowledge, their ability to help complete a round, and their willingness to do hands-on work with the company. Deosai’s stated policy — no warm intro needed, email or LinkedIn message will get a reply — is a deliberate break from the inaccessibility that characterizes most of the VC world.

He also draws a clear line between a venture deal and everything else. A single boutique hotel in the northern areas is not a venture deal. It cannot scale from one location to a hundred without a fundamentally different model. Roomie is a venture deal because the tech platform allows the model to replicate. “Venture deal needs to be scalable. That is something a lot of people don’t understand and they get frustrated — they think VCs are not paying attention to them because they’re not from a privileged background. But that’s not the reason.”

He closes with a note on what he sees coming: micro-private-equity, a structured way to invest in commercially viable businesses that will never be unicorns but will generate real returns through revenue share or dividends. “This is not a scalable Careem. This is not going to IPO. But this is a commercially viable business that will make a lot of money.” In a country where the stock market has never been accessible to ordinary savers and real estate absorbs capital that could be working harder, that structure has a real role to play.