How Salim Ghauri turned a $90,000 deal into $150 million

A father with nothing in his pocket

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Salim Ghauri as the founder of NetSol Technologies — a guest, he notes, that listeners had been requesting for a long time. Before the conversation reaches software or stock listings, it goes somewhere more foundational: a father from Bahawalpur who moved his family to Lahore with six sons, a wife, a sister, and no money.

Ghauri is clear that the business DNA people attribute to him actually came second. “Business baad mein aaya, pehle unki khwahish aayi,” he says — the desire came before the business. His father was a trader who sold oil and goods on the road, but what defined him was the courage to leave everything familiar. “He came to Lahore with just — and things worked for him. But when he started with nothing, that is the courage I wish we all had.”

That framing — courage before capital, desire before plan — runs through every decision Ghauri makes for the next fifty years.

Romania and the machine that decided four

Ghauri was born in Bahawalpur, schooled in Lahore, and then sent — against his will, loudly protesting — to Romania for a petroleum engineering degree. His father had a connection with the Romanian government through export work, and when the lottery of which son to send abroad landed on Salim, he cried. Romania was cold, communist, and linguistically impenetrable.

He calls it his defining period. “A very harsh life. But this is what happens to people jiinka kuch aage karna hota hai.”

The pivot happened in year two of his degree, inside a computer lab he had never heard of before. A professor sent the class to a room with a teleprinter. A clerk asked Ghauri for two numbers, typed them, fed punch cards into a reader, and a paper came out: two plus two equals four. Ghauri stared at it. He was convinced someone had typed the answer. The clerk told him no — the machine decided.

“That machine is the future. That changed my life.” He began ignoring his petroleum engineering coursework, went to Romanian libraries to read about computers, and by the time he graduated in 1977, he had already decided his degree was a detour.

Citibank, a pay cut, and Pakistan’s first freelancer

Ghauri arrived in Saudi Arabia in 1978 with a petroleum engineering degree and no computer credentials. He took a job as a transport manager — good salary, a car, nothing to do with computing. Then Citibank called back on an application he had filed months earlier. The job was in the computer department. The salary was half what he was earning. There was no car, it was a night shift, and it was in Dammam, not Riyadh.

The Citibank manager was baffled. “What’s wrong with you? Why do you want the lowest job we can offer with half the salary and no benefits?” Ghauri’s answer was simple: he just wanted to be in the computer field.

He was hired. At night he worked the shift. During the day he bought an Apple IIe — pooling money from friends, paying 5,000 riyals, connecting it to his television — and taught himself to program in COBOL and BASIC. He started taking freelance work. A Lebanese businessman asked him to build a payroll system. Ghauri did it for free, essentially, and when the man insisted on paying, he handed over a cheque for 10,000 riyals. “That was my first software sale. I realised I have chosen the right track in my life.”

Muzamil points out that Ghauri was probably Pakistan’s first freelancer. Ghauri laughs and doesn’t disagree.

Eventually, Citibank found out he was running a side business. His branch manager, Deepak Sharma, gave him a simple choice: stop the business or leave. Ghauri didn’t ask for a day to think. “No, I cannot do that.” He handed over his keys, collected his cheque from HR, and walked out. “I knew my destination is not a job.”

Lost everything, went to Australia

The Saudi chapter ended badly. Ghauri had opened a computer training centre with a Saudi partner. When it started working, the partner pushed him out and took over. Ghauri left Saudi Arabia one night with his family and nothing in his pocket, returned to Karachi, stayed with his brother, and eventually made his way to Australia.

Sydney in the late 1980s had strong demand for computer professionals. Ghauri arrived, got a PR visa within six months, and was immediately busy on contract work. He was hired by BHP, the mining company, for a three-month contract to network forty PCs. When the contract ended and BHP tried to hand his role to a replacement, the department heads intervened and asked the IT manager to keep him. He stayed for eight years.

Then, in 1993, something happened that he cannot let go of. His manager John asked him to set up a conference room with thirty networked PCs. Ghauri did it, locked the room, handed over the key. Three months later, walking past, he found the room open. Inside were people speaking Urdu and Hindi. They were from India, implementing software for BHP.

“My mind just went — no way. How come there’s no Pakistani company offering this software?” For two years, he says, his happiness left him that day.

The Bangkok napkin and the first contract

Muzamil asks when Ghauri finally decided to move back. The answer is characteristically unplanned. His eldest brother offered to invest two million rupees. Ghauri warned him there was no plan, no guarantee, no certainty of success. The brother said he understood the risk. Ghauri picked up his family and moved to Lahore in 1995.

He rented a small office in DHA Phase One for eight thousand rupees a month, hired three people, and started knocking on doors in a suit and tie, telling anyone who would listen that he could automate their business. Nobody called back. He asked his wife to phone the office a couple of times a day just so the telephone would ring.

The break came from an unexpected direction. His brother called from Thailand — his boss in Bangkok needed people in Pakistan with AS/400 and RPG skills. Ghauri found them, flew to Bangkok in his best suit in May heat, and discovered his meeting was with two men in shorts sitting in a hotel lobby. They laughed at his formal attire. He laughed too. The ice broke. On a napkin, they signed a contract worth forty thousand pounds to bring four Pakistani consultants to Thailand for six months.

That project led to a relationship with Oygen Beckett, the CIO of the company’s Asia region, based in Singapore. Ghauri wanted software development work. Beckett kept politely declining — the company was too big, the work too complex. Ghauri’s response was to fly Lahore to Bangkok to Singapore twice a month, arriving unannounced at Beckett’s office, and asking to be taken to lunch. He could not afford a hotel, so he would turn around and fly back the same day — a twenty-four-hour round trip.

“Itna maine usse tang kiya ho gaya unko.” Eventually, Beckett called. He had something in Taiwan. Could Ghauri do software? Ghauri wrote in his diary that day: “I got the call I am waiting for. The time will tell if this is the break we were looking for.” It was.

The $90,000 deal that became $150 million

The Taiwan project was for Mercedes-Benz’s finance company. Ghauri submitted a proposal for $300,000. Beckett said the budget was only $90,000. Ghauri agreed — but asked for one thing in return: the right to retain and resell the software he would develop.

Beckett was surprised. The software was built on the client’s business knowledge. Conventionally, the client owns it. But Ghauri let go of $210,000 in fees to keep the IP. “It’s not enough. Won’t be able to pay my bills. But at least I’ll get some business knowledge for that.”

Over the following five years, Ghauri kept negotiating the same clause into every subsequent contract. By the end, he owned the full lifecycle software for automotive finance transactions. Today, NetSol is one of only four providers globally that compete in that space.

“I sell for $10, $20, $30 million. Mercedes paid me five years ago $150 million for a twelve-country license. That same software.” He estimates he has billed Mercedes-Benz alone over a billion dollars across twenty-six years. The Thai client from that first Bangkok contract, he adds, still uses NetSol software today.

The wrong message Pakistan keeps sending

Later in the discussion, Muzamil raises the talent shortage — the widely cited problem that Pakistan’s IT industry cannot scale because it cannot produce enough employable graduates fast enough. Ghauri interrupts with visible frustration.

“I totally disagree with the whole problem statement you’ve given me. You create your own resource pool by yourself.” He says NetSol hires fifty people, twenty leave, thirty stay — and the twenty who left were trained by NetSol. He sees nothing wrong with that. “Industry aise banti hai. Stop crying.”

But his deeper objection is about messaging. Every time a Pakistani IT leader goes on a podcast or gives an interview and says the country lacks people, that message travels globally. “Who will give you work? What sort of people are you? Why are you telling people we don’t have people?” He points out that India, by contrast, always announced a number larger than what it had achieved. Pakistan, he argues, is understating its own exports because most freelancers and unregistered companies don’t file the required forms with the State Bank — meaning the official $3 billion figure is almost certainly far below the real number.

“We are damaging our own industry by saying these things.” He is not dismissive of the underlying problem — he acknowledges that Pakistan started building IT schools roughly twenty years after India, which is why it missed the Y2K boom entirely. But his prescription is to train internally, stop broadcasting weakness, and tell the world Pakistan has the people.

Building something that outlasts you

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Ghauri about succession — whether NetSol, as a publicly listed, family-founded company, has the structures to survive fifty or a hundred years. Ghauri returns to the distinction he drew at the start: making money versus building an institution.

“It’s easy to make money. It’s very difficult to build institutions. And institutions are the ones who last longer than yourself.” He says professionals, not family, sit at every tier of the company. Twenty nationalities work for NetSol. A second development hub is being built in China, staffed by Chinese developers, to serve the Chinese market as a Chinese company. Development centres are expanding from Lahore to Karachi, Islamabad, and Faisalabad.

He is equally direct about the stock market listing. NetSol listed in the US in 1998 or 1999, and in Pakistan in 2005. Asked whether he would do it again, he says no — not because it was wrong, but because public markets force quarterly thinking that conflicts with long-horizon institution building. “As a public company, sometimes you have to go because quarters pe quarter you have to be quick in sales. That affects your decision making.” He has no regrets, but the lesson is clear.

On Pakistan’s future, Ghauri is unambiguous. He moved back and does not want to leave. His children are here. “I believe this is going to be a tremendous country.” He sees a youth cohort that is more knowledgeable and more capable than his own generation was, and he believes the IT industry’s numbers will multiply exponentially — not in fifty years, but in three to five.

“Hum boat par hain. We are not missing the boat. We are in the digital boat.”