Sending your kids abroad isn't an investment, it's exposure

A recession sends the family home, before the real education starts

Muzamil opened this episode, recorded in Ginkgo Retail’s Lahore studio as part of a series with Endeavor Pakistan profiling the country’s fastest-growing startups, by framing e-commerce as one of two sectors, alongside fintech, doing the most to digitize an economy where, by his estimate, less than 1 percent of retail has moved online, against 15 to 20 percent in India and Western markets. That gap is the backdrop against which Obaid Arshad’s own story starts.

Obaid Arshad spent his first sixteen years in Dubai, where his father worked as a mechanical engineer for the Dubai government and his mother taught school. When the 2008 recession strained the family’s finances, everyone except his father moved back to Pakistan, settling in Wah Cantt, near Islamabad, in a house inherited from his grandfather, a retired army officer. It was, by his description, a small, limited environment to land in after Dubai.

Muzamil asked him directly where the discipline behind Ginkgo Retail came from, and Obaid Arshad didn’t point to a business degree or a mentor. He pointed to his parents. “The mother of all these things is the mindset,” he said, “and that mindset, work on it starts from day one.” He describes an upbringing built around patience, tolerance, and gratitude long before it was built around grades, and credits his school years alongside Indian classmates in Dubai with teaching his parents, watching him navigate that diversity, what a different style of raising a child could look like. He points to one concrete outcome of that culture today: he says employee retention at Ginkgo runs above 95 percent, which he attributes to running the company more like a counselor and motivator than a conventional manager.

That same answer carried the line that gives this piece its title. “I think we should send children abroad at a very early stage,” Obaid Arshad told Muzamil, “and parents should go abroad too, to see what’s positive in different communities, different civilizations. We should adapt that and bring it back to Pakistan.” His point wasn’t that families should chase money overseas. It was that Pakistan’s education system overloads children with books and exam pressure and forgets that a child is also supposed to grow into a person.

Selling credit cards, hauling tank parts, learning without a syllabus

Back in Pakistan, Obaid Arshad completed ICOM and BCOM in Wah Cantt, and by his own account, wasn’t a standout student either way. What he did know, he said, was that he was a hustler. His first job, arranged through an uncle who managed an HBL branch, was selling credit cards as a retail sales officer in 2011. From there he moved through a string of odd jobs: supplying tank parts to a heavy industry client in Taxila, running a Leopards Courier franchise, investing in a restaurant, and supervising overland logistics for TCS in Wah Cantt.

None of it made him money. What it gave him, he told Muzamil, was a practical education that university wasn’t offering. “I didn’t know what I would end up doing, or what I was made to do,” he said. “All I knew was that I kept on hustling.” Banking taught him fintech and cash handling. TCS and Leopards taught him logistics. The restaurant and the parts-supply business taught him what running something actually costs. By 2016, he moved into e-commerce as a customer services officer at Sapphire, on a salary of 70,000 rupees a month. Within that role and the one after it, he says he turned down other offers worth up to 300,000 rupees a month, because staying put meant staying connected to more than a hundred client relationships, and that access, not the paycheck, was what let him see where the industry was actually heading. He describes his own learning style the same way across every one of those jobs: where a university student was assigned one subject per semester, he says he assigned himself four or five departments at once, cash handling and loan processing at the bank, overnight parcel routing alongside his official supervisor role at TCS, absorbing adjacent functions because the actual job in front of him rarely held his attention on its own.

Building the product inside someone else’s company

Within a year at Sapphire, Obaid Arshad moved to Alchemative, where he says he ended up running four or five departments at once: billing, recovery, business development, marketing, and the Shopify Plus development practice the agency was building for brands like Sapphire and Ethnic. Alchemative became Pakistan’s first Shopify Plus agency-level partner, at a time when Shopify itself, a Canadian platform built for paid, card-heavy markets, had no real handle on Pakistan’s cash-on-delivery reality. Obaid Arshad says the country’s e-commerce sector grew roughly 97 percent year over year through that stretch, with individual brands going from a few hundred monthly orders to ten thousand as automation took over what used to be manual work.

The pivot from services to product happened almost by accident. A client came to Alchemative with a specific operational problem, and Obaid Arshad’s team realized their existing plugins could be combined into something bigger. Rather than raise outside capital, they went back to that same client with a pitch: fund the build for 4 million rupees, and it would return in a year what the market would otherwise take much longer to deliver. The client agreed, on trust built over prior work that had already grown their online business from roughly 9 million to 320 million rupees a month, and that funding became, in effect, Ginkgo’s founding capital. “We did not give equity, and we did not do a proper round,” Obaid Arshad said. The whole thing was incubated inside Alchemative, under one roof, because he says he didn’t believe in running a side hustle of the same nature as his day job.

An equity buyout, without a fight

As the product matured, Obaid Arshad negotiated an equity split with Alchemative’s founder: a stake for Alchemative, a stake for Obaid Arshad, and a stake for his CTO. Two years later, as Alchemative became what he calls a sleeping partner while Obaid Arshad’s team ran everything day to day, he bought out their equity outright. “When I moved from Alchemative to Ginkgo, I didn’t want my equity in Alchemative,” he said. “I wanted skin in the game, and I wanted my complete equity in Ginkgo.” Alchemative itself was later acquired by another Pakistani IT firm, long after Obaid Arshad had already moved on and bought out his own stake.

Muzamil pressed on whether the split was genuinely fair, framing it against what he called Pakistan’s low-trust business culture, where partnerships often end with one side extracting the upside and the other walking away with nothing. Obaid Arshad insisted the number both sides agreed on was neutral, not one he dictated from a position of power, even though by that point he held the leverage as CEO. “When I go to my grave,” he said, “I want to be certain that I never wronged anyone just over money.” He and Alchemative’s former founder are still on speaking terms today, by his account, and still exchange ideas.

The karyana store and Metro Cash & Carry

Asked to explain Ginkgo Retail in plain terms, Obaid Arshad reached for an analogy: a neighborhood karyana store has one person managing everything from memory, no ledger, no point-of-sale system. Metro Cash & Carry runs the same basic function, retail, at a completely different order of infrastructure. Ginkgo’s post-order management platform is what lets a merchant make that jump. Once a store owner is running Shopify or WordPress and has moved past a few hundred orders a month, cash-on-delivery verification calls, courier routing, address correction, invoice generation, and inventory sync across warehouses and storefronts stop being manageable by hand, across five different logins and a stack of spreadsheets. Ginkgo unifies all of it into one system, priced, Obaid Arshad says, to be affordable from a five-hundred-order-a-month startup up through enterprise.

The clearest version of that pitch came during COVID. Retail networks across Pakistan went into lockdown, and Obaid Arshad says Ginkgo converted brick-and-mortar inventory into what he calls fulfillment centers: a shop with unsold stock could pick, pack, and ship an online order directly from its own shelf rather than let that inventory sit dead. By his account, Ginkgo now runs omnichannel operations for over 200 merchants, including Sapphire, Nishat, Outfitters, and Bata, spanning more than 8,000 brand locations, and the same inventory pool can serve a store counter, a website, and a marketplace listing at once without duplicating stock or losing track of what has actually sold.

Why a Canadian platform never understood Pakistan

Obaid Arshad’s central argument for why a locally built platform beats an imported one comes down to data and payment behavior. Shopify, he points out, was built for a market where 80 to 90 percent of sales happen through Walmart and Amazon, largely prepaid. Pakistan runs on cash on delivery, and Ginkgo’s own storefront product, built to compete with Shopify and Magento, uses that difference directly: dynamic pages that show a returning customer non-discounted items if that’s their pattern, or resurface a discount if bounce-rate signals suggest they’re about to leave. He credits this personalization layer with lifting conversion by 30 percent before a customer even reaches checkout, a figure he offered as his own claim rather than an audited number. “We are that company,” he said, comparing Ginkgo’s local buildout to what Tesla would need to do to sell in a market with no charging infrastructure: bring the whole system, not just the product.

He drew a comparison, unprompted, to LAAM, a Pakistani cross-border marketplace he admires for its backend logistics work but criticizes for a consumer experience he says doesn’t match its technical strength. Muzamil raised a related platform, Octane, and Obaid Arshad drew a clear line between the two businesses: Octane is solving international fulfillment and shipping cost for brands selling overseas, while Ginkgo is solving local operations and omnichannel retail. “Our model is different,” he said, arguing the two overlap only at the edges rather than compete head to head, since a large local brand generally wants to keep its own warehousing rather than hand inventory to a third party.

Design is Pakistan’s weak point, not the technology

Muzamil pushed on a gap he’d noticed across Pakistani e-commerce generally: strong backend engineering paired with clunky, uneven storefront design, something he said he could sense in Ginkgo’s own client sites even without knowing the platform underneath. Obaid Arshad didn’t dispute it. He argued the deeper problem isn’t a Ginkgo problem, it’s that Pakistani merchants rarely treat design as something worth paying for the way they’d pay for a physical retail buildout. His comparison: nobody opens a store without hiring an interior decorator, yet the same business will launch a website without anyone dedicated to color, layout, or font choices, then wonder why conversion lags. “Until designers, marketers, and engineers sit at the same table for one objective,” he said, “this is never going to get solved, and it has nothing to do with the technology.”

That gap is part of why Ginkgo has started building beyond pure operations. The company recently launched Zentri, described by Obaid Arshad as a made-in-Pakistan digital business-intelligence and AI marketing audit tool, priced for merchants who can’t afford a full agency engagement. He frames the next five years around becoming an incubation hub for products like it, rather than a single-tool company, with an eye toward raising outside capital specifically to take Ginkgo’s own products, not just its services, global, eventually chasing an IPO for one or more of them rather than staying a single privately held operating business.

His broader point was that no software vendor can fix a merchant’s design problem for them if the merchant isn’t willing to invest in it in the first place. A brand that treats its storefront as an afterthought will keep getting an afterthought’s conversion rate, regardless of which platform sits underneath it, and Obaid Arshad was blunt that this is a market-wide habit rather than something unique to any one client of his.

Chasing Saudi Arabia and Egypt, not a funding round

Ginkgo’s international footprint, by Obaid Arshad’s account, already includes white-label review-management products used by more than 150 merchants in Canada and the US, including Nike and Adidas, generating over 8 million dollars in annual recurring revenue on that line alone. The core Ginkgo product has started expanding into Dubai and Saudi Arabia, with existing clients in the UAE and early conversations underway in Saudi. He frames Egypt and Saudi Arabia as natural next markets precisely because they share Pakistan’s structural problem: Egypt runs 80 to 90 percent cash on delivery, Saudi around 70 percent, against Ginkgo’s home market at 96 percent, in a country of 250 million against Saudi Arabia’s roughly 33 million. Whatever Ginkgo has already solved for Pakistan’s population, he argues, becomes the playbook for markets with the same cash-heavy pattern and a fraction of the scale.

On funding, Obaid Arshad was candid that bootstrapping wasn’t entirely a choice. Ginkgo’s early cap table, split between Alchemative, himself, and his CTO, made it harder to raise a clean round, so growth was funded through the business itself instead, at what he put at 70 to 80 percent year-on-year growth over the last three years. He said Ginkgo is now open to outside capital for the right, like-minded investors, though he stopped short of naming a timeline for an IPO, calling it something the company wants eventually rather than imminently.

Send your kids abroad, but not for the money

Midway through the conversation, Muzamil paused to draw out what he saw as the real lesson underneath Obaid Arshad’s numbers: not a growth hack, but a set of inherited values, patience, optimism, gratitude, that he argued matter more than any tactic circulating on short-form video. He tied that directly back to Obaid Arshad’s own story of growing up abroad. “The actual reason to go abroad is exposure,” Muzamil said. “It’s not money. It’s not that you’ll get rich, or that some lottery will land on you.”

Muzamil extended the point further than Obaid Arshad had: that a child raised with a different frame of reference stands out against every other student funneled through the same schools chasing the same grades, that exposure itself becomes a kind of differentiation rather than a shortcut to wealth. He also flagged something Obaid Arshad had said about himself earlier: that arriving in Pakistan from Dubai as a softer, more idealistic person felt, for a while, like a liability in what Muzamil called a market that rewards a harder edge. Obaid Arshad’s own answer to that, given earlier in the conversation, was that the return on values shows up later rather than sooner, and that he’d rather take longer to arrive than get there by cutting someone else out along the way.

Digitizing cash, and a bleak forecast for 2050

Late in the conversation, Obaid Arshad connected Ginkgo’s own work back to a bigger structural shift: digitizing cash necessarily digitizes tax exposure. He described a cosmetics brand selling a product for 3,000 rupees while staying outside the formal, cashless economy, losing customers to a competitor doing 100 million rupees in sales while paying no tax at all, and using that untaxed margin to undercut everyone else on price. As digital rails spread and that 18 percent sales tax becomes harder to avoid, he expects informal, low-margin operators either to formalize or disappear, while properly run businesses absorb their share of the market and newer entrants build compliant pricing in from day one.

Asked, without hedging, to project Pakistan 25 years out, Obaid Arshad didn’t reach for an economic forecast. “There would be money everywhere, there would be stability when it comes to economy,” he said, “but when it comes to the society, when it comes to the planet, it would become a disastrous place to live.” His reasoning wasn’t about GDP. It was about air quality, water, and a generation he believes is already carrying the same underlying sickness regardless of income. “First comes the planet, then society, then economy,” he said. “Here it’s reversed.” Muzamil closed the conversation by noting that whatever the state of the country in the decades ahead, Ginkgo Retail’s push into new regions looks, in hindsight, less like ambition and more like a hedge.