Nabeel Qadeer on being lost after Idea Karoron Ka

A golden spoon, a partition family, and a school chosen for fashion

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Nabeel Qadeer as someone he had been trying to get on the show for nearly a year — a guest he had been following for over a decade. The conversation begins, as Muzamil’s conversations often do, at the very beginning: where were you born, and what was early life like?

Nabeel traces his family back across the border — Amritsar and Jalandhar, before partition brought them to Lahore. He went to Alma for his O levels (the school’s second-ever batch, he notes) and then to Lacas for A levels, chosen, by his own admission, for no deeper reason than that it was fashionable. As a student, he was curious and risk-taking but not particularly grade-driven. “A good student in my opinion would be someone who is curious, who is constantly curious,” he says. “I was constantly curious. I was constantly risk taking.” His teachers, he adds with a laugh, did not always share that assessment.

From Lacas he went to FAST Lahore for a BSc in computer science, graduating in 2001 — right in the middle of the dot-com boom and the Y2K drama. FAST, he recalls, was a brutal filter: they admitted around 130 students from a pool where only about one percent made it through. His own name appeared second-to-last on the acceptance list. What FAST gave him, he argues, was not intelligence but a tolerance for hard targets, impossible timelines, and all-nighters. “Fast ने मुश्किل targets کو، مشکل timelines کو، nighters کو، mainstream کر دیا ہمارے لیے” — FAST made difficult targets, difficult timelines, and all-nighters a normal part of life.

The halwai who taught him customer empathy

After FAST, Nabeel tried job interviews and quickly understood they were not for him. He ended up doing customized ERP implementations for local businesses — a path that led him, memorably, to Nirala Sweets. His job was to automate the dispatch of mithai from factory to retail stores. The catch: the people he had to train were halwais who could not read the words “shift” or “enter” on a keyboard.

He describes sitting at two-thirty in the morning, trying to communicate a technical process to workers who operated in an entirely different linguistic and conceptual world. The experience, he says, was formative in a way no classroom could have been. “That exploration of my own ability to speak to someone who had a completely different linguistic system than I did” — it forced him to strip his knowledge down to its simplest possible form, to become friends with the workers, to understand their household problems. He draws a direct line from that night shift at Nirala to his later work with startups: “Every startup جو ہم اس سے بات کر لیں گے بعد میں جو غلطی کرتا ہے وہ یہ کرتا ہے کہ وہ اپنے perspective سے چیزوں کو بنا کر market میں لے جاتا ہے” — every startup makes the mistake of building from its own perspective rather than understanding the customer’s actual pain.

A family fracture, a grandmother’s death, and one page of a brochure

Later in the discussion, Nabeel opens up about something he says he has not spoken about publicly before. Around 2008 and 2009, his parents went through a serious falling out. As the eldest son in a large, old Lahore house built by his grandfather in 1966, the weight of that shift fell on him. He had grown up with every comfort provided. Suddenly, he was calculating how to divide limited money between his own education, his brothers’ futures, and his mother’s needs — who had also begun to fall ill.

His grandfather had died in 2003, a loss he describes as losing a part of himself. His grandmother passed in 2011. The accumulated grief, the family instability, and a growing sense that he needed to understand himself pushed him toward a master’s degree abroad. But the choice of university was unusual. He did not pick the highest-ranked institution. He picked the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow because of one page — the program director’s foreword, written by a man named Peter McKennis. “He wrote about self reflection. He wrote about how I’m not gonna teach you basic marketing, accounting, and blah blah blah here. So if you’re coming for your master’s program, it’s gonna be a master’s in yourself.” Nabeel describes that as “the sexiest thing I had heard.”

The pedagogy was intensely practical — at one point, students were dropped into the sea for three days and told to save each other as part of a management exercise. It was in Scotland, in those mountains and islands, that Nabeel says he found himself. “Nabeel Qadeer became Nabeel Qadeer in his mind also after he realized who he is.” He came back to Pakistan with no concrete plan, only a conviction that he needed to do something that served others, not just himself. His mother was battling oral cancer. He had no option but to return.

Plan9, PITB, and the limits of government

A phone call from a government number changed everything. Two friends told him that Doctor Umar Saif, chairman of PITB, was looking for someone dynamic to set up Pakistan’s first tech incubator. Nabeel met Umar, a synergy formed, and the two of them essentially figured out how to run an incubator as they went. Plan9 was born.

Nabeel spent five and a half years at PITB, running eleven batches through Plan9, designing the first government-backed skill development program for young people, and attempting — ultimately unsuccessfully — to establish a public-private venture fund modeled on Israel’s Yozma program. He and Umar spent months visiting the Planning and Development department and the Finance department, trying to translate the concept into language the government could process. “Government پر کہتی ہے یار یہ نہ بتاؤ کیا نیا کرنا ہے؟ یہ بتاؤ یہ کس جیسا ہے؟” — the government doesn’t want to know what’s new; it wants to know what existing thing it resembles.

Muzamil presses him on where government should and should not operate in the tech space. Nabeel’s answer is direct: governments are structurally incapable of efficient execution. “Governments are like these huge elephants — بڑی چھوٹی چھوٹی آنکھیں ہوتی ہیں” — big bodies, small eyes. They follow a rule book. The real problem, he argues, is misaligned KPIs. In the private sector the goal is profit. In government the goal is appeasement of the current political machinery. “کل تک بنا کر دو پرسوں CM نے فیتہ کاٹنا ہے” — build it by tomorrow because the Chief Minister is cutting the ribbon the day after. Everything else — proper requirements, testing, sustainability — becomes secondary to the ribbon-cutting moment.

He is careful to say that well-meaning people exist on both sides, and that the government’s role as a first mover — creating the concept of incubators, making entrepreneurship a public conversation — was genuinely valuable. But scale and efficiency, he insists, must be handed to the private sector.

What Mark Cuban said in Austin

By 2016, Nabeel had begun working on what would become Idea Karoron Ka, Pakistan’s first business reality show. The origin story is a sequence of rejections. He pitched to a major channel in Karachi; the executive had never heard of Shark Tank and suggested Nabeel host a wedding show instead. He shot a pilot with third-class cameras at his own expense and sent a CD to Dawn News; the response was that it was “below par.” Two other channels either kept him waiting for two and a half hours without offering tea — a serious slight in Lahore — or strung him along indefinitely.

The break came at a university event where Nabeel was standing in for Doctor Umar Saif. He met Chaudhry Abdur Rehman, who had a small, early-stage channel called Neo. Rehman had already been thinking about a similar show. He gave the show its name: Idea Karoron Ka. Four seasons followed.

On the question of whether the investments shown on the show were real, Nabeel is candid. He met Mark Cuban at South by Southwest in Austin and asked him directly. “He said to me himself that ہمارے جو investments ہوتی ہیں mostly پہلے سے pre planned ہوتی ہیں۔ ہم enact کرتے ہیں، ہم acting کرتے ہیں۔ We are actors.” Nabeel says that roughly 37 to 42 percent of the commitments made on Idea Karoron Ka actually converted after the show. Some investors, he admits, were misusing the platform. He takes responsibility for those choices. But he is proud of giving founders television and internet exposure at a time when that was genuinely scarce.

Lost between the show and the masses

By the time Muzamil asks why Nabeel has not launched a new season — particularly now that Shark Tank India has validated the format for mass audiences across the subcontinent — the conversation reaches its most honest stretch.

Nabeel says he has traveled to 87 cities across Pakistan. He has held meetups in places like Layyah, Swabi, and Bhakkar. He runs a training center network called Direction. And the more time he spends with ordinary people in those cities, the more uncomfortable he feels about producing a show that celebrates million-dollar raises and venture capital deals. “آپ actually masses کو ایک غلط dream کی طرف لگا رہے ہوں گے۔ جو achieve نہیں کر سکتے” — you would be pointing the masses toward a dream they structurally cannot achieve. The people raising those funds, he observes, are a privileged few. The common person standing outside a startup event, hearing only English, feeling looked over by mentors who judge them by their clothes — that person is not being served by another glossy investment show.

“مجھے نہیں پتہ مَیں کس کے لیے اگلا show بناؤں” — I don’t know who I’m making the next show for. He is, by his own description, lost in that space of introspection. He wants to build a skilled university by 2025, one designed for the masses rather than the privileged. The training centers are his data-gathering exercise toward that goal. He has stopped attending events. He has been grieving — his mother passed away a few months before this recording. He is in his shell, thinking.

The book, the three things, and faith

Muzamil asks about the book — This Book Is About You: Zero to One — and Nabeel explains its structure. The chapters are numbered like decimal points: 0.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, moving through empathy, goal-setting, personal branding, conflict management, and team-building. Zero is the moment you are born. One is the moment you find your identity, your brand.

The book’s final chapter is on faith. Nabeel says his deepening engagement with religion has shaped his thinking about what drives human behavior. He distills it to three things: the quality of your thoughts, the quality of your words, and the quality of your actions. All three, he argues, are downstream of intention — niyyat. “جو آپ کہیں گے ناں وہ آپکی نیت کی عکاسی کر رہا ہوگا” — what you say reflects your intention, what you think reflects your intention, what you do reflects your intention. If you want to understand a person, check those three things.

He has been teaching at universities for ten years, starting at FAST. He says that if he grows old with anything, it will be teaching — not academia as an institution, which he has reservations about, but the act of teaching itself.

Pakistan in 2050

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks his standard closing question: what does Pakistan look like in 2050? Nabeel is measured but genuinely optimistic. He does not predict an economic superpower. He does not predict collapse. He sees a young nation — demographically one of the youngest in the world — that has not yet learned to build its own narrative rather than borrowing one from elsewhere. “جس دن ہم لوگوں نے decide کر لیا ناں کہ ہم حقیقی آزادی چاہتے ہیں” — the day we decide we want genuine independence of thought and narrative, things will shift. By 2050, he believes Pakistan will be a recognized, growing regional player. Not among the top performers, not among the worst. Growing, and growing fast — provided young people take ownership.

Muzamil closes by noting what made the conversation unusual: Nabeel came in and spoke with a rawness that very few people at his level manage in Pakistan. That, Muzamil suggests, is itself a marker of genuine leadership — the confidence to be seen clearly, without the armor of curated success.