Tech, AI & the Future

Jun 9, 2026

How Asad Mehmood landed Mattermost from Pakistan before A levels

with Asad Mehmood

Asad Mehmood walked into Mattermost before he had A levels, crossed two million dollars on Upwork, and now runs a design agency from Pakistan. He sat with Muzamil to lay out the framework underneath it: become undeniably good, then become visible, then sell outcomes.

Jun 5, 2026

A 22-year-old Pakistani's road map to space by 2050

with Hassan Mossin

Hassan Mossin, a 22-year-old Pakistani astrophysicist training with the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences, walks Muzamil through the next twenty-five years of space — commercial stations by 2030, a lunar base by 2032, and why the bottleneck isn't food or oxygen, it's energy.

May 29, 2026

Penetrate, don't apply: a Pakistani's path to a remote US job

with Ghalib Hassam

Ghalib Hassam went from an unemployed electrical engineer in Nowshera to head of content at Darkroom by refusing to apply for jobs. He cold-messaged founders, worked for free, documented everything, and let the conversation move on its own.

May 15, 2026

Pakistan's startup space has become practically meaningless

with Mutaher Khan

Mutaher Khan, founder of Data Darbar, joins Muzamil to dissect why Pakistan's startup narrative collapsed, what VCs got wrong, why local business journalism never matured, and where AI leaves an emerging-market services economy.

Apr 1, 2026

Pakistan can't build the LLM. It has to build the application layer.

with Dr. Naveed Iftikhar

Dr. Naveed Iftikhar on why the freelancer-sweatshop model is dead, what it actually takes to keep Pakistani founders building from Pakistan, and the lie the local tech ecosystem keeps telling itself about its talent pool.

Mar 31, 2026

Culture eats AI for breakfast: Pakistan's real education fix

with Kamil Majeed

Kamil Majeed, principal of Nordic International School in Lahore, on why curiosity is the prerequisite for using AI well, why Pakistan's schools reward reproduction over creation, and why values — not technology — are the scarce resource in a post-AI world.

Dec 5, 2025

AI won't take your job. Someone who uses it will.

with Ahmed Abubakar

From selling water tanks in Karachi to a bootstrapped AI company doing $25 million a year, Ahmed Abubakar's founding story.

Nov 28, 2025

Six billion dollars a year already runs through Salesflo

with Yasir Suleman Memon

Yasir Suleman Memon, founder of Salesflo, on growing up in Sindh's university towns, eight years inside Unilever, the shutter-shop garage where the company started, the closure of Jugnu, why pricing isn't the moat in enterprise SaaS, and why he is convinced Pakistan can produce a hundred-million-dollar SaaS company.

Nov 19, 2025

ALETHIA AI Founder: We Made Muzamil’s AI Avatar & Asked WHO HE’D VOTE FOR

In this episode, we sit down with Arif Khan, Founder & CEO of ALETHIA AI, the global startup building real-time interactive AI agents, with a major.

May 14, 2025

South Asia will spearhead the next era — if it learns to communicate

with Shahyan Shabbir

Adelaide-based cybersecurity strategist Shahyan Shabbir on why data — not AI — is the real wedge, why South Asian talent will lead the next era of services, and what an Australian client actually needs to see before they wire money to Pakistan.

May 12, 2025

AI will not kill jobs. It will kill the people who don't use AI

with Zeeshan Sikandar

Software agency founder Zeeshan Sikandar walks Muzamil through the climb from a 6,000-rupee filing job to a million-dollar ARR services company — and why the next leg requires sitting in San Francisco, not refreshing Fiverr.

May 8, 2025

Why Shajee Aijazi left Autodesk to start a design consultancy

with Shajee Aijazi

Shajee Aijazi spent a decade in UX design, most recently as a senior lead designer on Maya at Autodesk. Three weeks before this conversation he walked away to start his own consultancy. He and Muzamil work through what UX actually is, what AI is and isn't replacing, how a non-technical Pakistani should break in, and why he's spent close to eighty thousand dollars on his own learning.

Apr 25, 2025

Out of 100 applicants, Ibex hires two — and that is the problem

with Yasir Rafiq

Yasir Rafiq, head of recruitment at Ibex — Pakistan's largest BPO — walks Muzamil through why fifty lakh young Pakistanis enter the job market every year and almost none of them can hold a conversation in English, why COVID was the boom that finally cracked the country open to global clients, and what India did in the nineties that Pakistan still has not done.

Mar 7, 2025

Pakistani businesses are one exploit away from going to zero

with Muhammad Zayn

Muhammad Zayn — one of the youngest CISSP-certified professionals in Pakistan — walks through what cybersecurity actually means for small and medium enterprises, why on-premise data storage often beats the cloud on cost, and what really happens when a production house loses years of work to a corrupted firmware.

Feb 26, 2025

Why NSTP is the only science park in Pakistan that actually works

with Yaruq Nadeem

Yaruq Nadeem of the National Science and Technology Park at NUST explains what a science park actually is, why it is different from an incubator or an IT park, the startups inside that are scaling internationally, and where Pakistani founders consistently fail at commercialisation.

Jan 29, 2025

Why brick and mortar will never bank Pakistan's other 100 million

with Irfan Wahab Khan

EasyPaisa chairman Irfan Wahab Khan joins Muzamil to explain why traditional banks cannot close Pakistan's 100-million-person banking gap, what changes now that EasyPaisa holds a digital retail banking licence, and where credit scoring, cross-border wallets and tokenisation actually fit in.

Dec 19, 2024

Faisal Aftab: the 1971 system is over, and Pakistan is mispriced

with Faisal Aftab

Venture capitalist and Shark Tank Pakistan judge Faisal Aftab on why the post-1971 monetary order ended in 2021, why entrepreneurship has stopped being optional, and why the next decade rewards the people willing to throw out their parents' playbook.

Oct 14, 2024

Pakistan's IT exports won't scale on cheap labour anymore

with Ahsan Jamil

Sy Ventures managing partner Ahsan Jamil on why Pakistan's first startup wave broke on weak technology foundations, why his fund invests local rupee capital into export-focused B2B companies, and why the path to scaling IT exports runs through Fortune 1,000 problem-solving, not headcount arbitrage.

Aug 2, 2024

How Avanceon now charges a premium for being in Pakistan

with Bakhtiar Wain

Bakhtiar Wain, founder and CEO of Avanceon, walks Muzamil through thirty years of building a Pakistani industrial automation business — from importing IBM-compatible computers in the late eighties to a $100 million order target across Pakistan, the Middle East, Africa, and the US.

Jan 5, 2024

Pakistan's IT growth is flatlining — and the policy is making it worse

with Syed Ahmad

Syed Ahmad returns to TBT — recorded at the Dubai studio — to walk through what the IT industry actually looks like from the inside: flat growth, a brain drain the country can't yet replace, a tax regime that punishes the companies trying to do things right, and a special technology zones programme he helped design that he now believes is being quietly hollowed out.

Dec 22, 2023

Pakistan does not have 240 million customers — and we made that number up

with Raza Matin

Raza Matin — founder of PayPro, Brandverse, and Chikoo, and the man who helped get YouTube unbanned in Pakistan — on why the 240 million people pitch was deliberately constructed at Google, why technology in Pakistan is mostly parasitic, and what it actually takes to digitize a small retailer's business.

Dec 15, 2023

Most SEO in Pakistan is quackery — and AI will expose it

with Salman Baig

Salman Baig — head of SEO for Daraz across five South Asian markets and a thirteen-year veteran of the industry — explains why most SEO advice is quackery, how Google actually reads a page, and why the AI shift will wipe out the people who only know the checklist.

Dec 8, 2023

Nabeel Durrani: my mother told me, if you fail, don't come back

with Nabeel Durrani

Nabeel Durrani left Peshawar for Australia in 2009 with a sealed envelope, no contacts, and one semester of fees paid. Fifteen years later he holds a PhD in AI and works on autonomous drones for the Australian Defence Force. He tells the story straight.

Dec 1, 2023

Why Pakistani founders glamorise the wrong half of a startup

with Awais Shafique

Awais Shafique sold his Munich startup Precise to Meta — the first Pakistani-founded acquisition for the company, and the seed of its German engineering hub. He walks Muzamil through a viral Stanford win that ended in depression, a borrowed plane ticket to Germany, the institute that gave him his co-founders, and why he thinks Pakistan's startup scene keeps optimising for the wrong things.

Nov 29, 2023

Why Jaffer Haider never took the VC money for PosterMyWall

with Jaffer Haider

Jaffer Haider, founder of PosterMyWall, on building a profitable product company out of Lahore that serves 20 million users globally — without venture capital, without an iOS app for years, and without ever leaving the city he grew up in.

Nov 8, 2023

Why she left a global Cisco role to rebuild Pakistani charity

with Kanwal Cheema

Kanwal Cheema spent sixteen years climbing Cisco — the only woman engineer in its Middle East and Africa region, then a global account director. She tells Muzamil why she left, moved back to Pakistan, and built My Impact Meter to put traceability behind every rupee of charity.

Sep 27, 2023

The engineer who became one of Pakistan's biggest singers

with Abdul Hannan

Abdul Hannan released his first song with zero followers, expecting two hundred listens. It went to two million monthly listeners and a Spotify number one — and he still codes full-time for an Amsterdam company. He talks Muzamil through the dual life, why Pakistan's live-music industry is broken at the fundamentals, and why he's scared for the country.

Sep 13, 2023

The AI scientist who says fundamental science already ended

with Dr. Nasir Ahsan

Dr. Nasir Ahsan went from a rebellious teenager in Saudi Arabia to the founder of Abyss Solutions, a robotics company whose perception software inspects the world's hardest-to-reach infrastructure. He makes an unfashionable case: most of what we call AI is glorified pattern recognition, and fundamental science largely stopped in the 1950s.

Sep 6, 2023

What AI does to law, and the courts too slow to notice

with Adam Jabbar

Adam Jabbar wrote a book of 101 ChatGPT prompts for lawyers and watched it sell worldwide. He and Muzamil work through whether AI can clear Pakistan's case backlog, who owns AI-generated content, and why a data-privacy bill written by copy-paste could push the next founder out of the country.

Aug 25, 2023

From IT help desk to CTO of the Middle East's top coffee app

with Shahood Siddiqui

Shahood Siddiqui took an IT help-desk job in Saudi Arabia — the bottom of the food chain for a CS graduate — and six years later left as group CTO. From a Dubai studio he walks Muzamil through digitalising a forty-year-old kitchen-equipment business, building the Middle East's number-one coffee pickup app, and the uncomfortable reasons Pakistani engineers keep getting left out of the region's boom.

Ep 354 · Aug 9, 2023

Why cheap data and a small mindset keep Pakistan offline

with Taimur Nawaz

Taimur Nawaz has built telecom careers across Telenor, China Mobile, Qualcomm and now Transworld's fixed broadband and submarine cable business. He walks Muzamil through why Pakistan keeps arriving late to every network generation, why the cheapest data market in the world has no reason to lay fibre, and why the real ceiling on the country's best businesses is mindset, not potential.

Aug 2, 2023

What web3 actually means once you strip out the money

with Talha Bin Afzal

Talha Bin Afzal runs a Pakistani web3 services studio building on Unity and Unreal. He takes Muzamil past the NFT hype to the part that lasts — ownership — and then explains why Pakistan keeps reskinning games instead of building them.

Jul 5, 2023

Why AI rewards problem solvers and could bring women back to work

with Mahe Zehra Husain

Mahe Zehra Husain runs one of the few woman-led tech firms Muzamil has come across in Pakistan. She argues the age of AI will erase mediocrity and reward ideas, problem solving and storytelling — and that it could finally pull Pakistani women back into the workforce.

Jun 21, 2023

Crypto in Pakistan is unregulated, not illegal

with Rohan Asif & Humza Khan

Binance's Rohan Asif and Humza Khan join Muzamil to separate crypto's legal status in Pakistan from its reputation, and to explain what actually protects an investor.

May 26, 2023

The Pakistani founder who bootstrapped three global startups

with Adeel Raza

Adeel Raza co-founded Salams, Mailmunch, and Unlayer — three bootstrapped global SaaS products — from Lahore before moving to the US. He talks about product-market timing, why distribution beats product, and what it actually takes to build for the world from Pakistan.

May 22, 2023

Why Ehsan Elahi built a time tracker to escape time trackers

with Ehsan Elahi

Ehsan Elahi, founder of timegram, traces a winding path from a banned PayPal account at age twelve to running four companies — and explains why privacy-first tracking, outcomes over hours, and human personality are the only things that survive the AI noise.

Apr 28, 2023

The man quietly connecting rural Pakistan to the internet

with Haaris Mahmood Chaudhary

Haaris Mahmood Chaudhary, CEO of Universal Service Fund Pakistan, explains how a decade-old telecom levy is being used to bring fiber, 4G, and eventually 5G to the most underserved corners of the country — and why connectivity is only the beginning.

Apr 14, 2023

Pakistan's politicians aren't incompetent — they're not trying

with Hussain Nadim

Hussain Nadim returns to Thought Behind Things to argue that Pakistan's crisis is not economic at its core — it's a collapse of human spirit, a failure to define national interest, and a political class that is smart enough to know exactly what it is doing.

Apr 7, 2023

The doctor who built PTI's digital machine

with Dr. Arslan Khalid

Dr. Arslan Khalid traces his journey from King Edward Medical University to architecting PTI's social media operations, building the PM's digital infrastructure from zero, and why political dynasties in Pakistan are already finished — they just don't know it yet.

Jan 11, 2023

Pakistan is on the precipice — and holding itself back

with Asif Aziz

Asif Aziz, Chief Commercial Officer of Jazz, on why 90 million internet users still isn't enough, why 5G spectrum pricing is killing the future before it starts, and why Pakistan in 2050 will be either formidable or finished — with no middle ground.

Dec 26, 2022

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

with Salim Ghauri

NetSol founder Salim Ghauri on leaving Citibank on impulse, building Pakistan's most globally recognised software company from a Bangkok napkin contract, and why he gets angry every time someone says Pakistan doesn't have enough IT people.

Nov 25, 2022

Why Muhammad Raza Saeed keeps his holdco in Pakistan

with Muhammad Raza Saeed

The CEO of PakWheels and Confiz on building a 700-person IT firm from a $1,500 loan, why specialization beats headcount, and what Pakistan needs before its IT sector can truly scale.

Nov 9, 2022

Pakistan's freelancers built this industry themselves

with Mohsin Muzaffar

Mohsin Muzaffar, Payoneer's country head for Pakistan, traces his path from a failed job search in 2009 to building the country's freelancing ecosystem — and makes a blunt case for what Pakistan must fix before 2050.

Oct 31, 2022

The AI engineer quietly building Pakistan's food future

with Atique Ur Rehman

Atique Ur Rehman went from a government-school kid in Wah Cantt to building AI systems for self-driving cars. Then he walked into a livestock market and saw something that changed everything.

Sep 30, 2022

The 21-year-old fixing Pakistan's traffic lights with AI

with Muhammad Ahmad

Muhammad Ahmad, founder of InLights, is a 21-year-old NUST student who taught himself computer vision, built a working prototype to automate traffic signals, and is now presenting to the chairman of the CDA. This conversation covers how he got there — and why he thinks Pakistan's engineers are sitting on a goldmine of unsolved problems.

Jul 15, 2022

Pakistan is missing crypto's biggest opportunity

with Haseeb Awan

Haseeb Awan built the world's first Bitcoin ATM network out of a restaurant meetup in Ottawa, sat in the same house where Ethereum was born, and went through Y Combinator — all before most people had heard the word blockchain. In this conversation he traces that journey and makes a pointed argument: Pakistan is so fixated on whether crypto is permissible that it is sleepwalking past one of the largest economic opportunities in a century.

Jul 4, 2022

Can 5G save Pakistan's economy?

with Yang Gu, Kashif Junaidi (Pasha), Akram Ali

A panel of three guests — OPPO's brand director for South Asia, the chairman of Pasha, and the head of business at Pro Pakistani — sit down with Muzamil to map out what 5G could actually mean for Pakistan: not faster YouTube, but autonomous farm drones, remote surgery, and a $60 billion new economy.

Jun 29, 2022

The man who built Pakistan's startup incubator from scratch

with Parvez Abbasi

Parvez Abbasi went from a village in Murree to Central London, built a billion-dollar phone distribution company, lost it in the 2008 financial crisis, and then co-founded Pakistan's first National Incubation Center. This is the full arc of that journey.

Apr 15, 2022

Pakistan has no worthy number two to Systems Limited

with Kashif Manzoor

Kashif Manzoor — SVP at Systems Limited and former head of Confiz — traces a career that ran from Schlumberger oil fields in Qatar to setting up an offshore center in Beijing, and explains why Pakistan's IT services boom could stall without a credible second player.

Apr 8, 2022

The founder who built a company from a cold Upwork message

with Umair Majeed Rana

Umair Majeed Rana went from a small city in South Punjab to founding Datics AI and Tech Nation. This conversation traces that journey — and makes a sharp argument about why Pakistan's IT ambitions are structurally broken.

Mar 2, 2022

Pakistan's first payment gateway wants to kill COD

with Adnan Ali

Adnan Ali left a 16-year banking career — including a stint as EVP at 35 — to build PayFast, Pakistan's first State Bank-licensed digital payment gateway. In this conversation, he explains why 85% of e-commerce still runs on cash-on-delivery, what Raast actually changes, and what Pakistan's youth bulge means for the country's economic future.

Feb 28, 2022

Pakistan's first IT stock listing isn't really an IPO

with Ali Naqi Shaheen

Ali Naqi Shaheen, co-founder of Coeus Solutions, walks through the company's journey from a Lahore frat house to a GEM board listing on the Pakistan Stock Exchange — and explains why market cap, not capital, was the real reason to go public.

Jan 21, 2022

The four-salesperson cloud bet that became AWS

with Taimur Rashid

Taimur Rashid joined AWS in 2008 as its fourth salesperson, walked away from a Stanford master's to do it, and spent ten years inside the hyper-growth phase. He talks through cloud's three disruptions, why Pakistan's talent pipeline still has no catcher, and what changes when borders stop deciding who gets hired.

Jan 19, 2022

Pakistan's IT problem is disconnection, not potential

with Mashroor Hussain

Mashroor Hussain, founder of CXO Global Forum and Dynamic Folio, sits with Muzamil to dissect why Pakistan's IT exports keep missing their targets — the institutional disconnection at the top, the talent pipeline that does not exist at the bottom, and the self-centric mindset that stops good ideas from scaling.

Jan 17, 2022

Why an ex-Morgan Stanley PM left New York to build Abhi in Karachi

with Omair Ansari

Omair Ansari, CEO of Abhi, on growing up in nine countries, watching emerging-market banks miss financial inclusion, leaving a Morgan Stanley portfolio manager seat for Karachi, and why his real competition is not other fintechs — it's cash.

Jan 12, 2022

Why Pakistan's freelancers will be dead in three years if they don't transform

with Syed Arsalan Ali Shah

Syed Arsalan Ali Shah, the founder of Connected Pakistan and the only Pakistani featured as a success story on Payoneer, talks through how he built a 70-person freelancing agency from four lakh rupees, why he believes freelancers will be dead in three years if they don't upskill, and where the conversation between freelancers, software houses, startups, and the government keeps breaking down.

Jan 10, 2022

Pakistan's bug bounty culture is destroying our cyber youth

with Etizaz Mohsin

Cybersecurity researcher Etizaz Mohsin — the only Pakistani holding the OSWE certification — walks through how he taught himself the craft from a borrowed PC in 1997, what the OSCP/OSCE/OSEE certifications actually mean, how Pegasus really works, and why Pakistan's obsession with bug bounties is hollowing out the country's next generation of security researchers.

Jan 3, 2022

Why Pakistan's factories still push, when the world has moved to pull

with Badar Khushnood

Badar Khushnood — Bramerz co-founder, P@SHA chairman, and an architect of Pakistan's first national e-commerce policy — walks Muzamil through the country's first B2B portal in 2002, the nine years he spent building Google's Pakistan presence, why Fishry is built around brand-conscious SMEs, and why a $4B domestic e-commerce market still struggles to export.

Dec 20, 2021

Pakistan has the largest Muslim diaspora in Silicon Valley

with Arzish Azam

Arzish Azam — CEO of Ijad Labs and country manager for Startup Grind — on why a software engineer is worth more to Pakistan than a textile worker, the case for a national emergency on digital skills, and why remote work, not freelancing, is the wave the country cannot afford to miss.

Dec 15, 2021

Pakistanis don't care about their own data

with Mirza Burhan Baig

Senior security consultant Mirza Burhan Baig walks through bug bounties, the social-engineering attacks that actually work on Pakistani banks, why iPhones are harder to hack than Androids, and what made the Pegasus exploit a state-grade weapon.

Oct 11, 2021

Why Pakistan's startup boom is a watershed, not a victory lap

with Zohaib Ali

Dastgyr's co-founder returns to Thought Behind Things to explain why September 2021 is an inflection point for Pakistan's startup ecosystem, why fintech and B2B commerce are absorbing most of the venture dollars, and why the real product everyone is racing to build is a credit score.

Sep 29, 2021

The internet is an ocean. Most Pakistanis are still wading in.

with Zaki Khalid

OSINT consultant Zaki Khalid on what open-source intelligence actually is, how to take your information off Google, why dark web myths are mostly noise, and how Pakistan's online discourse will need another decade to grow up.

Aug 6, 2021

Why Pakistan drew a border around technology

with Hamza Saeed

Hamza Saeed, Director of Planning at Pakistan's Special Technology Zones Authority, walks through how China's Shenzhen model is being adapted for Pakistan's knowledge workers — and why this time the incentives are written into law instead of an SRO that can be cancelled overnight.

Jul 19, 2021

Pakistan doesn't have career counsellors. So she built an AI one.

with Dr. Zunaira Saqib

Dr. Zunaira Saqib, founder of Merafuture.pk, explains why aptitude testing in Pakistan is broken, how she trained an AI model on successful cases to fix it, and what parents keep getting wrong about scope.

Jun 25, 2021

How Bitcoin actually works, explained from scratch

with Haroon Baig

Haroon Baig walks through the full architecture of Bitcoin — from mempool to mining, Lightning Network to proof-of-work — in one of the most technically grounded conversations on the show.

Jun 23, 2021

Pakistan's hologram industry is eight months of demos and no takers

with Oztech (Zabarthus & Yavar Khan)

Oztech's co-founders on bootstrapping immersive display technology in Pakistan — from projection mapping to drone light shows — and why the country's biggest brands still won't be first.

Jun 7, 2021

Why Bitcoin alone won't fix Pakistan's economy

with Ahmad Manzoor

Ahmad Manzoor, founder of Pakistan Blockchain Institute, sits down with Muzamil to separate the speculative frenzy around Bitcoin from the deeper promise of blockchain technology - and explains why Pakistan is not as far behind as people think.

Apr 21, 2021

How to get a job as a web developer, with Ehmad Zubair

with Ehmad Zubair

Ehmad Zubair, CEO of Cogent Labs, joins Muzamil to talk through the web development landscape in Pakistan - from frontend frameworks to freelancing traps, the value of a first boss, and why universities have become job factories instead of research institutions.