Why Iffi Wala is killing the BPO model for Pakistani talent

सामने साबतीना आज रात. Welcome back to another episode of thought behind things. आज हमारे साथ एक बहुत ही ख़ास मेहमान मौजूद है जिन्होंने पिछले दो ढाई साल के अंदर एक company बनाई और at this point in time यह जो company है यह क्या है, क्या करती है, इसके पीछे जो structure है, ढांचा है उसके बारे में भी हम बात करेंगे. But within building that company he has almost nearly 100 people right now building this company, a lot of them in Pakistan. And then वह जो company है उसकी वजह से directly around 2,000 jobs इन्हीं के through create हुई हैं a vast majority of them in Pakistan. So I was very curious कि यह क्या company है जो कि, you know, has been very recently आई है दो तीन साल के अंदर and they've been able to create 2,000 jobs, not just अपनी जो इन्होंने सौब बनाई उसके अलावा भी. Particularly in the context of कि यह जो दो साल पिछले रहे हैं, इसमें economy has been all over the place. Everybody's leaving Pakistan. Constantly यह thought आ रही है कि, you know, Pakistan में business नहीं हो सकता. But while everybody was being a negative Nancy, these guys came in and actually created value and by proxy of that were able to create a very successful business. आज हमारे साथ मौजूद है. इफ़ी वाला. And for you guys, conversation जो है, आप लोग हमेशा मुझे इस बात पर आकर डांटते हैं, लेकिन यह उर्दू में नहीं होगी. इफ़ी has been in The US for most part of his life and is much more comfortable in English. So I do apologize for that. But, Ify, thank you so much for being part of the

of the show. Yeah. Thank you for being here. And but English is the other company here.

Ify, I'm gonna start off just trying to understand a little bit of your background. Have you always been in The US? Were you born in Pakistan? Run me through a summary of getting born up until today. Yeah, okay.

I was born actually in a small village near Surgoda. My mom's from Balval, and my dad was from this village. And I think when I was like one or two years old, we moved to Surgoda. And, you know, that's where I went to school. That's where I was raised up until about seven or eight years old. And that's basically the extent of my experience in Pakistan, obviously, recently. And I would think around when I was seven or eight, we moved here to California. I'm in Northern California, an hour and a half outside of Silicon Valley in San Francisco. And I basically been here most of my life,

that's why I think And so my understanding is you would have moved early '90s. Early nineties. Yeah. 1991. That's right. Interesting. And so you've been there since. You haven't been to Pakistan for for most part of that time.

Is that correct? Yeah. That's correct. You know, I I think, like, as a kid, I went, like, once or twice. But you know how it is when you visit back home when you're young, you're there for a wedding or funeral or something like that, and you're kind of in a bubble. And so as far as experiencing Pakistan, yeah, I think the first time I really went on my own was, like, you know, around 2021

or something like that. 2020, 2021. What was it like relocating in '91? Because, I mean, people have moved, especially with the tech boom, early two thousands. But '91 is there's no Internet. You know, even if you have to call back home, there's this entire sort of process, and three minutes cost you a fortune. And you're in this sort of a very different and completely different environment. What was it like growing up as a Pakistani in this entirely new world? You know,

so my parents, I think they were about my age when they when they first moved in. I often think about this, like, you know, looking back at, you know, how easy it is, like communication and all those things compared to just, you know, twenty years ago. And I often think about, you know, how difficult it must have been. You're right. I mean, you know, I remember, like my mom used to write letters, like letters, and you send them home because the cost was, it was a fortune to make any kind of calls. And then it would be like a month later where you'd get, and the letter would say, Oh, this person got married, this person died, or this and this. Know, it was an interesting time. And, you know, we came here because my dad's brother who was here was, you know, starting some sort of company. And he was like, Hey, you need some employees. Won't you come? You can work for me. Unfortunately, three or four weeks after we come here, we're all excited. My uncle gets into a car accident and passes away. So really we're on our own. We're trying to figure out, very difficult obviously first few years just when you do any kind of major move. But it it was definitely a whole different world compared to now. And you've been in Northern California the same place since then or have you moved around The US? Yeah, we've been here. This is where we're based, this is where our friends were. We really came here. We didn't really have any family here. So we really built a community of friends. So we basically stuck around here. But an hour and a half away, like I was saying, from Silicon Valley.

Tell me about your education in terms of, college particularly. What did you study and, you know, were you like a star student?

No, definitely not. You know, I went to, a local university, Sacramento State University. Like a lot of young people, you're really unsure what you want to do. I did a little bit of pre med. I thought that's the direction I wanted to go. But then I ended up landing in business, you know, business marketing. And and, really, truth be told, like a lot of young people, you kind of just choose business not because you have necessarily any interest in it, but because they said back in the day that, you know, that's the easiest If nothing else makes sense, business is the same. Yeah, it's the Yeah, So after that, you know, really kind of not sure what to do, work for the government for a little bit, you know, work for a couple of banks and stuff like that. So really kind of trying to figure out what I wanted to do. So to answer your question, star student, definitely not.

Right. And so how did that sort of transition happen? I mean, you graduated randomly, didn't really have a very clear direction of what you want to do. And then you get into a bunch of different jobs. Where does the pivot come where you decide, okay, I've done I'm done with the job market. Let me try to do something of my own. Particularly because when you're getting into entrepreneurship, you can't really get into it without, you know, some sort of a direction or some sort of a problem to solve. You know,

so so I didn't make that decision, by the way. The decision was made for me. I think, you know, so I got laid off at that the company that I work with just because of, like, the, you know, just part of a layoff and needed to figure out something, you know, I need do. But, know, I'll tell you, you know, this is, you know, probably the greatest advice I ever received. You know, it's like our age old mother's advice, right? What do our mothers always say? You know, you're really defined by who your friends are. And so, you know, I was really lucky enough within my group of friends, like almost all of them were, you know, business owners and a lot of them started way before me. And so, you know, when you're in that circle, that's really all you're talking about. And so a couple of my friends did very well, and so really became an inspiration for me. And so that's really how I started dabbling into business as far as like, you know, and then when that decision was made for me for getting laid off, then it just seemed like the right time to, you know, figure something. But if you remember one thing, just remember it's all about your circle. That probably to me at least has, like, the biggest impact in your life as far as the trajectory or direction of your life.

Makes sense. If I were to ask you, what was the last role that you were doing? And I I understand that this was this company that you built right before your current organization. So what were you doing right before you built that company, and what did that company do? So right before that company, I worked at bank

as just, you know, a bank. It wasn't, like, a manager position. It was just, like, you know, you're working in a bank to support, you know, operations, stuff like that. You know, nothing interesting. But that was really but, know, I did learn a lot as far as, like, how to, I think, like, to deal with people, how to interact with people, like, especially, like, high net worth individuals, etcetera. But that's really that was, you know, what I did for a couple of years before I started.

And and what did the business what was the business about? It was a bank. It was a bank, basically. Oh, no. The one that you started after Oh, sorry. Okay. After getting you know. You know, another interesting story where,

you know, know, so this is like, you know, a few years after 2008, which is like, you know, the worst economic condition, you know, since they say the Great Depression. And so literally I was looking for something that, you know, was stable, right? That was super old school. That didn't necessarily have to be exciting, but something I can slowly build towards. This was my first business ever. So I wanted it to be kind of a safer bet. And so I got into the risk management and insurance industry. And so I started that around 2013 or 'fourteen. Since my background, a little bit in tech, super interested in tech in general, we looked at that industry and we kind of just figured out how it was basically insurance sales, right? It's like super old school. And we kind of figured out some interesting ways with partnerships and integrations, etcetera, how to make that business super efficient. And so I ran that for a few years. We expanded, I did some M and A stuff, I acquired a few companies, rebranded them into a single package, and then ended up selling that in 2021 to this pretty big insured tech company. And so that was really my first exit, first time running a business. It was a super cool experience, super difficult, a lot of learnings, but, it was an insurance business.

Interesting. And then you started Edge. I mean, the website says On Edge. So is it On Edge or is it Edge? No. No. It's just Edge. That was a domain. Interesting. Yeah. So so tell me about Edge. What does Edge do? And you started in 2022. Yeah. That's really about the sort of the the the turn. Right? So that's when right at the cusp of this startup boom, money is flying everywhere. Even Pakistan is now beginning to take a bath in it. And suddenly, you know, the Fed's interest rate sort of shoots up, and businesses collapse all over Yes. The world, essentially. So tell me what was the thought behind setting this up? What does this business do? And how were the first couple of years for you, again, at a time when it was difficult not just for Pakistan but all over the world? So

second time founder, and I fully appreciate that as a second time founder, you're kind of in a unique position. And the position that I was in, I'd sold this company that I ran for a few years. And this time, it was really important to me that I do something I actually am excited and actually really, really care about. So I went to a lot of friends, called a few friends in Silicon Valley, friends who have their own startups, who've really incredible founders, and just started talking to them. And, you know, between those conversations, literally took a pen and a paper and came up with three qualifications that were important. Number one, you know, whatever I did next had to be a tech enabled business just from a scalability perspective and all the, things and all the learnings that I did with my last company. Number two, I've been to something, again, dozens of countries around the world, I think 40 something countries around the world. And it was important to me that whatever we do next has a global footprint or at least a potential global footprint. I love people. I love being around people. Have friends all over the world. I've been all over Africa, Latin America, Europe, Asia, all that stuff. And the third thing is really, as a second time founder, it was important that whatever we do next, it be a business of impact, right? Like it, where you really feel like you're making a real global impact. You know, my last company was great. It changed my life. But, you know, if we're being honest and if we're, you know, if it, real, nobody else cares. I mean, it didn't change. It didn't have any real impact in the world outside of my life. And so this time, it was important that whatever we do have you know, the potential to make a real impact. So as I'm having these conversations with my friends in Silicon Valley, you know, one of things I realize is, you know, tech companies have been hiring globally for decades. Right? Think about Google, Microsoft, any startup. It's really easy for them to hire an engineer anywhere in the world. So if you know HTML, if you're in Beijing, if you're in Islamabad, if you're in Latin America, London, whatever, it's more or less the same. It's a pretty frictionless hire. And so that's why tech companies have been hiring globally. But one of the stats that I read around that time is 95% of businesses globally are not tech enabled businesses. They have no engineers. They basically have people like us, right? Like non tech people. And 95% of talent globally is not engineers. So really, that's where the idea of Ed started forming. We kind of saw this missing link where non tech people were really being left behind. And so how do we build a platform that really brings these two worlds together, not in the Upwork fashion or gig economy and all those things. So really this professional class, one of the catalysts for Edge in 2021 was that by 2030, there's going to be 300,000,000 university grads globally, vast majority of them in emerging markets like Pakistan, and vast majority of them with a non tech background. And so really, this is who we're building Edge for, and this was the idea behind the foundation of Edge. How do we build a platform, or how do we remove borders, right, to to make, you know, connect nontech businesses and nontech people who, because of COVID and because of the whole remote nature of the world and the direction of the world, all of a sudden are open to remote work. So that's really where the idea of Edge started forming. And, you know, again, like I said, we started in 2022 about three years in, and, we're making some pretty cool progress and pretty cool impact so far. Makes sense. Just to, again, reiterate and confirm,

the idea is for this for the simpler simplest user, the idea is if you have a global ready job and you're sitting somewhere in, let's say, Lahore, you can find work in The US, and you can go to the platform. You can apply there. You can put in your, your qualifications and your experiences, and then eventually, Edge will match you to a relevant role in The US. Is that correct? Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's

the key right there, match, right? So our CTO, Chief Technology Officer, he's literally a PhD in AI and machine learning. So we're doing a lot of interesting matching tech, kind of like the Richta apps, right? Hopefully better, hopefully better. But really match the right you know, nontech roles with the with the right nontech businesses. You have to try it.

Makes sense. And this I'm trying to understand the economic model, Hed. Are these people paid out in dollars? Is it, like, a dollarized income, or is it, like, you know, I mean, the companies onboard you, and then then you do do a payout for these individual workers depending on which region they are and what the market dynamics are. Exactly.

You know, most of the companies that use us and most of the talent that work through our platform, actually, stats 97% on both sides, they've never worked or hired globally. And so part of our company mission statement is making hiring and working globally easier than locally. That's our company mission statement. So we realized that if we want to deliver on that company mission statement, we can't be just another payroll company or something like that, global payroll company. We really have to own every part of the ecosystem. And and so, you know, that includes infrastructure, logistics, you know, salary data, equipment procurement, the talent marketplace, all those things. And, you know, our our global head of HR now she's reported, like I was saying earlier, directly to the founder of Uber. So she helped them expand to 3,000 employees, 20 countries globally. So she's really helping give us all the data that helps make this whole transaction easier. So our general rule of thumb as a business is we want to be somewhere in the top 70 to 90% of salaries in each of the markets that we're in relative to the local market. So the benefit for local talent is, yes, number one, you get to work for a, you know, global company. Number two, you know, the it's great experience. Third reason is the salaries that you receive from day one are between 70 to 90%, you know, top 70 to 90 percentile in in in the in the market. So that's how you get paid. And, of course, the benefit for the customers is, you know, because we provide this ecosystem, we make it super easy. We, you know, presolve all these problems that you would, you know, you would have. One of them, how much do you pay people? We've already solved all these. And so for the customer, it's like, I'm getting amazing talent and an amazing hire that's perfect for my business. And relative to where the customers are based, it's still pretty significant value compared to specific

local hiring. So, yeah, that's the whole purpose of the platform. Makes sense. But I'm trying to understand, again, there historical was software house model where someone would come to a software house and they would say, listen, we want to have or, I mean, not even a software house. Let's talk about business process optimization, right, or automation. You'd go to a company and you'd say, okay. We have this sort of call center that's in Houston, and there are 200 people here. What we wanna do is we want to expand this to a thousand people, but we wanna do it at a one fourth of the cost. And so this company would basically contract that particular would be like a like a third party outsourced offshore team, and they would be, essentially, the company would be dealing directly with the with the client. In this case, is the individual remotely hired for the for your clients? Or are you still they're hired with you, and then you provide those individuals as potential consultants to those individual companies? That's a good question. So like, when I was expanding my last company, we expanded to

Los Angeles. And the whole idea there was that we're gonna, it's a big market, we're gonna grow. And we did grow. You know, and And like a lot of businesses, I was having a hard time, you know, a difficult time finding talent. And and so like a lot of businesses, you know, we we decided to use some, like, outsourcing companies. We decided to use BPOs or call centers, virtual systems, whatever you may call it. And that's never a good experience for either side. So in the talent specific side, for a lot of talent in a lot of emerging markets, when it comes to global hiring or global working, like, that's kind of the best option. It's like, I'm gonna go work for a BPO or call center or whatever the case may be. And it's usually never a good option. Right? It's, like, bottom of the barrel jobs. And it's the whole BPO model, which has been decades old. Same thing from customers. Like for customers, for most non tech businesses, when you think about hiring globally, the best option they've ever had is exactly that. It's call centers, outsourcing companies, BPOs. And again, it's never a good experience for any party. It's never a good option for anyone. It's always a poor experience. And so we looked at the tech world. When you ask most tech businesses about global hiring, the answer you get is really different. They're like, Oh, you mean hire an engineer in XYZ country? Most of my friends who have these really successful business who've raised hundreds of millions of dollars for their companies, like their engineers are in Brazil, their engineers are in India, their engineers are in Pakistan. So tech companies, they don't call that outsourcing. They don't call that BPO because it's not. And so for us, you know, that's one of the industries that we're disrupting. You know, that's one of the industries that we're trying to kill or change. We're like, no, no. That's the old way. You know, forget outsourcing. Forget BPO. This employee is, like, your employee. We're the facilitator. We're integrating with whatever HR tool that they have. So if they have Workday, BambooHR, whatever the case may be, they're seeing this person just like their other employees, right? There's no difference. But now all of a sudden, you know, we've, our platform has unlocked global hiring. So there's no, you know, part time, there's no, this person is working for your employee, there's no outsourcing. No, this is your employee, just like anything else. In fact, we recently launched this program called Edge Mobility. And the whole idea is how do we help our talent in all of our locations facilitate visas, etcetera, all that stuff. So when companies are having kickoffs or annual meetings or whatever, they're able to fly there. We've had customers who've flown to places like Boksun, who've flown South America to meet their employees, to do kickoffs, etcetera, all that stuff. So really, our ecosystem, the whole point is it's a one to one, it's your employee, you hire them, you fire them. We're just a facilitator or the platform that delivers all that. So that's really kind of the idea here, and that's how, you know, that's why it's different.

That makes sense. In Pakistan, there's been a recent rise of I mean, there's legitimate business, but they're they operate in the gray area. Right? So with the rise of remote work, you found a lot of these companies that came up that were basically effectively putting people up for individual jobs, but they were wrapped around a software house. So in Pakistan, for example, there'd be a software house. But those individuals who were working for individual roles, they were all working for as employees of different companies. And there was a lot of, conversation around scams as well, obviously, because these individuals had to be in The US, SSN scams and so on and so forth. Now I'm curious because a lot of when I spoke to a lot of these companies, the I the the answer that we would get is, you know, the the industry is still so primitive that and and there are so many so many regulations that they're if they have to hire individuals, they will hire from within The US. And, again, not talking about the legal gray area. But the way that they would sort of rationalize it would be, you know, we're still providing them the service. It's just that we have to go through a workaround where someone in The US effectively says that it's my identity, and I'm sitting in Texas working for someone in Maryland, when in actuality, it's someone sitting in Lahore, you know, doing some work in X Y Z. Now I'm curious, first of all, based on their rationale, that is there a what's the appetite for the industry? Because they're now you're not saying that they're contracted with a LLC, let's say, Edge LLC in The US that's hiring anyone else. There's there's plausible deniability or the, you know, anyone in in the offshore office is your problem. They're directly hiring someone. And so, obviously, there must be some certain regulatory requirements there as well. How does that work out in your case? You know, look. You know

you know, so we operate in several countries now and, you know, and obviously, you know, our background is Pakistan and we're more sensitive to these things, you know, happening in Pakistan. But I can tell you, like, this isn't a Pakistan problem. This is a problem in a lot of emerging markets, right? I mean, when the economy gets difficult, when the economy gets tough, you have to kind of operate in these gray areas to survive. And so I've seen this exact same problem replicated in many places. I can talk about that. Like for us, you think about Uber, right? Or when you think about Airbnb, what are these businesses? So ultimately, to me, these are businesses, these are platforms that create trust. So before Airbnb or before Uber, it would be a big ask to ask your wife or your daughter or anybody in your family to get into this random car or stay at some random person's house. It just wouldn't happen, right? It'd be it'd be weird. And and so Uber and Airbnb, you know, over decades, right, initially they had their problems and all that stuff. But, like, through through several years, you know, they've really built these platforms of trust. And now it's a lot easier for Bukesan, like inDrive and Yango because they've set the bar and they've set the standard. And so now it's creating an environment ecosystem where other companies can flourish because of the, you know, the work that Uber put in initially. And so for us, when we look at, you know, what, you know, we're building, ultimately, we're building a platform of trust. We have our compliance person, great background. Our sales enablement person spent ten years at Tesla. Our CFO was the former CFO at Sadape. So we're building this really amazing team and really building a standard or a trust of global hiring, which helps talent, like trust that when I go through edge, this is what I want to get right out the gate. It helps, you know, customers, you know, who've for the first time hired globally, you know, trust that, you know, Edge is going to do XYZ. So our hope, our long term hope is that, you know, this trust system has this ripple effect. We raise the bar, the standards higher, and then ultimately other companies who have to compete with us also raise that bar. And so that's ultimately the goal with Edge. And look, like I said, these things happen in a lot of countries. It's not a buck sun problem. It's an emerging market problem. But we're hoping But what I'm trying to understand is

the idea, how's the industry taking it? The idea, because you said you've gone into an industry where they've never hired globally, right? And they're hiring directly to their team, someone from, let's say, 10,000 miles away. Are they open to that idea? Is there a certain amount of convincing that's required at this stage in in your journey? Yeah. You know, it is. Like, so, you know, we have,

you know, customers, I think, in about three dozen states in The US, like Alaska, Hawaii, a lot of the Southern States. And these are some of my coolest stories. So we have customers in the Southern States who had a certain perception, not just about Pakistan, but just emerging markets. And you wrap that up with their only experience with global talent is when they call their American Express or they call their phone company or something like that. And it's like transferred to The Philippines. Their their bar is very low. So yeah, totally. I mean, it's definitely a process. And and, you know, I was talking to a customer in Nashville, Tennessee. Right? So we flew there a couple of weeks because it's one of our big customers. And, you know, I think they've hired, like, dozens of people. I think close to, 80 or 90 people through our platform at this point. And they know every single one by name. They look at these employees exactly like local employees. He says to me, CEO says to me, he's like, Man, I never dreamed in a million years that I have this whole incredible team in Latin America or in Pakistan. That was a pretty cool experience. So there's definitely an uphill battle, but a lot of it's not because of places. A lot of it's just the options that they've had, the perceptions that they have. Because again, you have to remember, the best option most people, most non tech customers have had is call centers and outsourcing companies, which is a poor experience. And initially, when we first started in Bukh San, I'm the naive American who really was a little bit culture shocked visiting to Bukh San. There was some stuff that we had to do to earn trust at a local level as well from the talent in Pakistan because, like you said, in emerging markets, there's this whole general mistrust of companies like that. I remember, I think at that point, this was a couple of years ago, our starting salary was, I don't know, $2.50 ks or something like that, know, poxs and PKR. And, people wouldn't believe it. They'd be like, man, this is a scam. Like, you know, I remember those. And so, so, yeah, you know, you have to work for it. But, like, the point is, like, once you build a system of trust, just like Uber and others, like hundreds of clones, eventually the idea is that it lifts the market, that it makes the categories that we're in open to it now. Now they're telling their friends. So it's a ripple effect. And same thing in Pakistan. In countries like Pakistan, hopefully, people trust it. People get paid, and they're able to lift their economic condition, and it slowly builds trust. But definitely, initially, there is a little bit of hesitation for sure, and we have to work around that.

Makes sense. You mentioned categories. So right now, you're in medical, dentistry, and insurance, and you're focused exclusively on customer service representatives. Why why were these the categories that you started off with? I mean, they're they're fairly easy as well. That's not necessarily a very complicated thing because we know that there are a lot of businesses who are exclusively running small teams for certain companies abroad. So there's that talent that's available that this problem has theoretically been solved before, albeit now you have a platform, you're probably offering a bunch of other services. At what point do you think you can begin to go towards some of the more interesting areas, like, let's say, accounting or law or, I don't know, I mean, there could be a 100 different professions, that can theoretically be outsourced and have not historically been tapped?

Yeah. Well, one, we never use the word outsource. Right? So it's not it's not Right. And and so I think, look, you know, as as a second time founder, you know, one one of the things that, when you're trying to build a big global brand, that's like, right now we're in, we have employees, I think, in seven or eight countries. Our talent's in four markets right now, and we plan to be in like, dozens of markets in the next, like, couple of years. I think we'll be in 24, 25 countries in the next couple of years. But, like, when you're trying to build a global platform or something big, you know, it's easy to, you know, see this big problem or think big and have to conquer the world. But when you're building a big global brand, to me, you really have to think very narrow and you have to think very small. And you win there and then you move on, right? And we look at companies like Uber, right? So when they launch in a certain... They don't say we're in Pakistan. Don't say we're in Islamabad. They say that we're in F11 or Barya Town or whatever, right? Because they have a lot of infrastructure, logistics, trust that they have to build. We decided to choose healthcare insurance and dentistry, not because they were easy, because we thought they were the hardest industries to crack. Like, again, I live near Silicon Valley. Tech companies have been hiring globally for years and all that stuff. And so we're like, well, it's easy to hire tech workers. What's the opposite of that? What's the hardest industries? What are the industries that before remote and before COVID would have never hired globally? Forget globally. What are industries that would have never even hired remotely in a serious way? And so we looked at the most high compliance industries out there. And in this case, risk management and insurance. Like that's a big one, right? It's very high compliance, very tough industries to crack. Healthcare is another one. Very difficult, very high compliance. You have to have HIPAA, GDPR, all types of ISO, whatever. And so that's why we decided to launch in these categories first. So ultimately, our goal is to expand into any and every category. For instance, when Upwork first launched, they launched in four categories, and now they're in 500. When Uber launches, they launched in certain neighborhoods, and then they kind of work their way out. So our goal is absolutely to launch in every category. And I think our next launch, where on a quarterly basis, we'll have a systematic growth in countries and categories. We're starting November, and so we're really building this amazing team to help us think about expansion expanding. So why we're in these categories or these specific roles in these jobs or in these categories is we've already selected the hardest categories to solve for. And now within those categories, how do we get the roles that are most frictionless to hire? So we have underwriters, etcetera. So I think in each category, we have between four to five roles, and then that as well will be expanding fairly soon. But again, if you want to build this big thing, you have to think very small, and you have to think very narrow. That's really our strategy and our goal here. What are some of the potential roles that you could look look at maybe a year from now? You know, we definitely wanna move to more, you know, like you said, comp like, accounting's one. You know, that's, and we're already exploring that, you know, in a couple of Middle Eastern countries from an accounting perspective. Law is another one, you know, although that's changing a lot, thanks to AI and all that stuff, but SPAW's another one. You know, it's and so, you know, design is another one. This is one that we get most often. IT is another one. So, really, you know, you know, it's easy for me to say, we're going to go into this, this, and this. But I think for us, our strategy is we're going to ask our customers. So rather than saying, we're launching in this category from scratch, why do we go to our customers and we ask our customers, hey, what other roles in your business are you specifically interested in? And if customers tell us, this is what we're interested in next, We're gonna use that as a soft launch before we, you know, go and expand into,

you know, other categories and other other roles. Right. What's the scale of the company right now?

The scale, the size of the company internally, we're about, you know, a little less than a 100 employees. We've had a couple of 100 a couple of thousand people working through our platform. About 30% of our employees are based in the in the in, you know, US.

That includes all the I mean, 30% of your personal employees? Yes. All employees. Yeah. You know, sales, like, you know, customer success

is based out of here. You know, a lot of some of our VPs are based out of here. So, yeah, 30% of our internal team of those 100 employees are based out of here, the rest are you know, we have employees in The UK. We have a couple of employees in Dubai. We'll be expanding there pretty soon. And in Latin America, we have folks in a few countries. And then Pakistan, lot of our engineering team and some of our other companies are

in Pakistan. Right. And what about the couple of thousand that are working through your platform? Where are they?

Pakistan was the first place that we experimented with. The long term, I think Latin America will likely be our biggest hub just because of the number of countries and markets and all that stuff. But you know, Pakistan, I think we have close to about, maybe a little less than a thousand people working through to Pakistan. Interesting.

And these are all based out of Islamabad? No. You know, we have Islamabad.

We're we're launching officially in Lahore, I think, a few weeks. And probably about, I'd say, probably vast majority in Islamabad, a big chunk in Lahore. And then, of course, we have a bunch of people in Karachi as well that will be launching fairly soon. A lot of those people will either move there for various reasons, but really mostly Lahore and Islamabad.

And they're working from home or do you have an office facility where all of these people are converging, like a co working space of sorts? We

call them edge centers. And so we just launched our first one in Islamabad, and we're launching one in Lahore pretty soon. And then from there, in other countries. So we have this whole logistics and infrastructure team that really works on building these beautiful offices. And we call med centers. These are community spaces that anyone from our network or our talent network can go and use whenever they want. If there's power outage issues or political discourse or something like that, these are accessible for our talent to go work whenever they want.

But it's entirely dependent on the talent. Not like they're not forced to do that. No.

Depends on their it's we're the facilitator. It's the employer and employee relationship. So some employers insist that they work. But I think on average, on a daily basis, about 20% of people work in one of our ed centers, and then the majority of them. So a lot of it's just a hybrid

thing. Then some people, you know, been with their employers for a couple of years. There's trust there. There's that thing already built, so then they're okay with them working remotely, etcetera, whatever the case may be. Right. Over the last couple of years, there's been a lot of you mentioned power outages. There's been a lot of political unrest in Pakistan, particularly in Islamabad. And then there's been a lot of Internet outages that was fairly new. We'd heard of load shedding in electricity, but now we're seeing that in the Internet as well. How much has that impacted your work? And, you know, you've mentioned almost nearly a thousand people are based out of Pakistan. Right? So how has work been affected for these guys?

You know, there's definitely an impact. And, you know, it's on us. Again, going back to us being the system of trust. Like, you know, you asked earlier, you know, how are these customers taking hiring, you know, in most cases, their first employee in Pakistan or whatever else. And so one of the reasons they count on companies like Edge is the whole system of trust. And so in these emerging markets, whenever there's issues like this, power outages, definitely. It's more than just an impact in, monetary impact in the business. There's definitely an impact trust. And in a lot of cases, that loss in trust is harder to get back. And they're less likely to recommend this platform or this whole way of hiring to other employees. So there's a loss of trust in there. So, you know, we've we've had to work really hard. Like, we've had to build a whole team. We had to, you know, build our own VPN systems, you know, overnight. So there's a lot of stuff that, you know, we had to do to, you know, you know, overcome this. I mean, you know, one of the things with our platform is, you know, every talent that works through our platform, like, we have similar similar to Uber. Right? So we've had, like, a geo location thing where you have to be within thirty or forty minutes of an ad center in order to, you know, become live on our platform. And so we've we've definitely had to, like, you know, figure come up with creative solutions to, you know, to help facilitate this because, ultimately, customers, you know, one thing happens, they're okay with it, but, you know, in in there has been a lot. I mean, the Internet address has been an issue, and we've had to invest a lot of time and a lot of money to make sure that, you know, customers ultimately don't lose trust. But absolutely, it's a business impact. It's a serious thing as far as even our trust in what markets we want to expand in. If a certain market is continuously having the same issues. And yes, we have thousands of people working through our platform box and right now, and the goal is to get to tens of thousands. Well, when we have board meetings or when we have senior leadership meetings, those things impact. Those questions do come up, and all of a sudden the question becomes, well, do we want to further invest in X country? Should we take those jobs and should our future focus and growth be in Y countries? So, yes, there's absolutely an impact in for for customers and for us. Makes sense. Churn

has been a major issue in Pakistan for most companies. A lot of the top talent is choosing to leave Pakistan. Yeah. Or tends to, you know, as the as a sort of dollar rate or the rupee value collapsed. For most employees that were rupee pegged, until and unless companies really sort of constantly realigned their salaries, majority of the people were, you know, they began to switch. And so did you face this issue as well where, you know, people were beginning to leave either for other jobs or were relocating outside of Pakistan? My understanding is, again, because they are pegged to a local salary. So, if they are, for example, relocating to Dubai, they can't convert that to a salary in Dubai, or can they? You

know, our general philosophy is, and so this is, you know, something I think we were somewhat prepared for, again, not just in Pakistan, but a lot of emerging markets, you have this whole, this brain drain issue of talent moving and wanting to move out. And so, as a general philosophy, I think we decided pretty early on you know, that our number one customer and who we're really building the platform for is is not the customers. Our number one customer and our number one product, right, product itself ultimately is the talent. So as a business, when you have those type of values or that type of framework, then you can make certain decisions that help solve some of those problems where very early on we partnered with some global payroll companies and we decided that we're going to pay people in the US dollars. And in other markets, we kind of look at each local market, we kind of decide, you know, what's the you know, number one, how do we get to seventieth to ninetieth percentile from a salary, you know, pay perspective? Like, we look at a ton of data. Right? Like, we look at cost of living, we look at what does it cost to own a car, what does it cost to rent a house, what does childcare cost, right? So we look at all these factors and then we decide, okay, to get to 70 or 90 percentile from a salary perspective, which, you know, ultimately means, you know, yes, it costs a bit it may cost a business more short term, but ultimately what that means is, you know, you have less churn. What ultimately that means is, you know, you're able to build a certain brand. You're able to build loyalty following and all those things. So those are the factors that we look at to kinda come up with what we call ESS, which is Edge Starting Salary. And so this is the number that, know, there's a ton, it's a lot more complex than that, but this is the number that, you know, talent knows from day one that, hey, this is my salary, this is my starting salary, and it's going to help me live this type of lifestyle. And then this is my... And customers know from day one that, you know, this is the salary that will be of this employee, and this, you know, helps me save XYZ, get a better employee, all that. So yeah, this is an absolute issue. I mean, brain drain thing. And I'd say like as far as loss wise, it's slowed down in the last couple of months. But, yeah, I think last year, early last year especially, there was a massive, like, number one reason, really, I think the main and only reason, you know, people left us was, you know, I'm going to Dubai or I'm going to The UK or US or something like that. So it's absolutely an issue. I think the way I think about it, outside of you have an edge, the ripple effect that that has in long term economies as a whole. When we were thinking about starting edge, we looked at stories like when you look at South Korea, when you look at Taiwan or even Singapore. Forty years ago, GDP per capita was $200. It was 150, 200 or something like that. And in the specific case of Taiwan and even South Korea, they did a really great job building that trust amongst their young people. They did a really great job investing in the local economy. They did a really good job with programs that gave young people it gave them hope that I'm going to stay locally. And in fact, in the case of Taiwan, they did a lot of programs which said, hey, you work in XYZ country, you move to The UK to The US, these are government programs. Come back to Baksan and we'll get you this percentage of your salary still. I mean, it's not exactly the same, but you get to be with your family, friends, all that stuff. So that's the big hope is ultimately, we can, our COO at Edge based of Pakistan, you know, before we hired him, like, the next day he was going to leave. Like, he had a flight booked. It was him and his wife. They were gonna move to The UK because that's where he got his degree in. And so now, you know, because of this role, because of this job, which has, you know, helped him, you know, pay for his lifestyle and pay for his kids and all that stuff, he's decided to stay. So that's just one story. So our hope long term is what can we do as an organization to hopefully facilitate some of these folks. You know, we can't, you know, stop everybody, obviously. But even if it's 10%,

it's a start. Right? It's a it's a it's a it's in the right. I get that. But so so so my problem generally, and I've covered the IT industry particularly, you know, remote work or offshore industry for a while now in Pakistan. We're now going in towards a world. I get that cycle from '70 to to early two thousand and tens when, global payrolls and and all of that was so complicated that there was a certain arbitrage for conversion. Right? So you'd basically operate in local markets, local economies, India, Philippines, Indonesia, wherever. And so you'd basically offer... There's a very basic accounting. If if there's an engineer for $120,000 in The US, you can get a nearshow for 60,000. You can get an offshore for 30,000. Right? And you divide that 30,000 over twelve months. You get 2,500, 2,700. You divided that by three, and that's the salary for the employee. One third is effectively facility cost, and then one third is the premium that the company essentially makes. Now, recently, the what what's happened is one of the reasons why we're seeing a lot of this churn is with with with a lot of, sort of chaos in the economy globally, there's a lot of pressure on non dollarized currencies like rupee or any other. And so because of that variation, obviously, a lot of the accounting just goes out the window. So a lot of the the sort of boutique tech companies in Pakistan, what they've done is just to mitigate that, they've made it directly pegged. Either they're paying it directly in dollars or they've pegged the PKR to the dollar. So whatever the exchange rate goes up, goes down, whatever, you actually get the get the salary in PKR. And that makes a lot of sense. Now post COVID, with the rise of direct hiring and remote work, I know, for example, I'm a computer science graduate. This was unthinkable ten years ago. But a vast majority of the the the class fellows who stayed in Pakistan, they're right now earning in dollars. And so they're earning, let's say, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000. Depending on their seniority level, they don't really care much for the economy. Right? Because if even if it goes down, they're protected one way or the other. The inflation is always less than the dollar Yeah. You know, the dollar crash. Now I'm curious. Why did you choose? Because you if you're a, like, if you're looking at a forward looking company, it's going to be increasingly like, this entire arbitrage model of software houses and offshore and BPO is an obsolete model, in my opinion, wherein the in a globalized world, it would make more sense. Your entire accounting is in The US. Your customer is in The US. Would it not make more sense to actually just peg it to, you know, the customers, the, let's say, they're paying for 3,000. We have a basic accounting 1,000 premium, 1,000 facility cost for back home. And then, you know, you give that 1,000 to the employee, and they're comfortable. They have a career. They don't have to go to Upwork because a lot of people end up freelancing because of that sort of dollar premium that they get. Yeah.

I mean, you know, you're exactly right. So that's exactly what we do. I mean, so so in in Pakistan, we are pegged to the dollar. In fact, we pay in dollars, and now we're building our own fintech product, like, right now to you know, we're we're actually, you know, the bank for all the talent that works through our platform. So we're working through regulation and all that stuff. But, yeah, you're totally right. I mean, that's exactly what we do is everybody in The US. Not only because we're ultimately just a facilitator. We have a fee, a flat fee that we charge to our customers outside of salaries and all that stuff. We're very transparent about that. And so

that's exactly and not just from So it's a platform model. Basically, what you're saying is the employee is directly paid by the company, and for facilitation, you charge a particular fee. So it's sort of like somewhere in the middle of, let's say, upwork and offshore, historical offshore models. Yeah. But this is more platform driven. So it's it's it's my understanding is it's a lot more transparent, and it's a lot more where

it's a lot more democratized, if that makes sense, or at least will be in the future. Yeah. That's exactly right. So we're trying to democratize access to, like, Fairway just itself. But, yeah, I mean, it has to be platform, and it makes it scalable and all that stuff. But, ultimately, yeah, that that's exactly it. You have to platform ties it so you can think about scaling and growing. So I actually met the catalysts for Edge was Upwork. So I met the former CEO of Upwork. I think think it like 2021 as we were thinking about Edge. And, you know, and now our VP of customer success was actually a VP at Upwork. And, you know, I I think Upwork is an incredible company. It's an incredible brand. Because of what they've done to really build a centralized location where freelancers are able to get work and get hired. Before Upwork, it was like, if you want to hire a freelancer, it was some obscure website. It was Facebook, referral, stuff like that, not very centralized. Now there's dozens of companies like Upwork, there's Fiverr, blah, blah, that stuff. Upwork, great brand, but not really a good business model. So for instance, ninety three percent of talent that creates a profile on Upwork, they never make a dollar. They create a profile, but then somebody else undercuts them. It's hard to get started, etcetera. And so that's one of the overall problems with Upwork. I think 30% of our internal employees at Edge, they've done work at Upwork. It's not sustainable to a lifestyle. It's hard to build a life when your revenue is so up and down on a monthly basis. But ultimately, our goal is, how do we build a standardized platform that democratizes access to fair wages for these 300,000,000 university grads globally. So I think doing that is really how you solve a lot of the problems at a local level that we're talking about here.

Makes sense. I think one of the problems that I've identified, it's it's a very it's a no brainer. Right? You got you have 300,000,000 potential graduates, in emerging markets. They need work. You got, the West, which is aging very fast. They don't have productive age populations. You got, increasing rise of the right wing, and so immigration is becoming increasingly unpopular. And so it becomes a a logical outcome that remote work is going to effectively give you the right economics that can sustain economies, particularly developed ones. My one of the major problems that I found with this entire thing is is the mismatch between the education that is provided in emerging markets and the work that is required in developed markets. And to be very honest, it's not that complicated. There's a certain training and development or upskilling requirement where you just I mean, if you take an accountant from Pakistan today and you want to deploy him in The US, you probably... I mean, even if he has, like, twenty years of experience, just the the whole culture of work, the the market dynamic, the requirement is gonna be completely different. And so I feel like there's there's a lot of these sort of employer, employee connecting companies, but not enough have figured out the sort of learning and development part of it where you can actually plug in, get yourself acquainted with what's actually required. And then and, I mean, that can be fairly easily solved, and then be placed in a irrelevant position. Because that's in my opinion, that has been the major problem for scale, particularly for a market like Pakistan where talent is, you know, there's very few talent. It's easy to make a company of 200, 500, 700 people. But, really, when you go from 700 to 7,000, just the talent doesn't exist. You can blame the government. You can blame the brand. You can blame whatever. There's a lot of people wanting work. There's a lot of human capital, not a lot of talent. Right? And that the difference there between human capital and talent is actually very small, but there's just nobody trying to solve that problem. So I'm curious. When you I mean, right now, it's fairly simple. Customer service representative, there's a lot of talent here. There's a lot of been offshoring previously because of that. And a lot of it. There's S and P Global. There's Keep Trucking had a huge base out of Pakistan working on customer service. And so you have that talent currently. For a lot of when you're going to expand out, you will have to, some level, upskill these people. And and when I speak to the IT industry, one of the biggest problems that I hear is, you know, this talent which has they may have amazing skills. They don't have communication skills. They don't have hygiene skills. They don't have, you know, a bunch of those soft side of things. So run me through. Did you guys ever think about that problem and how that part of I mean, it's part of the same funnel, but did you ever think about how that part of the problem might be solved as you scale in the future? Yeah. You know, it's actually a really, really good point, and that's something we've spent a a lot of time thinking about. And you're right, the accounting is a perfect example.

Even somebody in Pakistan who has dozens of years of experience, they're probably not going to be successful just based accounting practices, backgrounds, and different global accounting practices like in The US. So for us, there's a couple of solutions. Number one, for instance, we know that in Jordan, let's assume our customers are looking for account. Let's say, because we will at some point expand into that category. So we have a ton of data on a lot of countries as far as our list of we're going to expand into next. So we know that in Jordan, for instance, you know, the accounting style that they do translates incredibly well to The US accounting style. But that may not translate into, I don't know, the Canadian accounting style or the Australian accounting style or The UK accounting style. In some of these countries, we already have some customers. So I think being a global company, that's one of the solves, is you just are able to think about certain if you look at each country as an ecosystem, like for instance, here in even in San Francisco, you have a booming startup environment. This is what everybody always talks about. So you have certain roles that ecosystem builds up really well. Customer success is one of them because, that's a simple one, but it's one of them because every tech company says we need customer success people. And in other locations like Pakistan, you know, what we found is, you know, customer success, it isn't as, you know, the general culture hasn't like cultivated like, good customer success people yet. And so every economy based on the cultures brings up these different types of habits people that are really good at certain roles. So for us as a business, that's one of our big solves. This is like really one of our successes is how do we identify those countries? How do we build the ecosystem? And how do we really, again, deliver on our company mission statement? Now, the second part of that also agreed. One of our goals and why we've been successful and how we think we're going to get to several million users on our platform long term is we have to think about that upskilling thing. So our benefit compared to most global payroll companies who are in 200 countries, super decentralized. It's hard to, you know, scale. We're we're thinking, look, you know, when customers hire I'm going back to Uber. Like, when you order an Uber, you don't care what color the car is. You don't even care what brand the car is. You're just like, hey. Does it get me from point a to point b? That's it. So for us, like, our big bet is that customers don't care really, honestly, where where the where their talent is based out of. They just wanna know, is it good? Is it the right fit for me? And is it a good value? That's it. Right? They don't care. And so based on that, you know, we we you know, we just and based on the fact that we're only in a certain categories for now, and we're very strategic about where our growth is and where we're gonna, you know, expand to, you know, we can really figure out, you know, in in this category, using data, like, have a few data scientists on the team, What actually makes a good employee? Like, how does what does that matching tech look like? And beyond that, we have a whole certification team. You know, we're not a free market like Upwork, and I think that's one of the problems with Upwork. You know, right now, you know, you go into the platform and you create an account and there's a whole certification process that you have to go to that's specifically for this role. And that gets you more prepared or more aligned with what success looks like. So I think if you want to scale, you have to do that. And why I think we're in the best position to do that is because, again, we're only focused on four or five roles in each category for now. And before we expand, then we're only focused on three categories for now. I will say, having this question of readiness of global, even when you look at a local level, having been around the world and all that stuff, this is a problem here even in The US. I think maybe it's education system, maybe it's whatever the case may be, but a lot of young people, there's a lot of young people that they graduate, they do their thing, they're not necessarily employable or they're not necessarily employee ready at that point. And and so, you know, when they take jobs, maybe they take internships to kind of learn, you know, whatever they need to learn so they're more prepared. But, you're totally right. This is a scalability problem, and this is a problem that one of the really core values of why customers hire through us and why talent works through us is because we have a whole certification process, which you have to go through to basically become live and, you know, active on the on the platform. Just like, a lot of these learnings, Uber does the same thing. When if you're a car, you want to become a driver, you have to go through the whole training, certification, blah, blah, all that stuff, but to be ready to deliver

for Uber. So great question. Makes sense. In terms of, and I'm gonna wrap this up. Just gonna have a couple of more questions. But I wanna understand, in in lieu of salaries, do you guys have a number? I'm not asking for the profitability. But in terms of the salaries that end up in Pakistan because of the and I'm trying to understand the impact here. Right? So what's the yearly number in dollars of how much money has, like, is is coming to Pakistan now because of the jobs that you guys have created. Do have a number on that? So, you know, our our the actual number is,

I think, like, $14,000,000, last year, and, we're increasing that by about, you know, 5 ish percent, five to 10% on a on a monthly basis. You know, we have a whole data team. That that Sorry. Go ahead. That 14 is for Pakistan or that That's 14 is for your just for Pakistan. Pakistan alone. And our our, you know, we have a whole data team and we look at a lot of this stuff pretty closely. And so our we think our actual contribution to the local economy is somewhere between 20 to $25,000,000, you know, in so far.

What's the projection for Pakistan, in your opinion, over the next decade or so? I mean, again, you've been hit by hit the worst possible climate. Feel like you've you've, you know, when you're playing a game, it's like god mode where you just boat. Starting to die. Right? So you've played the god mode, and I feel like if you survive there for just twenty twenty five, you're gonna have a fairly easy time next five, seven years in Pakistan. But what's, based on whatever punches you've received over the last couple of years, what's the outlook for you? And then based on your own experience as you rediscovered this country which you came from but seemingly hadn't visited, What's the outlook for Pakistan based on your own past experience with the last couple of years?

You know, Pakistan, like a lot of emerging markets, but, you know, obviously, it's closer to home for us. There's economic challenges, there's youth unemployment, there's this whole cycle of legal action against political leaders, media freedom. These are all issues that really, you know, lead to like the decay that young people have, you know, the trust that they have. And it leads to all the things that we kind of talked about. Generally, in a lot of things, I'm pretty optimistic. I think as a founder, have to believe that you're going to win and that things are going to be amazing pretty soon. Our hope is that I get calls all the time from founders who are doing some of similar businesses at a smaller scale who are starting out. And for me, whatever they need to help them with, right, as far as questions, etcetera, secret sauce, whatever the case may be. But my big hope is that as far as edge goes, that we play a small role, which inspires other businesses to follow similar standards, which ultimately hopefully lead to a lot more stories like our COO story of, I'm going to stay. Because I think ultimately it is very dangerous for a lot of, if you have this brain drain of these people who are super smart and really kind of like the future leaders. So if we can make an impact 5%, 10%, us along with other companies, I think just like bad decisions have these long term ripple effects and societal impacts, hopefully smart people staying also has a positive impact, which they encourage other people. And so my big dream for Pakistan specifically is, why can't we be the next Taiwan? Why can't we be the next South Korea? It's hard problems to solve, a lot of hardships ahead, but why not? To me, if something's been done before, it's possible. And if something is possible, then it's achievable. So that's my big hope. Obviously, easier said than done. There's a lot of problems that we have to solve and for some of the reasons. But that's my big hope for Box. And I'd love to see that. And if we can play a small role or other companies like us can play a small role, then that'd be amazing. So I just recently, I'm partnering with the counselor general here in The US, and we're doing a couple of webinars of other folks who are maybe a little bit further along than me, as far as business wise, to convince them or to give them reasons to invest in Pakistan. Even at a local level, there's been a couple of friends who were hiring engineering team, and they were deciding between India and they were deciding between Latin America. These are folks who are planning on building big engineering teams. And just based on my experience, based on me talking to them, we convince them like, Hey, look, you have to look at Pakistan as a viable option. We've kind of been in the gray area for so long, and there's just a ton of untapped talent that we can really utilize. So the hope is with the mixture of all these things long term, it kind of has this flywheel or ripple effect where it does have a positive impact in the country. So very optimistic,

Obviously, cautiously optimistic. A lot of problems to solve, but I think you have to be optimistic. Makes sense, इफिर. Thank you so much for taking the time out and sharing all that insight. And I hope, again, what you mentioned early on in this conversation, 1,000 to 10,000. I hope we can see that, reality out of Pakistan very soon. Thank you so much for taking the time. Appreciate it. Thank you. And for all of you guys, thank you so much for watching. अगर आपके episode पसंद आई हो तो दोस्तों, हमें साथ ज़रूर share करिएगा. Let me know in the comment section below. आपने इस company के बारे में सुना हुआ था.