This talk was delivered on April 29, 2017 in Oakland, California, to the Fulbright Class of 2017 shortly returning to Pakistan. I have added links and certain references, details and qualifications that I could not mention while speaking (in the interest of time).
I was invited by the Institute of South Asia Studies at UC Berkeley to lead this debrief session and help you prepare for your return to Pakistan. I know some of you because of prior affiliations, I have had the chance to speak to some of you already and I hope to speak to more of you after the talk.
Like you, I, too, came to the US in 2014 for a two-year graduate program. For different reasons, I decided to stay here after the program ended. However, if I had decided to go back immediately, what are a few things that I should look out for? In the last few days, I reached out to a lot of people back home and elsewhere, a lot of whom are eagerly awaiting your return because they have, or know of, opportunities where you could contribute. I asked them what advise they would give me if I was moving back. I did this on Facebook and LinkedIn and the two posts got over 20,000 views! People are excited.
I’m going to talk about three things:
- How to get a job, especially if you’re not from a well known college, from a major city, and haven’t done engineering. I’ll also give examples of some interesting jobs I came across in my research.
- Why “doing your own thing” is incredibly hard and not for everyone. You heard some mention of that from entrepreneurs earlier today at the OPEN Conference.
- How the world, in general, and Pakistan, in particular, are way larger than you can ever imagine… and that’s something you, as the privileged, have to actively recognize and take steps to mitigate for others who did not win the birth lottery.
Finding a job is hard. You have probably felt it if, for example, you’re not male, you’re not Sunni, you did not go to LUMS, are not from Lahore or did not study engineering. When I finished my undergrad in 2010, I had many opportunities, including starting my own thing and that’s what I did. I did not have to pay rent, did not have to worry about food, had not paid for my education through a loan, and… so on and so forth. I was guilty of the same later when I hired people. The common question, “Where are you from?”, ends the conversation before it can even begin. You ask that question, try to connect some ancestral, professional or pedigree dots and size up the person. If he or she is “worth it”, you continue talking and try to help them. If not, you take on a patronizing tone and wrap up the conversation on the first excuse. Of course, I found nothing wrong with this whole situation — why would I? After all, like all of you, I am privileged.
The whole equation changed for me when I moved to the US and had to look for a job myself. Back home, I could open doors because of my connections. Here I was a nobody who didn’t know anybody and did not have experience that translated easily. On top of that, I was in a graduate program at UC Berkeley studying international development. I wanted to do Product Management in a technology startup but companies and startups only wanted MBAs. When I would tell people that, they would look at me and think, and at times even say, that I’m the “NGO sort”. I faced rejection upon rejection. I was furious! Did they know who I was? Did they know I had advised governments, spoken at conferences around the world and had won international awards? How dare they not recognize how successful my work at the World Bank had been? Yet, they didn’t care. Why should they? They only cared about what I could do for them, what skills and understanding I brought to the table.
In such a situation, you can do two things.
First, you just have to accept the situation and try not to fight it. You should not expect the other side to change and understand your situation. Instead, you have to start speaking their language, start packaging yourself in ways they understand, start thinking like them. Accept that it will be a struggle and don’t feel bad about it… you are still much better off than many who can’t even get to where you are because they don’t have your privilege. Everyone starts somewhere, largely based on how lucky they were in the birth lottery. Accept it, and move on.
The other thing is a simple framework that Anjum Altaf, ex-dean of the humanities school at LUMS told me about when I was coming to Berkeley. I was looking for on-campus work to cover my tuition and I was struggling with finding something “new and interesting”. He told me to think about it in terms of “Learning vs Earning” — learning being the vertical axis, and earning the horizontal axis. Ideally, you want to be in the top-right maxing out on learning and earning. But most jobs aren’t like that and, more importantly, you usually never start in that spot. People don’t hire you to teach you, they hire you because you can do something for them. Of course, in the process, good employers expect you to learn as well, but that’s not the primary reason why you are hired. Remember that. We are all “interested” in things… but if I’m interested in jazz music, it doesn’t mean I should be given a job as a musician if I don’t know how to play anything. Since I was going back to school, once he put it like that, it was obvious to realize that in that situation, I needed to pay to learn and get on-campus work where I could work and earn. But even beyond that, it made me realize that we obviously want to be in the top-right quadrant — learning a lot and earning a lot — but we usually have to start in the top-left or bottom-right, depending on the situation, and work our way to the top-right. And, of course, it is, as it should be, a lifelong pursuit.
Now, let’s talk about startups and entrepreneurship. We want to do our own thing because it seems so exciting! But it is also incredibly hard. Incredibly hard. If some of you heard the health panel this morning at OPEN, one of the panelists said that you really have to be crazy to be starting your own business. Let me run you through my own experiences to put things into perspective.
- I launched my first startup while I was at LUMS. It was a group SMS service called chOpaal. It grew to about a million users all over the country, we were sending a huge number of messages a year and at the time, everybody knew about it. I did it for three years till I graduated when I lost control of the startup. I learned the hard way why a startup should be registered as early as possible, what is equity and how it is earned, how you cannot blindly trust anyone, etc. (The service was later rebranded as SMSAll and died a few years later)
- After I graduated, I decided not to do a job and, instead, try out another idea. I setup an SMS-based job match system for blue collar workers (in partnership with an American partner, Sam Janis). We spent too much time and money on setting up the technology before testing out the hypothesis. We got little traction, had no more money to spend on rebuilding the tech and gave up shortly after.
- Then I joined the World Bank to come up with ways for the government to use technology. I had the benefit of having an incredible manager who was more life coach than manager. We did a lot of impactful work, much of which was later scaled up. I ended up sort of coordinating a team of ten consultants but I couldn’t really elevate myself to act like a manager.
- In 2012, I setup a center at LUMS called the Technology for People Initiative (in partnership with Sohaib Khan, a professor at LUMS) that would take romantic notions of what technology could do for the government from idea to prototype stage. I ran that center for over two years, doing projects worth over half a million dollars, worked on important problems like crime mapping (later scaled up by the government) and won many awards. We got money from Google, DFID, USAID, etc. However, I learned later that some of the people who worked there hated me. Hated me. For me, what mattered was getting the work done! Why does it matter if I spoke to you in a harsh manner because you didn’t meet a deadline? Think about all the people out there who we could be impacting if we deliver on time! Not the smartest way to operate. I only realized in hindsight that building an institution comprised of people is different from just solving a problem.
- While I was doing those two jobs, I decided to launch another startup called SmartMan (with a friend already doing another startup). We would take successful ideas like smartphone-based data collection to the private sector as a SaaS offering. We got out first client and we could not deliver in-time. We thought that we could “wing it” while having our fingers in multiple pies. You cannot do a startup without 100% focus. You owe it to your clients, yourself and your organization, and the problem you’re solving.
- I kept thinking about that idea even after I came to Berkeley. This time, I was too far from the market. We’ve all seen this happen too many times. People in San Francisco come up with ways to bring clean water to people in a village in Kenya. People in Lahore try to solve problems of farmers in Sahiwal. If you’re that far from the reality of the market, it is almost always a bad idea.
- When I moved to the US, I met up after many years with some school friends (I went to Lahore Grammar School) working in the Bay area. As engineers do, we started dreaming about doing our own thing on the side. We came up with ideas, some of which I must say were not the brightest. An app to borrow everyday things like a MacBook charger from your neighbour, instead of just ringing their doorbell? Not a good idea? How about this: you’re sitting at an airport gate waiting to board and you miss the early boarding announcement because you’re wearing headphones; what if your headphones had microphones in them “listening out” for you like a buddy? Of course, we had no idea how to do it (but tech is moving in that direction). What was the problem here? We were merely looking for something interesting to do and we all forgot about these ideas in a couple of months.
- Now, I’m at a startup called Premise Data where I first worked in 2015 as a summer intern. It remains the most humbling experience of my life. I don’t mean to boast by sharing this but want to show you where I was coming from. At TPI, I used to get multiple internship applications from people in schools like Columbia. Here I was on the other end, a lowly intern in a startup with people who didn’t really care who I was or what I had done in the past. All they cared for was what I could do for them. Although I did well there in the three months (and was asked to join full-time), I really struggled emotionally. It took me another three months of introspection, taking courses on leadership, power and politics, and writing papers to reconcile with my internship experience. I had to come to terms with what it means to literally start up from scratch; go from somebody, to nobody, and take it in stride. Launching a new startup is not much different.
- Now, working full-time at Premise as a Product Manager, I’m learning things that I had never thought of before. Unlike previous roles, I don’t manage any human resources here. In fact, that was advice that my Berkeley advisor, Jennifer Bussell, gave me when I was considering the offer: “You’re just 27! You’re too young to be managing people right now. You can do it ten years later.” That’s contrary to what is traditionally celebrated back home; how many people work for you. Instead of shaping the vision of the organization as the CEO, now my role is to shape the vision of the organization as an individual contributor. I have to discover the right opportunities, build the right products and take them to market in the right manner. Also, remember that I’m an entrepreneur. I’ve always done my own thing. How do you enable someone like me to continue to feel myself while working on a shared vision? How do you hire someone who may grow up to outperform you? It takes a lot of confidence to do that and how to develop that is what I’m still learning.
Having said all that, if you still want to pursue your own idea, by all means do! Just remember it’s harder than you can imagine right now. For those who are looking for jobs, I’ve put together a short list of jobs and contacts here. Feel free to reach out to the individuals or organizations directly and let me know if you need help connecting.
Before I finish, I want to talk about something important. When I moved here three years ago, I was blown away by how LARGE my world became. Everything was new! So many new types of people, so much new stuff to do. But then you live here for a while, and your world begins to shrink. You start hanging out with the same people, talk about the same stuff, do the same things. It’s called homophily, a tendency to associate with what is familiar. If you keep doing that, over time, your world becomes so small that you start feeling like a vegetable. If it can happen in a place as diverse as the Bay area, it can certainly happen in Pakistan.
I’m sure many of you enjoyed the newness of moving here. Similarly, as you move back to Pakistan, treat it like you’re moving to a new place. Yes, you went to school there or you worked there or you have family there. You will be tempted to get sucked back into a routine life. At the same time, look around you in this room. I’m sure there are more kinds of Pakistanis even in this room than you’re familiar with. Reach out to people who are not like you. Reach out to people who have not had the privilege to come to the US for graduate school. Put it on your calendar. Put it on your to-do list to reach out to someone different every other week. It’s hard but it’s possible. Your world will continue to feel larger. There are so many ways to meet new people. I was fortunate to be an Acumen Fellow in 2013. That’s how I met a Pathan from Quetta. Yes, I was naive enough to think that Pathans are in KP and Baloch are in Balochistan (and of course, I have not been to Peshawar or Quetta). I only learned there are Pathans in Quetta when I heard Hum Quettay ka Pathan hai or met him. Like I said, Pakistan is large and I, like many of you, grew up too sheltered!
It is very important to remember that everyone you meet in the process will not be like you.
I have friends who are gay. I know some of us think it’s funny but I’m serious. I also have friends who are Ahmadi. They are as Pakistani and human as you are. When you, or people you know, don’t include them in your world, their world becomes smaller. In turn, your world also becomes smaller. Both sides lose. Don’t do that. Reach out to them. Make your worlds larger.
The world is large. Pakistan is even larger. Good luck!
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Originally published here.