# Two partnerships and a name

> A drying-room office in Lahore. Two partnerships that ended badly. The third try, alone, that became DevBatch.

Source: https://waqaspitafi.com/journey/two-partnerships-and-a-name/

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A drying-room office in Lahore. Two partnerships that ended badly. The third try, alone, that became DevBatch.

July 21, 2026 15 min Chapter 10 of 10

I came back to Pakistan in 2010 with no job, two children, a wife, and a question I had not figured out the answer to.

The question was: what next.

A friend from Dubai had set up a software services firm in Islamabad. He proposed a fifty-fifty partnership. He would handle the money side, including bringing the work and the payments. I would run the operations and the delivery.

I did the most important thing I have ever done at the start of a partnership. I wrote a deed.

The deed was a few pages long. It was not a pretty document. It laid out who would do what, who would pay for what, who would bring in what, and what would happen if any of those commitments failed. I wrote it because my project-manager training had taught me that the time to specify how a relationship will work is at the start of the relationship, not when it has already gone sideways.

We signed the deed.

I asked to move the firm from Islamabad to Lahore. He agreed. We moved.

A year in, the partnership broke.

The pattern of the breakdown is the boring one. He was supposed to bring the work. He brought less than the agreement required. He was supposed to handle payments. The payments started coming out of my account. The team, which was supposed to be his to fund and mine to run, was sitting on my head.

He came down to Lahore one weekend with a few friends. I will say only that the friends did not look like the kind of friends who had come for negotiation. The conversation was rough. I held the line on the deed. The deed was the document I had written months earlier, and the deed said clearly what would happen if the partnership ended. The deed protected me.

The partnership ended on the deed’s terms.

I want to put a line of advice here that I am qualified to give, having been on the other side of partnerships that did not have deeds. Always write the deed. The deed will not save the partnership. The deed will save you when the partnership ends. The cost of writing one deed is one weekend. The cost of not writing one is open-ended.

I went back to Multan for two weeks after the first partnership ended.

Two things happened in those two weeks. The first was that I had a major car accident. My car went under a truck. Everyone in the car survived. I will not write more about this incident than that, because the privacy of the others involved deserves it. I will say that the accident was the kind of event that sits at the edge of your life and reminds you what you actually have.

The second was that I had personal trouble in this period that does not belong on this site.

I came back to Lahore.

The Lahore I came back to was not the Lahore I had left. I had been the project-manager partner of a software services firm. I was now a man with no job, no co-founder, no team, no office. I had a wife, two children, the savings of a Dubai expat that had taken a hit from the partnership, and a stubbornness I have spent years trying to understand.

I rented a house in Lahore. The house was bigger than I needed. The reason I rented one larger than I needed was that I planned to use the drying-room area as the office.

The drying-room is the part of a Pakistani house where laundry is hung up to dry. It is usually a covered courtyard. It is rarely an office. I cleared it out. I put a desk in it. That was the first office of what would, eighteen months later, be DevBatch.

I had one customer. The customer wanted me to build a piece of software. I had not written code in five or six years. I had been a project manager. I sat at the keyboard for two months and wrote the software myself. The same hands that had taught themselves to type with all ten fingers in the lab in 1994 sat in the drying-room of a rented house in Lahore in 2011 and wrote production code, again. The keyboard had not changed. The man at the keyboard had.

A friend of mine, a man named Hassan, came to me with a request. He was running a team for a textile company. He needed a workspace to put them in. He asked if he could rent space in the drying-room office. I said yes. The rent he paid covered some of my costs. The textile-company team and I shared an office for a stretch.

I hired my first developer in this period. He was an iOS engineer named Asad. I hired him because the customer’s project needed an iOS app, and I had no idea how to build one. Asad knew how. He came in. He was the first person whose payroll I was responsible for outside of my own family.

I was now a one-person services firm with one developer and one paying customer.

This is the part of the story where the second partnership comes in.

A man came to my office. He had heard about me through a friend. He was a sales person. He proposed a fifty-fifty partnership. He would handle sales. I would handle delivery. He would bring more customers. I would build the team to deliver to them. His pitch was clean. His CV was real. His friends vouched for him.

I said yes.

I want to put down honestly why I said yes, because the why is the lesson of this chapter.

I said yes because I had not yet learned the lesson the first partnership was supposed to have taught me. The first partnership had not taught me to avoid partnerships. It had taught me only to write deeds. I wrote a deed for the second partnership too. The deed was fine. The partnership was not.

Three months in, the second partnership ended.

The reason it ended was that the operating styles were different. He was a sales person. I was a builder. He wanted to commit to projects on terms that would make the delivery impossible. I refused to commit to those terms. The arguments became weekly. The friendship strained. We agreed to end it.

After the second partnership ended, I sat in the drying-room office and I made the decision that has shaped the rest of my career.

I would not enter another fifty-fifty partnership. I would build the company alone.

I gave the company a new name. I called it DevBatch.

I cannot tell you why I picked the name. I think the name suggested itself in some moment of frustration with the existing name and the existing structure. I wanted something that was not the name of the previous failed partnerships. DevBatch was clean. DevBatch was mine. I registered the company. I moved the customer and Asad and the work and the office under the new name.

DevBatch has been the name ever since.

The third try was the one that worked.

I want to be honest about why the third try worked when the first two had not. The third try worked because I was alone. The decisions were faster. The conflict was zero. The accountability was complete. The bottom line was visible to me without translation. The customer relationship was direct. The hiring decisions were mine. The pricing decisions were mine. The strategy was mine. The mistakes were mine. The work was mine.

I have employed more than two hundred engineers since then. I have not entered another fifty-fifty partnership. I have entered other kinds of partnerships, including investment relationships and partner ventures, but none of them are structured as the kind of partnership the first two were.

The lesson of this chapter, if you want it stated cleanly, is this.

The conventional advice is to find a co-founder. I tried that twice. Both times the partnership cost me more than the solo work did. I am not saying co-founders are a bad idea. I am saying the bias toward two-founder teams underweights the cost of the wrong second founder.

If you are not certain about the second founder, default to one.

The DevBatch you see today is the company that was started in the drying-room of a rented house in Lahore in 2011. The first office was a courtyard. The first developer was Asad. The first customer paid the bills for the first six months. The third try was the one that survived.

Sixteen years later, the company is still mine. I am still the only owner. The legal entity is in Texas. The team is in Pakistan. The longest customer relationships are over five years. The work compounds.

I have written nine chapters of the journey before this one to give you the context for this paragraph. Most operator profiles would skip the nine chapters and start at the drying-room. The drying-room makes no sense without the nine chapters. The boy in the drying-room was the boy in the snooker club, who was the boy in the back of the class at Multan Public, who was the boy renamed three times in his childhood. The boy did not change. The structure around him changed, slowly, over thirty years.

That is the story of how I got to the drying-room.

The story of what happened after the drying-room is the rest of this site. Read on, if you would like, in the writing and the notes and the work and the giving. The journey ends here. The work continues.

Alhamdulillah.

[← Previous chapter: Emirates and the fall](https://waqaspitafi.com/journey/emirates-and-the-fall)

[Next chapter: After →](https://waqaspitafi.com/journey/after)

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