Writings

What four thousand monthly salaries actually mean

I am not an inventor. I am not building something the world has never seen. I run a services firm, and the way I think about its impact is through the salaries it has paid out, one month at a time, for sixteen years.

The uneducated engineer

Three buckets of education, and the one we have stopped filling. Why I think the modern engineering profession is graduating brilliant people who are still uneducated.

پاکستان کو چائنہ جیسی ترقی سے کون روک رہا ہے؟

ایک کاروباری شخص کا خاکہ کہ پاکستان اگلے بیس سال میں چین جیسی ترقی کیسے کر سکتا ہے، تسلسل، انسانی سرمائے، شاگردی، تارکینِ وطن اور اعتماد کے ستونوں پر۔

Who Is Holding Pakistan Back?

A founder's blueprint for how Pakistan could engineer a China-style rise over the next two decades, across continuity, human capital, apprenticeship, the diaspora, and trust.

چین کی ترقی کا سفر

ایک کاروباری شخص کا چین کی ترقی پر تجزیہ: نقل کرنے والی قوم کیسے ایجاد کرنے والی قوم بنی، انسانی سرمائے کی نظر سے۔

How China Rose

A founder's firsthand analysis of how China moved from the world's factory to a leader in quality and innovation, told through the lens of human capital.

Your first hundred blog posts will not be very good. Your first thirty talks will not be very good. Your first fifty essays for the newsletter will not be very good. Mine were not. The proof of that…

I am older now. I have driven a Mercedes for cash, and I now drive a car with two hundred and twenty thousand kilometers on it. My favorite food is masoor ki daal. My pants are old. My shoes have…

Lessons in namaz for your startup

Five times a day, every day, for as long as I am alive and conscious. The structure is its own lesson.

A dream is not what you see in your sleep. A dream is what does not let you sleep. If the thing you are working on is not keeping you up at night, you are not working on the right thing. Or you are…

How to Adopt AI in a Mid-Market Business

Two public playbooks, one sector asymmetry, and a five-step framework for owners facing a generational technology shift.

If you cannot say no, at least learn to say "give me a hundred years, I will come back to you." It is the same answer in practice. It is gentler in form. It buys you time to think and it tells the…

Make your word your bond. Contracts matter. Your word matters more. Let your yes mean yes and your no mean no, always. The spirit of a deal is as important as the words of the deal. The contract…

Five prayers a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. That is the consistency the religious tradition I was raised in asks of me. I run my company on the same shape. Small, meaningful,…

I fired the entrepreneur of myself

For the first four years of DevBatch I was the entrepreneur. The company was me, doing the job. Then I fired that version of myself and tried to be a businessman. Here is what changed.

Pakistan crossed into the $300 billion economy club a few years ago. Most of the operators I talk to in the United States have a stale picture of this country. The picture is from a decade ago. It is…

There is a line I keep coming back to. "By the time I realized that my father was probably right, I had a son who thought I was wrong." It is a small line. It does most of the work of a fifty-year…

The first time I started DevBatch I did not want to continue

Sixteen years ago I tried to start a company three times in twelve months. The first two failed. I want to write down what I actually thought during the third try, before the success made the failure look like a story.

The trickiest moment in any hiring process is the salary negotiation. Eleven years and five jobs of being on the candidate side, then sixteen years and several hundred hires of being on the hiring…

For ten years before DevBatch worked, almost everything I touched failed. Then I read a line that I cannot remember the author of. The line said: "mentally strong people give themselves permission."…

What's in the name

I have been called four different names in my life. Only one of them stuck. The story of the other three is the story of how my family raised me.

My first salary was 6,000 rupees, paid on 30 August 1999. I gave it to my mother. In today's money, that is roughly 12,000 rupees. It is also, almost exactly, what we pay our paid interns at…

I have been called four different names in my life. Kashaan, Zeeshan, Waqas, and finally Waqas Khan Pitafi. The first three were my parents trying to give me something that worked. The fourth was…