Shabahat Ali Shah on Making Pakistan into a Technology Powerhouse
Shabahat Ali Shah is the CEO of National IT Board Pakistan, Chairman of Ignite — National Technology Fund, Director of Universal Service Fund (USF), National Telecom Corporation (NTC) and Pakistan Telecom Corporation Ltd (PTCL). He’s a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, has formerly worked at Oracle, holds an MBA from MIT. He has been a part of the Public Leadership program at Harvard Business School and has a degree in Electrical & Communications Engineering from UET Lahore.
Shabahat has recently returned from the US to join NITB as the CEO. During a fireside chat with Startup Grind Islamabad, he reveals the reason for his return to Pakistan, his early education and how it affected his mindset; filling the gap between Silicon Valley and Pakistan; recreating the policy for Digital Pakistan; the future of the Internet; the startup ecosystem and the importance of teams when building startups.
The Return to Pakistan
“For the last 6–8 years, I had been looking for reasons to go back to Pakistan. As I looked around over the years, I found that various countries around Pakistan progressed while we lagged behind and it gave me heartache — I looked at the talent in the Silicon Valley and I used to look at the Asia Pacific and all the talent — the tremendous talent that I have been coming across from Pakistan is absolutely wonderful. However, in spite of all this, they’re only a minuscule percentage of academia, entrepreneurs, technologists. Why is that? A few years ago, I actually came to the conclusion that we haven’t done enough to build the capacity of our younger generation. We haven’t exposed them to all the technologies and opportunities that can help them grow and that is why we haven’t progressed the way Malaysia, Singapore or for that matter India or Sri Lanka have. I used to work for the government around 15 years ago before going to Silicon Valley. The way the files are carried around wrapped up with a string is exactly the same today. I now have the opportunity and we have finally decided to recreate the charter of Digital Pakistan. All the countries I mentioned before had to become technology powerhouses in order for them to become what they are and that’s where I want to take Pakistan — that’s why I came back.”
The Beginning
Shabahat has been inquisitive since childhood, which he attributes to his early years in a small mining town near Kalabagh — “I was born in a place called Kalabagh, a small place near Mianwali. My father was posted there at the time. There’s a small mining town near that place and I was born there. I spent the first 5 years of my life there, riding buffaloes in complete wilderness. That particular environment had an impact on me, making me inquisitive all the time. The family then had to move to Lahore because of my schooling and I went to Aitchison College in 1979. Then, I was enrolled at Berkeley and I went for a year, but I had to come back because my mother was not well. I came back and completed my engineering at UET.” Discussing our academic institutions, he continues, “I have heard people saying so many things about our academic institutions — it’s not just the environment, but also the attitude towards academics that builds institutions. That attitude comes from both the students and academia. For the first few years, UET was a shocking environment for me, after coming from Aitchison and spending a year at Berkley. At the same time, I’ve also seen engineers from UET years later in Silicon Valley and Wall Street. It all boils down to how you expose your students to different technologies and opportunities and the kind of drive that the student has. I think that I have been very fortunate in getting very good mentors and coaches in my career soon after I graduated. They taught me how to explore. There are two ways to go about things in your career — either you pounce on an opportunity that is provided to you or you explore and see what works best for you — the latter is so important. I’ve been very fortunate to be able to explore. I started out after university as an instrument engineer at a site in the South of Pakistan. Within two years, I could tell that I didn’t see myself in that environment in the future — it was not for me. The interview process I had gone through was extremely stringent and I had got that job after passing 4–5 different stages; there were two other people with me. I knew that it was a career choice for them, but I couldn’t see myself being a part of that closed environment where I was doing the same thing every day.”
Engineer Turned Intraprepreneur and Entrepreneur
After leaving that job, Shabahat ended up at NADRA — “it was its third year, while it was being built — it was taken over by the armed forces and they were building its strategies and policies, so I got the unique opportunity to work on the backbone infrastructure of NADRA. I designed the ID card that you’re carrying today — the 13-digit number, each digit means something — some of it is public information while some of it is classified. So, we made that policy of how we were going to design ID cards and how the biometrics were going to get done. Then, we went on to build the entire data warehouse of NADRA.I was also part of the team that made the machine-readable passport. I worked at NADRA till 2005.”
After NADRA, he started out with Oracle Communications based out of Singapore — “it was all about communication apps. I was in the evaluation committee, which acquired Sun Microsystems. Then we saw Oracle building the cloud, based on Sun’s hardware. In 2014, I left Oracle after spending close to 10 years there. By then, I had caught the entrepreneurship germ, which meant that I just couldn’t work for anyone else. I got the opportunity to be in a unique industry, so I started out with the first microsatellite manufacturing company, which could track vessels across the global waters of the world. Satellites are the only way to track them, which is expensive so the right sized satellites had to be built.” He co-founded his first company, which was San Francisco-based. After that, he started out another company based on IoT– “It’s focused on remote areas where there is no terrestrial access. The third company I founded right before coming back from the US was an intersection between telecom and technology, which can be applied in a number of industries like agriculture, etc.”
Living a Life of Purpose
Since he graduated from UET as a communication engineer, most of his work during his career has been based around commercial or corporate entrepreneurship. “Once you’re an engineer and you know that you like to create stuff, it’s very important to understand that no matter how good an idea is, unless and until you have a business case, it will take micro-seconds for that idea to go down the drain — there has to be a buyer. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a buyer in the monetary sense, it has to be someone who would take your idea to the next level. So, you should know how to sell your idea to someone.” He went to MIT for his MBA — “MIT is a unique environment as an institution. It grinds your DNA down to the lowest level and then builds it up from scratch. They actually teach you to serve above yourself. When you think beyond yourself, only then you know the value of solving global problems. Going to MIT changed me fundamentally because now I’m not just thinking about myself, but about how I can change the world in a positive way. They teach you to live a life of purpose. For the last 10 years, there hasn’t been a single day when I got up in the morning, looked in the mirror and didn’t ask what purpose I have to live this particular day. It keeps you focused in the right direction. Purpose in life is the most important thing. God has created human beings, but the purpose is what makes us really human. I think the moment you lose your purpose is when you lose your humanity. That’s what MIT gives you.”
Shabahat attended Harvard Business School to study Corporate Strategy and Public Leadership. This was the right move for Shabahat after MIT, as he elaborates, “Harvard gives you the opportunity and the interface to do something with the purpose you discover at MIT. It drives you to think that you have got something that the destitute do not. So, they actually teach you how to bring about change at a level where it would actually make a difference. I was in Mexico in 2011 and I had a chance to look at the slums — if you go into those slums, you realize what poverty actually means and the slums of Pakistan are nothing compared to those slums. I’ve seen a lot of poverty in those countries, poverty to an extent that it has converted them into real criminals. Looking at those people, you wonder about how to change their lives, with good ideas suitable for that environment, what kind of technology do you use? It gives you a perspective about how to think global, but act locally to change the lives of people.”
Filling the Gap
There has always been a gap between Silicon Valley and Pakistan. We ask Shabahat why that is and how that gap can be reduced. “The gap is still there, but it has started diminishing because of social media. Since the government changed, I had been following the government’s initiatives on social media and I was able to catch up pretty quickly. I think the information was very rapid and real-time. What hasn’t yet happened is that people from the Silicon Valley haven’t taken many initiatives to come here, listen to the ideas and take them back to the Valley and expose them to the right people, which include VCs, angel investors, etc. There are lots and lots of people who are very well connected and have done so much back and forth to Silicon Valley but haven’t done enough in terms of giving exposure to the entrepreneurs from Pakistan. There are roughly 275 incubators in India and out of these about 200 of these incubators have got a liaison officer sitting in Silicon Valley, whose sole purpose in life is to market those ideas to people in Silicon Valley. If you cumulatively aggregate the investment that those liaison officers have generated, it goes beyond 30–40 billion dollars. These are the kinds of things that we need to do. We’re intending to have Ignite’s consultant in Silicon Valley, who will be connected to all the incubators and at least once a year, hold some kind of a seminar with investors and stakeholders with startups who have gone through the funnel. That is something that I really want to do.”
While we talk about the gap, we continue to discuss a little bit more about educational institutions and the employability of fresh graduates. “The biggest challenge that the industry is currently facing is the quality of the graduates and how it can be fixed. There are roughly 25,000 engineers who graduate in Pakistan every year. According to the feedback I’ve received, these kids are not job-ready. Why is that? It’s not necessarily about the curriculum, but the bracket of experience. There are a few initiatives we have already taken to reform the education system. We’re conducting a drive in the Punjab province where they’re creating a project-based curriculum, which is something that is absolutely required. The model of bringing foreign instructors and having them teach here is not scalable, but the project-based model is absolutely necessary, so we need to create such a curriculum to promote hands-on learning. For students, we plan on starting that particular curriculum during the third year of their degree. We aim that by the time students graduate, they should know exactly which domain they would work in, which would be a huge improvement. This way, employers would know what to expect. Students would get a choice between going into project-based learning or pure academia. India has done this very successfully. My professor from Harvard, Clayton Christensen, who is known as the Godfather of innovation, is an authority on this and he has been promoting this idea since 2008, that if we really want kids to be successful in the next millennium and want a generation of technologists who would work on future technologies, introducing project-based learning would actually accelerate that process.”
Regarding interaction with Pakistan talent across the world, Shabahat commented, “Recently, I haven’t had too much of a chance to interact with any, but I’ve heard that people have moved to Pakistan, not necessarily from the tech world, but most media. I’m talking to a few more people at Google Singapore that it’s the right time to come to Pakistan because we need people like them. I’m recreating the digital policy of Pakistan, consolidating the figures under one big data center, which we will use to create various e-governance apps where a transaction between the government and the citizen would become easy, also offering increased transparency. There are so many use cases that I have seen where citizens have been facing numerous hardships in terms of going through a process, for example, applying for passports, submitting a case, etc. We want transparency across all levels — you can do that only when you have access to data.”
The Startup Ecosystem
There are quite a few notable startups in Pakistan like Bykea, Airlift etc. that have received funding and show a lot of promise. We discuss the role of the National Incubation Centers across Pakistan in developing the talent pipeline and the ecosystem in general. Shabahat expresses, “I’m so happy that we have incubators like the NIC here. There are two to three companies in India that came out of their incubators and I know them personally and one of them is valued at 3 billion dollars and the other at 4 billion dollars, purely out of incubators two years ago. I’m so happy that this is happening and my plan is to roll out 5–6 more incubators in smaller cities in Pakistan. There are kids in Faisalabad, Multan, Sukkur, Sialkot where they don’t have access to an ecosystem like this, so I want to bring that ecosystem, extend the reach of incubators to young people who don’t have this kind of privilege.”
Changing Perceptions
Pakistan needs positive branding not just in terms of the startups, but also promoting Pakistani tech talent. We ask Shabahat how we can go about changing the existing perception. “I think we need to show more presence, not just in Silicon Valley, but also in other parts of the world. The Scandinavian region is coming up really fast — countries like Sweden, Finland and Norway are going at rocket speed in terms of new ideas, entrepreneurship and technologies. They are pumping money towards fostering an entrepreneurship environment. In order to change the existing perception about Pakistan, we need to show presence; we need to be politically aligned with the different governments where we can showcase our technological and entrepreneurial ideas and initiatives — make collaborations where we can add a piece to their puzzle so that there is a common objective. They’re good in some areas, even better than Silicon Valley in some cases. Don’t forget about Ericsson which came out of Sweden; they have such innovative ideas still incubated in their back offices. We should try to pitch things to them, as they look for human resource, we can offer to help them achieve their objectives by giving them a human resource. Then there are other tech areas — there’s so much happening in e-commerce in the UK; in terms of building telecommunications and phone apps, UK is years ahead of Silicon Valley — there’s huge human resource scarcity in the UK, something we can contribute to.” Lack of human resources is a problem everywhere, whether it’s Canada, Silicon Valley, UK or other parts of Europe. Pakistan is already capitalizing on some of these opportunities in the form of the tech summits that Ejad Labs has been doing, for example to Oslo Tech Summit.
About the Future
Digital inclusiveness is a major objective for many countries across the world and considered a key element for development. Shabahat shares, “The only way to provide Internet to all parts of the world is through satellite because you can’t have antennas everywhere. The godfather of space technologies is Greg Wyler who started O3B and then started OneWeb because he wanted to democratize the Internet across the world to an extent that each person on the surface of this planet would be able to access it. All the microfinance related ideas that people have for rural areas could be materialized with this. The mission of OneWeb is to launch around 1500 microsatellites this year around the world to encapsulate the earth and then provide the Internet. SpaceX wants to follow suit in the sense that they also want to have their own constellation of microsatellites, but then Elon Musk’s business is geared more towards rocket launching than satellite. He’s got the money, the muscle and the brand equity, which is extremely important and helps you pull investment. So, his heart is more towards space launching, so he might somewhat be a competitor to OneWeb.”
Advice from Shabahat
To conclude the session, we ask Shabahat what advice he would give to young people, “I’m not sure if I can give you any advice, you know your cultural environment and your ecosystem probably better than me at this point in time, but I can share key learning with you about making a company successful. There is one variable that is very important — I can narrate a story with an important lesson that I learned. There was a sovereign country a couple of decades ago, which decided to pump 50 billion dollars to go to space. Their whole nation was excited about it. 300–400 people were a part of that mission — the mission man was chosen and they spent 2–3 years working on an entire plan, where they now had the satellite ready — the rocket was there and everything was set. The time t-8 was ticking and at t-4, there was an alarm that there was a small leakage in the pouring. There were about half a billion people sitting in front of their TVs. The team huddled in the room to discuss if they should launch or not. The rocket went off, at about t+2, the rocket blew up — 5 billion dollars in flames. When it was time to face the media and the whole nation and world, the mission head sat there and said that it was his fault and he said exactly one year from today we would launch the satellite again. The dust settled in a few months and they started working again day and night to launch the new satellite. A year passed and the day of launch was there again. Nothing went wrong, the rocket was launched, everyone was elated and they were all being congratulated. It time to face the media again and the whole team sat there in front of them this time. The lesson here is that team is the most important thing in a startup to make a company successful — an idea may look absolutely beautiful one day and the next day it won’t mean a thing, ideas come and go, things get destroyed, but the most important thing is the team that will take you from zero to one.”
This article is derived from multiple videos of Shabahat’s interviews and transcribed by Shehab Farrukh Niazi, Editor in Chief Startup Guide Pakistan.
