Jhankar Mahbub

Founders, here’s a growth hack they don’t teach in accelerators: When H-1B throws up walls, outsource to Pakistan and build bridges instead. Every dollar you don’t burn on visa fees, legal back-and-forth, or hiring delays is a dollar you can put into your product, your sales, your UX. Pakistan’s devs are not only competent, they’re aligned. They use your stack, your tools, your workflows. You gain speed, consistency, and sanity. If you’re scaling MVPs, iterating fast, or trying to get to Series A before cash runs out (or the visa lottery does), this might be your best lean decision.

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🤝 𝐀 𝐍𝐞𝐰 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐀𝐈 𝐂𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 Incredible news from Islamabad — the official launch of the 𝐆𝐎 𝐀𝐈 𝐇𝐮𝐛 & 𝐆𝐎 𝐓𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐇𝐮𝐛 marks a powerful step forward in building a shared innovation bridge between 𝐒𝐚𝐮𝐝𝐢 𝐀𝐫𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐚 and 𝐏𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧. This initiative connects talent, infrastructure, and opportunity — aligning with 𝐒𝐚𝐮𝐝𝐢 𝐀𝐫𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐚’𝐬 𝐕𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝟐𝟎𝟑𝟎 and 𝐏𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧’𝐬 rapidly growing digital ecosystem. With 17 partnerships signed across strategic, government, and private sectors, the foundation has been laid for an AI innovation corridor that will empower people, strengthen industries, and unlock sovereign compute capacity for the region. As someone who has worked closely across both ecosystems, I’m truly proud to see this collaboration take shape — linking Riyadh, Islamabad, and Silicon Valley through a common vision for the future of AI. Kudos to Ministry of Communications and Information Technology of Saudi Arabia, Ministry of IT and Telecommunication Pakistan, Special Investment Facilitation Council, Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB), Shaza Khawaja, Yahya Al-Mansour, Abdullah Alswaha, Mostafa Elamin ,MBA,CPM®, and all the partners driving this mission forward. The speed, clarity, and shared purpose behind this project are inspiring. This is just the beginning of a new AI era — powered by collaboration, trust, and vision. 🌍✨ Learn more 👉 www.goaihub.ai #GOAIHub #MCIT #MoITT #SIFC #PSEB #SpeedOfGO #SaudiArabia #Pakistan #AI #Vision2030 #Innovation #Partnerships #DigitalTransformation #TechEcosystem

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“We’re the best in the world when it comes to computer vision and operational AI—observing what’s happening, generating highly reliable, high-precision predictions, and enabling our customers to act on them.” I feel like I got to learn so much about this AI wave early on from Shoaib Makani. Motive was AI-native before that was even a buzzword. In 2017 (at only $1M in ARR), we acquired a small, failed startup working on consumer photo sharing and stitching, led by a founding team of PhDs in computer vision. Working quietly in stealth within Motive (the KeepTruckin — it was a mistake to name a company after a Grateful Dead song), they built a dataset of images from our sensors and forward-facing cameras, then trained our own AI models. You have to rethink your Customer Success motion when selling an AI-native product. Customer-specific training data matters, and a forward-deployed approach to accelerate onboarding is critical. At Motive, our CS motion often felt so different from the traditional SaaS playbooks that I sometimes questioned if we were doing it right. In hindsight, we were operating well ahead of our time. Through it all—and probably why I loved building at Motive so much—is that the founding team truly cares about its customers. That’s also why we’ve continued to succeed. There were lean years, failed bets, and no shortage of incredible challenges, but supporting customers and the teams that serve them was never in question. We always over-invested in support and CS. That's the winning formula! Awesome article by my friend Alex Konrad. (Fun Fact: I decided to work at Motive because of a back-channel reference Alex set up for me with Byron Deeter. I’ll never forget Byron telling me that Bessemer had passed on Motive, but they thought very highly of the founding team. He said he wouldn’t hesitate to take the job there—which ended up being exactly what I needed to hear. Every year when Motive lands on the Cloud100 list, I make a point to remind Byron that it was really good life advice. Motive changed my life) https://lnkd.in/eVddWNaa

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One of the main learnings from building Ztuth in Pakistan that I got was this. Health tech is probably one of the most difficult industries to build in. This was resonated by many people at multiple founder conferences I attended last year (Build Up, 92Disrupt, etc). Your product could technically be the best out there features-wise, even on parity with international players, but you need a solid marketing, sales strategy and capital to back it up. In fact, I sat down with one dentist at a very famous dental hospital, I asked her about what software they were using and it was Open Dental (widely-used internationally) which cost 10x compared to us. I asked her to list all the features that she loved about it and our product had everything she mentioned and more, features localized for Pakistan, things like integration with whatsapp, appointment and prescription reminders. Ofcourse, there was room for improvement but I was hoping the price gap would cover it up. So winning on features & pricing alone was clearly not enough. You need to become a great salesman, which I clearly was not. I'm open to hearing what we could have done better in the comments. If you're deciding to start a business, I'd say start learning to sell before learning to build. That's why I'm now reading books on sales, meeting with marketers and talking to you guys, to understand how to talk to my customers and present our value proposition to them before starting my next venture in Pakistan. Will share details about that as soon as I can.

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98% of Startups in Pakistan FAIL. And it’s not just FUNDING. It's the WRONG approach. Everyone wants to build the next Apple but forgets the steps that made Apple, Apple. Building an #MVP is one of the most critical steps. It shapes startups and saves both time and cost. Got an idea and need a partner to build, launch, and scale it? Try Ai DataYard.

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