The Lost Decade Revisited
The Spark: May 2012
A single call—disregarding the long-drawn-out prior conversations—changed everything. A founder friend(Jeff) from my TRG-Satmap days shared that the time had come to scale on an idea he was building out. Lead generation at scale. The second coming of the digital gold rush, that’s what it felt like when he described it to me.
The Model: Digital Gold Rush, Reimagined
Here’s how it worked:
People hunt for things online. “Cheap internet in Boston.” “Fastest fiber in Miami.” “AT&T triple-play bundles.” Keywords. Gritty little breadcrumbs.
Our job? Build licensed landing pages—digital kiosks—to connect those hungry searchers with the vendors feeding them. By getting paid ads to redirect to those landing pages.
Think of it like this:
The mall, 2012. Telco kiosks. Lines of antsy customers comparing prices, bundles, install dates. Back then, it cost providers $90–140 to bag one customer there.
Now flip it digital.
Buy keywords for $0.50 to $5. Send the lead to a provider for 40$ .If they bite? Ka−ching. A$20–$40 bounty. The provider saves $50 per sale. No mall hours. Intent driven sales, no cold calling all inbound leads with users ready to buy with intent. Just a 24/7 money machine. This is the first time I learnt what 24/7 conversion engines feel like and how you make money whilst sleeping. A revelation and an epiphany at the same time.
Simple? Sure. Obvious? Hell no.
The Visionaries: Madmen & Masterminds
Most people stare at gold and see dirt. Jeff? He saw veins. A madman with a pickaxe, backed by Zia—a serial visionary who’d build multiple B$ companies out of thin air (story for another day). When Zia bets, you listen. I had already experienced it firsthand when I went to work for him to build the global delivery arm for SATMAP (Now afiniti.com).
So I did.
Packed up in Abu Dhabi. Moved to Pakistan. Boots on the ground.
The Grind: Building in the Trenches
The grind? Brutal. Multi-party deals. Investor egos. TRG’s infrastructure was a double-edged sword—brand power on one side, legacy noise on the other, with its share of opportunists and assholes along with incredible souls. Jeff’s company, DGS, was the engine. My job? Make the gears turn. But the structure was different; I did not work for TRG this time around, instead I worked for a portfolio company, DGS. Tougher yet, balancing the Chairman’s view (Zia) with the Founder’s (Jeff). Staying honest to where the paycheck was coming whilst balancing loyalty to my mentor Zia.
It was not easy. Zia makes you work to levels you don’t think you can, but it brings the best out in you. Lots of learning, many disagreements. Some say he has a reality distortion field when he wants to get some thing done, I feel that is his super power, being ahead of the curve. Many breaking points along the way, days where it felt like this was an insane thing to do. But a masterclass in doing better if you are willing to go through with it.
Jeff was also going through a life-altering journey, many challenges but some one who figured it out in real time. You realize the best and worst of people when you work this closely. The good outweighed it all as it impacted so much positive change in Pakistan. Memory becomes selective over time, I tend to focus on the good vs the challenging. I am sure if the tables are turned I would have had similar short comings. Its just that I’m narrating the story this time around so I get to choose the parts I share.
Gold rushes aren’t about the gold. They’re about who’s willing to dig while everyone else naps. And we dug hard… Like really hard.
The Climb: From Green to Grit
Easy? If I lied and said it was, you’d smell the rot.
I’d left Pakistan as a teenager. My Pakistan specific resume? A single internship at Hubco and a small exit on a consulting business, before coming back with global experience. Zero deep scars from the trenches of building, scaling, or leading domestically at this scale. Now I was back—green, hungry, and staring down a mountain that had energetic young souls who wanted a stab at scaling their outcomes.
First lesson:
You don’t climb a mountain. You carve it.
The Talent Revolution
We needed talent. Not just bodies. Diamonds. The 1% who’d trade textbooks for paid search algorithms. Engineers. Botanists. Medical researchers—anyone who would pass the screening test I’d built. All retrained to hunt leads like wolves. I became a mad professor—teaching myself Google Ads in stolen hours, then recruiting chemists and coders to unlearn their past and weaponize their minds for the new game. It felt oddly satisfying to see people scale to new heights. In the initial days, I was present for the first 300+ interviews in person and met every candidate we hired from the recruitment cycle. It was insane, unscalable but it built the most fiercely loyal and aligned team I have ever worked with.
The Metrics:
From 0 to 30+ paid search assassins.
From borrowed desks to 400 then 600 souls across two cities, eventually hitting 1,000.
From scavenged TRG furniture to building offices and a culture that people refused to leave and go home.
The fuel? Hunger.
A 19-year-old A-level kid earning 500K PKR/month by earning conversion bounties.
Civil engineers tripling salaries—70K to 250K—by mastering lead gen.
Women, 27% of the workforce, rewriting rules in a system built to ignore them.
We didn’t just hire. We ignited.
The Team: Forged in Fire
Hassan Ahmed, our CTO—architect of the machine.
Salman Wajid, the delivery savage who turned chaos into cash.
Ambreen, the HR whisperer who found talent and made them stay.
Great teams aren’t built in boardrooms we had 100s others, far too many to name, you know who you are. (If you were part of the journey would love to hear you comments in the section below the post and how you are doing now.) They’re welded in the wild, trust by trust.
The Chaos & Cashflow
Brutal? Yes.
When was I got on the ground, there was no board. No SECP paperwork. No employee payroll bank account, heck nothing. I was one of the signatories to the SECP shareholding document in trust for TRG. Just inter-company assignments from the principal investor, TRG. Just raw hustle. We reverse-engineered TRG’s decade of lessons into weeks and months. Built offices, bandwidth, fire escapes—even battled Google’s poachers from their newly established offices in Singapore who salivated after our talent pipeline and domestic bureaucrats who’d surprise us at 2 AM for “inspections.” It was the wild wild west.
Cashflow? A vice grip.
Customers paid net-90, sometimes 120. Growth bled us dry. But Zia—always Zia—saw the endgame. “Go public. AIM Market. Now.” Just like that, we had a flurry of advisors and investment bankers between Karachi and Lahore. We were finishing offices, putting a local board together, getting the optics to match the growth. We were never about optics, but going public required some level of structural growing up, to match the fantastic positive growth. I remember painting our makeshift expansion office with call center personnel, 24 hours before our consultants arrived in Lahore.
The Storm Before the Calm
Karachi. Lahore. Hiring lines so thick we needed traffic cops to untangle the streets. Kids in faded resumes becoming kings. Call-center rookies out-earning their fathers and forefathers. A country’s lost generation finding hope in lead-gen paychecks.
Why Tell This Now?
Because 2012 & onwards wasn’t just a decade. It was a heartbeat. A flicker of belief that Pakistan could build. That talent, when unleashed, could lift a nation. That “brain drain” could become brain gain.
We didn’t just scale a business. We proved a truth:
Gold isn’t found. It’s made.
Journey & Impact
Launched/Conceived in 2008, DGS accelerated into a powerhouse by 2012-2015. On February 14, 2013, we achieved a landmark AIM IPO, raising $20.5 million and unlocking transformative value:
Market Momentum: Opening market cap of $73.9m with a 27.7% free float – a vote of confidence from investors.
Balanced Growth: Only 10.8% dilution to existing shareholders, preserving equity while fueling expansion.
Valuation Metrics: Trailing multiples of 3.3x revenue, 22.0x EBITDA, and 36.6x P/E – signaling strong future potential.
Beyond Numbers:
This wasn’t just a financial win. We rewrote futures:
Global Mobility: Relocated talent from Pakistan (PK) to the U.S. and beyond, creating opportunities for employees to thrive internationally.
Skill Revolution: Built Pakistan’s first paid search specialists & software engineers to build atop googles search algorithms and ignited a lead generation revolution, empowering a wave of entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurial Ripple Effect: Alumni from Lahore, Karachi, and beyond launched dozens of startups – from Lisbon to Kentucky – mastering digital innovation. Many became investible ventures in new markets (non-competing, of course 😉).
Legacy:
1,000+ lives transformed directly and many MORE indirectly, skills upgraded, and a blueprint for scaling emerging-market talent globally. DGS proved that ambition, when paired with opportunity, turns local expertise into global impact.
TL;DR
A raw, unpolished journey of scaling Digital Globe Services (DGS) from a scrappy emerging business to an AIM-listed powerhouse. Fueled by lead-gen innovation, relentless hustle, and visionary bets by Zia , it transformed 1,000+ lives, sparked a digital skills revolution, and proved emerging-market talent can compete globally. No fairy tale—just blood, sweat, and an IPO. The question is who will do it again and how soon?

Interventions for the Next Decade
Pakistan’s next decade demands founders who see dirt and envision gold—again. To reignite the spark of 2012, three interventions are non-negotiable:
AI as the New Lead Gen: Pakistani tech companies must pivot from outsourcing to owning AI-native verticals—think hyperlocal healthcare diagnostics, climate-resilient agritech, or vernacular LLMs in addition to global ones. The playbook isn’t chasing trends but creating them. Founders must marry domain expertise with ruthless execution, building “24/7 conversion engines” for the AI era. What you have is access to large data sets. Use them.
Youth as Architects, Not Labor: The youth bulge is a sword—grip the blade wrong, and it cuts. Upskill relentlessly: partner with global AI guilds, launch micro-credentials in prompt engineering, and incentivize startups to train, not just hire. The 19-year-old earning 500PKR/month in 2012? Tomorrow’s version builds AI agents that out-earn Silicon Valley.
Founders Grit > Founder Genius: Success will favor those who thrive in ambiguity—founders fluent in Karachi’s chaos and Regional markets. Double down on hybrid models: remote teams solving global problems, but rooted in local insights. Zia’s “reality distortion field” wasn’t magic—it was seeing two steps ahead while others whined about load-shedding.
Let me leave you with this: Gold rushes don’t repeat, but the hunger to create them does. A decade ago, we carved veins out of keywords and call centers. Tomorrow’s treasure lies in code, data, and the audacity to believe a kid in Lahore can outbuild a Stanford grad. Pakistan’s tech future isn’t about catching up—it’s about leaping. But listen close: AI won’t save you. You save you. The same sweat that scaled DGS must now forge AI factories, the same loyalty that welded teams must now anchor ecosystems. The mountain hasn’t changed—only the tools. So pick up the pickaxe. Dig. And when bureaucrats knock at 2 AM or investors scoff at “emerging markets,” smile. You’ve been here before. Gold isn’t found. It’s made. Again.