Mudassir Sheikha: The Meeting that Led to $3.1BN Buyout: The Battle Between Uber and Careem | E1056

... the two or three things that I generally tell founders are, one, let's just figure out how can you get a lot more from your spending than you would do without a lot of creative thinking. Second, make the product very, very local.

(instrumental music) Mudassir, I am so excited for this. As we said, I've spoken to the who's who of the ecosystem, from Fadi, to the Bekko team, to your co-founder, Magnus Adib. Thank you so much for joining me today, though.

It's a pleasure to be, uh, to be here.

Now, I would love to start with a little bit of context. I always believe, and I'm a bit of an armchair psychologist, but I always believe that we're a function of our past. And so, when we think about that, what do you think you were running from to start with?

Yeah, it's a, it's a good, uh, question. Uh, look, I, I grew up in, in Pakistan, in Karachi, in a very humble middle-class background. And if you've been to Karachi, you know that life is, uh, full of friction, a lot of daily challenges, um, basic things like water, power, uh, safety. It wasn't easy. Um, so I think one thing that, uh, I've, I've, I've learned over the last few years is to just be resilient, just to make sure that, uh, nothing can bring you down. So, if I'm running from something, I'm probably running from a lot of daily friction in life that, uh, can take away from people's potential to be, to achieve, uh, to achieve things that are aligned with what they're capable of achieving.

Can I ask you, you said that resiliency, uh, bad things happen, hard things happen, challenges occur. When they do, what does your resilient voice in your head tell you?

The first instinct, uh, these days is to figure out, uh, what can we do to overcome it. And the second thing is, uh, okay, what's the silver lining in it? Every challenge, as we know, is an opportunity. And if you look hard enough, you'll find that, uh, silver lining that can actually become a source of growth or, uh, or something that makes you stronger. Yeah, those are probably the two things that, uh, come to mind when challenges occur.

I, I, I love that, and I'm totally with you on the silver lining. I always try and do the same. I want to move to the founding of Careem. We were with McKinsey before, and then we decided to co-found Careem. What was that aha moment, and what was that founding moment for you and Magnus with Careem?

Like most people who run into a problem and they have a moment where they feel that something can be done better, I don't think we had that moment. But there were two things that happened that created a desire to build something. And more important thing happened in Magnus's life, where, in 2011, a year before we start Careem, he had a bleeding in his brain that almost took his life. And as part of the reflection that he went through on life and what he had done in the first 30 years of his life, he promised himself that if he survives, he will call himself Magnus 2.0 and build something big and meaningful. On my side, something much less dramatic. Uh, as part of McKinsey, we were trying to open the office in Pakistan, which is where I'm from, and I realized as part of that process that, as a country of 220 million people then, we haven't built large and lasting institutions. At that time, 2011, there was only one company outside of the national gas company and the national oil company that was worth more than a billion dollars. And I found that a little bit embarrassing, because, of course, I had spent many years in Silicon Valley before that. Every hundred meters, there are companies that are way larger than that. Magnus, I joke around with, "You grew up in Sweden. For a nation of nine million people, you guys have produced many large and lasting institutions. So, what the hell are we doing wrong in, in my country, in this part of the world, that we haven't been able to build those large and lasting institutions?" So, when Magnus came and said, "Let's build something big and meaningful," it was very easy for me to subscribe to it. And then we said, "Let's figure out what can become big and meaningful." So, as diligent consultants, we made a list of all the problems that we had faced in the region. We made a list of ideas and ranked them on size of opport- opportunity and how meaningful they could become. And then somehow transportation came up, which is something that we had faced day to day, week to week, as consultants going around the region. There wasn't an immediate angle which made it look meaningful until we got close to the captains or drivers and understood that their lives are, are very, very difficult in the way they serve customers. Many of them don't know where the next, uh, earning will come from. Their families are typically in Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, that depend on their... We realized that if