A few years earlier, Monis Rahman wasn’t a CEO in any way that looked impressive, spending time on his knees wiring cameras into daycare centers for his first startup. That company did not make him, but it taught him he could survive almost anything, a lesson that would prove essential for what came next in his career.
Rahman then did something that, on paper, made little sense. He walked away from Intel, from Silicon Valley, from building microprocessor chips at the center of the tech universe, and moved back to Lahore to start an internet company. His bet rested on a simple premise, that the real cost of running a web business lies in people, and Pakistani talent cost a fraction of what it did in the Valley. The logic held together, but the problem was that no one had proven it yet, since no Pakistani startup had ever raised a dollar of venture capital at that point.
By 2007, Rahman was trying to become the first, and the process proved brutal, with nearly every investor call meaning he had to fight through a wall of skepticism about Pakistan as a viable market for venture-backed technology. At a critical juncture, the investor he needed called with second thoughts about the deal, presenting Rahman with a fork in the road: a careful founder might have sent a reassuring email and hoped for the best, while a nervous one might have gone quiet and let the round quietly die. Rahman did neither, instead sitting down and writing what he framed as the top ten reasons to invest, not an apology for the risk involved but a direct case for the opportunity itself, before sending it off.
The round closed, bringing in 2 million dollars from two venture funds, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and ePlanet. That capital became Rozee, which grew into Pakistan’s largest job platform, and Rahman is widely credited as the founder behind the first Pakistani startup to raise venture capital, opening a door that an entire subsequent generation of Pakistani founders would walk through because he refused to let it stay shut. The man who once knelt wiring cameras into daycare centers and the man who opened Pakistan to venture capital were the same person, a throughline that underscores how early, unglamorous setbacks often precede the moments that later define a founder’s legacy within a country’s broader startup history.
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