An introspective entrepreneur

When I call Muneeb Maayr and request time for an interview for this profile, his response is one that I have rarely heard. He says that people have seen enough of him, and that he can introduce me to other entrepreneurs who are establishing start-ups in Pakistan instead. Undeterred, I manage to convince him to be profiled; a week later we are seated in a lounge at the Bykea offices, located on Karachi’s bustling Shahrah-e-Faisal.

After he introduces me to his team members (he tries to have them interviewed as well), we finally settle into conversation. Maayr has, unlike a lot of people his age (his is 40), worked at very few places. After graduating from the University of Virginia, he joined Bear Stearns as an investment banking analyst in the US; nearly two year later, he moved to Islamabad to work for SNL Financial (which was later acquired and renamed S&P Global Pakistan) as Director and CEO, Pakistan Operations, where he spent nearly seven years. After that, the entrepreneur in him took over and with Abdul Mannan (who now works with him at Bykea), he proposed an idea for a start-up on the lines of eBay to Rocket Internet. As it turned out, Rocket Internet convinced him to work for Daraz, which was about to launch and Maayr worked there as CEO and co-founder for four years. After that, he went on to establish Bykea, a motorbike-based ride hailing service which is now in its third year of operations.

Maayr, however, is not one of those entrepreneurs one reads about. (You know the ones I am talking about: they give up their promising careers at the drop of a hat to pursue their dreams and struggle endlessly, usually in a room without furniture, before finally succeeding.) Maayr has a more practical approach.

“When you are trying to build something big, you have to have capital to do it; you can be a brave maverick and try and do it on your own, but the truth is businesses [such as Bykea] require a lot of investment.”

To this end, Bykea was seed funded by Ithica Capital and JS Group; more recently, the start-up has secured funding of a further $5.7 million from Sarmayacar, in addition to investors from South East Asia and the Middle East. Over time, the number of users has grown to two million, and partners to 25,000.

However, despite his seemingly businesslike approach towards his venture, Maayr is not all that practical as he would like me to believe he is. Case in point: despite a financially rewarding career with Bear Stearns and, to an extent, Daraz, he decided to establish Bykea. He says he left Daraz for several reasons.

“It stopped being fun, after I realised a couple of things. Daraz was not a product I built which I could tweak or alter to customise to Pakistan; it would never be as big as I would have wanted it to be. Secondly, I felt that we were trying to force a behavioural change through discounts; I didn’t feel that I was solving a large enough problem.” When I ask him to elaborate, he says: “It’s not a challenge for people in urban centres to buy a new kurta or a phone.”

This need to “solve a big problem” led him to establish Bykea. He says that given the fact that it is an Urdu app, it reaches out to more people than most other apps (which are available in English) and solves an issue that a larger chunk of the population faces: finding cheaper ways of transportation.

No wonder then that Maayr finds ‘the Bykea experience’ the most rewarding yet, because the impact it has, in his opinion, is higher than his other ventures. Also he says that it allows him to stay creative.

“It allows me to create a product which I really enjoy intrinsically, and I am not saying this facetiously.”

That is not to say that the journey was an easy one.

“Many people say that you have to love what you do; that is correct but it is also a painful process.” Although he doesn’t go into details about the hardships he went through, the uphill task of establishing Bykea was not, in his words, akin to “walking through a meadow of flowers”. He elaborates that the second year was particularly difficult, as other ride hailing companies such as Careem and Uber began to introduce motorbike taxis.

Despite this, he persevered and worked on improving the product; he is in the midst of planning an English version of the app, improving the concierge service and the efficiency of the drivers and introducing Bykea Cash, a service which will allow people to pay their bills on the spot with the help of a Bykea driver. “It is incumbent upon us to stay ahead of the curve and keep innovating and we are super excited about Bykea Cash.”

What comes through our conversation is that Maayr is a structured thinker. With regard to his vision for Bykea, he says there are four values he expects everyone at Bykea to abide by: empathy (“for our drivers, customers, and employees”); simplify (the communication should be clear and concise); “own it” and “keep learning”.

The last one, it seems to me, is the one that is most important to him For example, when I ask him about his hobbies, he says, “I recently watched The Spy on Netflix [I rarely watch TV] which is about a Mossad agent. If I am going to watch something it can’t be for entertainment, it has to be about learning something. Even when I read, it has to evoke learning.”

This statement also betrays that he is someone who wants to grow, learn and improve constantly. As he says, “I would hate to retire,” and adds that in his opinion people should try and be “useful”. When I ask him to elaborate, he says that “unfortunately, in this world of social media, we have lost depth. In the past, people created tangible things that continue to have an impact, be it the books they wrote or the monuments they built.” I conclude from this that he is driven mainly by the need to be useful and create something that lasts.

It is no surprise then that he is predictably a workaholic; having been married for 10 years, he has two children, with whom he admits he is unable to spend as much time with as he would like. Hence, weekends are spent with them, whether it is going to the beach, kayaking or “jumping around in a mall”.

However, he seems to be a bit of an introvert; he says he loves travelling alone, which gives him time to think.

“People think that it is strange I like travelling alone but I use that time to contemplate and think about purpose; it gives me time to think and talk to myself; that is very important.”

This, I think, sums up the secret to Maayr’s success: the thirst to learn, improve himself – and, of course, the need to create something that will last.