From Pakistan to Stanford - The Tayyab Tariq Story
Tayyab Tariq. All rights reserved by Tayyab Tariq.
Tayyab Bin Tariq grew up in Pakistan and has just graduated from Stanford University as a Fullbright Scholar. Using the online work platform, oDesk, was instrumental in his story.
Opening Thoughts
Following my previous interview with Gary Swart (CEO of online work platform, oDesk) I asked if they had anyone they recommend I talk to. I told them I was interested in talking to someone who had used oDesk to change their life. As an online work platform operating world-wide I figured they must know of some interesting stories that have intertwining threads of technology, work and culture running through them.
They suggested I talk to Tayyab Tariq, a masters student at Stanford University, who had used oDesk whilst living in Pakistan. An interview was arranged via Skype and I had the pleasure of hearing Tayyab's story. It's a fascinating one that I immensely enjoyed listening to.
In telling Tayyab's story I felt it best to use his words. If you compare this post to the transcript or audio file you'll notice I have changed the order of passages. At all times however I have been very conscious of preserving Tayyab's voice and only making changes that remove the barriers between storyteller and reader - not inadvertently create them. These changes were made to give his story a chronological flow.
The next section is in his words.
Tayyab's Story
I am from Islamabad I grew up in a small town in the suburbs of Islamabad. Basically my father worked for a research institute run by the government so there was like the residential area of the institute was right next to it and everybody was basically kind of living on campus for the research institute and it was like an amazing community in that some of the top minds in the country they are living on your block and on the other edge of the same block because you know it was kind of like a self-contained community so everybody was living in a certain close proximity there was no kind of a, what should I call it, status gap, the janitor and top people were kind of living on opposite ends of the street so it was just a great community and it was not only manifested in where people lived it was manifested in how they behaved and there was this amazing sense of community there so it was almost like a utopia that you would be in the vicinity of all these smart people and they would be so down to earth.
My mother was a stay at home mum, my father was a photographer it was an interesting transition that the family made because my grandfather and like the seven generations before him were all painters and they were all in arts.
My father was kind of in the middle because he was into photography, my grandfather was also into photography, but my father was more into the scientific side of it which is why he was working where he was working.
… all my siblings [Tayyab has 3 older brothers and 3 older sisters] were particularly helpful they were not at all the jealous kind thankfully, so what happened was my mother passed away of cancer when I was ten.
To the credit of my sisters, and I just cannot thank them enough and it is without any exaggeration, it is true that I never cried for my mother except for the day that she died, except for that day I never ever cried for her because my sisters were just so awesome.
After we moved out we moved to Islamabad, a few years before that actually my brother moved to the US in the early 2000s ... he initially moved to California then to Georgia Tech for his PhD and now he's in the Valley again so we live like 8 miles away from each other .
[My older brother] actually was my inspiration to get into computer science, he was ten years older to me and when he started his BS in Computer Science I was 10… 8 years actually, so I took one of his books and I started reading them.
It was called: "Teach yourself C" it was thin blue colored book I can still remember it and you know I had not studied Algebra and Mathematics in school yet so there was this topic about this thing called a variable X you know I practically lost my sleep at night wondering what kind of thing is this X, sometimes it's 3, sometimes it's 5 and I just could not grasp and I just did not have the foundation and it was a funny, interesting time.
So that is what inspired my interest into computer science and I started pretty early, I started around, I started actually understanding it around 10 and from there it kind of never stopped. After college I got into computer science degree again and after my degree since my brother was doing his PhD he encouraged me to pursue graduate studies and during my Undergraduate I applied to a few PhD programs but I got rejected from each and every one of them because I hadn't even done my undergrad I had not done any solid research and I had applied to the top schools so I could see that coming when I was applying but after I graduated that is when the older story starts.
Just as I was about to graduate one of my friends was doing work on an online work platform and he told me about oDesk and I was like "Yeah so what?" So then he told me "You know I am working on that platform and I am making quite a lot of money" and then I was like "I'm listening now."
He got my attention and I created my account during my final exam and applied to one job and I immediately got a response there was this guy in Switzerland who was running a start up and he said so just give me the sample code so that I can get to know you and then I will get you started on your first project and during my final exams while preparing for them I wrote that short piece of code I sent it to him he really liked it and by the time my exams were finished he hired me on oDesk.
It was an hourly contract I was making 5 dollars an hour which was great for me because I had a 9 to 5 which on average paid me like 2 ½ dollars an hour but that was great by the standards because the cost of living is much much more than I was able to [make] in Pakistan.
But I never thought of it as something that could become very, very serious but nonetheless I found the work very interesting the guy was great it was a great learning experience for me and I was making good money although working was kind of hectic because I was doing a 9 to 5 and on top of that I was putting in 20 hours a week for this thing but then again I had nothing else to do. I was not married, I had just gotten out of college, so that were the only two things I was doing you know working and meeting my friends and having some fun.
We were all doing computer science and we were just, like, our group was like any other group that you can think of, of college students, yak in the evening, go out for food, pretty much pointless stuff. Nothing meaning full, you know?
I had trouble explaining to people what is it that I am doing actually.
Christian: You mean you had trouble explaining in Pakistan?
Tayyab: In Pakistan [people would ask]: "What are you doing? You quit your job? You're working from home daily and you want to take that chance, do you even know the guy". You know it was interesting … the culture was not there and people started to see that there was a lot of value in that even if you are making like $10/hr it is a lot of money by the local standards and you just couldn't get out of college and make like $20,000 a year.
Put that into perspective: what that really means is that you have paid off your college loan because the college degree cost you between 4,000-8,000 dollars, maybe 10 the more expensive one. Take this to the US how many US graduates can say they had paid off their college loan in a year?
People were able to do that and I see more and more people that do not want to work in the 9-5 and they go this way and Pakistanis have done their own version of a startup which is kind of a hybrid of outsourcing and a real startup that builds a new value product. The idea is you do some outsourcing you get some cash and you pump that into your own company.
It's typically 3 or 4 guys two of them will be working on the cash flow another two will be working on the actual product and then there's a lot of people are working around mobile development encoding their apps on the app store, on the Android store so the culture the way there's been a mushroom growth in people who have chosen to work online either as individuals or as groups or as companies it's just amazing.
So I was working for them [the Swiss company from oDesk] part-time and at the end of the first month I discovered that I had made more money from the part-time job than from my full-time job. Then another month passed and this guy offered me to work for him full-time and I was a little hesitant because there was kind of even if you did sign a formal contract there was no way for me to get hold of him if he chose to abandon me.
I talked to my brother and he said "You know you have no responsibilities on you I am here to catch you if you fall so go for it, take the leap". So I quit my 9 to 5 after 3 months of working there and I started working with these people full-time and in December I visited them.
So when I was working after my undergraduate with this Swiss company so I visited them in Switzerland in December 2010 and it was a very interesting team, it was a very small team - four people: myself, another guy from France, there was one Italian and one Kiwi-born Swiss.
I think it was a good decision ... It had a significant impact on the way I think my career is going to turn out and my career ambitions in general. So I went there to Switzerland and I told you what the team was and it was a part of Switzerland that is right next to France so the language spoken there was French so everybody other than me knew French but the Italian guy had his own kind of spin on French then and we would have like a 30 minutes discussion and at the end of it you would discover somebody would say:
"Oh, I didn't say that"
"But I thought you said that"
"No I didn't say it"
"Then what were you saying?"
"I was saying this"
"But that was what I was saying"
"Yeah, that is what I was trying to say"
It was like kind of a comedy of errors at that time, it was really interesting working with those people.
Christian: Did you have much culture shock?
[There was] not much of a [culture] shock but it was like a dream in the sense that the office was at the foot of the Alps and I was staying in France and I was working in Switzerland so every day because the guy I was staying with lived in France and basically the countries have a… so every day I crossed the border on a small boat that crossed Lake Geneva which by the way is absolutely stunning so it was like a dream that you wake up in the morning you open your window and right in front of you is Lake Geneva and everyday you take a boat ride across it twice actually and great people to work with so I stayed there for two weeks.
When I was in Switzerland all the guys I worked with were like very, very professional and it is kind of speaks a bit to the Swiss culture also that they try and keep private and work life very, very separate so that went for the CEO of the company who was Swiss.
The Italian guy had a completely different style where his mum would call in the office to check up on him because it's kind of part of Italian culture that your mum is like important, and for everyone mum is very important but it is something about the Italian culture. So that was interesting to see that contrast right there and the third guy, the French guy and he was hosting me in his apartment so he was very young so he was living alone so it was kind of an interesting thing.
And you were talking about the pizza and I was with an Italian guy and he took me to a special pizza place and he said "You know, all the pizzas that you have eaten in your life they are not pizzas. American pizza is not a pizza, the only kind of pizza is Italian pizza." He was very Italian about it. And that was like a completely different kind of a pizza that I have never seen in the US and I have never seen in Pakistan.
The idea was that we'd be able to come up with a plan so that, that Swiss company could set up an office in Pakistan so I started, kept working on that till the point that I heard from Fulbright, so the way the Fullbright works is that you have to apply and the application process takes one year so I applied for a scholarship and they said that: "You have been accepted for a scholarship now you have to chose the Universities that you want to apply to."
First I got accepted at University of Central Florida and I was not really interested in going there because the Fullbright program is kind of restrictive in the sense that they do pay all your fee and they give you a stipend but it is restrictive that they say you cannot work in the US after you complete your degree you have to go back to Pakistan immediately. It's not like I did not want to live in Pakistan it was just having that option at your disposal is great.
… I finally got to know that I got accepted at Stanford then I was particularly depressed at that time for some other reason and I was walking to a friend's place and I got a call, so somebody from the Fulbright office in Pakistan was calling me to tell me that I got accepted at Stanford.
[I was] literally jumping in the street and people were looking at me like is this guy crazy or something?
[My brother] was very, very excited that I got accepted at Stanford and also excited because he was actually getting to see me and I could live nearby so his excitement was kind of two-fold, my dad was very excited.
The thing about my dad is that - so the family transition that I told you about from arts to onwards, it was a realization that we needed to invest time into formal education so my father was doing a job he was not doing a business of his own, he realized that we as a family need to invest more time into education and he inculcated that spirit into us and he and my mother worked very very hard to make it possible for all of us so that is like a kind of something for a captain of a ship to get the ship to the other side I was the youngest one and I got admitted to one of the top universities in the world so it was like the icing on top of the cake for dad.
Yeah and the thing that he toiled for all his life and my mother toiled for with him and they were actually kind of like making that dream come true.
And then there was this kind of a choice for me do I go with the option of setting up a company for the Swiss company in Pakistan or do I go for my Fulbright and once I knew I could go to Stanford then it was really a no-brainer but then I could not abandon the Swiss guy so I told him I've got this great opportunity I can suggest you some people in Pakistan and you could work with them and maybe I could partner with them to set up a company in Pakistan and he said then it would become too risky for him to set up the company so he just outsourced it as a project so me and a few friends of mine in Pakistan so they ran the project, I ran it for three months before I left for the US and then my friends ran the project for like 6 ½ months more.
Then I got here at Stanford and this place is just amazing … every time I talk about this or think about this it makes the hair at the back of my neck stand up you know, when I first got here the people who I had admired, whose books I had read as like my textbooks, the first class I took was from one of those professors whose book I had read and admired and so in some sense like meeting your hero and meeting them every day so it is just amazing and that was the first course that Stanford offered online and the first day the lecture room was jam-packed by 250-300 students and attendance kind of vanished by the second week there were like couple of dozen people in class and I was like what is going on, why don't people want to be in the shadow of this amazing people?
And it turned out everybody was taking the lectures online and one of the Professors talked to that a bit and he said "You know when I ask students why don't you show up in class? Why do you take the lectures online?" and he said "You know students say: 'Professor we can rewind you on video but we cannot rewind you on the lecture'". So being kind of there witnessing that revolution was just amazing, one of the most amazing things that has happened to me here in Stanford.
… the oDesk guys got to know me because they were running a marketing campaign to get more contacts onto the platform and I got talking to their marketing team and so those were some of my first link to the US and when I got here I met all these people I went to oDesk's office I went to a couple of conferences with Gary and it has been a great experience.
It's definitely less bureaucratic on oDesk compared to a 9 to 5 job in Pakistan most, if not all, people I know on oDesk all of them enjoy that as contractors that the system is not very bureaucratic and it really cannot be because nobody can manage you all the time, that's the entire point and then the communication skills that you develop and that you have to develop to survive on oDesk most people that I know really value that, that their communication has improved a lot because without that you just cannot survive you have to get better at it.
And on the culture end, so people definitely get to know a lot about the culture, one of my friends his name is Immat the guy who introduced me to oDesk I was talking to him recently and he was working for an employer in Australia and I was telling him about the video that you sent me and how it absolutely made my day and he was telling me about a similar story [with his employer] … Those kinds of exchanges are interesting there are people I worked with had no idea what cricket even was.
Tayyab's Current Projects, Startup Insights and Future Plans
Christian: What is "Red Buffer ("MVP Secret Sauce for Startups")" [one of Tayyab's current projects] about?
"Red buffer" is providing software development services especially around the web and mobile to startups … we are kind of an MVP secret sauce kind of a thing that we work with start ups and we help them build their projects of course when they are starting up they want to minimize their risk, they want to minimize the cash that they are spending and they do not want to build expertise developing software especially if their startup is not about software itself per se it's about adding value in a process for which they require software, either they get to learn to make the software themselves and to do it takes a lot of time or they could hire somebody in the US or in Europe which takes a lot of money or they just hire us and we've done this before we've been doing it for almost a year.
The value that we really are able to add is number one we've done it with so many startups now that we know what the common pitfalls are and at times it is kind of difficult to communicate, if you are somebody 30 years old sitting in the valley it's very hard to convince you that some person sitting in Pakistan some 25 year old sitting in Pakistan has a better intuition or can tell you a bit about the pitfalls of a startup. It's not hard to sell our services as software developers but it's hard to sell the advice that we have to offer in some cases.
maybe to people in Pakistan but having said that they are rightful in having their doubts in the sense that it's just a hard thing to sell you are younger, you have never been in the valley, hard to prove it and the thing that you are selling is you're trying to tell them "Dude, trust me I know" it's becomes much more difficult because those pitfalls are just like so hard to explain and if they were easier to explain they would just not be pitfalls.
Actually most of them are not around computer science a lot of them are around the product itself for example I was talking to a startup here at Stanford and what they wanted was they were looking for a lead developer that was kind of before I struck this partnership deal so they were looking for a lead developer and I told them I'm going for this partnership and they said you know we still want you to work for us so why don't you be part of them and still work for us?
I said "Yeah that could work!" [during the summer] the startup that I worked for, I was the kind of sole lead developer and I had very good terms with the CEO (whom I also got to know through oDesk) and I went through a lot of VCs with her and I got to learn a lot (about VCs). These [Stanford Startup] people were young, they were very excited, they had an idea in their head but they had not already defined it yet they were looking for seed funding and everybody they went to would kind of push them in a different direction and they would get excited about it, you know these people are very persuasive but the thing I had learnt about VCs (during the summer) what they do is that everybody is going to have their own niche and everybody is going to have their own hammer in something and no matter what their niche is they are going to hammer with the same hammer, if somebody is into monetizing business through advertising, they will say take your subscription plan move to advertising, if somebody is into subscription they are going to say take your advertising plan, go into subscription and it gets much more complicated than that.
Every time they met an investor they got excited and they would start going different direction so I grabbed hold of one of their guys and I sat him down and I gave him like a 45 minute preamble that "Please dude, don't get offended this is why I am saying this and this is what I have learned and I am not saying that you don't know what you are doing but I just want you to have this at the back of your head next time you meet those people” and two weeks later he came back to me and he said "You know, yeah, you were right I talked to my partner about it and I did not tell him where the advice actually came from and he was actually able to better explain to me: 'Yeah, that is what is going on'."
To be able to sell that kind of a thing it's difficult but it's interesting and it's where all the value is so we have placed ourselves as an MVP secret source and I said secret source because the startup that work with us not all of them can go out and say publicly that they work with us because of the constraints from their investors those are understandable but they make private referrals, my partner is going to be visiting Sweden shortly on business development one of our clients who is there was so excited with our work that he said more people should have access to your skills and he said: "Why don't you visit me and I set up some meeting for you with some people that might be interested in this kind of a thing?"
I will still have to spend two years in Pakistan before I can move to the US then again I have been a great proponent of meritocracy over geography it should be about merit it should not be about where you are located unfortunately still it is a bit about where you are located.
And whenever I say that and people especially people who know about how I worked at oDesk they always say "You speak like a true oDesk person they should hire you on the marketing team".
Final Thoughts
Here's what stood out the most for me personally in Tayyab's story:
- Work hard, work often and only good will come of it.
- The support of family at key times (and in general) has no real substitute and can the difference between chasing your dreams or deferring them.
I wonder what Tayyab's story might have been if his brother hadn't encouraged him to take the leap and quit his day job to work on oDesk fulltime or if he hadn't planted the many seeds of learning, computer science and the Fullbright scholarship from such a young age. Or if his sisters hadn't have done the thousands of small favours I'm sure they must have done in order to give him the time it took to develop his skills in the computer programming area.
If nothing else then the image of Tayyab's father's contentment and joy in navigating the safe passage of the family ship through straits that were no doubt long, difficult and fraught with difficulties fills me with a quiet sense of joy. Even though we've never met and probably never will I feel we can all share in his joy.
I'll be sure to stay in touch and write an update when the time is right but for now I feel it's only fitting then that I end with Tayyab's words where he deflects the spotlight from his personal achievements to his family:
"he [Tayyab's father] and my mother worked very very hard to make it possible for all of us so that is like a kind of something for a captain of a ship to get the ship to the other side I was the youngest one and I got admitted to one of the top universities in the world so it was like the icing on top of the cake for dad … the thing that he toiled for all his life and my mother toiled for with him and they were actually kind of like making that dream come true. It was great."