Welcome to another episode of Mentoring Developers! In this engaging installment, host Arsalan Ahmed chats with Zain Mustafa, the founder of Geeks of Kolachi—a tech company that blossomed from humble freelancing beginnings into a thriving enterprise with a team of over a hundred professionals. Zain shares his remarkable journey from tweaking video game codes as a youngster to choosing programming over a potential cricket career, highlighting the passion that propelled him into the tech world.

Together, they delve into the challenges and triumphs of starting a tech company, especially during the pandemic. Zain discusses the importance of community and networking, the evolution of remote and hybrid work models, and how his company embraced AI and cutting-edge technologies to stay ahead. Aspiring developers will find invaluable advice on continuous learning, staying curious, and navigating the ever-changing landscape of the tech industry.

Later on, I also developed a lot of different hobbies. A big one for me was cricket. So when I was doing my bachelor’s degree, I was given an opportunity to pursue a professional career in cricket. So I was like, why not? Let’s give it a shot. So I spent like a year playing cricket and I figured out that’s probably not for me. That was the moment when I picked just one thing that I love doing since the early times. Then I started giving more time to programming, and since then, I haven’t looked back to any other thing that I could have done better.

So the fourth time when I learned programming, that is when I got to know about exactly how things are working. Just the basic stuff was very difficult for me to catch. So I think most of the people who are starting, they might find it difficult. But yeah, that was the case with me as well.

To answer your question, if the degree is important or anyone can learn to code: actually, the company that I run, Geeks of Kolachi, was actually a bootcamp training program for students. I was very inspired by the bootcamp programs in the States. They were like HackerRank, Flatiron School; they were teaching how to code to people who were in different fields. They got themselves into maybe accounting, finance, or electrical engineering and something like that. They lost their job and they put themselves into 16 weeks rigorous coding bootcamp program, and they were getting into Google. So it was really inspiring for me.

So when I finally made it to my first internship and then to a job, after spending two years, we were like, we should give back to the community. We should start something like that. So we started a bootcamp. Unfortunately, we couldn’t generate that much funds, so we were like, let’s just make money, then we get back to this again. So for the last six to seven years, we have also been running a program on the weekends in collaboration with a local university that teaches students how to code. But again, that 16 weeks program—I could see a lot of institutes online that were doing those programs, and people who didn’t know how to code, they would start from HTML, CSS, and end up being hired by Google or FAANG companies. So yeah, that’s something that can be done.

But again, the degree program actually gives you more than just the programming skills. It gives you a network that you can build on and also the confidence that you can carry throughout your life.

But when I started, that was not the case. There were cubicles.

So I think it has become pretty normal here, working from home, and their families have also realized if the guy’s at home, he’s not available.

And then the second thing was I ended up working all the time. So I’ve—usually in large consulting companies, you work from Monday to Thursday at the client site. And then there, Friday, basically you—Thursday night you fly back home. So Thursday you work until about 3, 3:30, and then you take your flight back home. And then Friday, you’re at home, kind of relaxing, a little bit of work. But when travel stopped, so there was no such thing. There’s no Thursday night I have to catch a flight. There’s no Monday morning, oh, you know, coming in maybe at 10 or 10 a.m. from the flight. No, you have to start at 6, 7, 8 in the morning. And then you work all day, and then after that, stay late because you have to go somewhere. You don’t have any reason. So there were times on crunch projects that people would work nonstop.

There was a time I worked three days without stopping. Three days. I’m not talking about three days and then go to sleep. Three days, just maybe an hour or two of napping here and there because it was a critical project. And not just me; it was like 20 people. Nobody’s sleeping. This happened. This could never happen if you were traveling because you’re in a hotel. You have to take a flight, which has a thing. So we did some ridiculous stuff—impossible. We did a two-month project in four days. That’s how it happened.

So we were previously doing development. We were spending like two to four hours making good money. But when we got ourselves into training, a lot of our time would go into training those students, and no time, no energy left for the other work. And I was at the time also studying my last semester in university. Two or three things happening at the same time. So that is when we decided we’ll go into making money for ourselves, and of course then we’ll think about how we can contribute to the community.

So the first two, three years, starting from 2017, we were adding two, three resources every quarter. And when COVID came, we had lost two of our main clients at the time because of COVID. And they were heavily e-commerce dependent products that we were working on. But luckily enough, we started receiving more and more requests after two or three weeks of that time. And the projects that were coming in were because of COVID. So some projects that we lost, but a lot more projects came in. So that is when we scaled from an eight-people company to a 30-people company.

So the office that I’m sitting at this moment can accommodate a hundred people in one shift, and we work in two shifts mainly. The sales team usually works in the night as well. We do have some salespeople working in the daytime; mainly our developer team works in the regular hours. So yeah, the challenges have been changing throughout this time. The problems we had when we were a five-people company were different. We were different in age. I was 23, 24, had different responsibilities. So things have changed, and we try to accommodate and solve one problem at a time. So whatever we see, we saw the problems that’s there, we try to just solve that problem. Of course, in business, every day there is a new challenge, and you find yourself in a situation where you think, maybe I should opt for something else. Or you get thoughts of, this might end up not in a good place. But somehow or the other, if you are true with yourself, with your people that are working with us, and also to the clients especially that we are serving, somehow or the other, we were getting clients from left and right we didn’t know about. So that has happened quite a lot. And I think that’s the thing with business: you never know where your next client will be coming from.

So it looks like you’re not going for that. You’re going for scaling out. You’re like, “Oh, I need a hundred people.”

So for the first three years, we were like a 10 to 15 people company just focusing on—like, it was early time for us as well. The time I started doing Geeks of Kolachi, I was two, three years into the industry. So I had to also build my experience. So when it was like two, three years old, we then thought about why not add more people if we are receiving more referrals? So why not just go for it, hire more people?

So one of the interesting things that happened—and I heard it also happened a lot of times in Silicon Valley as well—so we were in an office, we had like 30 people capacity, actually 24, and we occupied 30 people in that office. And at that time, we were changing our office literally every year. So we would get an office for 10 people; it will fill out within a year to what we planned for two years. And then we’ll change to a 20-people office. So we changed to that, and that happened for the first four years. So we sat back and gave it a thought: every year we have this problem, let’s just solve this once and for all.

So we built this beautiful office with glass rooms, meeting rooms, and an amazing town hall to play table tennis, and everything is there. And we planned for a hundred people. What happened was when we moved into the new office, things started to change. So that is when the market was settling in after the COVID breakthrough in technology. So everything was working out in technology in COVID times; everything wanted to go digital. But when it was getting normalized, a lot of people pulled their investments off the internet. And also we were heavily working on blockchain and NFT technologies, and NFT was down to 2 percent of the total market cap, and the clients that we were working with had no money left to pay us, let alone make their profits.

We were having our office of a hundred people, only having 30 people in-house. We planned to add 70 more people within six months’ time, and we lost two of our main clients. And it was the great depression coming again. But somehow or the other, we tried to sail through that period as well for two, three months. Before that, we didn’t have a dedicated sales team. So we would get our clients through referrals and repeat work that we started off back in 2017.

If you have a profile online of your work, in the shape of a very good LinkedIn profile or a website that highlights your achievements, then it doesn’t have to be for sales in a business context. It could be to get a job. Employers—I have found, personally know people who have gotten jobs through people contacting them after seeing their profile and like, “Oh, you’ve done all this. We need somebody like you.”

Okay, so without giving away too many secrets, what’s the most exciting project you’re working on right now? Anything that you’re excited about?

Apart from that, we have had many experiences. Like one of the projects that I personally got myself attached to was one with Audi. So in COVID times, the dealership was closed, but they were still delivering their cars. And another problem was whenever there is a launch of a new car, what they’ll do, they’ll deliver that car into that market. So if they are launching Audi e-tron GT, they’ll send that car to San Francisco, to Dubai, to Tokyo, and then take the pictures of that car with the environment and then add into the brochures or social media marketing that needs to be done.

So an interesting approach that Audi came up with was they’ll generate pictures and videos through Unreal Engine that will be streamed into a web application where the dealership can select their environment, be that Dubai, San Francisco, New York. And after selecting the environment, they can select the car they want brochures for or videos or pictures for, and they can select all the things that are there in the real environment. If they want nighttime and it’s raining, that can be done. And if you’re seeing Audi e-tron and the new cars that are coming in from Audi, you will probably be seeing that platform-generated content. So we were doing that in 2020-21, and it was really amazing. It was so uncanny in terms of how it looked. It was so real, and we could generate videos of like the doors open, the lights open, and from interior and exterior. And the impact of that software, like reaching millions and millions of people, the software that we worked on. So it was really a humble experience being able to contribute.

On top, the developers that were working with us were the contributors of React.js, Vue.js—they were actually the creators of Vue.js.

One technology—Angular—can work on mobile and web, both the platforms. So it was quite new at the time. And when we started actually doing the development, there was a lot of work available because a lot of the people who started in 2005 or till 2010, they were working on PHP or .NET. So a lot less competition was there at that time.

Speaking of 2024, it’s—the market again, the situation is PHP, WordPress, .NET of that time. So we now have our focus on LLMs. We have, I think, more than 10 projects that we did only last year on AI. So AI, of course, is the market shift that has happened.

So I was actually doing some research to see, okay, what are the types of things that companies are working on. I’m not plugged into the companies for the last year or so. I’ve been traveling. I went to six or seven different countries last year, or a year ago, and was building my education platform, and I was exploring multiple countries. I had a good time; my kids had a great time. But when I came back, everything had changed. Because when I left, I had never heard of ChatGPT. ChatGPT blew up while I was away. So when I came back, I was like, what’s going on? So I had to really catch up. And then, of course, I learned about the generative AI, LLMs, and so many other companies are in the mix. So I have been keeping up now. I got the ChatGPT subscription recently. I use Claude, I use—Perspective, is it Perspective? Ah, forgetting. But I never use it. So I use ChatGPT, the 4.0 model; I use that. Now I’m learning about, okay, do you make your own models, all that stuff. But it’s a lot.

It’s exactly the situation how it used to be with blockchain back in 2017, 2018. Everyone wanted to know how blockchain can help them grow, help them make more money out of it. Mainly, we did SaaS products out of those more or less 10 products that we did last year. They were mainly SaaS—software as service—products. In terms of industries, one of the interesting things that is going to happen is in education, educational sector.

So a cool project that we did was actually in the education space. So if you are someone who has two or three years of experience, or even if you’re in your university, you can upload your resume and the skills that you know at this moment. So the AI program will let you know how you can improve on the international scores where you are at. Zain Mustafa wants to upload his resume into that application. So that application will let me know where do I stand out of maybe out of five. And if I get a score of 3.5 or 4, how can I improve on this? So it will recommend me courses online according to the background, the skill set that I already have, and how I can improve on this.

I think we got more than a hundred thousand users on this platform. It goes by the name skillscore.com. And in Pakistan, we have a lot of youth that is in university, and they really want to figure out which career they would want to choose. With the inception of AI, LLM is available for everyone. Blockchain was not exposed to the common man.

The biggest thing that I hear is, hey, I want my data. I’m a professor, or I’m just—I generate all this data. It’s my proprietary information. I don’t want anybody to see it. I don’t want this to go into training ChatGPT. I don’t want this to be public. I would like to now infer some information out of that or do some data mining using some chatbots.

So where do I start? I am somebody, I have two months to learn. I’m a new person or young person, and I want to learn something. So give them some cool advice. What can they learn in two months?

So first recommendation from my side would be to pick a course on a dedicated online course website. Not only it’ll help you keep your focus on that, but also it is something that is only developed for students, for people who want to learn. So there are a lot of complementing things that’ll be there. So let’s say if you pick a course on Udemy, you’ll have relevant tests available after each video or each chapter that you do. So that’s something I figured along the lines when a few of the MOOCs courses, just to convince that I completed, they were on those websites. They were not on YouTube.

So you’ll see a series of videos of nine—maybe nine-video playlists. The first video will have 10 million; the second will have five, and it drops down to maybe 50,000 for the last one. So yeah, that’s the issue. That’s the thing that you can see. So don’t consider yourself different from others. So you will get caught up—you will get caught up by the thumbnails, by the clickbait on YouTube. So figure out a platform that is available and pick just one thing. And try to make sure that you also talk to the community. So a lot of—on these websites, you will find forums, you will find community. So start talking to people who are new. So that’ll also help you get along, get moving every day.

So in my early times when I was learning how to program the fourth time, I was about to quit. So a friend of mine was like, “If we’re coming here, if we’re coming to this place, at least we’re spending in a good environment. What else could we do? Instead of spending two hours here at the institute, we can spend this time maybe playing cricket or watching a movie back home. So why not just be here, even if we are not understanding a bit of what the teacher is teaching?” I just somehow managed to get convinced by that idea. So after two, three months, I really got serious about it because some of the topics really clicked. And that is how my journey began.

So my suggestion, of course, will be to pick a platform independent of YouTube, spend some money—not a lot—a lot of cool options and cheap options available, and also try to talk to people, talk to community, be that the forums, be that groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, or maybe Discord channel.

But before we close, I just have one last thing. I’ll let you talk about how do people get in touch with you, and if they want to work with you, maybe they want to give you some business, or, “Hey, these are some cool people who’ll give you some good projects, and let’s work together.” We will go into that.

But before that, this is something that I really wanted to know: If you could implant one mindset or habit into every developer’s brain—okay, let me just, I can just turn a switch on, and now they have this thing—what would it be? Because there’s some things that you wish developers had so you could hire more of them and they fit right into your team and they’re successful. They’re successful, and that means you’re successful. What is that one mindset or habit?

All right, Zain. So it was excellent meeting you. And I think the audience would have greatly benefited from you, and maybe they can benefit more by working with you on—if they have any projects, especially in AI these days. Or you have a team, you have a team of a hundred-plus people or roughly a hundred people that are ready to work, and they’re working in all time zones, right? Two shifts means that if I’m in the U.S. and it’s nighttime for you, somebody could be there live working for you.

Because one thing that I was curious about—we have to wrap up—but the one thing that I was curious about is, are people getting—are you getting projects and just assigning it to people as you have them available? Or is it that you have somebody who’s maybe augmenting someone’s staff, staff-aug type thing that you could get—you have, “I have two developers here and one designer here for you.”

Right, everybody, thank you very much, Zain. Stay on the call. We’ll keep talking. We’ll end the show here.

To everybody who is watching, go to https://mentoringdevelopers.com/episode97 for show notes and bios and links and all that good stuff. All right, bye everybody!

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