Nitasha Syed is a Senior Product Manager with a software engineering background. Born and raised in Canada, she started her career in the gaming industry and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area 5 years ago where she works as a Sr. Product Manager at Rally Health. She’s the former founder of a media company, Unboxd, where she changed the stereotypes of women in the media by sharing stories of women in STEM fields and showcasing their multi-dimensionality. She is an advisor to early-stage startups (pre-seed/seed) out of the US, Pakistan, India, where she helps startups on product market fit, user acquisition, retention, and growth. She has now started a digital talk show called Shaam ki Chai where she highlights the Pakistani diaspora all over the world.

Following are the edited transcripts of a conversation BR Research had recently with Nitasha Syed:

BR Research: Tell us briefly about yourself and your career.

Nitasha Syed: I was born and raised in Vancouver Canada. I have a background in software engineering and machine learning. I started my career in the gaming industry at Electronic Arts. My first project was the FIFA14 game on the PS3 platform. I then moved into the smart city/ smart building space where I was programming building management controllers to help build eco-friendly cities. I moved out to Silicon Valley about five years ago where I started working in the startup world at a healthcare tech company called Rally Health. We were acquired by United Healthcare (the largest insurer in the United States) in 2017 and I also transitioned my career from engineering to product management. I now lead Rally’s mobile engagement team as a Senior Product Manager for both Android and iOS platforms.

BRR: You are a trailblazer for women and young girls who are looking to break out in the field of tech and entrepreneurship. Could you share some of your initiatives that specifically target women?

NS: I founded a media company a few years back that told stories of women in tech and entrepreneurship. It was called Unboxd, and we aimed to change the narrative of women in the media and used stories to inspire young girls to pursue careers in entrepreneurship and technology.

BRR: As a founder of Unboxd, what is your current engagement with it?

NS: Through my own experience and the research I had done on the way the media builds narratives, one thing I noticed was that the narratives built for women always disassociated femininity and intellect. If the character was interested in math or science then she wasn’t popular, she didn’t dress nicely, she wasn’t allowed to be feminine. If the character was feminine then she wasn’t very good at math and science. These narratives actually have an impact on young girls and how they perceive themselves and their future careers later on in life and I wanted to change that. 70 percent of girls feel that they can succeed at math and science in elementary school, that number goes down to 13 percent by the time they reach highschool. Most of the young girls I spoke to never thought they could be successful in tech because they never saw anyone that looked like them in those roles and Unboxd was going to change that.

I started off by doing Vogue style photoshoots with women in STEM fields and sharing their stories. I transitioned into working with tech companies and making documentaries on the women that worked there and eventually kicked off a small web series where I would interview female executives. Like most startups, Unboxd did not fare too well alongside COVID so it was shut down.

BRR: Pivoting our discussion to female entrepreneurship, what do you think are the key challenges that need to be addressed to bring women into setting up their own businesses in Pakistan?

NS: The challenges fall into two buckets.

I think the first (and most important bucket) are just the societal challenges women have to face. Women just don’t think they can do it because they don’t see other women like themselves doing it. In Pakistan (or just in South Asian culture more broadly) women tend to be pushed towards marriage soon after finishing school. I want to be very clear in saying that there is nothing wrong with focusing on family and getting married etc. - at the same time there is also nothing wrong with building a career and becoming financially independent (and certainly nothing wrong with balancing both). If society can start seeing more examples of Pakistani women starting different types of businesses, then it will have a huge impact on what young girls think they can achieve later on in life. Furthermore, since Pakistan is a community centric society, the attitudes of the community at large will shift with more diversity. Starting a business is not a one-person job and is a bit of a marathon (not a race). Man or woman, it requires resources, a lot of time, money and taking risks (all of which require sacrifice). Pakistani society is accepting of men sacrificing whatever is needed on their businesses but is much less accepting of women doing the same thing. In fact, if a man were to fail at a business idea, the general response is ‘at least he tried’, whereas with a woman it would be something along the lines of ‘Paisa aur waqt dono zaya kia’. These sorts of double standards make it really hard for women who are trying to get businesses off the ground to continue to move it forward and it sends signals to younger girls that this isn’t really the right path for them. As long as a woman’s value is going to be tied to her ability to get married at a young age and have the ‘right’ number of children, she won’t ever prioritize anything else and if you want to build a successful business it needs to be on your list of priorities.

The second bucket (and I think both men and women face this) is operational. There needs to be infrastructural changes in Pakistan for businesses to scale, one of the main one being online payment systems. There are a few companies that are trying to tackle that, but even a technical solution in place Pakistan is still a very cash-based society and that makes things difficult. There are also logistical hurdles around registering companies in Pakistan, setting up the technical infrastructure, understanding which platforms to market on etc. A lot of these challenges are easier for men to overcome because we’re in a society where it’s more common for a man to start a business. As we see more female entrepreneurs, hopefully even the logistical challenges become easier.

BRR: Do you think there are opportunities in the tech startup space in Pakistan?

NS: There are massive opportunities in the tech startup space in Pakistan. I think the startup wave is starting to gain traction in Pakistan and it’s super exciting. According to I2i’s yearly roundup, there were $57.7 million invested in Pakistani startups in 2020 ($1.8 million of that was raised by women led startups). If you read through their roundup, you can see that companies are starting to gain traction in raising Pre-Series A and Series A funding (and Bykea raising a series B), which is amazing. A lot of expats are going back to Pakistan to invest in early-stage startups there and when you combine that with outside investors coming in and wealthier Pakistani’s starting to diversify their wealth through startup investments you can see how Pakistan is on the brink of a tech boom.

BRR: In general, how do you rate Pakistani women versus women from other parts of the world in terms of their entrepreneurial skills and attitudes?

NS: I don't think Pakistani women are any different from women in any part of the world. I think they are as skilled and competent as women from anywhere in the world (maybe more, but I could just be biased!). I just think the challenge they face (like all South Asian women) is that society is generally less accepting of women focusing on their careers and so the societal pressure a woman faces when she does set out to become an entrepreneur far exceeds the hurdles that a Pakistani man would have to face. I think that causes Pakistani women to just undervalue themselves in the business world and that is a big mistake.

I was working with an incubator out of Pakistan once, and helping them set up a program focused on female startups. The manager leading the program was a woman and when I spoke to her about narrowing the kind of startup we accept in the program (because the program required to help get a blockchain startup off the ground is quite different from a consumer startup like Instagram) her response was ‘oh woman here won’t start real tech companies. I was completely shocked that I would hear that from a woman so I pushed further and asked why, and she said that they just can’t do that, so we’ll just find women that want to sell coloring books and clothes and help them get those businesses off the ground. Now to be clear, I don’t think there is anything wrong with businesses that focus on coloring book or clothing businesses (especially since one of Pakistan’s leading export is linen) - but the fact that I was talking to a woman, who was in charge creating a female only program in a startup accelerator thought that Pakistan women were not capable of starting real tech companies is so disappointing. I come from a world where women can do anything - I have a friend growing mustard seeds on the moon!

I just wish more Pakistani women believed in their own untapped potential and our society could be supportive of a woman who wants to turn that potential into a successful business.

BRR: Do you think developing passion, introducing, and exposing women to STEM subjects and opportunities early on in life would address the underrepresentation of women in tech space in general in the country?

NS: Absolutely. Also note that the underrepresentation of women in tech is not a Pakistan only problem. It’s a worldwide problem. It’s a problem that is very much reality here in Silicon Valley. There are just not enough women in tech. Not only should you start exposing girls to STEM subjects early on but nurture their talent and interest as they get older.

BRR: On the technology side, understanding of blockchain technology is extremely limited plus there are also limitations from the regulation side; hence the application is nowhere in sight. What in your view are some ways a developing country like Pakistan can benefit from blockchain technology? We have heard that blockchain technology can be leveraged to solve e-governance problems.

NS: At a high-level, blockchain is just a decentralized ledger system. Because the ledger is decentralized (which means there is not one owner, rather everyone that is part of that particular network is an owner of that blockchain), it makes the information recorded in the ledger almost impossible to be tampered with. When a transaction is added to the ledger, it must be approved by all parties in the network, and once added it cannot be removed. Keeping that in mind, developing countries like Pakistan can use blockchain to keep track of things like land ownership records, the process of pharmaceutical drug development (to prevent the sale of counterfeit medication) and supply chain management to name a few use cases. One of the other most popular applications of blockchain are in the digital currency space (such as crypto), but I think it’s going to take a while before Pakistan can fully adopt digital currencies.

BRR: Why did you launch “Shaam ki Chai”?

NS: The stories told in Pakistani media have remained unchanged for decades. Between dramas that depict cruelty to women (that she has to bear), morning shows that fight for eyeballs over controversial topics (that don’t move the country forward), and news channels that just sound like your grandmother's living room where everyone is shouting over each other, the stories of Pakistani’s and their accomplishments is getting lost. Sham ki Chai is an attempt to break through the traditional framework of Pakistani media and bring a bit of light and humor through the stories of Pakistani expats making waves all over the world.

BRR: Being part of Silicon Valley as well as your experience in tech and entrepreneurship, what message do you have for our readers.

NS: Your career is a marathon, not a race. Success does not happen overnight, no matter what industry you’re in. You have to make a choice to work towards it every single day, and over time you will see the results.