In an April 2019 interview, Cheetay.pk founder Ahmad Khan described leaving a growing family textile business to build Pakistan’s e-commerce market, then launching a food-delivery company that tested other uses for its rider fleet. His account offers a snapshot of the choices behind Cheetay’s early growth—not an update on Khan’s current role or the company’s present status.
Why Ahmad Khan left the family business
Khan said he grew up in a professional, middle-class family rather than an entrepreneurial one. His father, an engineer working in the Middle East, established a factory in Pakistan in 1995. Khan later joined that family textile business. In the interview, he said exports rose from PKR 20 million when he joined to PKR 500 million by the time he left. Those are figures Khan gave in 2019, not independently verified company accounts.
Despite that growth, Khan said he wanted to pursue work with broader social impact. “The idea was to create a bigger impact in society which legacy textile industry cannot do,” he told interviewer Ahsan Saleem. He linked that ambition to helping develop a new market in Pakistan rather than continuing in the established textile business.
What McKinsey and Rocket Internet contributed
Khan credited McKinsey with teaching structured problem solving and giving him credibility and a strong alumni network. He also described a challenge for consultants who become founders: theoretical learning must be put into practice while building a real company.
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He then joined Rocket Internet, where he said he initiated Daraz.pk and helped kick-start Pakistan’s e-commerce ecosystem. Khan characterized the opportunity as building a market with ambition and autonomy while using someone else’s capital. He also said the end of his Daraz experience was not enjoyable; the interview does not provide enough detail to draw a broader conclusion about why he left.
Was Khan Cheetay’s solo founder?
Khan said four people conceived Cheetay, but he was the only one fully involved on the ground. The other three were abroad and, in his account, contributed 20–30% of their time. On that basis, he said he could be called a solo founder in a strict sense while emphasizing that the others supported the venture. The distinction is between day-to-day operating involvement and participation in the original founding group.
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Why Cheetay looked beyond food delivery
“We are primarily a food delivery company,” Khan said. He explained that demand clustered around meal times, leaving the delivery fleet less utilized at other hours. The company experimented with opportunities beyond food delivery to make better use of that capacity. Khan summarized the rationale this way: “Lack of utilization hurts our business model so we experiment with opportunities beyond food delivery.”
This was a utilization strategy, not a claim that Cheetay had stopped being a food-delivery business. Khan’s interview does not quantify how much the experiments added to revenue, rider utilization, or profitability.
How Cheetay tried to standardize delivery
Khan described salaried riders, standardized training, uniforms, and smartphones as ways to make the customer experience less dependent on which rider handled an order. “All of our riders are salaried employees,” he said. That model gave the company more control over training and service standards than a purely on-demand approach might, while also making rider pay and staffing part of its operating overhead.
He also described providing tablets to restaurants and linking operational data so Cheetay could monitor preparation times. “I can tell you average food prep time of every restaurant,” he said. In principle, that information could help coordinate dispatch with a restaurant’s readiness; the interview does not report measured effects on delivery times or customer satisfaction.
What Khan said about team size, delivery, funding, and growth
The following figures are Khan’s statements in the 18 April 2019 TechJuice interview. They are historical, attributed claims rather than current or independently verified metrics.
| Interview-era measure | What Khan said | How to read it |
|---|---|---|
| Team size | Close to 400 people | Khan’s estimate at the time of the interview; not a current headcount. |
| On-time delivery | 91% | A figure reported by Khan; the interview does not state the measurement period or methodology. |
| Investment | Close to USD 4 million invested by Jabberwock Ventures | Khan’s account; the interview does not establish an independently verified investment total or terms. |
| Expansion ambition | 12–13 major cities over the next three years | A forecast made in 2019, not evidence that the expansion took place. |
Why growth and profitability were in tension
Khan said Cheetay was still burning money despite what he considered encouraging unit economics. He attributed the cash burn to overhead built for growth and said the company could slow its expansion and become profitable, but was aiming to become much larger. His summary was: “Our unit economics are very encouraging but the overheads we have built for growth consumes cash.”
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A free scan shows the junk files, broken settings and background clutter dragging Windows down - then fixes them in one click.Free scan · Windows 10 & 11That description captures a familiar startup trade-off: a company can believe each transaction is economically promising while still spending more overall to build its team, systems, and operating footprint. The interview provides no underlying unit-economics figures, cash-burn rate, or financial statements, so it cannot establish how close Cheetay was to profitability.
Who Khan identified as Cheetay’s competition
For food delivery, Khan named Foodpanda as Cheetay’s biggest competitor. For logistics and fulfillment, he pointed to TCS and similar firms. His distinction reflects the different markets Cheetay was navigating: consumer meal delivery on one side, and broader parcel or fulfillment services on the other. These were Khan’s assessments in 2019, not a current competitive analysis.
What the interview does—and does not—establish
Saleem’s TechJuice interview, published 18 April 2019, is the source for this profile: Inside a Founder’s Mind: Ahmad Khan, Founder and CEO of Cheetay.pk. It records Khan’s own account of his career, Cheetay’s operating choices, and the company’s ambitions at that time. It does not establish whether the expansion happened, how the company’s financial position developed, whether its service continued in the same form, or what role Khan holds now.
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