When tourist investors leave

Imagine it’s early 2022. You are scrolling through LinkedIn and looking at all the gurus talking about the unstoppable rise of Pakistan’s startup scene. After all, the country had raised $365 million in investment during 2021, almost 6x the value of the previous year. The optimism is contagious, even if the posts are cringe and cliched. Fast forward to now, and all of those self-styled gurus have changed gears, having spent the last 12 months or so to become an expert on monetary economics and its history. It’s a milder version of crypto bros becoming AI guys after their decentralised heroes turned out to be frauds. In Pakistan, too, those who sold the optimism drug while labelling the sceptics as anti-progress are now on the sidelines and talking about how unsustainable and out of touch the good old days really were.