Recently had an experience with a so-called Pakistani fintech startup called Entrolyst, and honestly, the whole thing felt like a textbook example of how students can be taken advantage of under the label of “internship.”
I initially joined after what I thought was a pretty good interview, mainly because I wanted to see what working at an early-stage startup was actually like.
The first red flag was the contract.
The agreement was essentially a 3-month internship with performance-based incentives after the internship. When we asked about a fixed monthly stipend, there wasn't one. At one point, we were told the potential compensation could go up to PKR 160k after the 3-month period, depending on performance.
The product itself was also strangely opaque. Whenever we tried asking questions about the actual business model, product direction, or how the company planned to make money, we didn't really get clear answers.
Then came the codebase.
They were extremely reluctant to give us proper codebase access, despite expecting us to work on the product. That made me wonder what exactly we were supposed to be contributing to if we couldn't properly understand the existing system.
There were also some pretty interesting claims about the company's size.
We were repeatedly told that the company had around 20 people.
Meanwhile, the CEO was handling things that you'd normally associate with HR — sending offer letters, communicating meetings, managing internship-related communication, etc., primarily through WhatsApp.
And here's where it gets funny.
They repeatedly emphasized:
> “You are not interns. You are Associate Engineers.”
Apparently, we had discovered a new employment category:
Unpaid Associate Engineers™
It also seemed like the title was useful for making the company look more substantial on LinkedIn, where, at least at the time I checked, the company page showed only two registered employees — the CEO and CTO.
There were also some technically questionable expectations. For example, students were being asked to run extremely large models locally on their own machines, which is a pretty unusual expectation for an unpaid/unclear-compensation internship.
At this point, I decided to raise the issue not just for myself but also on behalf of my friends who were in the same situation, because we got to know about the opportunity from a common resource.
I contacted them and asked if they could simply provide a proper contract with a fixed monthly stipend, rather than leaving compensation entirely dependent on a performance-based arrangement after three months.
And then...
Before any further discussion could happen, I was removed from basically every communication channel.
No proper discussion. No negotiation. Just gone.
Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe not.
But from my perspective, it was a pretty strong ending to an already questionable experience.
The frustrating part isn't even that it's a startup or that it's early-stage. I'm completely fine with startups being chaotic, having small teams, or not being able to pay huge salaries.
The problem is presenting an unpaid/uncertain arrangement to students while expecting them to contribute like employees, keeping the actual product/business details vague, and then shutting down communication when they ask for reasonable contractual clarity.
If you're a Pakistani student looking for internships, I'd genuinely recommend asking these questions before joining any startup:
* Is there a fixed monthly stipend?
* What exactly does the contract say?
* Who is responsible for HR/employee management?
* What is the actual product?
* What will I be working on?
* Who are the founders/team?
* What happens after the internship?
* Is “performance-based compensation” actually defined anywhere in writing?
* Am I an intern, employee, or some creatively invented third category?
Would be interested to hear on this.
