In Pakistan’s noisy tech streets freelancers doing midnight sprints around power cuts, startups scrimping to keep servers alive, founders flying to meet clients because local procurement rarely buys from them. The Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) sits like an institutional fossil. Founded in the dial up era to “promote Pakistan’s IT industry,” it still evaluates … Read more
The writing is on the wall. We just got bail out funds from Xi, its not a bad thing. Who else would underwrite the plundering of all our combined leadership or the lack thereof. “China comes with a lot of money and says you can borrow this money,” Dr. Mahathir said in an interview before the … Read more
There’s a lullaby for suffering And a paradox to blame But it’s written in the scriptures And it’s not some idle claim Every month, every week, every day, someone is hell bent on asking, probing or claiming something to do with a payments play. I say “stop it.” The answer is self evident. Like … Read more
It truly is complicated, every one just graduated from MAU(Monthly Active Users) to AI (Artificial Intelligence) and now on to Blockchain. (Formerly known as Block Chain). We are still catching up on financial inclusion. Before we get in to Artificial Intelligence lets talk about basic intelligence or due diligence. With news daily of X “local” … Read more
TL;DR; NBU(New Bankable Users) + E-commerce + Payments + Logistics. Did the big guys really miss this? Move over ad-tech, the ride hailing guys may just have a better handle on this one. Here are the thick big published statistics. An addressable population of 210M+. Roughly 125M people under 30 years of age. 60M smart … Read more
This is joint post by Jawwad Farid & Faizan Siddiqi * Before we start let us all take a deep breath and try to ascertain what GMV means. Gross Merchandise Volume From Wikipedia Gross merchandise volume or GMV is a term used in online retailing to indicate a total sales dollar value for merchandise sold through a particular … Read more
Are you an Entrepreneur with either 100k MAU or between 30-40% Margins in your business(Not Just Tech)? Are you struggling to scale beyond this? Read on. Are you interested in Scale? Chinook Strategy will invest its resources for an 8%-10% revenue share to either lead you to a desirable seed round, exit, IPO or institutional … Read more
These days its seems like not a day goes by and some one or the other publishes a picture, a leaked story, an input a whisper about Alibaba talking to some one in the country. That in it self is fantastic and super exciting. The choices for Ali Baba are literally unlimited in what they … Read more
So I was wondering how Facebook identifies upcoming companies, startups , products and competition. How did FB decide to acquire Whatsapp? How does it see traction? What tell tale signs is it mining for? Beyond trends there has to be hard data and user attribution that is allowing it to completely destroy the competition or … Read more
There is no simple plan or check list, if I had one, I’d be using it my self. Clearly one doesn’t exist, in its entirety, yet . If you read either or both of my last posts you know that these guys generally don’t need to be on the ground to launch a viable product … Read more