Pakistan’s Software Export Board: A Legacy Trap in the AI Era

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

Veon’s Jazz in Pivot Peril as PTCL-Etisalat Merger Shakes Up Pakistani Telecom Landscape

In the burgeoning telecom sector of Pakistan, Veon’s subsidiary Jazz faces a pivotal juncture. Veon’s third-quarter financial disclosures and strategic plans, outlined during their latest earnings call and a comprehensive trading update, convey a narrative of a company striving for digital metamorphosis amidst a fiercely competitive and economically challenging environment. The latest figures from Veon … Read more

Its Complicated. The curious case of Fintechs, Banks and Asma.

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

The Game of Assumptions. Road to Pakistan’s GMV

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

**k your Accelerator / Saith Investor & get ready for an IPO

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

The Worlds Biggest Startups & The Men who run the largest Accelerator @ Scale

I bet you are thinking to your self you already know the answer to this question. If I was a betting man, I would wager that you didn’t, or at the very least it would not be your first guess any way. Saudi Arabia doesn’t come off as easily as MTV(Mountain View) or SFO(San Francisco) … Read more

Alibaba and its Chaalis (40) choices in Pakistan | 阿里巴巴及其在巴基斯坦的40個選擇

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

The Nuts and Bolts of Digital Innovation & Transformation | Part Science, Part Art & Part Fiction.

This article has been updated with the PPT used at the 021Disrupt Conference on Sat Nov4th 2017.Disrupt-Faizan Siddiqi Digital Innovation is not easy, actually its more difficult than transformation. Because Innovation is real touchy feely stuff, transformation at its core is the vernacular of the C suite chaps who like LBOs of the 80 and … Read more

Pakistani banks have nothing to fear when it comes to Fintech!

You read that right, but what you missed was that they are barely mobile and or digital to really fear the paradigm shift that is essentially Fintech.  Fintech wont take down Pakistani banks, they will try to totally blame that(in time), but what will take these banks down are the 50-60 Yr old CEOs lack … Read more