I just spent the last 30 days on the road away from Canada to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Abu Dhabi, Oman, Dubai spending time with founders from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Myanmar, and every corner of the global south. Every single one of them was cautiously optimistic about the future. Smiling. Talking growth. Common thread..”next year … Read more
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
Before you start reading. I urge you to watch the above first to get the context. If you cant relate to it. Dont read further. In the summer of 2017 I put out a survey based on the request from all those friends, colleagues, family members professional acquaintances and aspirants from the Pakistani diaspora who … 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
Every day when people wake up in Silicon Valley, they get up , set eyes on their mission and get going to deliver on their vision. This btw is not only limited to California but from Tel Aviv to New Delhi and from Jakarta to Sao Polo all the places that are going places have … Read more
Pakistan has many internal and external aggressors. We cant blame every thing on external elements, as we are, ourselves to blame for letting things get out of hand. A strange thing is happening in Pakistan, in the race to the top of Tech stardom. Before we dive in to the details, to understand what’s going … 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
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
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