The Silent Storm: AI Is About to Eat Traditional Businesses in the Global South & GCC

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

Tech bandits come to Pakistan: Economic Hit[wo]men in Startup land

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

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

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 End of Apps : OK Google, Alexa.. From AMP to PWA to AI

  Play First, watch for about a minute then read on. In 2016 Vani Kola, MD, Kalaari Capital asked Rajan Anandan, MD, Google SE and India, at the Kstart Digital Marketing Summit to share his thoughts. In retrospect when I watch this(he did know some thing) clearly the rest of us are only finding out. … Read more

Does your startup have a plan to indulge Google, FB, Uber, AliBaba and the likes – at scale?

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

38 Ceos? The Interesting case of our very own Alternate Facts

For the last three days roughly, there has been a positive sentiment around a lot of foreign Ceo interest in Pakistan. I for one actually missed the news item initially but later saw variants on official FB Pages, Media outlet sites, TV and last but not lease a frenzy of “fwds, via  Whatsapp”. Most interestingly … Read more

Anatomy of an FMCGs Marketing & Sales function

It has been a very enchanting learning experience to interact and analyze FMCGs and the people who work within. There are 2 basic types of FMCGs operating in Pakistan. The foreign & the local. Today we will look at the anatomy of the foreign one. Pakistan is a country with over 120M potential clients , … Read more