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

The next 100 million users are ready? Are you?

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

**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 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

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

Stop Playing Startup and Start Growing Up: Its not you, its your Incubator

The real cost of Incubators and Accelerators and the boogymen who promise capital I love startups. I hate the startups that don’t do any thing and cant stop playing pretend. They are wasting every ones time, most importantly their own. But at no fault of their own, they don’t know any better. Day in and day out, … Read more