Why you should care about Allen and Company & not Raiwind and Company

You can and will be forgiven if you didnt know any thing about Allen and Company before today. But only this once. It tells me a few things about you, the amount of online hours you are spending need a new cause, as what ever you are doing online is clearly not half as bad-ass as you think it is.

Every summer, the the tech, media, and business titans assimilate in the resort town of Sun Valley, Idaho. You ask why, they are there for investment bank Allen & Co.’s week-long conference which has been an annual ritual for 30+ years. It took them 30 years to be an overnight success no less.

This year too,  brought some of the wealthiest and most powerful people from around the world to Sun Valley once again.    Deals forged at the event in the past have included Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos’ purchase of The Washington Post, and Time Warner’s ill-fated merger with AOL.

To give you an idea, the billionaires summer camp attendees’ parking lot is Friedman Memorial Airport, which was packed to capacity with 100s of Millions of dollars’ worth of jets as of midday Wednesday as the event was kicking off .

With around 85 jets, many of them Gulf Stream G650 and Bombardier Global Express models boasting wingspans of almost 100 feet and prices of $45 million to $65 million each, the airport is a private gateway to Sun Valley for most attendees, whose nondescript aircraft typically carry no logos and are often fractionally owned. Did I say this was an invitation only event?

This time around the two that stood out were  Nike and Sprint , their jets’ flashy graphics featured company logos and left no doubt as to who was in attendance. I guess if you have your own Jet you can be forgiven for this type of opulence.

The gathering is put on by the investment bank and is closed to press. It attracts an impressive array of moguls. Warren Buffett, CBS CEO Leslie Moonves, Snap Chairman Michael Lynton, Viacom Vice Chairman Shari Redstone, and Discovery CEO David Zaslav are among the names who have flocked to the resort and in the coming weeks many many more names will surface.

The gathering  included panel discussions on the state of the economy, the political divide in America, the drug epidemic, and scientific breakthroughs. Bill Gates spoke on  philanthropy.

Other speakers include Nike co-founder Phil Knight, Colombia President Juan Manuel Santos, King Abdullah II of Jordan, and General Lori Robinson, who oversees North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command. (So yes it is a big deal) Past gatherings have included talks from the likes of Argentinian President Mauricio Macri, Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter.
While in a parallel universe the entire machinery on our side of the planet is either trying to prove or disprove who is innocent or not. Where is our Allen and Co? We have industries and industrialists that pre date Allen and Cos 1922 foundations but thats exactly the problem.  The industries and industrialists  lack smart capital and an even worse we have a lack of companies, tech or otherwise who have either the scale or the gravitas of what is required to be globally competitive. We have some great companies, but we must not fool our selves of their paltry success against the S&P 500.
To give you perspective, here is the list of the companies with the highest Revenue Per Employee of 2016. Yes this is the revenue one employee contributes in that firm (hypothetically total revenue divided by employees). Some of our largest companies do not have total revenue equal to RPE of these firms let alone tech companies.

The table above shows the top 50 companies by Revenue Per Employee in 2016 in S&P 500.

 

This is why the Allen and Company Billionaire camp is note worthy, a host of these companies were represented there. We need our own camps, we need to start some where, it most certainly cant be f***  Raiwind. We have to get past our national obsession with “small people”, be it politicians or the forces or media personalities, we have to create our own billionaires club and not one which is created on the back of *allegedly looting innocent citizens.(* matter being           sub judice) . To create such a club we first need to dream and have ambition, that too kosher ambition , the halal variety that is not an outcome of robbing some one.

Also we have to park our national obsession of saving money vs generating money, these people did no become billionaires by saving X% of their income, they did amazing things that lead to amazing companies that led to amazing fortunes, you can not save a  7 or 8 or 9 figure net worth.  The best return on your time if you invest it in making money instead of saving money.

I see startups, people, businesses,  moms and dads, spending 30-40  hours per week doing simple household tasks, looking for deals, driving all over town and working their asses off to save  Rs 15000. Before you write me off as heartless, lets look at the flip side of the coin, If they would spend that same time and ingenuity working to generate money, they could easily lock down a potential promotion at work, if self employed add money to the bank by growing revenue using the same ingenuity and time, as I said before we need to be hustlers. All of us. Thats whats missing from our DNA, we have enough “juggar” hustle, but its real economic mind set hustle that we need.

That’s the real difference between a scarcity mindset and abundance mindset. All our lives every thing has been so scarce in our life that we have become hoarders, we hoard water, power, fuel, food and every thing in between albeit due to the likes of Raiwind and Co types, leashing economic hell for decades,  we have to totally and completely stop working so hard to hold on to a tiny slice of pie. We need to start  working on making the god damn slice bigger.  But we cant be blamed entirely as we have been conditioned this way.

The number of technology companies in the Fortune 500 has steadily increased since 1955, and this sector saw the second highest revenue growth during this period.It is also no surprise where companies are from. Take a look.

The  table above shows the growth rates of the 47 companies in this sector.

 

We need our California, we had it once in Karachi, but its been pillaged and run dry. We need a place that fosters growth, the arts, music, literature, tech and a general sense of freedom and an open and tolerant mind set in what we do and how we do it. We need to move away from minding others peoples business to using our minds to grow our own business.

We need to move away from thinking when the power going to be cut off to worrying about if our AWS account will be cut off . Its a paradigm shift that wont come, irrespective of how much electricity Raiwind and Co generate. We still have a Minister who thought Calibri like Black Berry was was a phone and not a font on national television and still kept on arguing to make his point. He is presently Minister for Law, Parliamentary Affairs and Public Prosecution.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words so for a change Ill share some for you to make up your own mind as to why the Allen and Co camp matters and why we need our own rival.

Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of Fox News, and Lachlan Murdoch(son), co-chairman of 21st Century Fox
The Wizard of Omaha Mr Warren Buffet
Apple Ceo Tim Cook and Sr. VP of internet software and services Eddie Cue
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos
Mark Pincus CEO of Zynga
GoPro CEO Nick Woodman
SNAP Chairman Michael Lynton
CEO Ycombinator Sam Altman
Twitter COO Anthony Noto
Former Ebay CEO John Donahoe
GM IBM Watson David Kenny
CEO Discovery Communications David Zaslav
CEO GM Marry Barra
Stewart Butterfield CEO Slack
Kleiner Perkins Partner-Bing Gordon
Ceo RRE Ventures Jim Robinson
Mr Facebook
Ceo of Warner Bros Kevin Tsujihara
CEO of NextDoor Nirav Tolia and Wife Megha
Jerry Yang of Yahoo Fame

Want to know what was happening in Pakistan around the the same time whilst Allen and Co sessions were kicking off. Raiwind sessions were kicking off. Ill leave it at that and one picture to sum it up.

Raiwind and Company

Interestingly enough with all that was happening in the White House these two still made it and were taking calls from the sidelines.

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner on the sidelines of the Billionaires Camp

 

This is how they make sure that the show must go on. Not like our Raiwind and Co who are  obsessed with their own Incestual shit to give a damn about the rest of us. So its time we step up to the plate. No one will come and give us our Allen and Co it must rise from within. In the process clean the ( tax evading, bank loan defaulting, ECL listed, under invoicing, duty avoiding, politically motivated, morally bankrupt) filth that occupies the seat at the table in the corridors of business today and hand the reigns to those who will treat Pakistan and her subjects in a better state than they got them.

 

 

 

One thought on “Why you should care about Allen and Company & not Raiwind and Company”

  1. Wow. Thats too honest and jolting and mind blowing. I’m short of breath. Killed my sleep too. You need a warning up there! Solid piece.

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