Archive for the ‘Columbia Business School’ Category

Online Finance – Good and Bad bosses – A review of leadership trends across the decades

Over at the Startup Insights blog, we posted a research paper completed at Columbia Business School 10 years ago as a class project that reviews the perception of good and bad bosses in management media all the way from the pre-war years from the Second World War to the late 1990′s. While the research is [...]

June 13, 2010  Tags: ,   Posted in: Columbia Business School, Desi Startup, entrepreneurs  No Comments

Startup Guide: The Darden Reboot Chat – Videos are here

And they are here. Seven episodes due to the youtube 10 minute rule. Many thanks to Uzma for burning the midnight oil, encoding the video and solving the volume problem once and for all. Thank you Adnan for ensuring that the session gets recorded for the family (as well as agents and friends) and shipping [...]

May 9, 2010  Tags: , , , , ,   Posted in: Columbia Business School, Desi Startup, Education, Failure, Startup Insiders, entrepreneurs, new ventures, small business  Comments Closed

Startup Guide: Lessons from a failed startup

Looking through the wreckage of an old folder, found this post for the really early days of Reboot – the original list of lessons from a failed startup that became the book. Here is the list, with one new addition, five years later. 1) Technology is not a competitive advantage. Focus on the business problem [...]

April 7, 2010  Tags: , , , ,   Posted in: Columbia Business School, Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, Education, Failure, entrepreneurs  3 Comments

Columbia Business School, 10th year, class of 2000 reunion update…

Frank Byrd was the portrait of a southern gentleman at Columbia. Cultured, polite, smart, likeable and very down to earth. I remember at least a handful of my class mates who used to swoon, every time Frank would pass by (don’t worry my lips are sealed, Frank make it worth my while and I will [...]

April 7, 2010  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Columbia Business School, Personal shit  One Comment

Startup Guide: Linking Pain, Features, Pricing, Segments and Reach

Teaching entrepreneurship is difficult. Teaching it to 50 smart kids can at times get rough. Teaching it to 150 students distributed across 50 groups with very interesting ideas across 25 odd domains will make you get up at 4 am in the morning after catching a few winks past midnight just so that you can [...]

April 2, 2010  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Columbia Business School, Desi Startup  No Comments

Reboot goes on sale online, gets featured at CIO, the Standard, Network World or the Ides of March

What a week it has been. Last night was the first night in 7 days that I slept for 7 hours. My average naptime for the week was an astonishing 4 hours, excluding the time I spent power napping waiting for the red traffic light to change to green, on hold waiting for customers to [...]

March 13, 2010  Tags: , , , , , , , , ,   Posted in: Blue Screen, Columbia Business School, Desi Startup, Education, Failure, Pressing words, Startup, Startup Insiders, entrepreneurs, new ventures, small business  No Comments

My love affair with Google, Google check out, Part I

It was the beginning of the year that would mark the turn of the century. I was a second year MBA student at Columbia, sharing a conference room with a first year who had just moved to New York from the valley. We shared a seat each at the Integrity Board Club and I don’t [...]

March 9, 2010  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Alchemy stuff, Columbia Business School, Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, entrepreneurs  One Comment

Memories, Cookaracha Guides or Venture number two…

Much before Reboot and the Blue Screen of Death, before the Alchemy discussion on our family dinner table and the wild dreamy bet that turned out to be Avicena, before blogging and before DesiBackToDesh, in a land far far away (then marked as Geocities in Jedi lore) there was once a venture named Cookaracha Guides. [...]

February 5, 2010  Tags: , , , , , , , ,   Posted in: Blue Screen, Columbia Business School, Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, Failure, Personal shit, Writing, entrepreneurs, new ventures, small business  2 Comments

The second best job in the world, part two…

To the three batches (Division A, Division B, and EMBA Batch 13), who made me feel like a rock star two Thursdays in a row. Thank you. Keep them pictures coming J

December 20, 2009  Tags: , , , , , , , ,   Posted in: Columbia Business School, Education, Failure, Startup, Startup Insiders, Training, entrepreneurs, new ventures, small business  No Comments

The Reboot presentation at TIECON, Karachi – Revisited

The TIECON 2009, Karachi, 4th November 2009, Reboot presentation was the first time I was able to shrink the story in under 20 minutes. Spent three days putting the presentation together but it will be a while before I am able to get to an editor that will run the presentation and the video coverage [...]

November 27, 2009  Tags: , , , , , , ,   Posted in: Columbia Business School, Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, Education, Failure, Pakistan, Startup, TIE, computer science, entrepreneurs, new ventures, small business  No Comments

Telecompk on Reboot

Babar Bhatti covers Reboot on the Telecompk blog.

November 24, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: Blue Screen, Columbia Business School, Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, Failure, PASHA, Pakistan, Startup, Writing, entrepreneurs, new ventures, small business  No Comments

The many faces of Alchemy

I did this slide deck a year and a handful of months ago. We were riding high and the cycle had hit but hadn’t really hit us. When I started working on the deck the objective was to showcase all the interesting things we had done together as a team. It still bring backs great [...]

November 7, 2009  Tags: , , , ,   Posted in: Alchemy stuff, Columbia Business School, Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, Karachi, Startup, entrepreneurs  No Comments

Reboot presentation @ TIECON

Here is the slide share version of the Reboot presentation I made yesterday at the TIECON 2009 event in Karachi. Had a lot of fun putting this together. Alchemy Reboot @ TIE CON Karachi View more presentations from jafcbs.

November 5, 2009  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Blue Screen, Columbia Business School, Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, Failure, Karachi, Pakistan, Startup, TIE, entrepreneurs  3 Comments

A review, a review, my kingdom for a review

Finally, courtesy of Salman Latif at the Book Review blog, a review of Reboot, Second edition. ‘Reboot – in search for the land of opportunity’ is not the sort of book you usually find on stores. Take a quick walk down the shelve-lanes of bookstores and you’d find hundreds of self-help books with success stories [...]

September 27, 2009  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Blue Screen, Columbia Business School, Failure, Writing, entrepreneurs, new ventures, small business  One Comment

Reboot now available on Readers Club, Karachi

For those of you who were waiting to get a copy from your local friendly library, here is the link to the book on the Readers Club site in Karachi. The book is in stock now.

September 25, 2009  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Blue Screen, Columbia Business School, Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, Writing, entrepreneurs  No Comments