Archive for the ‘Desi Startup’ 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

500,000 page-views, 4.5 years, three incarnations

I had been so busy with work, travel, travel, work and breaking the 3 dollar Adsense barrier that I completely missed a milestone I had been eagerly awaiting for the past few months. Somewhere in May, (don’t know when), the Desi Back to Desh blog crossed 500,000 page views. I was just checking my regular [...]

May 23, 2010  Tags: , , , , ,   Posted in: Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, Pressing words, Writing, 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 Trek: Pitching lessons

If possible always have multiple sales pitches for a meeting. A pitch could be for a product, a service, a referral or even information about the industry that isn’t widely available. For the US trip it was Alchemy Risk Manager, Outsourced research, two investment banking deal and selling Pakistan as an investment destination (product ideas [...]

April 30, 2010  Tags: , , , ,   Posted in: Alchemy stuff, Desi Startup, entrepreneurs  No Comments

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

Four conversations or my Google Adsense journey

My first introduction to using Google to make money was Zafar Khan and Sofizar at MITBAP. About a year ago I asked Zafar the inevitable SEO optimization question and got a few answers; up went a few pages at our home page business domain, representing the little I actually understood of the entire process around [...]

April 5, 2010  Tags: , , , ,   Posted in: Desi Startup  2 Comments

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

Finding the voice of the customer

Startup Insights – Finding the voice of the customer I have been teaching entrepreneurship as a practitioner for 8 years and the format that I follow is very simple. Start with a group of students willing to express their ideas in less than one hundred words. Mix in between 18 to 36 hours of instruction. [...]

March 28, 2010  Tags: , , , , , ,   Posted in: Desi Startup, MIT BAP, PASHA ICT Awards, Sales guys, Startup, Startup Insiders, TIE, entrepreneurs, new ventures, small business  7 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

Talent ,Technology, Management

Ages ago for an upcoming PASHA career expo I did a piece on hiring. A few months earlier I had done a presentation on knowledge workers at Zayed University Campus in Abu Dhabi. Today at the Nutshell forum I used ideas from both pieces to do a different take on talent management within the technology [...]

January 23, 2010  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, I can't hack it, Karachi, PASHA, Pakistan, Startup, Startup Insiders, entrepreneurs, new ventures, small business  2 Comments

Dreamers in Dubai

Kumar, the soft spoken driver from Kerala, has been picking me up from home and dropping me back for the last seven days. On Wednesday night he finally asked if I was working the hours I was working by choice. Starting the day at 8 am and landing on Villa 16, Cluster 35 at 11pm [...]

December 12, 2009  Tags: , , , , , ,   Posted in: Alchemy stuff, Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, Education, Failure, Startup, entrepreneurs, 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