Archive for the ‘entrepreneurs’ 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

My Google Adsense mis-adventure – Invasion of the spiders, help please – Part III

Since we are on topic, I thought I would also post the Statpress snapshot. Is this normal? I have about 80 – 100 unique visitors with 425 pageviews (which is fine) but 2,513 spiders in a day and by the time I am done with may I would have had the dubious distinction of having [...]

May 23, 2010  Tags: , , , ,   Posted in: I can't hack it, entrepreneurs  No Comments

My Adsense mis-adventure – Struggling to break 3 dollars a month – Part I

I thought I would fess up today and share the progress or lack of it made on the Google Adsense project in the first three months. If you have been following me around you know that around early February I decided to build a printing press for printing US dollars (or the money machine as [...]

May 23, 2010  Tags: , , , ,   Posted in: I can't hack it, 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

Teaching Ethics to business school students

If there was one mandatory course that all business school students are allergic to, it would be ethics. Not that business school students have a personality flaw that makes them hate the subject, it is just that we intensely dislike being preached to. We are smart, intelligent and savvy enough to figure out what is [...]

May 1, 2010  Tags: , , , , ,   Posted in: Education, I can't hack it, entrepreneurs  No Comments

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

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

Value at Risk, Derivative Products and the Dummies crash course on options

I ran two workshops in Dubai and Abu Dhabi last week on derivatives and treasury risk management. Three new related courses in these two areas have now been uploaded as master classes. They are:   Master Class: Calculating Value at Risk – a quick and dirty guide to calculating VaR   Master Class: Derivative products [...]

March 21, 2010  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Pakistan, entrepreneurs  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

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

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