Startup Guide: Darden Reboot Chat – transcript of the EVC, DSAS event

Thank you very much for showing up for my chat. My name is Jawwad Ahmed Farid and I am a failure. Before I became a member of Failure anonymous, I always wanted to be a winner. I wanted my own world record; see myself where you see Mr. Usain Bolt; ideally with a medal or [...]

April 26, 2010  Tags: , , , , , , , ,   Posted in: Alchemy stuff  5 Comments

Startup Mentor: Darden Reboot DSAS, EVC event

It takes a lot to fill up an empty room. Specially with smart people, who are paying good money to get a great education at a top ranked business school and have already had a roster of highly ranked speakers appear before them. But the Darden EVC and DSAS societies managed to do just that [...]

April 25, 2010  Tags: , , , , , , , ,   Posted in: Alchemy stuff  6 Comments

Startup Guide: CEO Club session at Columbia Business School

Thanks to Hasan, Carolyn, Ben and the CEO and SABA members for first arranging the session at Columbia Business at such short notice and then showing up in strenght at 8 am on a Monday morning. I was pleasantly surprised by the size and the enthusiasim of the audience. And as Hasan and Carolyn put [...]

April 20, 2010  Tags: , , , , , , , ,   Posted in: Alchemy stuff  One Comment

A moment of silence, if you please…

At the stroke of midnight yesterday, Adnan Haider Rizvi, able bodied dreamer, bonded in servitude at IBM, heart breaker of girl friends of East European origins and noted Dubai socialite, pulled the plug on Lootmaar.com. I had been the attending physician, the counsel of record, the peddler on the street, the bearer of signs from [...]

April 15, 2010  Tags: , , , , , ,   Posted in: Alchemy stuff  2 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

Dubai Tech Nights – 9th February 2010

It ended up being an evening full of surprises. When Adnan first checked with me about my availability on the 9th for Dubai Tech Nights I thought we were talking about a small gathering. So when I walked in at 5:45pm after following some really colorful directions to Room 212 at the RIT campus at [...]

February 10, 2010  Tags: , , , , ,   Posted in: Alchemy stuff, Startup, Startup Insiders, TIE, Training, new ventures, small business  No 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

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

Robert Ferrigno, Reboot and me…

My favorite hangout is a large format bookstore. Think anywhere in the world, think library stacks, think of Borders, think of me. Three years ago on a business trip to Malaysia, a new fiction release caught my eye. It had an interesting cover, sort of a patchwork of the US flag and the Islamic Crescent [...]

October 27, 2009  Tags: , , , , , ,   Posted in: Alchemy stuff  No Comments

Glenn Hubbard, Reboot and me

I was a brash and ambitious desi with a business plan at Columbia. Glenn was part of the entrepreneurial faculty at the school. We met and exchanged notes on the sidelines of Amar Bhide’s chat about his upcoming book, “The origin and evolution of new businesses”. A few months later when I lost out during [...]

October 27, 2009  Tags: , , , , , ,   Posted in: Alchemy stuff  No Comments

Jehan and the TieCon Speaker’s interview series

Jehan goes on the road with her flip to capture the TieCon speakers before they put on their show in Karachi on 4th November. Jawwad Ahmed Farid talks about his Entrepreneurial experience from Jehan Ara on Vimeo.

October 25, 2009  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Alchemy stuff  One Comment

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