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 side by side so that you could see what the audience was seeing. As it is figuring out how to cut the dvd onto less than 10 minutes youtube slices deserves a post by itself.
Torque, Umair, Urooj and Talha Iqbal get full credit for putting and hosting a great show. Sabeen Mahmud at TIE, Karachi was the woman behind the event and the inspiration behind the speakers, the format and the unique menu which was a refreshing change from standard Sheraton fare.
Since I am new to youtube, I wasn’t able to find an elegant way of circumventing the new 10 minute per video limit. I have had to break the video down into three episodes. All three have now been uploaded onto youtube.
Episode I – Following in the footsteps of Adil Moosaji from Ego, Sameen Raja from Canvas Gallery and Shehzad Saleem from Student Biryani, I am introduced as a failure by Talha Iqbal and we are off. This video starts off at the tail end of the Student Biryani presentation and spends 5 minutes building up on the failure theme. The episode ends immediately after describing what the Avicena business was all about.
Because of my editing abilities I was successful in cutting the part where we describe that there were three primary customers for our products. Business School Students, Analyst & Associate training programs and Continuing Education Credit customers.
Episode II – The second episodes starts with the Avicenna story at Columbia Business School. Why it made sense to do it while at school, the incubation theme, definition of success from the point of an entrepreneur, our ultimate demise and the lessons learnt across New York, Tokyo, and California. I speak about the now infamous drowning incident, my reality distortion field and what it took to break it after living in an unreal world for two years.
Episode III-The third episode picks up Reboot, Alchemy and our near demise last year. Infront of 300 strangers I confess that we came very close to Rebooting. I also confess that across continents if I had to start a business all over again, I would pick up home, every time for the home ground advantage. Post presentation the video covers a few of the Q&A questions. The original TIECON DVD has more.