Dear Sergey and Larry Greetings from the land of the pure. I am sure you have heard of our lovely country (official motto: we are in the news again) and the more than 8 million loyal Google customers who are slightly miffed at you. We are the ones who advertise online using Adwords and Admob,…
Category: Desi Startup
Plan 9, P@SHA, PITB – Tech Startup Incubation Pitching competition – IBA Main Campus – Sep 2012
This Saturday, the main Campus IBA Auditorium was buzzing with activity. It was time for twenty student teams to pitch their ideas for the 5 Plan 9-P@SHA-PITB Incubation seats up for grabs. The format was a short verbal, non visual pitch, followed by judging, followed by a day of mentoring, followed by a second round…
Business Plan Cheat Sheet – Two business plans up for a half baked sale
We learn by doing, seeing and at time imitating. For that is what it took for me to write my first business plan. The course that made it happen was Glen Hubbard’s Entrepreneurial Finance at Columbia Business School. For the past three terms I had been working on the outline of an idea and using…
The Value at Risk online store goes live at Learning Corporate Finance
After a number of requests for an offline, easier to use, read and work with electronic version of our courses, Learning Corporate Finance announces the soft launch of its online course inventory store. For soft launch, our most popular Value at Risk (VaR) and Interest Rate Derivatives courses have been converted into PDF files with…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…