Soon after I decided to run a restaurant (instead of another PM gig in tech), I got a call from a friend in San Francisco. I’m out of my mind, he said, and that this is the worst “financial decision” I could ever make! I agree, I said. It’s not a financial decision, it’s emotional. […]
Tag: San Francisco Bay Area
27th March, 11: 15pm. I called Zubair and Sabina: “We lost money in March again, and April is going to kill us. I’ve looked at our expenses — we need to dramatically cut costs and save cash.” The lockdown had already started in Toronto. Like every other business, we had shut down and were now isolated in […]
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Product School, Lahore
I’ve attended Product School events in the San Francisco Bay Area and Buenos Aires. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that they also have a chapter in Lahore. Their local organizer, Haseeb Raza, reached out on LinkedIn and asked me to speak on a trip to Lahore in 2019. Product School talks in SF […]
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Trillion Dollar Coach
Bill saw all the chess pieces all the time, because he had the luxury of not being on the board. This line stood out the most for me in #trilliondollarcoach because it reminded me of the concept of the balcony in Ron Heifitz’s Adaptive Leadership theory. He defines it as “getting off the dance floor […]
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“Make your worlds larger”, Oakland
This talk was delivered on April 29, 2017 in Oakland, California, to the Fulbright Class of 2017 shortly returning to Pakistan. I have added links and certain references, details and qualifications that I could not mention while speaking (in the interest of time). I was invited by the Institute of South Asia Studies at UC […]
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Startups and Pakistan, Oakland
I was invited by the Institute for South Asia Studies at UC Berkeley to lead the final debrief session at the 2016 Fulbright Reentry Seminar for scholars from Pakistan. This is a short-clip of the full talk. Clearly, I was having a good time.
I was invited to a panel discussion titled “Exploring the Current Role and Potential of ICTs for Development” at the USAID Higher Education Solutions Network’s TechCon 2014. The event was co-hosted with the Development Impact Lab (DIL) at the University of California, Berkeley, and that explains my connection. Fellow panelists were Ann Mei Chang and […]