PhDs Who Dont Teach

There is a useful discussion going on the yahoo mailing list, Pakgrid. People are sharing their concerns about entrepreneurship in Pakistan.In particular, there is an email by Mr. Zeeshan Ul Hassan Usmani, which says:

Dear All

Thank you so much for all of your advice, emails, and suggestions. I’ve received a ton of responses through Pakgrid, privately to my inbox, and even couple of calls to say “hi”. It feels really “good” when you see a lot of people like you who are either facing the same problems, or are available to help you out, or provide guidance.

We have all the talent we need; we are performing on the fraction of our potential. We are even afraid to think big!

With the recommendation of my advisor “Get good education and Move to a bad neighborhood”, I returned back home a year ago. My dean (originally from Iran) at Florida Tech also used to tell me that “Zeeshan I would rather love to see you working in Pakistan as an above-average Pakistani, than a brilliant scientist in the middle east.”

Dharmesh Shah at Business Of Software Conference 2008 Part III

Below is the last part of summary of tech talk of Dharmesh Shah in Business of Software Conference. You can read part I here and part II here.

You can watch the complete video here.

Thanks are due to Neil Davidson for allowing me to use content from the site.

Attention Economy: Dharmesh discourages the adsense/advertisement model of selling the software. The notion of this model rests on the premise that the customer still has some time left out of using facebook etc, and that time can be monetized. There are two problems with this model. First, it involves a lot of uncertainty, something which can not be relied upon for sales target. The second problem is that between the entrepreneur and the customer, there is now a third person, the advertiser. The entrepreneur is trying to attract the attention towards the product, while the advertiser is interrupting that attention: conflict of interest!

Dharmesh Shah at Business Of Software Conference 2008 Part II

Below is the second part of summarized tech talk of Dharmesh Shah in Business of Software Conference 2008. The first part can be read here. You can watch the complete video here.

Thanks are due to Neil Davidson for allowing me to use content from the site.

Write A Blog: Dharmesh shares a wonderful experience during his Masters from MIT. . As part of his graduate work, he was supposed to write a thesis focused on software startups. In order to collect first hand comments/ideas/feedback on startups for his thesis, he setup a blog. His blog, onstartups.com turned out to attract more traffic than most VC- backed startups could muster, despite the fact that those startups had allocated huge budget for online marketing. The lesson learned is that, one doesn’t need to spend a lot of money to attract customer attention. The focus of entrepreneurs should be on smart marketing, like launching a blog.

Dharmesh Shah at Business Of Software Conference 2008 Part I

Dharmesh Shah graduated from MIT with an M.S. degree as part of the MIT Sloan Fellows Program in Innovation and Global Leadership. As part of his graduate work, he wrote a thesis focused on software startups (more on this below). He is a software entrepreneur and currently the co-founder and CEO of HubSpot , a software company building a revolutionary software platform for Internet Marketing. Prior to founding HubSpot, he founded Pyramid Digital Solutions , an enterprise software company in the financial services sector. Bootstrapped with less than $10,000 in capital, Pyramid went on to demonstrate exceptional growth and was a three-time recipient of the Inc. 500 award. After acting as CEO and chief software architect for the company from 1994-2005, he got the company acquired in August 2005 by SunGard Business Systems , a large $11 billion technology company.

Below is the summary of his tech talk delivered in “Business of Software Conference- 2008” . Thanks are due to Neil Davidson for allowing me to use content from the site.

Dr Umar Saif Reveals the Success Formula (Part 2 of 2)

Below is the remaining part of interview of Dr. Saif for In the Line of Wire. You can find the first part here.

You can watch the complete interview over CIO Webstudio: Part 1 : Part 2.

Should freshly pass out professionals with zero job experience try ventures?

Entrepreneurship is itself a different discipline which has little to do with job experience. Assume you were a software tester in Google. So, although you were doing a glamorous job, you were really not exposed to situations like IPO, exits etc. In summary, its not a necessity that successful entrepreneurs must have worked for someone before their first startup. Although, he has also worked with successful people who quit their jobs and started their ventures. There is no definite answer to it.

Entrepreneurship is not just about money!

Dr. Saif tells that 98% of startups are a failure in USA. [This sentence wouldn’t have caught my attention if he hadn’t clarified he was talking about USA. – Misbah]. There is nothing wrong in being failed. The really successful entrepreneurs are those who have gone onto the next startup after their second failure in startups. Entrepreneurship is not just about failure or success. Who wants to do the same boring 9 to 5 routine job for 20 years? Entrepreneurship is thrilling, exciting and interesting. Dr. Saif has known people who hate their job, even if they are working in companies that pay bonuses worth one million.

Dr Umar Saif Reveals the Success Formula (Part 1 of 2)

Dr. Umar Saif was the first Pakistani to receive a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Cambridge, where he was admitted to the doctorate program when he was only 19 years old. Dr Saif worked and taught at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) for four years, where he was part of the core team which developed system technologies for project Oxygen– a US$40 million project sponsored by the US Department of Defense and an industrial Alliance of world-class companies including Nokia, HP, NTT DoCommo, Phillips, Acer and Delta.

However, the reason he has caught my attention is not above achievements. Dr. Saif co-founded four technology startups: BumpIn.com (contextual chatting), SeeNreport.com (citizen journalism), ChOpaal.pk (SMS social networking) and TicketMy.com (event tickets) after returning to Pakistan. Dr. Saifis the founder of one of the first startup incubators in Lahore, Pakistan, called SCI. His good work in SCI won him the Young Global Leader (YGL) by the World Economic Forum in 2010.