Had two insightful chats with two fellow academics and educationists yesterday.

The topic? What is it that we need to change to improve state of higher education in universities we teach in.

Here is a quick summary / the cliff notes edition of the conversation. The purpose of undergraduate education?

Help our students discover, explore, develop and acquire interests.

A more ambitious goal? To get comfortable with personal performance windows and envelopes.

What are you really capable of? What is it that you want to do? Who are you?

SWIFT MT 103. Foreign Currency Wire Transfers.

A single customer credit transfer made on the SWIFT network.

The bane of remittance/ free lancer / tech founder challenge across banking sector in Pakistan. More so for small businesses / founders that receive sub $ 1,000 wires. Once upon a time in a different life we wrote, ran and supported treasury systems that generated MT 103 messages for local banks.

Given how treasuries front / back offices are structured and how all $ payments are consolidated and cleared via NYC, workflow was simple.

If you work with risk, insurance, trading or pricing, loss distributions are a key concept.

Traditional or introductory statistics courses don't have time to do justice to them.

We took a deep dive with automobile claims data (80,000 rows) in the ADA course. With insurance models we are interested in two key parameters.

a) Frequency - the likelihood or probability of a claim.
b) Severity - the size of a claim, when a claim occurs.

Loss distributions focus on b).

If a claim occurs how big or bad is it likely to be?

How do you encourage or foster creativity?

Cross pollination and collaboration of ideas from different worlds and backgrounds?

We learn more when we

a) Work with individuals and teams with different perspectives.

b) Remove crutches that we use without thinking about them. How would you design a high fidelity prototype for a game without using technology or standard art?

You level the playing field in one stroke. No developer, artist or designer would have an edge.

Only creativity would rule.

Welcome to @ibakarachi @Mindstormstudio @RaptrGames

Fun talk today by Dr. Alnoor Bhimani @ibakarachi on data as a product, monetizing data, qualitative insights, and decision making processes.

And what all of the above implies for business school education. My favorite takeaway?

If the data is the new oil for the knowledge economy, and we produce a lot of it, how do we productize and monetize it as an economy.

If we don't, someone else will. No one had put it down or explained it this clearly.

Data is our new edge.

The most fun engagements in my senile years are ones where I pick a new skill, crack a difficult problem or learn stuff I didn't know before.

Easier to do this type of work when you run a small specialized shop without distractions of a large team.

Small shop. Large footprint. 2018-19.
IFRS 17.
Teaching Portfolio Optimization Models + Algorithms + Financial Modeling.

2019-20.
First and second half marathon.
Remote work + Zoom Cohort based live training.
Founder Puzzles. Product launch.

2020-21.
Surviving Covid + recovering.
Close call.
3rd half.

I have been mentoring 2 bright candidates for MBA program prepare for top US business school interviews.

Both are international students which changes their profile and application strategy.

The first has been called in for an interview with her first choice. We did a mock interview yesterday and a few things immediately stood out.

A b-school interview is a pitch and a filter.

As alum and students when we interview candidates for our programs, there are two important questions we have to answer.

The most awkward and painful lessons I learnt earlier on in my life as a professional?

Not everyone is your customer. You are better off not having a specific type of customer.

Over years I built this template. Predicts engagements to a T.

Took much longer to act on it. The ones that fit our template we walk away from.

We don't engage, don't bid, don't work with. Full stop.

Everyone gets a second chance and when we feel, we made a mistake, we are always open to re-evaluate our assessment.

But the model is scary accurate.

High lights from the class on Sunday.

Research is not dumping data or tables or quoting other experts or research.

Research is not synthesizing data and presenting it visually.

Research is examining data to identify trends, inflection points, 2nd order effects and insights. When you pick a problem to explore think about applications, usage and utility.

How would your work be used? Who would use it? Who will it impact? Will it change practice in your field?

Has anyone else examined this problem before you? What did they find?

On default. Are we going to? No.

With due respect for everyone who shared their take, but once again, no.

Let's take a look at underlying data. Don't take my word, see for yourself.

The only thing to focus on and worry about is global bonds.

Source:
finance.gov.pk/dpco/Debt_Bull… Everything else can be negotiated, rolled over or placed on a principal moratorium.

We did it before in 1998, post sanctions when economic conditions were much worse.

But then why the alarm bells?

This graph, same source. US$ 21 billion figure for '22? How much is Eurobonds?

I think it is important for kids and students to intern in professions they plan to work in before they commit to them.

I fell in love with numbers and picked the actuarial profession.

For the 11 years I took actuarial exams, I had tremendous fun.

But there was a catch. My first year was benefits valuation.

The essence of my assignment was to update already existing clipper valuation software.

Change a few lines of code, run numbers, take summary tables and update an existing report template.

In about 8 months I was bored to death.

There are certain aspects of my work where the only thing I am sure of is that everyone is guessing.

No one knows anything.

Almost everyone is making it up as they go along. The sooner one accepts and acknowledges it, the wiser one's outlook.

Also good for blood pressure. This has interesting applications to professional market price trends forecasting.

I remember seeing this fascinating result 20 years ago. A primer on simulation.

The best educated guess for the present value of terminal future price is.....

Despite my repute for wearing rose tinted glasses, I tend to be blunt and early with my calls.

Exhibit 1. The winter of funding tweet in early April.

Here is my latest call.

Yes the news on the ecosystem front is depressing but this is not the end.

https://twitter.com/rebootdude/status/1511306682244214786?s=20&t=Ohf-4lHl4JVqn3SBA7s8Gw

Markets work in cycles. We have just witnessed a down cycle.

This is a natural part of startup evolution.

Yes, there is more depressing news in the pipeline and it will keep coming.

But we will also see a pickup in deal flow and checks by end January '23, if not earlier.

Notes from Dr. Tariq Banuri's chat on quality, from @ibakarachi faculty retreat.

I never had the pleasure of hearing him speak before. @jehan_ara we must invite him to +92D in Karachi.

I volunteer to moderate a fireside chat with him on talent and tech, tech and talent Dr. Sahib's spoke about quality and made it fun.

Relying on Robert Pirsig's Zen and the art of motor cycle maintenance. A book I grew up seeing around Shehla Baji, maternal aunt, respected and qualified engineer.

It was cool to see him quote it.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_t…

Middle class? All the work we have done on this subject in the last year and I finally found the right definition yesterday.

The class in our society where mothers eat two day old left over food and children think they do so because they like it.

That is my mom. Three layers given the feedback so far.

Upper middle class. Everyone eats food cooked the same day.

Middle middle class. Mother eat two day old food for dinner.

Lower middle class. Mothers skip dinner. Period.

Notes from my chat on non-academic perspectives at @ibakarachi faculty retreat, covering our needs as founders, parents, dreamers and teachers from academia.

Learned a great deal about outlook and teaching philosophy across the 2 day faculty retreat hosted by @EDIBAKarachi. As founders, talent we seek should be comfortable with taking risks, making mistakes and recovering from unexpected shocks.

Mechanics and process are important but intuition is more valuable.

You builds intuition by being wrong. Academic assessment rewards you for being right.

I don't have any pictures together from our days in New York.

I had work, out of city, was mostly broke and missed my graduation ceremony.

Because billable hours were more important.

Same for Broadway plays or a long run, Riverside.

At 29, I didn't think it mattered. Don't get me wrong. It wasn't a hard life. I did what I wanted to do.

I read oodles of papers hidden in the stacks. Spent hours modeling Excel in breakout rooms. Placed limit orders for trades at 4 am.

Discovered tapas on Amsterdam, Matrix and Episode One in all their glory.

As a founder who lived through '00 dot com and '08 GFC crashes I only have one advise for fellow founders in Q2 '22.

Do not take personal or credit card debt to cover payroll or office expenses.

You either have the cash or you don't. Don't get creative with basics. I know you are sharper, smarter, more driven and hard working than I was.

It will take you maybe a third of the time it took me to do things. So here is a metric.

It took me 10 years to pay down my '00 debt. I am still paying down my '08 one.

1/3 * 14 years. Not really fun.

3 separate founder conversations today.

At 8:30 am. Please don't drink the Kool-Aid. Build value / deliver it before you can/will raise. Also don't count on it.

At 9:00 am. Never take anything I say or do at face value.

At noon. Investors don't owe you anything. Neither do you The real world we live in is more interesting and revealing than the world we observe on Twitter.

Some stuff we see here is make belief. It will never happen to/for us.

Some is posturing. Some is real.

Some is out right psychosis. You need to build your own truth filters.

Understanding valuations in a down market for founders in Pakistan. On request.

Markets are not static. Valuations are not isolated calls. They depend on context. Understand the context.

Here is a simplified guide to the math behind valuation models. There are 6 primary factors that control fund investment valuation models

1. Expected future payoff

2. Founder + Team credibility

3. Opportunity cost. Discount rate.

4. Future dilution. Additional rounds

5. Likely consumer traction

6. Stage of Economic cycle

A thread on tech demos. On request.

I follow the Sun Tzu school of demos.

Best demo are the ones not given.

For context I sold risk software to banking industry for 15 years.

Always focused on solution design, data requirements and regulatory approvals for models. To be fair, we almost always did a demo but we avoided them in first meetings.

The first meeting was all about discovery. We set expectations on day one.

We will not be doing a demo. Our expert needs to understand your needs. Once understood, a demo will be arranged/done.