Silicon Valley – My Experiences | Faruq Ahmad in Conversation with Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy

[Music] welcome to the black hole is or um Silicon Valley experiences foreign foreign people used to make new companies and then there is Silicon Valley tell us about your your adventures over there your experiences what you have seen and why is it such a exceptional place in the first instance so over to you thank you pervez and special thanks to the black hole for having me here it's a real pleasure um so what I'll do as you've suggested is to go through my experience over the last few decades but I thought before I did that to take a couple of minutes to reflect on my most recent visit here which has been after quite a while and these observations I think are relevant to the experiences that I will discuss in a moment and I wanted to essentially discuss four items of summarize four items first is you know what are assets at the end of the day we think of assets very often as being building and land but over there in what I'll call the progressive parts of the world like the US where I've spent the last few decades assets are often seen as a result of the application of brain power so if you look at Silicon Valley for examples as Perez mentioned many of the big companies that we've come to know whether it's Facebook or Intel or apple these have all been created over the years through the application of brain power or the building of teams so there seems to be a bit of a gap between how we look at wealth and assets here and over there so that's one observation that I made over the past few few days that I've been here second observation is that there is a lot of discussion about yesterday what is history where have we come from what is the right interpretation of history and this is very important I I do not want to underestimate how important it is but by and large Silicon Valley focuses on the future what do we do with tomorrow that's ahead of us so how do we look at a situation analysis of where we are today and use brain power to build for tomorrow to help Society move forward in every way so that's the second quick note and I'll be very brief and get to my chronology soon the third observation my third observation is that that there's a focus on knowledge in Silicon Valley on learning on teaching on building up a corpus of knowledge so that Society can Elevate and lift itself belief has a role it has an important role but in the balance between belief and knowledge the the priorities tilt towards knowledge and that is a key part of what's been behind Silicon Valley and actually I'd say the West in general uh the rise recently and my fourth observation is that um the way we look at things over there is a win-win not a win-lose so and maybe this goes back to how we look at assets so if we think of assets as being a piece of land either you have it or I have it so it's win lose but if you look at assets as being brain power you're really growing the pie and if the pie starts off this small and you apply your mind your energy your focus do working to increase the pie then it's a win-win everybody wins Society wins you win and and and so forth so these are the sort of four by four recent observations now I'll go back to the chronology but bike with questions if win win then does it help if let's say China discovers a way to increase the semiconductor density by a factor or a factor of three then Silicon Valley is pushed no is it still a win-win then okay you you provoked me so that's why I have to ask that with your permission can I defer an answer to that question yes yes because I'll come to that in a moment and and but I will provide some context so over the course of the last few decades I have have had an occasion to work with China and India during its rise so I was investing in companies in China 20 years ago and with funds in India 20 years ago so I have personal experience with what they went through in the early stages when they were where Pakistan is today so your point is very well taken about you know the geopolitical aspect of it so if I could come back to it I'd appreciate that okay but I I've made a mental note so please tell me if I overlook it so so these are just observations sort of as a backdrop given that I haven't been back for a while now chronology as Perez mentioned you know we have known each other for a long time I've been to Karachi Grammar School I got my old levels my a levels I did my SAT achievement test I applied to a bunch of universities I got into MIT and I accepted and one reason I accepted was that a good friend had gone there the year before and this was a Chinese Pakistani friend so in those days when I was in school there were people that were Chinese there were Hindus and even some Jews and you know Buddhists and everybody and it was a very diverse population so that is just sort of a commentary I went to MIT MIT was really where I learned how to think in a way I learned how to look at problems how to structure problems and perhaps most importantly to ask the right questions when faced with the situation so I spent four years at MIT I got my bachelor's degree and then I applied as Perez mentioned to Stanford one reason quite frankly was a bad winter at MIT I realized I didn't like cold weather as as much as some others did so I was fortunate to get accepted to Stanford in the PHD program in electrical engineering and I actually had my PhD thesis lined up the Voyager spacecraft that was was sent up around that time was passing through the ionosphere which is is this this shield around the earth and it was it was transmitting data and my thesis advisor told me well look this data is coming in you have to sit in the basement for a couple of years and you'll get your PhD and I realized that my interests really lay in the in the real world so to speak so I applied to business school at Stanford then again I was fortunate to be accepted so I got my masters from uh from Stanford and then and then went into the MBA program and for me personally those two years really gave me a fresh look at how in many ways the world worked from a different point of view from a business point of view but also social policy asset investment just just the way things actually the framework we all actually live in so it's one thing to want to change the framework and I have many thoughts about that but to change it you have to first understand it well and I understood it well after my Stanford Business School MBA degree so after that uh you know the fashionable thing in those days was to go to cons into Consulting so I went into Consulting and I realized I didn't like it because most of the time I was giving recommendations to clients and the recommendations weren't being implemented the way I thought they should be implemented so it was very frustrating and the next two jobs I had were really important in helping me to understand what I liked and what I wanted to do um one job was with the world's largest company at the time it was very well run in fact it was on business week which was one of the periodic of the best run company in the world unfortunately the company couldn't change to keep up with technology and as a result it had to be broken up the company was at T the other company I worked for that helped me to understand my own preferences in terms of work I was a company that was growing very fast in the deregulated industry but not fast enough it was growing at about 300 percent a year which you think is a lot but the industry required it to grow much faster because it was growing into a vacuum literally and that company was Sprint so in instead of succeeding because it was growing so fast it ended up being acquired so that taught me in a way that you cannot use the same measurement for different Enterprises and that I enjoyed environments that were in Rapid change where there was a challenge every day where you essentially had to figure out what to do in in circumstances where the future was completely unclear you didn't know what was going to happen you didn't have data you didn't have information but you had to do something and doing nothing was doing something so I found those environments more interesting and then coincidentally one day I got a call from an executive recruiter and he said um you know Gordon Moore wants to have lunch with you and I don't know if you've heard of Moore's law has anybody here heard of Moore's Law okay so Moore's Law basically says that the performance and cost of semiconductor chips will decline will be will decline by 50 percent in 18 months uh in other words if you have a chip today that costs a hundred dollars or 100 rupees You can predict that it'll cost 50 rupees 18 months from now and be smaller so you didn't actually have it today but the prediction was that it would be that way in the future what that meant is that you could design a product today assuming the chip would be that small and that cheap and your customers could design in today's product assuming that you could deliver and and there's no other industry where uh that is the way things work so that essentially is the foundation of Silicon Valley the exponential growth that is enabled by that level of increase in price performance uh so the guy who invented that wanted to speak with me and so my reaction was you know tell me when so I essentially had lunch with him and I loved the culture at Intel immediately because it was it was it it was a culture of equals so he took me to the local cafeteria we stood in line with everybody else and when my turn came you know we looked for a table and we sat down and had a conversation I had come from an environment where you know everybody dressed in the jacket and tie and it was very formal and this was an informal environment where it was clear that everybody's ideas counted that people essentially were treated with respect as having equal potential as far as brain power was concerned so I joined Intel and the in the my experience with what they called Intel culture was very profound and it really helped me to understand one of the aspects of Silicon Valley that makes it work which is culture now culture you know we think of social culture this is corporate business culture and I'll come to that a little later in terms of describing how it works and what the key elements are so I worked at Intel for a while um and and then um uh well a friend of mine actually from MIT a Pakistani friend of mine so the world is a small place uh called me up and he said look I have this fantastic product but I don't know what to do with it he was an engineer and he had stayed on the engineering track I had gone off from the business track as I mentioned earlier and so I took some time and worked with him and we started up our first company together and this company developed computer language compilers so computer language compilers in those days and this is going back away so I won't go into detail were high performance pieces of software there that were at the foundation of building code building applications for for General you for General uh utility and so we had great compilers but the market was such that we essentially got the got killed by Bill Gates and there's a story around that and you know if we have time I'll get to it so what we did was we took the base technology and moved it from computer language compilers into mobile devices so that was the time when an earlier version of this device was being shipped and they needed really small high performance compilers on which applications could be written so we did that and uh it they were tough times those days and I can I'll come to the Venture Capital end of things because the Venture Capital industry is interesting in itself but we we ended up having a a good exit our investors were happy we had raised venture capital and so I was done with that company and I moved on I joined another friend who I'd known from Stanford Business School Days in his firm as uh in Venture Capital so I was investing a fund in Venture Capital primarily in Silicon Valley and I'll I'll get into further detail if there's interest in how that works so I and I will get into it actually I think it's probably a good idea in a moment or two uh and over the over the time I was doing venture capital I must have seen hundreds of company plans so part of my job had been to Capital is a job it's a hard job sometimes people think that you know you have a bank account and you have a company idea and all the venture capitalist has to do the right to a check but it's not that easy it's really hard to figure out whether a company is going to make it and how you can help and how you can help is the key thing because the venture capitalist even though the word is capitalist is not really a capitalist her venture capitalist is a brain power job so you have to know the area you're investing in you have to be able to help the company because you're going to be on the board of the company and if all you're doing is writing a check you're wasting the company's time and your own so it's a it's a very difficult job it requires looking at hundreds of companies to pick one company to invest in and and but it was fun because I enjoyed looking at working with different teams and working with new ideas people who had ambitious goals and you know being able to in some instances work with them to help those goals come true that was also the time that I worked with investments in China and India so in China it was 2002-2003 and the Chinese system was just starting to get up they were coming up to speed in Venture Capital uh there was still some naive Notions I remember once an entrepreneur got a check for his company and the first thing he did was to go buy a Mercedes because they didn't have at that time the distinction between an investment in the company versus a personal investment but that disappeared very quickly and and the Chinese were Extreme as we know from history extremely impressive in how quickly they understood how to add value in their ecosystem and to take the brain power that was developed either externally or within China and to commercialize it for their purposes to their needs India got off to a great start around the turn of the century and the reason was something called the Y2K problem which you probably have never heard of but what happened is that late in the 20th century people were afraid that many of the programs that were written had only had two two digits for the year so that in the old in the old computer languages like Cobalt and so forth when you had a date you know you wrote um 85 when you meant 1985 because nobody ever thought that you know 2000 would be around the corner and there was great fear that many of these systems would collapse and these were vital systems so people looked around and said you know where are the software programmers that we can bring in immediately to go through this old code and to do the hard work of taking this code that hadn't been properly documented well it was a fake scare but it was as if the whole sky was going to fall down absolutely and and you know to Indian to India's credit they had this huge reservoir of programmers and they jumped on it they provided the expertise needed to go through the millions of lines of code and you know it was a fake scare but it took time to figure that out and and they got they got an entry into the software Market in the U.S since in the last 20 years they've done a great job of leveraging that and I won't go into the details I'm sure you've read and heard about it um so that was my Venture Capital uh would it be helpful to go through how Venture Capital Works do you think okay terrific so um there are basically three levels to the Venture Capital ecosystem uh the the fun part is starting a company okay and having done all three levels I I think I I always encourage people who have ideas to start companies to follow through on them because it's the most exciting thing in the world you have a new idea you're building a team and and you know getting that going um uh the second level is then to find an investor where it makes sense so in some instances your company generates cash immediately you're in the market where you're well protected and you may not need somebody else to come in and invest in your company and you know sit on your head and tell you what to do because you know what you want to do and it's a fairly well established Market or well-defined Market in other cases you need to grow very fast I gave you the earlier example of Sprint where Sprint grew by a factor of 300 in a single year but it just wasn't fast enough because the market because the the competitor which is the MCI was growing faster so if you if you looked at at market share they were losing market share so so Venture Capital comes in when you're in an environment where you have an advantage and you need to capitalize on that Advantage quickly um and and when I say Advantage it's not it's not purely a selfish thing because very often what you're doing is you're bringing something better to the market that'll really improve people's lives and so your mission is to make it available as inexpensively as broadly and as quickly as possible and what capital can do in a situation like this is to play a part in helping to accelerate a delivery of your product or service but then the venture capitalist so the venture capitalist looks at all the companies in that space so you have a certain product let's say you have a you have a product a software product that goes into this phone so it's the venture capitalist job then to say okay you think you have a product that is very special but let me look at all the other products here and all the other Alternatives and confirm that you have a great product that's one part of it but a product by itself is not enough to make a company you then have to build a team and diversity is key in the team so if you're a good CEO if you're a leader you need to have a terrific engineer engineering or a CTO Chief technology officer with you who who you work with and others as well Chief marketing officer depending on the stage of the company so that you essentially have a team that is able to take the capital and then deploy it effectively venture capitalist also helps the company to structure a board a board of directors is an oversight group that whose job it is to help the company move in the right direction to confer with the CEO to guide the CEO to help with hiring decisions things like that so you're on the board and you essentially are with the company every step of the way you might talk to the company every day you might have a board meeting every month so it's a very labor-intensive thing to be an investor in a company an early stage company uh so that that's that's um that's what a venture capital job is now how does the Venture Capital capitalists get his or her money there are two types of venture capitalists uh that there are there are what is called an angel investor and then that's there are what is called an Institutional venture capitalist and angel investor is a person who has some personal assets and wants to write a check to a company so let's say there's a company that is making uh making equipment for heart disease or some physical ailment and or or they have a solution for it and and you have a family issue with that ailment and you are passionate about trying to help solve that problem and you know the CEO you have a personal interest in helping solve the problem so you you write a check from your own bank account and you you don't have to you don't have to check the CEO's credentials the team the technology or anything else because it's a personal investment that is an angel investor because there's no need for what's called due diligence uh what an Institutional Investor typically does is collects money from other investors and puts the money to use with these or invests the money in companies so the institutional Venture capitalists essentially promises their investors that they will work hard to take the capital that they invest with the Venture Capital fund and pick the best companies so that the the the uh the fund succeeds so typically the institutional investors at least in the US are very very large pools of funds like Pension funds and Foundations and and uh and so forth and they typically put a small amount of investment in Venture Capital because the other element of venture capital is it tends to be risky uh because you're investing in companies and most companies do not succeed uh if they did then it wouldn't be Venture Capital you'd be putting uh money in the public markets instead um so so so we so what I've described uh tried to describe is three levels to the Venture Capital ecosystem the actual company that's being invested in the Venture Capital fund and the and the uh Venture Capital investors they're called General Partners typically in the fund that are trying to find these companies to invest in and then the investors that actually invest in these funds that expect these Venture capitalists to work very hard to find the best companies so that basically is the overall ecosystem so I did that for a number of years and then after that I I did investing in Venture Capital funds and more recently I started an advisory group called the Palo Alto Capital Advisors uh silicon valleys Palo Alto but but now I I spend a lot of my time uh mentoring and essentially advising companies and also institutions in different areas and if I can say a word about that I've mentioned I've mentioned culture a few times one of the things about Silicon Valley culture that has helped to promote its durability is that people go out of the way to help each other without expecting Financial benefit for themselves always and it's a bit of an unusual thing but people Mentor advise help and and they do it if they if they make a commitment to do it they expect compensation in stock typically because they know that companies don't have much cash they're supposed to use the cash to grow but in many cases you can call a lawyer for example in Silicon Valley and get a consultation for free you can talk to somebody you know at a conference and if they are interested in you or if you get along or if you have an idea that that they like they'll spend a lot of time helping you because they they think of the community as uh as an ecosystem in itself that if we help each other we will uplift each other and the place will be a better place better place to live and a better place to work so some of the hardest working people I know are people who stopped having to work decades ago and you know ostentation and and so forth and spending is not something that many people in Silicon Valley always do there are exceptions lots of exceptions uh but but the culture is one of of work and that's the other thing I should mention is that there is there is a commitment at every level to enjoy work enjoy hard work and to do it as long as you can because you're enjoying it so the concept of retirement is not not one you hear about very often I mean people do retire they do work less than 100 percent they do do other things but because they are very often doing what they do because they enjoy it they don't really see any need to stop doing it they just do it a different way um to stay engaged with people that have ideas and people that have a vision and the energy and the focus and the motivation uh to try and execute and make things work um that's that's a monologue right there but is there anything I can expand on uh that you think many many questions come to mind many different dimensions of course uh this kind of uh Community thinking is not the same for all individuals obviously there's Bill Gates who's who now has the Gates Foundation and he looks to curing AIDS and looks to um helping out with polio and Pakistan Etc and then there's somebody like Elon Musk who will who wants to become who is the richest man on the planet and he's a Cutthroat capitalist so they're all kinds of different personalities involved and different ideals and of course your Silicon Valley might be a community in itself but it's it doesn't look too much Beyond itself to see uh what impact it has on the globe as a whole and then there is competition so let's come come to that now okay so so this here got it and China there so first you ask two questions first individuals Elon Musk Bill Gates are perfect comparison in one case the perfect opposite in one case you have someone who's trying to do good with the billions he has in the other case perhaps not um so absolutely I mean people are have strong personalities uh there is no commitment to doing things one way or the other the point I should have made in that in that regard is that you'll always find people in both categories so in other words if you have a venture that you're trying to uh succeed in you'll find people on the Bill Gates side of the equation so you can avoid people on the Elon Musk side of the equation if you need to so it's a big it's a big Community with good and not so good as part of the community now now going back to the global question um people are selfish uh people are self-centered and Silicon Valley is not filled with Saints are quite the contrary and the U.S is focused on its own success uh I the U.S is not particularly interested in you know in a competitive sense so if you help others and Pakistan is focused on its own success too or should be uh so is China every country has an obligation to the people that voted for the people in power so I vote for my you know representative because I expect the representative representative to work for me and if helping others helps me in the long run then that's what they should do so that's kind of the backdrop and and it's no different anywhere or shouldn't be different anywhere so if you take China and the US which is the question you asked earlier um if you'd asked the question a few years ago the relationship was one of collaboration keep Chinese labor cheap products for the US and it was a win-win situation what has happened recently is that there's a competitive chill we've all been seeing it and the two countries are seeing each other as adversaries so I would think it's natural then for uh the American side and the Chinese side to reassess what they presumed was true and to focus on what is in it what what they need to do to put their own interest first and and so I I would say that there isn't necessarily a conflict with the overall intent but it's it's very troubling the troubling part is that uh Silicon Valley is a Melting Pot and and one of the strengths of Silicon Valley is that you can have a management team with people from all over the world so one of the companies I'm talking right now the CEOs from Brazil uh you know you can have a company where there are people from you know India China uh you know Japan all over the place Romania and and when a foreign country or a foreign people are singled out or targeted it tends to chill um you know give them a feeling that they are not equal in the environment and I've talked earlier about Intel cultural inequality that gets impacted so you're absolutely right that that this kind of adversary situation with a country like China is having an impact but the impact is local so about Chinese Americans in Silicon Valley you know if they go to Texas or Mississippi or some of the states where uh uh which are which are commonly known as red States if you follow American politics you know they may not be able to draw a distinction between Chinese and Chinese Americans and so that would be an issue yeah and a a guy who looks Chinese is Chinese would be treated very differently in Silicon Valley and of course Boston Massachusetts the East Coast where they would be considered just no different from anybody else but if he was to go to Mississippi that might be a very different thing there okay now um you started off by saying that capital is actually intellectual Capital it's not the buildings that you have it's not even the facilities or the amount of money that you'll be able to bring it's actually brain power now that brain power comes out from universities mostly in fact to the extent of 90 percent or more but there are lots of universities in the United States lots of universities across the world but there's a particular mindset which then leads to success or otherwise I think that's a very important takeaway from your talk over there but now you know given the situation in this country what we need is a few positive examples of pakistanis who have made it big in Silicon Valley what are the three names four names that come to your mind and what did they do tell us a bit about that well I can give you a couple of names um more please okay I can give you where you can get a long list of names like actually I can tell you where you through again okay so uh going back to Multicultural equality in Silicon Valley pakistanis that have gone abroad have gone to Silicon Valley have done very well in general um and uh you know I can go back to go back 20 or 30 years people like so here babasi was an early executive at uh at the Oracle and after he finished with that he joined Informatica which was a public company that was struggling and grew it rapidly turned it around uh and uh and then moved on and currently he's uh I think he's a little younger than me but not that much and he's still professionally active on several boards uh and and he is following the Silicon Valley model of working uh you know through his life in different ways and of sharing his perspective and knowledge with others along the way another example is Atik Raza Atik Raza is one of the Pioneers in semiconductors and he has started several companies and continues to do so he has had exits and you know has done very well and is integrated again in his own way into the social Fabric in Silicon Valley one of the people that you may have heard of I don't know if you've heard of the Khan Academy Salman Khan but he's Bangladesh oh okay um okay okay but I I I I I I don't know I didn't I didn't realize I I'll let you continue you don't notice these things foreign [Laughter] [Music] then the next thing we hear is that he has invented a chip and the chip has is faster than anything else I think you know the 286 386 chip or something like that and he became I don't know worth how many billion dollars billions few billions anyway so continue now with the list well I would suggest you go to a website called open silicon valley.org and open is an organization that essentially brings together successful entrepreneurs of Pakistani origin it's called the organization of Pakistani entrepreneurs open and there's a long list of people there that have been very very successful I will add one additional person to the list among others is nazim Karimi uh who was my he unfortunately passed away last year but he uh after we exited he's the he's was my friend who who I started my companies with um and after I went to venture capital he continued on as CEO of several additional companies uh and had some successful exits and so he's another example um and let's see uh there's a long list of current individuals that are active as well good so that tells you that it is possible to make it there but possible is one thing and probable is another um so why is it that um relatively few pakistanis make it there's um so compared to other nationalities we're not doing very well there either is that right is my understanding roughly correct well um it's difficult to do quantitative comparisons but I think that pakistanis are doing well but they could be doing better and what doing well requires in a place like that is working with non-pakistanis primarily which means fitting in well not necessarily being focused on one's beliefs or backgrounds but focused in on the common mission as I mentioned earlier you know teams come together in order to make things happen and whether the other people are you know Indians or Hindu or Israelis or Romanians or Catholics or whatever it doesn't really matter nobody talks about these things you come together with the mission so part of that requires not being being in the community and making the community stronger but not being in a ghetto and that that's an important distinction um I I so I think I I don't have numbers to say that pakistanis are less successful I think pakistanis are helping each other a lot and I mentioned open open in particular has been very active but I I think that getting out there feeling more socially and culturally comfortable in integrating with the community and leveraging the rest of the community is an important part that we all could do better that's at the social level but I'm um I think it would be helpful if you could talk about the engineering level so in terms of capacities that are acquired during one's education a lot of pakistanis just up for softer stuff basically they don't want to go into hard engineering um and maybe that's why you don't see them figure out prominently in the engineering departments or the science Departments of U.S universities you do see them to an extent in business and particularly in medicine you see a lot of Rich Pakistani doctors but you don't see a lot of well people like Raza now that to me seems um an offshoot of our distance from physics and Mathematics which has traditionally been a weak subject for pakistanis in general and to my mind unless that is fixed someday we will be able to do good business maybe at most but we won't be able to technologically innovate what do you say I I say absolutely correct now I've you know one naturally Compares pakistanis and Indians let's I mean we tend to do that right if you look at Indians that go to the U.S many of them come from iits and iits do a great job of training them in the hard Sciences to do the hard work uh and I think pakistanis by definition comes from Pakistan and Pakistani universities need to do a better job of encouraging people to study the hard Sciences here in Pakistan so that they're better trained when they are sent abroad that would give them a head start to doing as well as they can in a place like Silicon Valley or elsewhere now Innovation is pretty much Global it's in other parts of the U.S as well but you're absolutely correct I think that being able willing and having the capacity to focus in on problems to learn the hard stuff you know the math the physics and so forth is critical in in moving ahead in fact I made a list of what's important then knowledge and and universities are at the top of the list now with startup companies you have to execute too so when you get Capital into the picture uh the everyday counts you know you so you can't have a great product and and wait for a month for something to happen you have to get it working tomorrow the day after so it's the 24 by seven kind of Lifestyle but to do that you have to have the best team possible to so to make it to the top of the team you have to be the best possible so if the CEO is let's say American and the CEO is looking for a chief technology officer and the chief technology officer you know has a background from Pakistan that is not as good hypothetically as an Indian alternative with the background from from IIT then you know the decision is is obvious so absolutely you know if you want to get into the top ranks you have to be best good okay so um now I'm going to open the floor and let's have questions from whoever and of course lots of things still left in my mind so while the mic goes around um you stressed social integration as well and that's absolutely true with that means that means also open-mindedness and way of looking at life however how is it all that important elsewhere in the world as well I mean look at China China's caught up very fast you know and it is a pretty close Society so there seems to be a different model at work over there what can you tell us of the Chinese model perhaps in a little more detail sure sure and and let me make one other quick comment before I get to that and that is that the other way pakistanis and Indians have succeeded is to bridge build with their home countries so the Indians did a fantastic job of bridge building where they have the front company in Silicon Valley and the back office is in India and the Pakistani organizations open is doing an excellent job I think of trying to do the same thing where companies there are offshoring work to Pakistan and there are a number of individuals in open Silicon Valley that are pushing that very effectively so that's that's a very good thing China is such China has State policy um and they have superb universities that they've developed over the years so they've hired the best professors uh that they could have access to from the US and elsewhere to come and teach people the hard sciences and to build up their research capabilities and I don't have an account but I would imagine that the papers that have written they've written in physics mathematics and other engineering disciplines are of a higher quality with every passing year because the um the the the quality of the teaching has been steadily improving over the past 10 to 20 years uh they and and because their state policy has been for a while to independently be be in to be independent and to have Excellence as a goal this is something they've worked towards for a long time and as have the Indians quite Frank and both have been remarkably successful so today for example the the Chinese believe that they can meet their goals for the next 5 10 15 years based on on what they're doing I have questions about that but that's a different issue um before we get to the question one more thing um the U.S and China are in a in a race now on semiconductors and now with um the increase in the number of constraints that China is is facing the hope is that the U.S will be able to maintain and increase its lead what is your view on that will the U.S be able to stop China's growth in the semiconductor industry in I.T and everything associated with it so that's a very difficult question but I let me take a stab at it um the semiconductor industry is global so different parts are done in different parts of the world so you know we all think of Taiwan as being the epicenter of the Leading Edge of semiconductor technology but these chips assembled in Taiwan use equipment from the Netherlands from Japan they use designs from the U.S so hypothetically you know if China took Taiwan tomorrow they wouldn't have anything because the rest of the world would simply stop supplying Taiwan with anything so it's very much a global industry today so that's one observation um the second observation is that um if we talk about the the semiconductor at the lower end of the spectrum where which are not at the Leading Edge China makes lots of those and those go into you know internet of things and some of them go into cars and Equipment of other kinds almost everything we use has semiconductors in it now and they can continue with that part of the market I think what we think of generally when we talk about semiconductors in China versus the US is we're talking about the Leading Edge which has both Commercial and Military applications in terms of staying staying at the top and and that's where the competition is one of the difficulties is that China's success over the last few years has essentially been sponsored by the US so in other words the U.S among other countries uh pushed China into into succeeding so in other words you know we we ordered stuff from China we the sent technology to China did a lot of contracts with China and helped China a lot and now the tide has turned and and a lot of the Western countries are looking at China in in the in the opposite way so it's very difficult to know how much of China's success over the past few years can be extrapolated into the future or whether there is sort of some fundamental issues that they'll come up with and developing your own industry is fine if the world is going to stand still but the world isn't standing still there's a real alignment going and that applies to Pakistan of course as well because you know we I hear discussion about things going on here but the problem is that in the outside world while we are sort of getting our act together them continuing to move ahead as well but but that's a long answer to your question basically to say that it's a it's a tough call but it's a big and growing market and at the at the high end where the competition is the jury is that and at the highest end just one small thing before at the highest end you have Quantum computation and it's as if there is a war effort similar to that of a radar in the second world war which is going on with Quantum computation here in the U.S Quantum computation there in China and he is going to be very important because of code cracking because of other applications where you can simulate molecules and make drugs that will be able to do practically everything because quantum computers can work they can they don't have to they can work thousands and even millions of times faster than classical computers and but that's for the Future Okay so first question hello sir thank you for the insights okay sir a question that uh I really Ponder upon is that uh usually uh Founders take exits from startups like uh we can see uh people like uh Ben hoshways Peter Thiel they uh they built a great product but then uh when the grinding has been done when when they're ready to uh to like solve better problems do more they somehow are interested into the Venture uh type of things so why is that like they they are the the people who have been grinding the most but uh somehow they their interest has been shifted towards uh financing startups and uh be on board rather than doing the core things of problem solving so why we see these Trends in things you know that's a very good question um and um uh I if you've actually done something if you've started a company if you built a company you're in the much better position of evaluating others that are trying to build companies so um if if you actually built one or two or three companies and taken them to exit if you've experienced the real life challenges of trying to get something commercialized trying to get teams together trying to meet deadlines trying to do all the things that it takes to get a startup then then you have a sex sense that develops when you look at a startup so I mentioned to you earlier that I've seen hundreds of companies right so after you've seen a few hundred companies when the next company comes in it doesn't take very long to get a feeling as to what the issues are and if the company has issues you can give positive feedback to help the founders even if you don't invest so you can say well you know this is a great idea but here are one or two things to look at so that's where the positive feedback comes in right but but you also don't waste time with the company that you know you won't invest in so that's why very often you'll see the best Venture capitalists have a background in starting and running companies because they can then leverage that to make better Investments um why don't they keep starting companies some do uh so I mean I have a good friend who's in his 70s uh you know who's still starting companies and and so because they you know it's fun uh in a way so actually in every way so he still has the energy to do it uh others when they get to a certain point they say okay I've started some companies it's really hard work and now I'd like to help others uh who are starting companies so it's a positive next step for somebody who's done something a number of times to then help others do the same thing sorry since you've seen uh countries like China and India grow the startup ecosystem from infancy which is currently in Pakistan so uh apart from a lack of access to funds uh venture capitalist fund uh what are the trends or uh how would this ecosystem emerge in Pakistan what are the missing facets uh currently that uh there are a lot of challenges different challenges that uh although uh the founders who are working they're great they have great Ambitions everything but how would this industry emerge in comparison uh to uh India and China okay well to the good news is they're starting to emerge so there are enough funds right now that are investing in Pakistani startups um and actually this is a good transition from Silicon Valley to what's going on here so the future is encouraging because brain power is everywhere I mean it's in this room uh many of you have great ideas right potentially you could be founders of startups uh and uh so that he doesn't have a monopoly and doesn't want a monopoly so the whole idea is to you know to lift people everywhere there are a number of venture capital funds uh and the funding in Pakistani startups has Excel had accelerated in the last couple of years the other side of the coin is that it has now fallen sharply globally because what happened in the last few years was that interest rates were low there was a lot of liquidity and Venture Capital everywhere in the world was plentiful so a venture capital funds came in and they invested in lots of startups many of which will fail which is okay but now funds are tightening their standards are much higher and it's going to be a lot tougher to raise Venture Capital funding but that's good because that means you'll have to have a better quality startup so you don't waste your time doing something that's not going to work and the venture capitalist that invests in you will have much more time to help you to succeed so um you know I'm sometimes asked you know there are so many layoffs going on at Google and Amazon and so forth you know is is that a is that bad for the technology industry and my reaction is it's terrific it's good news because what happened in the last two or three years is that these four or five technology companies grew a lot and they grew much faster than than they needed to and there's a lot of fat in it and they hired the best people by paying them a lot so if you have somebody who's really good as an engineer or a scientist and Google offers you a lot of money you say yes right so you don't go do a startup because you're working for Google and making a lot of money that way but now people are being laid off so the best people that are being laid off will go start their own companies so from a venture capital point of view this is a great time to invest in companies because people who start new companies are going to be really focused and motivated in fact the best companies get started in downtown so if you look at when Apple got started when Google got started when Amazon got started the time was really tough so Amazon was started I remember the Amazon Roadshow and Jeff Bezos came and it was 2000 and 2001. there had just been a huge crash the.com bubble which some of you may remember and and Venture Capital was really difficult he had a difficult time raising money uh but uh you know so so it's a cyclical thing what appears for um one group of people to be a terrible thing to be laid off which I I would be if I was in the laid off employee is for the industry not not a bad thing because the industry is coming down into the size it needs to be and the best people are now going to have an opportunity to do the work needed to build the next generation of startup companies and you know the next Amazon and the next Google and so on and so forth but this is very provocative yes uh there's a question but I I must ask this what's important is it the progress of an industry making more money more important or is a better Society more important when you lay off people you you you crush their lives look at what this money Elon Musk has done by laying off 50 percent of of Twitter that's criminal that's criminal I mean you've destroyed so many lives by doing that it might be good for his company he makes it makes him the richest man on the planet but damn it what he's done over there is bad what do you say about that I I say uh yes and no if I can come outside so so Twitter never made me money uh Twitter lost money uh over the last few years so here's a company that is vitally important I mean I've used Twitter since the beginning it's lost money so when you have a business that's losing money and it's investors are getting tired of it what do you do you know do you keep feeding it money and it keeps losing it or do you say okay how do I fix it and how do you fix an existing company so that you do just the right thing sometimes you have to you know uh got 50 and then build it back in the right way I don't know Elon Musk and I haven't personally talked to him about his Twitter plans but that's what he seems to be doing I think he's outside his area of expertise so I personally agree with you that what he's doing is probably dysfunctional for Twitter now on the employee side um you're absolutely right I mean it does wake up employees that are fired if they're Junior employees that have just started it might devastate their uh career for a while but it I'm going back to the opportunity part of it and there's a concept in the start of World called creative destruction which I won't go into because it sounds sounds awful but the idea is that if you have a company if you have products you're in markets and if you're comfortable and you do not destroy your own product somebody else will and Intel is a perfect case in point actually because the Intel I worked for had a culture where where they focused in on their own competitiveness and they were the first to destroy their own product in fact I was at Intel when they got out of the memory business which was making a huge amount of money and they got into the microprocessor business which was completely untested and if they'd been wrong the company would have collapsed so they made the very difficult decision of taking a a successful line of business shutting it down and putting all their eggs in a different basket because they figured that what they were doing was going to be obsolete anyway so the the I would I would say that the creative destruction aspect of Silicon Valley is critical in making business decisions and that these Engineers that are working on a product that is not going to be sustainable are better off being on the street looking for a better job ah first thank you um so my question is about some comment you made earlier in the talk um for both of you so what will it take for Pakistani children to get interested in math and physics um and um I mean simpler Solutions not a tectonic shift in education policy hmm that's a question that we really want to see answered and which we see is not even not even being addressed in the present National curriculum which is not oriented towards problem solving or critical thinking which are in fact education they're not a part of Education that is education and so um this then has to be something that parents and students themselves will have to take upon themselves and a few of them very few of them are doing this one tries and helps them as best as possible one tries in one tries to hammer in the point that it makes absolutely no sense to memorize mathematical or physical uh Prince formula what matters is how you look at a problem and how you go about solving it and so look that's your question is how do you turn society around completely like that there's a bad history to this the lack of interest in in science in physics and Mathematics especially is what led to Pakistan becoming pretty much static and and India growing Iran growing and it's so fundamental but but people don't seem to understand it and even people with high degrees and with a liberal Outlook say oh yeah that's yeah yeah we should teach our kids physics math Etc they don't understand that this is really where it where all the strength comes from so it's a that's what that's the challenge I so let me make a comment on that I think the problem is not just Pakistan in the U.S we have the same problem which is that kids are going towards the easier classes so uh a lot of native born Americans you know would prefer to take jobs in marketing and uh and softer areas rather than you know go in for the hard Sciences so if you go to a PhD class at Stanford uh I mean almost everybody will be Indian or Chinese uh I mean I'm exaggerating for effect but a big percentage will be so so so it's it's a problem because it's easier but they belong there already they have the advantage of roots and they have the advantage of family background and and there's a renewal that goes on uh in in Silicon Valley and still in the U.S despite recent issues which is that because it's open to immigrants it's an opportunity for immigrants to excel in math and science and use that as a stepping stone to success and that's what many of the many of the folks from India have done so successfully so in other words you know that's how you get in um and and the U.S welcomes it actually because that's how the US has stayed ahead uh and that's one difference between the U.S and many other countries which is it's it's a country of immigrants now each immigrant group that comes in has to go through hell before they accept it I was when we were in Boston uh you know the Irish were looked down upon uh more recently you know after 9 11 for the last 20 years you know who's had problems and now it's the Chinese in a way so it's it's not it's not one group or the other everybody knew who comes in has a higher bar to clear but that allows them to um to uh to display their excellence and to earn a right to play a part in that country's future which is what they allow you to do so increasingly in politics in the U.S there are more pakistanis and and more uh more Muslim named people coming in because slowly slowly slowly they're coming in and they're taking their role in it now Indians I think about 40 percent of the Fortune 500 have Indian CEOs uh you know the CEO of Google the CEO of Microsoft the X CEO of Pepsi the list goes on and on um and and they've had a head start and they've come in and they've risen to that level because of that focus on technical excellence and and on hard work and on you know getting ahead competitiveness and ambition so that's something that we can quite easily emulate if we choose to and good evening sir thank you so much for telling about the Silicon Valley and what's going on there uh and what's the difference between others my question is maybe a little out of conversation but it is from the conversation as you mentioned about the game theory perspective win-win situation and win low lose situation if we look from economics I don't think that think that there is a win-win situation we may every time you have to lose something if we look from the trade-off perspective or any uh if a perspective of Economics for example if you say that you are going to invest in Silicon Valley then you are trading off from investing in Pakistan and there's like a lot difference what do you think about this um so uh specifically when I mentioned win-win I was referring to um uh to company level activities but I'll address your Silicon Valley versus Pakistan as well so the on the company Level side what investors strive for is an alignment of interests so if they invest in the company they want to make sure that all the employees have plenty of stock so if the company succeeds everybody succeeds so it's not a question of investors coming in writing a check and then expecting to take all the money out and leave the employees iron dry so Intel as an example created lots and lots of millionaires because even the secretaries had stock and the stock went from here to here when the Intel succeeded now in terms of countries I mentioned earlier that there are three levels to the Venture Capital ecosystem what at the upper level there are these large pools where they invest they allocate a small amount of their overall investment to venture capital and within the that they take a global view so they say okay I've got so much to invest in Venture Capital I'll put you know so much in the US so much in Europe uh so much in India so much in Pakistan right and in each case I'll try and get the best companies so there's an allocation mechanism uh at work so the capital that's allocated to Pakistan will reflect the perceived risk of Pakistani companies succeeding and returning Capital to the Venture Capital investor okay ultimately it's an investor and when an investor invests even in Risky areas they expect a certain probability of success and so they have what's called a portfolio which means they have some Investments that are not so risky and some Investments that are risky and they expect to balance out because some of the risky investments will do very well and some of the not so risky investments will fail so investing in the US investing in Pakistan is part of looking at the universe from a portfolio standpoint I don't know if that answers your question but I hope it helps since this session is going streaming live on the black holes Facebook page we have a few questions from our online audience uh in what ways can the government of Pakistan support the growth of the tech industry and create an environment conducive to Innovation and Entrepreneurship an excellent question and I mentioned earlier that I had experience with China and India the government's played a critical role in making sure that the rules and regulations supported Venture Capital Investments and entrepreneurs in the case of china there was a lot of interaction with Silicon Valley and they copied a lot of the approaches that Silicon Valley had taken but they modified it for China in the case of India many Indians from Silicon Valley came to India I know some of them in the 1990s and they worked on the Indian government to change the rules and regulations in the case of Pakistan I know there's active discussion going on to try and make it easier for cross-border companies to get started and to succeed and and to encourage that so the government plays a critical role because venture capital is not is not the same as investing in real estate property or land or in public listed companies it's it's an activity that is essentially a brain power activity as I've mentioned earlier and it it requires a lot of support uh from from the country from the government there are incubation centers by the way that are up and running at places like Lums and elsewhere I mentioned earlier that if you're interested in starting a company uh these incubation centers you know will be very helpful I I believe they'll be very helpful in in providing Direction but the government has a role to play and I can get into some of the technical rules that are involved in making it easier to invest and to repatriate profits that Venture Capital investors would require in order to invest ah but that condition cannot be met presently because oh there are no dollars you can't pay back in dollars is none so hope let's see let's hope this is temporary but we take a long term view we take a long-term view yes and you know the long term view is but it's positive I mean you know they're too this is a large country it's it's by and large has a tradition which is very similar to you know the rest of the subcontinent and when one part is moving ahead the other part you know can can uh you know hopefully the internal issues that you're bringing up can be resolved one has one has to be an optimist is the way I see things okay the next question is what role can Pakistani diaspora communities in Silicon Valley play in fostering connections and Partnerships uh between the two regions they're doing so right now I mentioned earlier the organization of Pakistani entrepreneurs it's a terrific organization it's based in Silicon Valley there are several local chapters there's the chapter in Boston the chapter in Washington Chapter in Dubai chapter I believe in London and active chapters in Islamabad Lahore Karachi and and they you know people go back and forth they have meetings companies that have business models that are cross-border they support those I mentioned earlier about companies that start in Silicon Valley with back Offices here uh you know they they I know companies in Silicon Valley that are uh that are training software Engineers here so that they can be ready to provide services for companies companies over there so there's a lot of very good work being done and I think a lot of a lot of support is a lot of additional support would be welcome to get that to accelerate that I should also mention that that these are Pakistani entrepreneurs entrepreneurs but historically other organizations have helped as well uh so so I think there's a general desire to try and uplift and help as much as possible uh so I think I think entrepreneurs here that are motivated have uh opportunities that they should take Avail themselves off the next question is how can Pakistan balance the need to attract foreign investment and expertise with the goal of developing its own domestic talent and resources uh well um I I think it'll be easier after the current crisis is over and you know hopefully down the road we'll be able to look back at this phase as temporary I mean that has to play a part I think in the near term in terms of attracting foreign but I mean I go back to the diaspora because I I know that the diaspora they are entrepreneurs and they're entrepreneurs here so in the interim while the domestic issues are sorted out there's nothing that is holding back entrepreneurs here and entrepreneurs there from connecting and leveraging the common Bond and history to build companies faster and more efficiently and the government you know has a role to play but it's one of in many cases getting out of the way in other cases supporting the Grassroots training programs that they're already already doing how about that Lums last week and I went went to the uh to the incubation Center there at Mom's an excellent facility very impressive uh and and you know they have several cohorts every year uh and and I don't know if if anybody in this room has has been there but I encourage you and there are others I met somebody who's involved with an incubation facility in Peshawar there's another in Islamabad in Karachi and elsewhere as well so so you know momentum is up and running can you tell us a bit more what's happening in these incubation centers uh I can based on my knowledge but I haven't personally been involved with the companies there but what what happens is that they are so I can tell you what happens in general in information centers because I am an advisor to do some accelerators elsewhere what happens is that you essentially bring in entrepreneurs that have ideas that want to start companies give them some funding give them a place to sit and give them resources and mentorship and advice and encourage them to move ahead with their business idea to the next level and those that get it to the next level are then supported in addition to that level of support a little more money a little more support in terms of the marketing programs or product rollout plans and and then the hope is that as time goes by the the you know it's a funnel so you might start with say you know 10 companies or 20 companies and you may reduce it to half that number and then a quarter of that number but you end up with companies that are really very good and in some instances one hopes world class so these are companies that can that can develop and and that's what incubation the word incubator you know you incubate you kind of big companies open for some specific local examples but you may not be sufficient in your talk you mentioned about uh building a great culture and developing the brain power in within a startup so uh as you review and assess startups for investing in that what are the few key things uh that you look in a startup that should be present internally within the team that are crucial to convince you that it's a good thing good thing well for the first step is uh is knowledge they have to they have to know the space that they are trying to commercialize so let's hypothetically take a startup you know in the area of uh semiconductors since we're talking about that they have to know the space they have to know the competition they have to have world-class individuals as technical Team Heads so that's that's the first step second is they have to have a team so typically a startup has at least two or three people even the very early State startups so you've demonstrated the ability to sell to others so if if you have a Founder you have to at least sell to other world-class people to get them excited so yeah team third they have they have had to put in personal work so when there's a lot of money sitting around I've seen companies be fun based on a business plan and absolutely no product or no work and now in general that has not been the case you have to put in the work you know work if you're working at a regular job work evenings weekends whatever to get to get the ball rolling to to prove that you're committed to it um fourth you you have to you know have a plan uh uh a business plan now A business plan doesn't have to be a 50 page document uh it can be a five-page PowerPoint but you have to have a clear idea of what Market you're going after uh what product you're initially offering in that market how you expect to get the product to the customers in that segment how you expect to do it cost effectively and and how you expect to finance it so initially if you're going to be using money how much you need and how do you know that that's how much you need have you done the research necessary so if you say well you know I'm going to be in the red for a while and then I'll start making money well how do you know so so be on top of top of the data that you're presenting present the right data presented well presented efficiently and be motivated and ready to work hard and have a team that is referenceable ideally you know from universities where their professors if it's if it's a team coming out of a college a college where the professors are willing to vouch for their their work so currently for example I'm working with the university that has an incubation Center this is not here so I couldn't give examples locally but in in Silicon Valley uh and and that's how we do it there I'm also working with uh uh with a university in commercializing faculty IP because one of the things over there is that faculty members engage with startup companies uh so that again there's an alignment of Interest so it's a win-win so if you're a faculty member uh you can be an advisor to a company on The Advisory board so in this case the um University is interested in helping professors commercialize inventions that they've made which is harder than it sounds for a number of reasons but that's another area where they're trying to trying to trying to make it happen uh sir my last question will be uh of a little uh like your preference if you could go back 30 years and you're a 20 year old young man living in Pakistan living living out the nationalism part uh and uh like observing the geopolitics economic conditions and the extremism party within Pakistan what would you suggest you're 20 years old self if you are ambition ambitious to solve uh Global problems to entrepreneurship would you consider uh to to be here within Pakistan and soft problems or would you uh choose to go abroad uh specifically USA well I I would say 30 years ago let's see I think I can't remember that far back can I go back 50. okay I had my 50th reunion at MIT last year so he knows that um uh well I I would say you know you you do the work where you are uh you know being in the different place doesn't solve problems it gives you new opportunities for sure I mean if if you magically were trans you know been from Islam about to Cambridge Massachusetts you know you'd be in a different environment with different opportunities and challenges but there's nothing stopping you from uh there may be something stopping you but I would I would focus on doing the best you can to educate yourself to do the hard work where you are and that's your best bet also to being somewhere else in the future so I mentioned to you that I was fortunate enough that you know I I didn't get to go to go abroad but I had good grades right and I got good scores and uh in fact if I can think about that far back I worked hard uh and you know I worked hard at MIT to get to Stanford so at every step of the way the opportunities you have Here and Now are the ones to focus on so you know they talk about gloss Empty Glass fall uh look at the glass half full so you know when I have conversations here people are constantly good reason talking about the problems we are facing right now uh spend ten percent of your time talking about the problems Focus 90 percent of your time on improving your own personal professional abilities to solve problems locally nationally and internationally because you know some of you may end up solving problems internationally and the world certainly needs problem solvers there are lots of problems that we have both in the country and globally so I would say be optimistic look at look at the opportunities do the best where you are which is right here and that is that will give you the best opportunity to potentially be elsewhere in the future if you so choose okay good uh okay so last question yes hello um I think um much of our attitudes about wealth are rooted in cultural conditioning um so in Pakistan if you look at an average family that consists of people relying on salary jobs there's this perception that Venture capitalists are the other they are some sort of the other community like we tend to otherwise people who are making money from other sources rather than salary jobs so I think my generation who um basically looked at their Elders making money from just single salary jobs let's say during the 80s or 90s and then you know we saw the transition post 2000s where a lot of focus was on multinational corporations where mncs ruled the rooster but then after a few years we saw the startup Boom by the time we um you know figure basically much of our early 20s my early 20s were spent uh figuring out what what is working and what is not working and then by the time we tend to we get inspired to make a conscious decision of getting out of our comfortable careers which were mostly you know um motivated by Family aspirations I think is it like too late to make a conscious decision of switching careers and also because I think someone like in Pakistan people are not you know um inspired to dream big uh so it's very hard to you know change those family patterns and and also because during your late 20s and early 30s maybe a lot of people a lot of people in our Circle have already settled into comfortable careers and have started you know their families but then uh the career that requires uh you to look at problems and solve problems and then you know get connected with um The Venture Capital industry and I think it's very hard what what is your suggestion um for people like me who um you know want to make a conscious um shift from their careers and also want some support from their family so that's another another very good question um let me give you the China example 20 years ago when I was investing in China the best people went to work for multinational corporations that's what parents wanted for their children because multinational companies were coming into China they were offering great jobs great benefits and and they were they offered reliable employment right um then what happened is that some people got involved with the startup ecosystem and they started to be successful and very quickly the mood changed and and and you know people like Jack mosman in the news there are several other people and step by step the feedback loop started to work and you'd be amazed how quickly people notice what's going on so when when you're you're mentioning the cultural aspect I think you know uh I'm I'm as I mentioned by Nature an optimist I think that where Pakistan is is where in this respect China was 20 years ago where you know uh you want your kids to have a stable job and if you have a stable job you want to be able to keep it right I'm not suggesting that anybody with a stable job not have a stable job but I think we will find that stable jobs stable jobs aren't sometimes as stable as they start out as um and uh so it's a tough question to answer I don't I don't want to get specific but I think that these are opportunities and this cultural transformation is something that individuals end up leading the way out of um uh and and I've I've seen this happen in India and China uh where you know the cultural Transformations happened uh you know I I mentioned that earlier on that there were two companies that that sort of helped tell me what I wanted and and what I really liked is that I've never done a job for somebody so I had bosses that asked me you know what should we do and then I said well you know here's what we should do and here's what I want to do so in some sense one of the fun things about about uh well a part of that is that you can have a startup in an established company so in some sense the established company that you're working with is facing uh disruptive change in their environment too with technology and Market shifts move towards the part of that company is that is facing the most stress and be a problem solver whether it's a product whether it's the market and then you'll get a taste of being an entrepreneur within a large company right and and you'll find out for yourself whether you want to be in the safe space within the large company or in the fun part and then if you enjoy helping that large company succeed in their turbulent environment that may help answer your question as to whether you want to go and do a startup because you know not everybody should be doing a startup it takes a certain mindset and it takes takes a certain you know type of person it'll help you to figure out whether you're that type of person inventiveness is scheme let's move on hi my name is Muhammad Ali I'm a law student and I'd like to ask everybody to overlook the Simplicity of my question or if it has already been asked or answered before so we were talking about how people are choosing easier subjects as we move on especially in America marketing I believe it's easier for us to relate to social sciences or human related psychology or you know human behavior subjects so how can we for example in Pakistan starting at a very fundamental level in the earlier years of life for people how can we push them towards exploring more technologically you know yeah those kinds of subjects as you were talking about software engineering and all of that I believe as a personal as my personal experience has been either you're good at math or you're not or you do sizes or not and this is a it's a block you know it's like oh I can't do it it's too difficult for me or I just I'm not Built For This so I I believe we should start earlier so how can we do that well first you should have people come to more TBH events I mean I took a look at what they've done and it's extraordinary I mean you know um but having said that so that's the that's the um but I I a certain example is is what and and motivate and the cultural shift I I you know uh I don't uh have a better answer than that but uh you know perhaps there's this famous book by Daniel Caiman Thinking Fast thinking thinking slow so one part of our brain can do fantastically complicated calculations without us even knowing about it like when you're driving a car I mean when you're driving a car the amount of brain power that is needed is just a way beyond what a super computer can do so even if you have Google driving cars they they wouldn't be able to function in our traffic over here because we need to do much more computation than Google is capable of on the other hand you do simple math you know like uh divide two numbers by each other and and use use or multiply two and use your mind goes very very slowly although a computer can do it like that okay now there's the easy part there's the hard part the hard part you learn when you're in school at the age of five six seven eight Etc you know what the two in our schools is Criminal foreign so we got to start very early which means you've got to convince society that this is important and instead of kids learning on their own when they have to foreign a kid in school would probably not be able to do that so we have that innate intelligence the question and how do you focus it in formalize it then go to the next stage and the next stage because see physics math is math just builds from the foundations up and up and up and then it becomes more and more abstract until at some point it becomes totally disconnected with the world and but that's not a bad thing you just go to higher levels of abstraction no no it's necessary it's necessary yeah but we have to wrap up very soon what you're talking about like the um the how we should feel math or physics or science like we do while we're driving like we don't have to consciously think about making a decision it's just reflex how could we uh in integrate that into education because now education is just like you know like a horse with blinders people are going universities even you're going from assignment to assignment exam to exam and you're just going through you don't want to actually learn or I don't know maybe there's and stop being taught as well so what can we do to to change that or what can we input into the you know I'm a very old-fashioned person and I still believe in exams and I think there should be exams but they should be very good exams and the exams that have questions that that challenge you yes Beyond yourself just just a little bit beyond yourself so that you keep trying and trying and trying expanding expanding but don't leave kids without exams no I'm totally up for exams would be like a way to test your knowledge or your practical skills but if we're just focused focused on passing the exams yeah it's so the the inner motivation where does it come where's your inner motivation and that calls for a different mindset this universe why does it work why does why is the sky blue why is water wet sometimes and sometimes it's not wet you can no it's not innate it it is it is it is innate um but it has to be nurtured it has to be nurtured and it gets less with time and you can see it in cats especially they're very curious they go into every part of the house when they get old they say we've seen it all yes thank you I just wanted to share something on the question of incubation centers uh that previous asked uh there are multiple incubation centers in Islamabad Nic National incubation Center and almost every University now is having uh incubation Center I'm currently in two of universities and Islamic International and they both are they have incubation centers and the Nic they also organize uh uh coffee uh Founders coffee Club every month so anyone who is interested in startup or building something so he can join uh this as uh like we are joining in uh here the black hole so it's open but tell us a little more um do people come up with inventions ideas no they don't they don't well so so if I can continue so you mentioned these incubation centers and you know I intend next time I'm back to spend more time with some of the companies in the incubation centers and and I understand that in the early stages their ideas and you know many times they don't get very far perhaps but that's I think we have to be fairly um generous with ourselves you know it takes time it takes time so I think if there's an investment in these activities people's mindset changes so they see the opportunities even if they aren't quite ready right now they may be ready next time or they may encourage others to be readier than they were when they approach these centers so I think it may take a few sessions or a few years but I'm delighted to hear that you're in a couple of these centers and I hope your experience has been good because this is the kind of investment that is needed to stimulate the innovative Asian and to encourage people to think for themselves of careers that are outside sort of the regimented Alternatives yeah but it depends on people when they are ready and I'm also looking for a co-founder uh if anyone uh in uh these people he's having uh some expertise in technical aspect uh I.T background actually I'm having a business background and religious studies I have all my background so if anyone interested in starting a company we can contact with each other thank you so much thank you everyone thank you for being here thank you Faro we've had a very good discussion [Music]

Channel: The Black Hole

Views: 40,015

Keywords: The Black Hole, The Black Hole Islamabad, TBH, TBH Islamabad, Education, Knowledge, Science, Art, Culture, Silicon Valley, Technology, Faruq Ahmad, Pervez Hoodbhoy, Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy, Hoodbhoy, Pervez Hoodbhoy lectures, Venture Capital Investment, Venture Capital Investor

Id: om4XfiGBWzQ

Length: 104min 6sec (6246 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 05 2023