OPEN Forum 2012 in Silicon Valley
Hundreds of Pakistani-American entrepreneurs met on Saturday, June 2, 2012 at Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum for this year's annual conference called OPEN Forum held each summer. It's organized by the Organization of Pakistani-American Entrepreneurs (OPEN) in Silicon Valley. The conference had a large number of sponsors, including dozens of
Silicon Valley companies founded or managed by Pakistani-Americans.
Successful social entrepreneur Salman Khan of Khan Academy was the keynote speaker. There were also a number of parallel tracks on various topics of interest to the community. Panelists included venture capitalists, business executives, entrepreneurs, engineers, lawyers, scientists, editors and reporters. I am sharing with my readers some of the highlights of the key sessions that I personally found interesting.
Photo by Ali Hasan Cemendtaur
INVESTMENT CLIMATE IN PAKISTAN – DO THE RETURNS OFFSET THE PERCEIVED RISKS?
It was moderated by Stephen West, Deputy Bureau Chief & Editor Bloomberg News, and included Sarfaraz Ahmed Rehman, CEO The Dawood Foundation, Junaid Qureshi, CEO, SSJD Group, Javed Hamid, Sr. MD, International Executive Service Corps, Former World Bank, Founder, LUMs and Naveed Sherwani, President & CEO at Open-Silicon as panelists. Sarfaraz Ahmed Rehman represented Dawood Group includes Pakistani conglomerate Engro with multiple businesses ranging from consumer products to fertilizer and energy. Rehman talked about annual growth of as much as 45% per year in some of the product categories in Dawood's consumer product sales and profits. He said other consumer giants like Unilever Pakistan, Colgate-Palmolive and Nestle Pakistan are experiencing similar rapid growth as well. All of these companies are investing heavily to expand their FMCG offerings in Pakistan.
Naveed Sherwani of Silicon Valley based OpenSilicon talked about his reasons for setting up his company's chip design centers in Lahore and Islamabad by hiring 67 Pakistani design engineers. Sherwani said OpenSilicon considered adding staff at their existing design center in Bangalore, India and also considered Shanghai, China for expansion before choosing Pakistan. The key reasons include availability of top talent, lower turn-over and lower costs in Lahore and Islamabad. Comparing turn-over, he said it's about 15% in Pakistan versus 30% in India. Answering a question on power outages and security concerns, he said both are manageable. Stand-by generators alleviate the problems caused by load shedding. And, being a frequent visitor to Pakistan, he feels quite safe there.
GAME CHANGERS TELL ALL: “WORK? PLAY? THERE’S AN APP FOR THAT"
The panel was moderated by Umair Khan, CEO, SecretBuilders; Chairman, Folio3; Venture Partner, Entrepreneurs’ Fund and included Joe Robinson: Product Lead, Square, Charles Huang: CEO Blue Goji; co-founder Red Octane (Guitar Hero), Zia Yusuf: CEO Streetline; former EVP SAP, Robert Martyn: Studio GM, Zynga; Executive Producer of SIMS, SimCity at EA, Omar Siddiqui: CEO Kiwi; former VP Playdom (Disney) as panelists.
The mobile apps market has exploded from almost zero to nearly $3 billion within just a few years as smartphones and tablets have become ubiquitous. Panelists represented a range of apps from gaming and social media to an application that allows people to find a parking spot while enabling the cities to raise their parking revenues. The key question was how can developers effectively market their apps in such a crowded space. Zia quipped "Get Ashton Kutcher", referring to the use of celebrities to get attention. Another panelist suggested turning to new niches such as fitness and cycling to get a slice of the action by offering a piece of specialized hardware along with the application. One suggestion was to sell a hard-shell case for the mobile device and offer free download of a useful application for cyclists.
SALMAN KHAN'S KEYNOTE:
Defying tradition, Salman Khan chose an interview style format with Bay Area Journalist Thuy Vu who introduced Khan and played a CBS 60 Minutes segment on Khan Academy.
Thuy began by asking Khan if he was still recording his videos in his closet, and Khan said "No, I have come out of closet". Then he proceeded to offer to pay "market rate" for larger office; studio space in Palo Alto for Khan Academy.
In answer to a question about being "teacher to the world" in Bill Gates' words, Khan said he is aware that English language limits his ability to justify that title. He is working on broadening access to his tutorials in many parts of the world through translations in multiple languages ranging from Mongolian to Urdu. He showed a video clip of such translations.
Khan said the ubiquity and price declines of connected tablets make them ideal devices for watching and learning from his videos. With twenty students sharing a $100 tablet, the cost is only $5 per student, he said. In developing nations where electricity and Intranet infrastructure is not available everywhere, he supports the use of Internet cafes or off-line learning through kiosks supporting DVDs. He is prepared to license his video contents at no-cost for non-profit organizations seeking to educate the poor and the disadvantaged.
SUMMARY:
The conference was put together well by OPEN President Moazzam Chaudhry and his team. It provided a great opportunity for Pakistani-Americans to meet each other and learn about start-up opportunities and current entrepreneurial endeavors of the community members in Silicon Valley and Pakistan. I believe the conference clearly succeeded in its immediate objective of bringing aspiring entrepreneurs of Pakistani origin together with many investors and mentors in Silicon Valley, informing the audience and stimulating discussion of new ideas and opportunities, and educating the speakers and the attendees. But its real impact won't be apparent until there is a significant critical mass with many more successful Pakistani entrepreneurs inspired by what they saw and heard at OPEN Forum 2012.
Acknowledgement: Asghar Aboobaker and Ali Hasan Cemendtaur contributed to this report. Photo taken by Ali Hasan Cemendtaur.
Related Links:
Haq's Musings
FMCG Profits in Pakistan
Pakistani-American Entrepreneurs Catch the Wave
Khan Academy Draws Pakistani Visitors
Minorities are Majority in Silicon Valley
Pakistani-American's Game-Changing Vision
US Firms Adding Jobs Overseas
Pakistan's Demographic Dividend
Pakistanis Study Abroad
Pakistan's Youth Bulge
Pakistani Diaspora World's 7th Largest
Pakistani-American NFL Team Owner
Pakistani-American Entrepreneurs Catch the Wave
Pakistani Graduation Rate Higher Than India's
Successful social entrepreneur Salman Khan of Khan Academy was the keynote speaker. There were also a number of parallel tracks on various topics of interest to the community. Panelists included venture capitalists, business executives, entrepreneurs, engineers, lawyers, scientists, editors and reporters. I am sharing with my readers some of the highlights of the key sessions that I personally found interesting.
Photo by Ali Hasan Cemendtaur
INVESTMENT CLIMATE IN PAKISTAN – DO THE RETURNS OFFSET THE PERCEIVED RISKS?
It was moderated by Stephen West, Deputy Bureau Chief & Editor Bloomberg News, and included Sarfaraz Ahmed Rehman, CEO The Dawood Foundation, Junaid Qureshi, CEO, SSJD Group, Javed Hamid, Sr. MD, International Executive Service Corps, Former World Bank, Founder, LUMs and Naveed Sherwani, President & CEO at Open-Silicon as panelists. Sarfaraz Ahmed Rehman represented Dawood Group includes Pakistani conglomerate Engro with multiple businesses ranging from consumer products to fertilizer and energy. Rehman talked about annual growth of as much as 45% per year in some of the product categories in Dawood's consumer product sales and profits. He said other consumer giants like Unilever Pakistan, Colgate-Palmolive and Nestle Pakistan are experiencing similar rapid growth as well. All of these companies are investing heavily to expand their FMCG offerings in Pakistan.
Naveed Sherwani of Silicon Valley based OpenSilicon talked about his reasons for setting up his company's chip design centers in Lahore and Islamabad by hiring 67 Pakistani design engineers. Sherwani said OpenSilicon considered adding staff at their existing design center in Bangalore, India and also considered Shanghai, China for expansion before choosing Pakistan. The key reasons include availability of top talent, lower turn-over and lower costs in Lahore and Islamabad. Comparing turn-over, he said it's about 15% in Pakistan versus 30% in India. Answering a question on power outages and security concerns, he said both are manageable. Stand-by generators alleviate the problems caused by load shedding. And, being a frequent visitor to Pakistan, he feels quite safe there.
GAME CHANGERS TELL ALL: “WORK? PLAY? THERE’S AN APP FOR THAT"
The panel was moderated by Umair Khan, CEO, SecretBuilders; Chairman, Folio3; Venture Partner, Entrepreneurs’ Fund and included Joe Robinson: Product Lead, Square, Charles Huang: CEO Blue Goji; co-founder Red Octane (Guitar Hero), Zia Yusuf: CEO Streetline; former EVP SAP, Robert Martyn: Studio GM, Zynga; Executive Producer of SIMS, SimCity at EA, Omar Siddiqui: CEO Kiwi; former VP Playdom (Disney) as panelists.
The mobile apps market has exploded from almost zero to nearly $3 billion within just a few years as smartphones and tablets have become ubiquitous. Panelists represented a range of apps from gaming and social media to an application that allows people to find a parking spot while enabling the cities to raise their parking revenues. The key question was how can developers effectively market their apps in such a crowded space. Zia quipped "Get Ashton Kutcher", referring to the use of celebrities to get attention. Another panelist suggested turning to new niches such as fitness and cycling to get a slice of the action by offering a piece of specialized hardware along with the application. One suggestion was to sell a hard-shell case for the mobile device and offer free download of a useful application for cyclists.
SALMAN KHAN'S KEYNOTE:
Defying tradition, Salman Khan chose an interview style format with Bay Area Journalist Thuy Vu who introduced Khan and played a CBS 60 Minutes segment on Khan Academy.
Thuy began by asking Khan if he was still recording his videos in his closet, and Khan said "No, I have come out of closet". Then he proceeded to offer to pay "market rate" for larger office; studio space in Palo Alto for Khan Academy.
In answer to a question about being "teacher to the world" in Bill Gates' words, Khan said he is aware that English language limits his ability to justify that title. He is working on broadening access to his tutorials in many parts of the world through translations in multiple languages ranging from Mongolian to Urdu. He showed a video clip of such translations.
Khan said the ubiquity and price declines of connected tablets make them ideal devices for watching and learning from his videos. With twenty students sharing a $100 tablet, the cost is only $5 per student, he said. In developing nations where electricity and Intranet infrastructure is not available everywhere, he supports the use of Internet cafes or off-line learning through kiosks supporting DVDs. He is prepared to license his video contents at no-cost for non-profit organizations seeking to educate the poor and the disadvantaged.
SUMMARY:
The conference was put together well by OPEN President Moazzam Chaudhry and his team. It provided a great opportunity for Pakistani-Americans to meet each other and learn about start-up opportunities and current entrepreneurial endeavors of the community members in Silicon Valley and Pakistan. I believe the conference clearly succeeded in its immediate objective of bringing aspiring entrepreneurs of Pakistani origin together with many investors and mentors in Silicon Valley, informing the audience and stimulating discussion of new ideas and opportunities, and educating the speakers and the attendees. But its real impact won't be apparent until there is a significant critical mass with many more successful Pakistani entrepreneurs inspired by what they saw and heard at OPEN Forum 2012.
Acknowledgement: Asghar Aboobaker and Ali Hasan Cemendtaur contributed to this report. Photo taken by Ali Hasan Cemendtaur.
Related Links:
Haq's Musings
FMCG Profits in Pakistan
Pakistani-American Entrepreneurs Catch the Wave
Khan Academy Draws Pakistani Visitors
Minorities are Majority in Silicon Valley
Pakistani-American's Game-Changing Vision
US Firms Adding Jobs Overseas
Pakistan's Demographic Dividend
Pakistanis Study Abroad
Pakistan's Youth Bulge
Pakistani Diaspora World's 7th Largest
Pakistani-American NFL Team Owner
Pakistani-American Entrepreneurs Catch the Wave
Pakistani Graduation Rate Higher Than India's
Comments
With Pakistan so much in the news for the above (negative) reasons it is no surprise that few fund managers have set up single country Pakistan funds.
However, newly established Swedish fund manager, Tundra Fonder, was determined to look beyond the headlines.
Tundra was founded in September last year by partners Johan Elmquist and Mattias Martinsson. By October the group had launched its first funds, one investing in Russia and the other in Pakistan. In February Tundra unveiled a third offering: the Global Emerging Markets Agri & Food Fund.
Launching Tundra Pakistanfond was a particular ambition for Mr Martinsson, the fund’s lead manager, who had formed a personal conviction in the country’s growth story. Even he has been taken by surprise, however, by how well things have gone. By last month, Mr Martinsson says, he and Mr Elmquist had noticed an extraordinary thing – the Tundra Pakistan fund was on top of the most clicked list, “Mest clickade fonder ” on the Swedish version of Morningstar, the fund news and data provider.
Investors have not only been clicking. They have been investing too. “We currently have approximately $65m in assets under management of which a little bit more than $50m right now is in the Pakistan fund,” says Mr Martinsson.
Early investors have already been rewarded. By May 31, year-to-date returns were 27.9 per cent, according to Morningstar.
Mr Martinsson says the strong inflows into Tundra’s Pakistan fund could be due to the structure being something that investors can understand and trust – it is Ucits IV compliant and open for daily trading. A buoyant period for Pakistan’s stock market (the KSE 100 has risen more than 20 per cent since January 1) might also have been helpful. But these factors cannot explain the whole story. The World Investment Oppportunities Funds – Pakistan, a Luxembourg registered Sicav still has only $1.75m in assets under management and it launched in 2008.
www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/76092248-af06-11e1-a8a7-00144feabdc0.html
The launching ceremony of Ipsos, Pakistan was held at a local hotel of the city on Tuesday, hosting over 200 representatives of leading companies in Pakistan. The participants included CEOs, marketing and research heads of national and multinational companies from the FMCG and services sectors.
The chief guest of the event was the global founder and co-president of Ispos, Didier Truchot. He was accompanied by the chairman and CEO of Ipsos MENA, Edouard Monin and Global Group CFO Laurence Stoclet. While foreign investors are usually reluctant about investing in Pakistan, the launch of Ipsos in the country denotes the trust of the group’s stakeholders in the potential of marketing research business in Pakistan.
Didier Truchot said that he had high hopes for tapping the tremendous potential of the research industry in Pakistan owing to immense demographic dividends of the resource-rich country. “Ipsos believes in imparting knowledge and expertise across various countries it is working in. Our global presence gels in with the locally intelligent need gap assessment and deliverance of services accordingly. I am happy that Ipsos has already been well-received in Pakistan and is a critically acclaimed research company in terms of its futuristic and client-driven approach.” Ipsos co-president said that the success story narrated by Ipsos across the globe is the result of a vision held by sound intellectual deeds of professional researchers. “Ipsos is owned and run by researchers and this fact speaks volumes for its intellectual and professional supremacy over other competitors in Pakistan.”
Ipsos Pakistan is headed by Abdul Sattar Babar, a researcher. During his inaugural speech, he said: “This is a moment of pride for us that Ipsos is formally announcing its anchoring in Pakistan. I am happy that our global co-president made it to Pakistan to attend this event and his presence ensures transfer of knowledge and technology in a wide range of marketing research services that are not fully developed in Pakistan. Ipsos Pakistan is all geared up to make a headway in the industry based on trust, which certain clients had already conferred on us even prior to this formal launch.”
http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-3-114091-World%20s-3rd-largest-marketing-company-anchors-in-Pakistan
For the first time, the influx of Asians moving to the U.S. has surpassed that of Hispanics, reflecting a slowdown in illegal immigration while American employers increase their demand for high-skilled workers.
An expansive study by the Pew Research Center details what it describes as "the rise of Asian-Americans," a highly diverse and fast-growing group making up roughly 5 percent of the U.S. population. Mostly foreign-born and naturalized citizens, their numbers have been boosted by increases in visas granted to specialized workers and to wealthy investors as the U.S. economy becomes driven less by manufacturing and more by technology.
"Too often the policy debates on immigration fixate on just one part — illegal immigration," said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a political science professor at the University of California-Riverside and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "U.S. immigration is more diverse and broader than that, with policy that needs to focus also on high-skilled workers."
"With net migration from Mexico now at zero, the role of Asian-Americans has become more important," he said.
About 430,000 Asians, or 36 percent of all new immigrants, arrived in the U.S. in 2010, according to the latest census data. That's compared to about 370,000, or 31 percent, who were Hispanic.
The Pew analysis, released Tuesday, said the tipping point for Asian immigrants likely occurred during 2009 as illegal immigrants crossing the border from Mexico sharply declined due to increased immigration enforcement and a dwindling supply of low-wage work in the weak U.S. economy. Many Mexicans already in the U.S. have also been heading back to their country, putting recent net migration at a standstill.
As recently as 2007, about 390,000 of new immigrants to the U.S. were Asian, compared to 540,000 who were Hispanic.
The shift to increased Asian immigration, particularly of people from India, China and South Korea, coincides with changes in U.S. immigration policy dating to the 1990s that began to favor wealthy and educated workers. The policy, still in place but subject to caps that have created waiting lists, fast tracks visas for foreigners willing to invest at least half a million dollars in U.S. businesses or for workers in high-tech and other specialized fields who have at least a bachelor's degree.
International students studying at U.S. colleges and universities also are now most likely to come from Asian countries, roughly 6 in 10, and some of them are able to live and work in the U.S. after graduation. Asian students, both foreign born and U.S. born, earned 45 percent of all engineering Ph.D.s in 2010, as well as 38 percent of doctorates in math and computer sciences and 33 percent of doctorates in the physical sciences.
Several bills pending in Congress that are backed by U.S. businesses seek to address some of the visa backlogs, through measures such as eliminating per-country limits on employment-based visas or encouraging investment in the sluggish U.S. real estate market. They have stalled amid broader public debate over immigration reform that has focused largely on lower-skilled, undocumented workers.
In recent years, more than 60 percent of Asian immigrants ages 25 to 64 have graduated from college, double the share for new arrivals from other continents.
As a whole, the share of higher-skilled immigrants in the U.S. holding at least a bachelor's degree now outpaces those lacking a high-school diploma, 30 percent to 28 percent.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gvrz95hHkumwJFCd0qSKKG4_QHPA?docId=df96a819a41043a98ae7299a3f287122