Following a 9-year uninterrupted bull run, the stock market faces a major correction caused by COVID-19 prevention measures and panic. With markets falling, is investing in startups sane? Living and working in Hong Kong, I’ve had a front-row seat to
Why We’re Not Leaving Hong Kong Amidst the Wuhan Novel Coronavirus Outbreak
At the time of this writing, the Novel Coronavirus outbreak is still in its early days and could soon become a global pandemic. Its exponential growth continues in China and has now spread to 28 countries. It can be transmitted
Drought: Anticipating A Parched Future
In May, 2019 a close family friend who I’ll call Auntie N (to protect her privacy), was, in her beautiful Connecticut home, deeply distraught. “Extremely Severe Cyclonic Storm Fani” (that’s what Wikipedia calls it) had just struck Odisha, India, where her
New Decade, New Domain Name
When I first launched this blog in July 2010 (with a post on the value of a plan), I used my full name because I wanted to control what people saw first when they googled my name. A search for
What Are Unit Economics?
Unit economics are the direct revenues and costs associated with a business on a per-unit basis. The unit economics of a shirt, for a fashion company, for example, relate to the all the costs of making it, the costs of
Notes from Dhaka: Bad Air
Air pollution has now been a daily fact of life in Asia for over 20 years, with a permanent brown-tinted haze doming entire cities and blotting out blue skies and sunshine on most days. My frequent travel to Dhaka gives me
How You Can Build A Smarter Team In 2 Days
Some teams are better at decision-making than others, and groups of smart people are just as capable of making bad decisions as groups of less smart people. But what drives those differences has been a mystery until the relatively recent
Earth Is Burning And You’re Working On What?
The Paris Climate Agreement aimed to avoid a “catastrophic” 2ºC increase in global temperatures. We have just a decade left to cut current carbon emissions by half, and unfortunately we are nowhere near achieving this goal. Here’s what happens if we
How CEOs Can Create Instability & Anxiety
The most common challenge for a startup CEO is to stay focused. This is especially true in early days, before a company has found product-market fit, when the CEO expresses insecurities about their business with endless experimentation. More moving parts
Will Asian Industrialists Survive Disruption?
Over the past 30 years, globalization transformed sleepy, agrarian economies like Malaysia, Bangladesh and Vietnam into specialized industrial economies, and in the process birthed powerful family-run conglomerates. Today these industrialists face multiple challenges: succession to the next generation, domestic and