Category: About Me

As we come to the end of 2022, it’s time for me to look back and reflect on the past year. I have had plenty of highs and lows across the year. But that is not specific to 2022. It’s specific to life – which is full of highs and lows. As long as the highs outnumber the lows, it is a life well spent.

The year started with my younger brother’s wedding. He has been an introvert all his life so I really didn’t know what to expect. However, it gives me great joy as I look back and see how they have evolved together as a couple.

2022, unfortunately, also had a difficult health scare for my family. In February, my father suffered from subarachnoid hemorrhage. It is nothing short of a miracle that not only did he recover, he recovered well. We feel grateful that he has been given another life. It has reinforced my belief that life is fragile and true happiness stems from spending moments with family & friends. My friends & family took this opportunity to put together a small fund to help brain hemorrhage patients in Pakistan.

Later in the year, my father in law was involved in a hit and run accident in Lahore. He sustained brain injuries and unfortunately didn’t live. In addition to lessons on life’s fragility, it was a reminder of a sustained failing law & justice system in Pakistan.

Mid year, I travelled to three countries including Qatar, Turkey & Georgia and ended up moving to Georgia to give a shot to digital nomad lifestyle that I’ve written about several times on this blog.

Some parts of this lifestyle are great; e.g higher standard of living for a low cost. And some parts just outright suck; being alone in a city with very little Pakistani expat community. Moreover it is hard for friends & family to visit me here as the visa policies are somewhat non-existent for Pakistanis. Despite that, a few of my friends did come to see me here from Pakistan and hence I’m bullish on friendships.

As I wasn’t as social in Georgia as I was in Pakistan, I had more time available. I took some short courses on financial markets. I’m really excited to have learnt more about the things I’m passionate about. I also had a wonderful time home-schooling and bonding with my children. My daughter has really connected with me during this period and has worked on several projects that she wouldn’t have had in a traditional school environment.

Financially, the year started off very lucratively for me. I had big crypto wins, mostly out of luck. A fund delayed my withdrawal due to liquidity issues, and paid a few months later at the market top instead. If you don’t believe in luck or randomness, you should start doing that.

Everything is usually random. Those who know this have learnt to spread their wings wide enough to provide themselves with a higher probability of catching something out of sheer luck.

It was a tough year for financial markets with S&P500 closing ~20% below where it started the year from. Private markets, crypto etc have done even worse. Naturally my portfolio is affected also just as much as everyone else’s. But I’m a long-term optimist in these assets and continue to average in as the discounts get deeper. I plan to continue to deploy more funds over 2023. I have acquired more SaaS businesses along-side Saad. I have continued to write more micro-checks in a large number of startups. My plan with startups is similar to my understanding of concept of randomness i-e to write equal-sized micro-checks to a large number of companies spread over several years to capture the luck & randomness that the life offers.

I’m very close to my plan of achieving a financial state where my assets grow just enough to a) pay for my life b) and still not decrease in value after adjusting for inflation. I’m not there yet, but I see more and more signs that a self-sustainable flywheel can be a possibility.

While spending some time in Kazbegi, I learnt how to start a campfire just with an axe and a lighter which seemed really simple on YouTube but was a lot of work in real life especially in a freezing weather. As I was learning how to light a campfire, SBF was pulling the rug underneath me and others. FTX scammed customers out of $8 billion dollars and I lost some funds too which were held at the platform. Saad kept calling me to tell me how grave the situation was, but it was too late to do anything, so I enjoyed the fire instead.

My wife always wanted to spend a full winter holiday season in a country that celebrates it to the fullest. As orthodox Christians, Georgians really celebrate the season quite unlike anyone else. And she had the blast of her life doing that.

I end this year as well as this blog with gratefulness. For the opportunity to do more things. For the luck. For family. For friends.

It’s been over 4 years since I transitioned out of my digital marketing career and I’ve spent a lot of time asking myself why I’ve done the things I’ve done which included being less involved & less excited about a well paying well established business and letting it gradually slip away.

While I was doing it, I didn’t know exactly why I was doing it, I just knew it had to be done. After years of introspection, trying to collect my thoughts to understand myself better, I think I’ve a little bit idea of why I chose that path.

My business and everything I was building felt like a game to me. The income/profits were points and I loved seeing my scorecard grow. As I got good at the game, setting a newer high score became more accessible, and less exciting. So I probably ended up changing the difficulty mode to hard i-e a painful career switch leaving most my leverage behind and starting over again.

I think I’m excited to try to rebuild. I’m earning much smaller game-points but excited to see the scorecard go up again from 0. I think I will be very excited when I break my previous high score on this new difficulty level.

2020 certainly wasn’t an exciting year for me. A lot happened contrary to how it was planned. But I’m still grateful to be alive, to have friends and family around me, and to have food on the table. We have lost more than 1.8 million people to the pandemic so far and during these times if you still have your family with you thats really something to be grateful for.

Me and my family haven’t contracted the virus (yet) and I’m thankful for that.

I started the year by picking up pieces of me to restart a dropshipping business. Since dropshipping for me has been a plug and play business, it made the most sense to me to start from there. It is something I can start & stop abruptly. The business saw supply-side disruption as soon as I started it due to the surge of COVID-19 cases in China. This caused delays in shipments from China leaving unhappy users. As the operations in China started to normalize, the rest of the world started contracting the virus and hence shipping was disrupted pretty much everywhere in the world. Air-shipping became as slow as ocean-shipping while it continued to cost even more than before. Although the stores were profitable, I soon paused the campaigns due to inferior customer experience.

In February I was lucky to travel outside of Pakistan for a small vacation. I’m glad we were able to do that just in time right before the world went into the lockdown. I’m grateful for this.

When Pakistan saw it’s first COVID-19 wave and the country went into lockdown, we spent nearly 3 months at home. We stopped ordering food and started cooking at home 100% of the time. This resulted in some unsatisfied cravings which pushed us to start cooking and baking things we never usually did. We baked quite a few pizzas at home. Despite the adversity, we tried making the best of it.

I spent majority of the year making predictions and bets regarding where to invest the money. I quite suck at investing, but continue to do it despite losing money. I hope that I’ll learn something valuable before running out of funds to try things with.

In March, we saw liquidity crisis hitting all sorts of markets. US stock market crashed by over 40%, while Bitcoin crashed by up-to 70%. Soon the Fed took control, and injected 2 trillion dollars in the market, and another trillion before the year ended. The interest rates were also dropped to near 0%. This set the perfect stage for Bitcoin which I’ve been vocal about through-out the year, but even more so since the Fed decided to QE.

2020 has been the year of Bitcoin because until 2020, Bitcoin seemed like a solution looking for a problem to a large part of the world. In developed countries the state issued currencies are mostly viewed as stable, and inflation is usually lower single digit. But in Pakistan or Turkey or many other parts of the world, Bitcoin was at all time high (in Pak Rupee or Turkish Lira) long before it was at an all time high in the rest of the world. For countries where the state backed currencies are losing purchasing power quickly, and inflation is double digits or even triple digits, Bitcoin as a solution is a no-brainer. However, 2020 allowed the west to see through from this lens too. With growing supply of USD vs fixed supply of Bitcoin, it is becoming clear to a lot of people that they can no longer store their wealth in state backed currencies.

Despite being right about Bitcoin, I failed to capitalize as much as I would have liked to due to some unexpected circumstances which caused me to lose some part of my holdings. This makes me incredibly sad but I’m trying to stay positive because the future is bright. And while I know I’ll miss out big time on the kind of gains I expected, I feel given the amount of upside that’s still left for Bitcoin, every HODLer of $BTC will do just fine.

I and Saad also bought equity in a few Shopify apps in Q1. Since this was done right before the pandemic, and COVID-19 pushed the e-commerce adoption through the roof, we saw unparalleled growth and capital gains for our equity in the Shopify apps. I’m happy about this one.

I was also lucky to catch March’s dip for the stocks and happy to build some albeit small position.

I have also written quite a few extremely small checks for early stage companies in the seed round. I expect this to be extremely illiquid long-term investment, which will likely not result in substantial gains. Or even losses. I know this. But how do I learn if I don’t try. I also did this because stock market didn’t present me a long enough opportunity to build a substantial position. And as stock market quickly recovered and posted new highs, I thought to allocate some funds towards super early stage startups instead. You can be wrong majority of the times about early stage startups, but you usually do not have to worry about valuations being outrageous.

Over the last couple of years, I’m trying to transition to make 100% of the income by investing. It hasn’t worked out so well because for everything I get right, there’s one I get wrong. And so I take 1 step forward and 1 step backwards. In the end I feel I’m quite right there where I started from. But may be slightly wiser. I hope this to change. I hope to do well with investing, and I hope to become a lot more wiser. And I hope not to pay a hefty fine to do that.

I prefer investing to spending, but if I have to spend I prefer spending on intangibles compared to toys. This usually means that we like to spend a big portion of our annual budget on travel which we couldn’t do big time this year. This resulted in some additional savings which I felt like spending in the last quarter on buying things for the house. I almost became a shopping addict in the last quarter and slowly regaining sanity.

2020 has been one step forward and one step backwards for me. 2020 felt like I couldn’t move. Both, physically due to COVID-19 and professionally due to setbacks.

But I’m thankful even if I felt I couldn’t move. It is a lot better than falling down, losing a loved one, an income source, a job etc. A lot of people have gone through that (and more). Years like this present an opportunity to reflect and be grateful for everything you have. Despite being a stagnant year, I have countless blessings that continue to grow. And I want to continue to be thankful for that.

I have written for 240 days now. In hindsight, I think I could have taken the weekends off instead of writing everyday. But I’ve always been indisciplined like that. Or disciplined, I’m not so sure. Indisciplined because I never have a balance in my life. And too disciplined to always focus on a singular goal.

I remember when I worked full-time, I couldn’t have gone through a single day without achieving something. Almost addicted to progress like a substance user. Over time, I thought I stopped doing that. I thought I stopped running after singular goals and giving everything to them. But I was wrong.

I started to write for therapeutic reasons. But by setting a streak, I fell into my old habits before I even began. I was still serving my old self that couldn’t have gone through a single day without progress. I was still doing it to feed my ego. Sure, I wanted to prove by example how progress is made. I felt that It’s great to help others and lead by example. But when you satisfy your ego along the way, you’ve already lost the plot. I honestly can’t say that along the way, I didn’t hope for readership, distribution and appreciation.

I read this wonderful piece on New York times. I read it again and again and many times over to fully absorb it. Despite being a small article, I found it be way more enlightening than many books I had read.

It’s about the two mountains some people climb. And what these mountains represent. The valley in between. And what the valley can do to you, or what you should do while in the valley.

I encourage you to read the original piece. Although every sentence resonated with me, here are some of my favorite excerpts.

The first mountain is about acquisition, the second mountain is about contribution. The first mountain is about building up the ego and defining the self, the second is about shedding the ego

And the following just hit me like nothing has hit me in a really long time.

Freedom is not an ocean you want to swim in; it is a river you want to cross so that you can plant yourself on the other side.

I know that I’m in the valley right now. In between the mountains. Or the ocean that I’ve been swimming in for a long while.

Life could only be meaningful with a second mountain. Or by crossing the river and being on the other side.

On the first mountain we shoot for happiness, but on the second mountain we are rewarded with joy. What’s the difference? Happiness involves a victory for the self.

Thank you for reading. I will be writing again, but not on a regular basis.

The social media is often used to put out your best self. Since you get to pick and choose what the people see from your life, you only put out the best things that you’ve done or the best things that have happened to you. In addition, you also get a chance to enhance those already best experiences of your life using filters, music and what not. In short, you lie on the social media to look better than your peers.

I tried not to write this post for a long while. I’ve been thinking about it for quite sometime. It is natural for me to put here the best things I’ve done so far and my opinions on things I’m knowledgeable about. It makes me look accomplished and intelligent. Here’s the other side though.

I spent most of the past 10-15 years trying to build a business from scratch. Like many other tech entrepreneurs in Pakistan who work at the eastern time, I have also been a 100% night owl since 2008. For 12 years, I have only slept after 6 in the morning. I was able to build a company that I always wanted. I was able to save and invest like I wanted. And I bought myself financial freedom that I wanted. So I could stop one day and be free. Free to do whatever I like. I could just read books, or travel, or do anything I wanted.

It is only when I got free, I realized, I fucked up. I realized that I’ve gotten obese in the process. That my spine doesn’t work the same way as before. That I may have to live with the constant sciatic pain for a long while, if not most of my life. That I can no longer sleep at night even if I wanted. That my personal grooming went down the gutters for spending most of this time working from home. That I can’t wake up for anything that has to be done early in the morning or noon so I don’t sleep at all instead.

On the papers I felt successful just as the world described successful. In real life, I didn’t feel successful at all. Having free time and not the right health to enjoy it is very unsuccessful.

I feel obligatory to write this truth. So if you decide to be “successful”, you don’t give up everything else in the process and feel unsuccessful in the end.

I knew a really really toxic person back when I was involved in running KoolMuzone, a Pakistani music blog. He did everything in his power to destroy my business including using illicit means just because he couldn’t see me do better. Everything that he did kept haunting me for years. But, in hindsight, he gave me 2 beautiful things in the process. I only realized that after my good friend and colleague Faizan Shoaib made me realize.

Firstly, he gave me a lot of knowledge. As I learnt more about the tactics that were used, I also learnt about the remedy as well as the defense. I became an over-all more experienced digital marketer. I pushed my limits and became a better version of myself. All companies should grow like that. E.g PayPal or Facebook are safe because hundreds of thousands of hackers & scammers have tried exploiting the loopholes. They only learnt the remedy as well as the defense to make a better version of their product afterwards.

Secondly, he eventually made me realize that the juice in my business is just not worth the squeeze. He made business so terrible for me, that I had to look for more viable business options with over-all better outlook. He helped me set on to do many businesses that I did afterwards which worked out much better for me.