Faisal Chohan

I have never met Faisal Chohan but I owe him an apology.

As I write these lines, Faisal is a typical techno geek entrepreneur with a difference. Yes he runs a technology company, based out of a software park in Islamabad; yes he is a frail thin, thing; I don’t know if he wears spectacles, but I assume so since 18 hours a day in front of a bright LCD screen for the last decade of your life is not supposed to lead to 20-20 vision. His co-founder is a digital fellow at Stanford; his company does big things with interesting technologies with little names.

At the surface, you may be describing me, the next Google or hundreds of my technology peers in Pakistan but there is one difference. I am sitting peacefully in my home office, a room away from my family, a floor above my parents, a short drive away from my office, right next to a clean, accessible, functional white tiled bathroom with running water. While Faisal sits in a jail cell in Adiala, Rawalpindi, possibly freezing, possibly hungry, certainly wondering the life his dead child could have lived, if we had given him half a chance.

I owe Faisal an apology. Perhaps more.

I heard about Faisal last Thursday in Lahore. His partner Atif, the visiting fellow at Stanford, sent a short note on the PASHA forum, asking for our help. PTA and PTCL had raided their office in Islamabad and like plundering Mongols pillaged servers, drives, phones and equipment. They had set Basra on fire, looted Baghdad, razed Kabul and a week later would kill Faisal’s child in search of their equivalent of Weapons of Mass Destructions – a technology that goes by the name of Voice over IP. Unlike General Colin Powel and the nation we all love to hate, the General at PTA and the team at PTCL didn’t need to make a case in front of anyone. They thought a great crime had been committed against our great country and could only be punished by barging into this idly pidly little technology company and turning off its life support.

I owe Faisal an apology. I did nothing.

I run a small technology company too. I was in Lahore on business, out of office, I was busy; If you needed something urgently please contact Mujtaba Iqbal, my partner in crime – the auto responder said. I thought some one else would pick up the ball. We have 40 full members, 130 Associate members at PASHA. Atif had asked every one for help. Surely, there would be others who would come forward, this wasn’t my problem. While FIA and PTA were busy raping Cogilent, I sat down in a friend’s office in Lahore, turned on the heater, checked my email, browsed the internet and thanked God that I wasn’t in Faisal’s place.

I owe Faisal an apology. I believed in our great nation. I waited for the four witnesses to come forward.

But there is hope.

I may be a shameless, selfish, indifferent prick but there are others who are as different from me as Faisal and I are different from each other. Wahaj Siraj came forward and became the little voice in my head that kept on saying – shame on you Jawwad, you are a selfish, indifferent, cynical prick. Wahaj’s daily updates from the front, show casing PTA’s arrogance, Faisal misery and our helplessness shamed me into picking up the phone and asking if we were going to do something.

We did but it wasn’t enough. Four days ago we found that IP address on which PTCL had detected VoiP activity and PTA and FIA had taken action didn’t belong to Cogilent. There was no case. No WMD’s. The General had invaded Beirut, rather than Baghdad. A difference of a few miles, but now that the General was here, and the troops were raging to go, and Faisal was in his Jail cell, what really mattered was to boldly go where every one had gone before. We made a mistake, so what; screw Faisal and Faisal’s family. Yes we know he is innocent, but he is in the system, he is a techno geek without connections, the system will take two months or eight years, we don’t care and he can afford a few days in jail; what difference does a fucking weekend make. So what if a few children die, it’s all collateral. You care, you do something about it.

I owe Faisal an apology. I didn’t care. And the child that died was Faisal’s.

I have blood on my hands. The General at PTA is a general. He will behave like a general, he doesn’t care. Faisal is not his son, it is not his grand child that is dead. But what about the rest of us? What difference does a weekend make? I get depressed at Holiday Inn Islamabad because the bathroom is not clean enough and the room is not bright enough. Try a jail cell in Adiala for 10 days, with your wife in the hospital and your child in the mortuary and then ask me what difference does a fucking weekend make?

I owe Faisal an apology. I don’t know how to wash his blood off my hands.



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To learn more about the Faisal Chohan saga, see:

http://wheelofjustice.blogspot.com


If you are a pissed as I am, write to these guys:
Federal Minister for IT: aleghari@moitt.gov.pk
Minister of State for IT: stateminister@moitt.gov.pk
Secretary IT: secretary@moitt.gov.pk
PTA Chairman: chairman@pta.gov.pk

Shane's foreword

I will shamelessly reproduce Shane's foreword for the bluescreen book again. Have acquired a habit of reading it once every few months - so should you. Finetre btw has been acquired by Bisys and Shane is working on his next edition of the new new thing.

Shane's foreword
Entrepreneurs seem to come in two varieties. There are those that begin small… perhaps with an invention close to home, building a product to meet a very specific need, either for themselves or for a friend in another business. They build the first iteration on a shoestring, and deliver it to their inaugural customer. They experience some success, and sell the product to other customers.

Before they know it, they have a fledgling business. The business grows without a rigorous business plan, board of directors, disciplined marketing, or any of the other accoutrements of mature firms.

These businesses grow easily up to the point where the entrepreneur can no longer personally manage every facet of the business. At this point, most of these endeavors struggle, hitting the wall without disciplined processes and procedures. A small percentage of these businesses make the transition to mature management processes of planning, implementing, and measuring. Many remain small businesses, staying within the founder’s comfort zone. And many die.

I’ve always called this business founder the “accidental entrepreneur”. They are driven by need. They create a product to solve a focused problem, but are rarely driven by a love for business in the abstract, or business as an art form. Often they are surprised at their own success, having begun with modest goals. They soon find that building the first product, taking on the role of inventor, is very different than the role of businessman.

Most fail when they either can’t or won’t transition from building a product to building a business.

This book is not about the Accidental Entrepreneur. It is about the “purposeful entrepreneur”. The Purposeful Entrepreneur begins with a big idea. Not the solution to a small, focused problem, but an idea with larger scope and impact. From the very beginning the Purposeful Entrepreneur plans on building a business with impact. They think further ahead. They have visions of greatness. They are driven by scale. They want to change their piece of the world.

But most of all, every Purposeful Entrepreneur that I have known loves business. Business for business’ sake. As an art form. As the highest expression of the most complex strategic games that humans play.

So what does the Purposeful Entrepreneur do? They plan on bigness from the start. They plan on success. They plan on rapid success. But mostly they plan. They put the right team together. They raise capital. They execute quickly. They succeed or meet the Blue Screen of Death.

The world is littered with books about entrepreneurial success. Even books documenting high profile failures begin with wild success. But most attempts to create significant businesses out of dust do not end with entrepreneurial success. They end in anguish.

When the Accidental Entrepreneur fails it is a painful thing, but the sphere of people touched by the event is limited by the scope of the startup. When the Purposeful Entrepreneur fails… well, we are left with a much bigger hole in the ground.

Why is there so little written about entrepreneurial failure, with this the more common experience? For one, it takes a lot of courage, confidence, and borderline audacity to walk the path of the Purposeful Entrepreneur. When failure happens, it shakes one to the very core. Few want to talk about it, let alone write a book. Most retreat to the safety of traditional employment. A few lick their wounds and give it another go. Fewer yet eventually succeed.

“The Blue Screen of Death” is an important book. It captures the very essence of the gut-wrenching effort it takes to create a company from nothing. And even though it is fundamentally about failure, you will recognize that the difference between failure and success is but a few small decisions. Jawwad Farid, now a successful entrepreneur, emerged from failure more valuable than if he had succeeded. He learned the process, but also learned much about the inflection points that define failure and success. Jawwad is one of the few that took stock of the lessons learned, greatly expanded his personal capital, and gave it another go.

In the end, if you hunger success, it is most important to study failure.

Shane A. Chalke
CEO
Finetre Corporation