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Here’s a small story from the past I nearly forgot. I was living in South Korea in a small officetel. It was a Friday night and the country was shutting down for it’s annual massive long weekend – Chuseok. This is when everyone returns to the family home, the women work their backsides off preparing food…

Hi all, As you know I’m leaving GBCA to work on SportHold. As most of you know I’ll be moving on to the world of startups. I have mixed emotions including the joy, terror, optimism, freedom and lightness at starting something new: But when I think of the colleagues I’ll leave behind I feel a lot…

I love asking questions. Dumb ones, smart ones, important ones – I’ll ask anything but my favourite by far are outrageous requests. I’ve considered doing Jia Jiang’s 100 Days of Rejection Therapy to further increase my boundaries in this area. But today’s quick post is about when you accidentally asked for way more than you meant to…

It’s really not a big deal and, in my mind, barely worthy of writing a blog post about but thought it might be worth mentioning that I’m an agnostic atheist. The two (agnostic, atheist) aren’t mutually exclusive. Calling myself an agnostic atheist is just a fancy way of saying: “I don’t believe there’s a god…

Survivor bias is a huge problem in startup thinking. As Edwards Deming is famously misquoted as saying: “You can’t manage what you don’t measure”. This has become extremely popular in corporate culture as companies base their KPIs on measurable results[1]. The motivations are noble but this leads to a fatal problem: big problems that are…

One of the many really cool things about having my own website is that, over time, it can help with things like getting jobs, getting past the worlds’ gatekeepers and finding places to live. Take any situation where you have to make a decision about someone you’ve just met and a personal website becomes useful.…

Tayyab Tariq. All rights reserved by Tayyab Tariq. Tayyab Bin Tariq grew up in Pakistan and has just graduated from Stanford University as a Fullbright Scholar. Using the online work platform, oDesk, was instrumental in his story. Opening Thoughts Following my previous interview with Gary Swart (CEO of online work platform, oDesk) I asked if they had anyone…

My favourite concept for digital strategy comes from Warren Buffet. Buffet talks about looking for “Economic Castles with Wide Moats”. This is something that makes it very hard and undesirable for anyone who wants to compete with you to do so. In fact, the only way for them to do so is to change the game…

Stare death in the eye and see if you can hold eye contact.photo credit: @Doug88888 via photopin cc Death. There it is. The one word that’s the most terrifying and the least liked. Most people have a strong visceral and negative reaction to hearing the word – myself included. And, despite the possibility that we’ll reach a singularity and potentially…

If there’s one thing I can say with absolute certainty about my childhood it’s that it was about as magical as any childhood could be. I grew up on a boat sailing around the world with my family for the first five years of my life. Afterwards my mum wrote a book about it. I…