Talking about disasters, I've just had one. Lost a solid 6 digits of personal $. My first business angel experience actually. A start-up whose expansion strategy was based on acquisitions. The project, I still believe, was a very good one. But the choice of the first acquisition target, the acquisition process itself, and the management were all completely fucked up. I finally decided to pull the plug after only a few months because it just made no sense (I would have poured more money if I thought management could be better with more money, but that's probably not the case).

Where I got it wrong? As someone who has an engineering background myself before moving by both training and experience to management/entrepreneurship and more recently to finance, I wildly overestimated the ability of others to move in that direction too.

There are a couple of MENA-related variables that have been at play too, I thought about writing about them here, but they're really minor in this venture and I don't think there would be enough meat for an entry.

Interesting time to write this. Just got into an argument with someone today who insisted that his financial models were accurate to the second decimal place, which made no sense to me. When this happens I end up dividing the numbers by something slightly larger than 1, and then rounding down to an integer. Just in case.

Shaheen Bey

You know I would love to have the case study on my blog if not on Aqoul, fuck the MENA specifics - if you want to vent, reflect and blog on this. Or on Aqoul, we're too quiet now to be ideological. Feel free if you have time.

M: I am sure your modeller was mathmatically and statistically accurate. What's hard to learn for maths modellers is Garbage In - Garbage Out. Of course if one waits for perfection, one does fuck all. Best to plow ahead, but always keep in mind, at every step, the data is fucked, dirty and a long fucking way from being proper, say like science measurements.

That's okay, but values out to multi decimals and in general belief in exactness (versus 'indicativeness') of said models is blood dangerous. (again this is about dirty real world enterprise to fin fin. models, to be clear)

I will L., I just have a rush I have to take care of for the next couple of weeks or so.

Speaking of non MENA topic though, and this is for you and eerie (actually I already mentionned this to eerie), it might be interesting to broaden the topics at Aqoul to anything written by authors connected/related to/interested in MENA. That way it would make the site a more ecclectic multi-author blog with MENA as a recurring theme (which in itself communicates about MENA somehow anyway) as opposed to writing exclusively about it.

Shaheen Bey

I agree on the widening.