High-Tech Pakistani-American Entrepreneurs Top Venture Capital Deals

[Riaz Haq]

Latest funding of Ashar Aziz's FireEye and Zia Yusuf's Streetline rank #1 and #4 among top 5 VC deals in Silicon Valley announced in January 2013, according to Silicon Valley Business Journal.

FireEye is riding high on a wave of growing cyber security concerns amidst increasing cyber attacks being reported almost daily from around the globe. FireEye's founder Asgar Aziz is among the top recognized experts in the field of Internet and computer security. With the recent $50 million round from top investors, the company has raised $100 million to date. The new funding comes from new and existing investors —
including Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Goldman Sachs,
Juniper Networks, Silicon Valley Bank, and others.

Streetline is offering smartphone applications to help drivers find the increasingly scarce parking spots in crowded places. The company bills itself as "the leading provider of smart parking solutions to cities, garages, airports, universities and other private parking providers". The company has raised $25 million in January, 2013 from True Ventures, with participation by new investors Qualcomm Ventures and
Citi and existing investors Sutter Hill Ventures, RockPort Capital
Partners and Fontinalis Partners. The company has now raised a total of $40 million, and it says it
recently obtained a $25 million credit facility from Citi, too.

Another Pakistani-American who has been in the news is Rayid Ghani who served as the Chief Scientist in President Obama's re-election campaign organization. Before joining the Obama Campaign, Ghani worked for Accenture as Chief Scientist  and developed tools to mine mountains of private data of client corporations to find statistical patterns that could forecast consumer behavior. Instead of just using Facebook for posting messages and
tracking its followers’ feelings, Ghani's
team turned social media into a tool for efficiently recruiting the
human resources it needed leading into the election’s home stretch.

Using Ghani's tools, the Obama campaign was able to match up supporters’ friends' profiles with voting
lists and decide how it should reach out to supporters to reach their
friends through micro-targeting. If someone was going to spread a message to 10 people, the
campaign wanted to ensure they reached 10 people most likely to take
actions such as donate money, get active knocking on doors or even to
switch sides.

Pakistani-Americans Ashar, Ghani, Zia and many other entrepreneurs and professionals like them from Asia represent a dramatic shift in   Silicon Valley's racial mix over the last few  decades. I have been a witness to this historic change. When I arrived here to join Intel in 1981, there were few non-whites in the Valley. In fact, I was the only nonwhite person in a picture of the six-member award winning Intel 80386 CPU design team which was published by the PC Magazine in 1988.

Standing L to R: Riaz Haq, Jan Prak, Gene Hill, Pat Gelsinger, John Crawford				Sitting: Dave Vannier

My experience of the demographic changes in this high-tech valley is not just anecdotal. It's supported by data compiled by the local San Jose Mercury newspaper in 2010. The data shows that 49% of Intel employees are now Asian, a full 7% more than whites. In Silicon Valley, the difference is even more pronounced with Asians accounting for 53.9% of the employees versus 37.6% white workers.
 

 With Asians accounting for just 15.5% of the high-tech work force nationally, Silicon Valley's high-tech racial mix is also very different from the rest of the country. Silicon valley's employee pool also differs in terms of under-representation of Blacks, Hispanics and women relative the national averages.

 Among Asian-Americans, Pakistani-Americans are the 7th largest community in America, according to a report titled "A Community of Contrasts Asian Americans in the United States: 2011" published by Asian-American Center For Advancing Justice.  Pakistani-American population has doubled from 204,309 in 2000 to 409,163 in 2010, the second largest percentage increase after Bangladeshis' 157% increase in the same period.

The total fertility rate in the United States is now at 2.06, just enough to maintain the current level of US population. It's possible mainly due to the history of relatively liberal US immigration policy. If US immigration policy is tightened in response to pressures from various labor organizations and the traditional anti-immigration groups, the US fertility rate is likely to dip and hurt the US economy which needs more workers to pay for the retiree benefits of the growing population of senior citizens. Already, many US multinational corporations have added 1.5 million workers to their
payrolls in Asia and the Pacific region from 1999 to 2009, and 477,500
workers in Latin America, according to US Commerce Dept data as
reported by the Wall Street Journal. If the businesses can not find workers in the United States, they are more likely to continue to accelerate moving jobs elsewhere, depriving the US government the revenue it needs to balance its budget.

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[Riaz Haq]

Here's a PakistanToday report of a Silicon-Valley based Pakistani-American VC Faysal Suhail's Pak visit:

ISLAMABAD - Pakistan has great opportunity to tap the true potential of Venture Capital for job creation and acceleration of economic growth on sustainable grounds. “Pakistan is having potential as well as talent to promote venture capital to strengthen its economy,” Faysal Sohail, Managing Director of CMEA Capital in San Francisco USA told APP in an interview.
The American experts was accompanied by Matthew Boland, Deputy Press Officer-Deputy Spokesman of US Embassy in Islamabad and Ambassador Shahid Kamal and Advisor Science, Technology and Innovation Organization (STIO).
It is pertinent to mention here that Faysal Sohail is currently visiting Pakistan to explore venture capital potential in various fields of economy with special focus on energy sector.
He was of the view that although venture capital was a new idea for Pakistan but it has the potential to boost the country’s economy by utilizing the vast talent of its young generation.
He said that complying with Islamic ideology, Venture Capital is risk-based capital for entrepreneurship with prospects of good returns on investments.
Faysal Sohail said the venture capital sector was investment-friendly as risk was shared by both investor and owner of the project. It provides an opportunity of sharing capital and skills through a mutual venture, he added. Replying to a question, Faysal said in Pakistan the energy sectors, including solar and other alternative energies, web, software and commerce, including e-commerce, and third generation mobile technologies were the major sectors which could boost national economy and create job opportunities.
He said during the last 20 years, 100 per cent new jobs created in the United States were through venture capital, so this sector had great potential for Pakistan also.
“Venture capital is like life-blood for various companies”, he remarked.
Replying to another question, he said Pakistan and the United States have a lot of potential for collaboration in the field of venture capital and in this regard Pak-US Business Council and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) could play an important role.
The venture capital expert stressed the need for highlighting the new idea of venture capital in Pakistan so that people as well as the entrepreneurs take optimum benefit of the important sector.
“Since the economic growth is driven by small and medium size enterprises, the venture capital can play an important role to boost the economy on sustainable grounds,” he added.

http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2013/02/23/news/profit/pakistan-urg...