Investing in Revolutionary Technology | Conversations@Jazz

In this episode of Conversations @ Jazz, we were virtually joined by Asra Nadeem, the first female Pakistani venture capitalist and angel investor. As the vice president of DraperU, an accelerated entrepreneurship school based in California, USA, Asra is a vivid motivational and inspirational speaker who has spoken around the world.

Having started her career in Pakistan working for an internet company, Asra has since risen to global fame as a thought and action leader as well as an investor with a focus on revolutionary technological ideas. “I want to invest in technologies that are going to have a great impact on society as a whole,” said Asra, speaking about where the priorities of investment should point in the coming years as we head into the artificially intelligent era, “I believe you cannot grow something until it is profitable,” she added.

When navigating through the valleys of investment while faced with the lockdowns due to Coronavirus, Asra says it is crucial to focus on markets where the cost of service is high but the quality is low, making them the best potential markets; education, healthcare, and food production being some of them. Asra is also a strong advocate for working efficiently. “People who are successful are efficient with their time and money,” she says, explaining how the skill of learning new things and then executing them efficiently makes for one the most crucial skill to learn in your career.

Rising to success from the humble beginnings of entrepreneurship, Asra emphasizes how time can be utilized to yield more for us than it does right now. “It takes the same amount of power and time that it takes us to use Instagram or Facebook, or making a video on TikTok, the same amount of time can be used to learn something online,” she said, “if you have 24 hours in a day and you spent 8 of them sleeping, what did you really do with the rest?”. Asra also supports the mindset where nothing should initially be wrong but instead be something that can be tried. “Just keep doing new things and keep moving forward,” Asra said, “Soon enough, your failures are left behind.”

Currently working on many revolutionary investment ideas like a platform for sharing skills and learning with a focus on rapid learning, Asra shed light on some of the recent initiatives, one of them being Opus, who are building a new kind of technology which enables users to map scenes for the screen by just writing text, which it converts into 3D scenes.

With a barrage of ideas and a fresher outlook to learning and investing, it was a true honor to host the brilliant Asra Nadeem on Conversations@Jazz in this episode. We wish her success and fortune and thank her for sharing all this wisdom!