Blog Posts

Unified Climate Sustainability Framework

My climate journey has been a long time coming, gestating since I first watched An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. I later took a course in environmental studies at Santa Monica College that same year. For the last fourteen years I was always been ‘aware but not active’; I never really did much more beyond recycling, the occasional tree planting, and just being a conscious consumer (whenever the option was frictionless).

In the last three

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Remote Learning’s Hidden Curriculum

My involvement in EdTech through the work being done at Qureos has had me thinking of how we could localize for a more specific US-market problem. Product Market Fit in Dubai might be able to translate into PMF in a different region but just trying to adapt for the same PMF, we might miss opportunities for other grander problems that could potentially be solved with the same solution.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about

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The Role of Politics in Progress

I recently read The Atlantic article “How a Plan to Save the Power System Disappeared” and it made me rehash a previous thought-note I had made before.

The role of politics is not to be underestimated in the progress we make (or don’t make) in society, whether it comes to energy/climate, health, infrastructure, technologies, etc.

Political opinions aside, I want us to look at how certain decisions by politicians

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Biology vs. Sociology

With optimistic projections of a COVID-19 vaccine on the horizon sometime in late 2020 or early 2021 (see: Pfizer and Moderna beginning Phase 3 trials and Oxford’s ‘so-far’ successful trials) there is another factor often not talked about in the fight against COVID-19.

We might be tackling the biological issue with the development of vaccines, but the societal issues of actually administering and distributing the vaccine are yet to be widely

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Thoughts on Quibi

Quibi was ambitious in thinking that the format of content should adapt to how we watch (whether portrait or landscape) and empowered users to watch in the format of their choice. 

However orientation is barely scratching the surface, what they failed to consider is that context and co-creation matter more in a short attention format.

Consider

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Everything old is… old (for now)

As author Stephen King wrote in The Colorado Kid,

“Sooner or later, everything old is new again.”

It maintains some truth if we look back at the Spanish Flu pandemic, a time where some defied face mask usage and individual cities tackled the pandemic in various ways.  However, there are some things that just feel old now.

If you watched Jerry Seinfeld’s comedy special on Netflix, “23 Hours to Kill” it was very apparent it was filmed

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Restarting the Global Economy

Following up from my previous post on the Test of Modern Capitalism. I decided to look into what would an economic restart look like and what new behaviors, costs, and actions would need to be considered to reimagine businesses in a Post COVID19 world.

Let’s start by looking at some data collected over the last 3 months. KPMG UAE put out a report that UAE grocery sales were up but non-food retail has dropped by up

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The Test of Modern Capitalism

The Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) presents a unique moment in the history of Modern Capitalism.  Can capitalism work if there is a pause?  A 2 week shutdown… 30 day… or even a couple months?

What does that mean going forward?

There have been calls for freezing on credit card interest, freeze on rent and mortgages – which all are essential cogs in the modern capitalist machine.  So if this freeze is what is needed and we need a

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Living in the Future

Here in Dubai, we are starting to come out of lockdown ahead of many other countries.

Dubai, under the Dubai Future Foundation initiative, has considered itself the testbed for the world.  Inviting startups from around the world to prototype new technologies to help craft future regulations.

Now with Dubai’s enforced lockdown strategy coming to an end, it can serve as a testbed for the rest of the world and hopefully, set an example for how

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Starting Positions

In racing, one’s starting position can affect the outcome of the race.  The ‘starting position’ is the position from which movement is initiated, which holds true in various contexts.

Everyone assumes we start out in the same place but we don’t.

From economic circumstances and career progression, where we start can set us up for where we will be years down the line. It defines the obstacles we will go through and also the grit and resilience that

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