#389 - Imran Khan - Founder @ Proem Asset Mgmt - Investing In The Fourth Industrial Revolution
Imran Khan is the Founder at Proem Asset Management. In this episode we explore the arc of his remarkable career—from his early days as one of Wall Street’s top-ranked analysts to leading global IPOs and eventually launching his own hedge fund.
We discuss:
- Why gross margins are a critical indicator of fundamental shifts in a business
- How he met Joe Tsai and helped lead Alibaba’s record-setting IPO
- The vision Evan Spiegel had that made Snap a generational product
- His criteria for identifying high-quality public companies and warning signs to avoid
- How private market hype has skewed investor incentives—and why that might be changing
Links:
Proem Asset Management - https://www.proemasset.com/
Imran on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dotkhan/
Imran on X - https://x.com/dottkhan
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Topics:
(00:00:00) - Intro
(00:03:17) - Becoming a great research analyst
(00:06:44) - The difficulty in controlling gross margins
(00:08:25) - How to research companies to invest in
(00:12:53) - Are there similarities today in technology to the 2001 tech bubble?
(00:17:11) - The state of AI investing
(00:20:04) - The America/China AI race
(00:23:26) - Imran’s experience with Alibaba
(00:26:26) - The state of China’s inevitability
(00:31:11) - Imran’s experience working at Snap
(00:39:09) - Leaving Snap
(00:40:26) - Imran’s fund structure
(00:43:00) - Being drawn to bias
(00:45:05) - Mercenaries vs. missionaries
(00:47:07) - The market likes to fool the greatest number of people
(00:50:18) - The pendulum of private and public market investing
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