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 - Intro
03:17 - Becoming a great research analyst
06:44 - The difficulty in controlling gross margins
08:25 - How to research companies to invest in
12:53 - Are there similarities today in technology to the 2001 tech bubble?
17:11 - The state of AI investing
20:04 - The America/China AI Race
23:26 - Imran’s experience with Alibaba
26:26 - The state of China’s inevitability
31:11 - Imran’s experience working at Snap
39:09 - Leaving Snap
40:26 - Imran’s Fund structure
43:00 - Being drawn to bias
45:05 - Mercenaries vs. Missionaries
47:07 - The market likes to fool the greatest number of people
50:18 - The pendulum of private and public market investing
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