Shaq (Shakil Khan)

Founder, CoinDesk · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

Shakil Khan is a London-based entrepreneur and investor who founded CoinDesk. He is widely active in the European technology and startup ecosystem.

10statements → 4claims → 1claims resolved → 3.8/5average certainty → 2.6/5average debate potential →

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 3 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 2 assertions · 3 opinions · 2 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 3 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Shaq argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Khan: UK tech giants Rightmove and Zoopla scaled successfully without international expansion
“Some of our biggest online real estate companies are just UK only. Rightmove and Zoopla, two huge companies, have never really ventured outside the UK. You couldn't do that if you're from Estonia, or if you're from Finland, or if you're from Sweden.”
Shaq (Shakil Khan) Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 9:37 a16z Podcast | Scaling Ideas and Startups in the U.K. and Europe

How they sound: speaking style how? →

243 words/min while actually speaking · 11.7 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Shaq (Shakil Khan): no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,174 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Shaq (Shakil Khan) said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion
Khan: Uber won ride-hailing; Hailo VCs want immediate exit
“Halo is basically a London niche company funded by VCs who, if they could get an exit, would take their exit tomorrow and get out of the business, because Uber has won in that space.”
Shaq (Shakil Khan) Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 16:09 a16z Podcast | Scaling Ideas and Startups in the U.K. and Europe
Insight
European Startups Adapt Better to City Expansion Than US Firms
“Look at the marketplace businesses, it's actually no longer about countries. It's cities, right? Which cities work and which cities don't work. And, you know, Istanbul is many thousands of miles away from here. And there's an entrepreneur probably go London, I…”
Shaq (Shakil Khan) Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 11:00 a16z Podcast | Scaling Ideas and Startups in the U.K. and Europe
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Shakil Khan: TransferWise Could Exceed Spotify and Skype in Scale
“TransferWise is doing an amazing job, and I hope this goes down as, you know, one of the biggest companies ever to come out of Europe, up there with Spotify and Skype, or bigger than even those companies.”
Shaq (Shakil Khan) Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 33:21 a16z Podcast | Scaling Ideas and Startups in the U.K. and Europe
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Khan: UK Lacks Multi-Billion Exits Needed for Capital Recycling
“We haven't had those major hit after hit of multi-billion dollar exits, whether in the private market or in the public markets, such as the Googles or the Facebook. So that trickle-down effect hasn't happened, and it'll be a while till it happens.”
Shaq (Shakil Khan) Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 2:37 a16z Podcast | Scaling Ideas and Startups in the U.K. and Europe
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Khan: London Bankers Are Less Active in Tech Investing Than Wall Street
“I think the London Financial Centre versus tech are two separate things apart from where fintech is involved. They seem like two very different industries, unlike Wall Street where a lot of investment bankers are active in investing in tech startups.”
Shaq (Shakil Khan) Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 6:07 a16z Podcast | Scaling Ideas and Startups in the U.K. and Europe
Insight
Khan: Small-market European startups succeed by designing globally from day one
“Take a market like Sweden, the reason why Spotify partly has been successful was, from day one, the product was built to go global. The same thing with Skype, transfer-wise, a building for a global audience, because The local population is far too small to be …”
Shaq (Shakil Khan) Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 8:30 a16z Podcast | Scaling Ideas and Startups in the U.K. and Europe
Opinion
Khan: US market is far closer to UK than France is
“US is far similar to UK than France will ever be.”
Shaq (Shakil Khan) Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 13:28 a16z Podcast | Scaling Ideas and Startups in the U.K. and Europe
Opinion
Khan: Strong UK safety nets make the country less entrepreneurial than US
“The country has never been as entrepreneurial as the USA has, and there's a number of social reasons and governmental reasons. One, we've got even though people may complain, we have a pretty amazing welfare system here, and a pretty amazing healthcare system …”
Shaq (Shakil Khan) Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 20:32 a16z Podcast | Scaling Ideas and Startups in the U.K. and Europe
Disclosure
Shakil Khan invested half his net worth into Spotify before product launched
“Ended up meeting Daniel Ek when he was 22 years old with an idea of Spotify, and I put half of my net worth into the company before there was a product.”
Shaq (Shakil Khan) Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 16:27 a16z Podcast | Scaling Ideas and Startups in the U.K. and Europe
Assertion Supported
Khan: UK tech giants Rightmove and Zoopla scaled successfully without international expansion
“Some of our biggest online real estate companies are just UK only. Rightmove and Zoopla, two huge companies, have never really ventured outside the UK. You couldn't do that if you're from Estonia, or if you're from Finland, or if you're from Sweden.”
Shaq (Shakil Khan) Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 9:37 a16z Podcast | Scaling Ideas and Startups in the U.K. and Europe

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | Scaling Ideas and Startups in the U.K. and Europe Jan 2, 2019 15m
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