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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