There is something odd about trekking into the wild. You either go all in, or you won’t enjoy the trip.

Your subconscious should forget all the worldly deals and focus entirely on the moment as it is, the feeling of immensity when clouds stitch into the peaks, the birds sing into the rhythm of the wind, and the rivers argue endlessly with the rocks.

That is the deal the trekking offers. It is not a negotiable one. But I did not hold up my end.

My father and I hiked through Kyrgyzstan last weekend. We went to the Lenin base camp, stayed in cottages around Kara-Koi, and visited Sary-Chelek, a valley full of lakes so blue that it looked computer-generated.

Most of the time, the air smelled of rain, but the rain never came. We played volleyball with the Sherpa men at the Lenin base. The air was so thin that any reasonably long cardio would cause you to faint immediately. We tried qymyz, the fermented mare’s milk the steppe people have lived on for centuries, and my body registered an immediate rejection. We rode horses for a few hours through terrain that looked like the nature drawings from my kindergarten. On the evenings, to the backdrop of the Milky Way above us, my dad and I enjoyed drinks on the panoramic balcony of our cottage and talked about God, purpose, stoicism, and how a man was supposed to live.

All of it was right there, in front of me, unhurried and kind. But I was, somewhere in the back of my mind, still sitting at a desk in Agora’s office, turning over emails I had not answered and business I had left half-done.

The strange thing is that those dealings did not actually need me. They could wait. Nothing would collapse for a few days of absence. The world wouldn’t even notice I was gone. But I noticed that I was not quite gone, and that is the problem.

When you carry your unfinished business into a place like Sary-Chelek, you are not really at Sary-Chelek. You are at some uncomfortable midpoint between two places, not present enough to enjoy where you are, not focused enough to solve what you were supposed to leave behind. You get the worst of both.

What I should have understood before leaving is that a trip is not a pause in your life. It is a different thing entirely, with its own demands and its own logic, and it asks for your full attention the way any serious thing would.

The mountains do not offer half an experience. The qymyz does not offer half a taste. The Sherpa men at the Lenin base did not play half a game of volleyball. Everything there was whole and immediate. I was the only thing that felt in-whole.

Next time, the emails can wait. The business can wait. Everything in Tashkent can wait, because it always does anyway. The mountains will not.

By no means do I pose myself as someone qualified to offer any “expert” notion on any of the following topics. My thoughts are (for the most part) subjective and come from my understanding of the world, and they should not be taken as direct facts. But, some observations can be universally true and can apply to 99 percent of the situations. I hope, and I believe, my observations and conclusions are pushed into that list of “universal” observations.

What is Skin in the Game?

Nassim Taleb came up with a little concept that explains most of the things in our society. Skin in the game, he called. Wrote an entire book about it. A part of his famous Incerto series. The concept became quite famous.

If I make a decision, and if it affects me, then I have skin in the game. Whatever game I play. I can have more or less skin in the game depending on how big or small the decision is. And “skin,” as you might have guessed it by now, refers to you.

Politicians usually have less skin in the game than pilots. If a politician makes a bad decision, he is not losing a limb, going maimed, or dying. A pilot’s bad decision, however, can cost him his life. We surely don’t want to generalize anything, but you get the idea. That’s skin in the game. Simplified.

More on that after I touch upon the venture fund state in Uzbekistan.

Venture Capital Ecosystem in Uzbekistan

It’s basically a government jobs program wearing a Silicon Valley costume.

The “ecosystem” runs on state bank money, presidential decrees, and IT Park subsidies. And when new VC funds are launched by any state-owned banks, we can’t call it venture capital. That’s a slightly different form of bureaucracy, the one involving pitch-decks and due diligence.

Earlier last year, people were hyping up about the growth rate in the ecosystem. The 230x funding growth story. That’s just one company: Uzum. If we remove it, we end up with a 17M US-dollar market across 38 deals. That’s an average check of around 460k US dollars.

The exit market virtually doesn’t exist. Billz was acquired. MyTaxi and Express24 in the earlier years. But the exit market is relatively very small. That’s actually expected. The entire startup ecosystem is very young. We might need some time to expect larger exits.

Yes. We have much to improve. The opportunity is there. But the hype is 4-5 years ahead of the current startup/vc infrastructure.

Skin in the game in Venture Capital

The fund manager loses their own money if they’re wrong. Their reputation, their carried interest, their personal LP relationships. All on the line. That’s what aligns incentives.

Things are a bit different here in Uzbekistan.

Most of the ventures that I won’t write the name of are deployed by salaried employees of state-owned institutions following a presidential decree. In simpler words, because the big guys working for our local VCs don’t have any equity and because they are just salaried employees, they don’t share the same risk aversion as someone who has equity in the VC.

If the portfolio burns, nobody gets fired. The bank absorbs the loss, the government recapitalizes it, and the fund manager moves to another department. There is no Taleb-style downside. They don’t have skin in the game there. Zero skin, almost. The person writing the check doesn’t feel the check.

There is more.

IT Park is a landlord pretending to be a venture capitalist. It provides space, grants, and mentorship subsidies. All cool and useful infrastructure. But a landlord whose tenant fails just finds a new tenant. No skin lost. This means IT Park’s incentive is occupancy. Number of startups, number of deals announced, and number of press releases. All for the optics. This doesn’t return anything.

This also affects the founders.

In a market where government grants (President Tech Award) and subsidized loans are everywhere, a founder can run a startup for 2-3 years essentially on public money. They can fail and walk away fully intact.

The cost of failure is unimaginably low. Which means the quality of founder commitment is self-selecting downward.

People who would sell their apartment to build something are the minority. The majority are rational individuals taking a low-risk government-subsidized career experiment.

And I can continue this rant for hours. There are abundant problems. But let’s pause a second.

Do I think government involvement in the ecosystem is good? No. It is not conducive for the ecosystem to become independent and grow. “Venture” means “undertaking a risky journey.” “Venture capital” is about undertaking a risky journey using your capital (your money, your cash). And if that money isn’t yours, it is not venture capital.

But do I think there is progress? Absolutely. Not all ecosystems grow in a standard form. Maybe this approach is more fitting for the nature of Uzbekistan? Maybe it will result in a better growth rate than if the privates had occupied the ecosystem? We don’t know. I don’t know.

But all I can say for sure it, there is progress. There is some movement. And if there is anything we ought to learn from Charles Darwin, it is that “nature doesn’t prefer the unmoving.”

Two weeks ago, we organized the fourth iteration of the Founders Circle.

Every iteration usually brings a couple of great ideas. With enough effort, some of these ideas can actually achieve solid traction. But most others have the blessing of having to learn and improve more.

And now that I think about it, Founders Circle is a perfect reflection of the Uzbek startup ecosystem right now. It is raw. It is honest. And still figuring out what it wants to be.

And I mean raw in the best possible sense.

Earlier this year, I got to know more about Richard Hamming through his book “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering.” Richard spent 30 years in Bell Labs observing brilliant minds fail to produce brilliant work. [1]

The diagnosis Richard reached had nothing to do with intelligence itself.

Courage. Courage to choose problems heavy enough to matter. That’s the diagnosis.

Most people in the industry actually know which problems those are. But then they look away. They find something they can manage with ease and call it pragmatism.

Uzbekistan has not yet mastered this particular kind of reflex. (Maybe because we yet lack people who actually know which problems to solve. That’s unlikely. But, that, I don’t know.)

As they scale, ecosystems (particularly in innovation) start having this gravitational pull towards repetition.

Silicon Valley built the internet. A huge breakthrough for its time. Everything was happening just too fast. People expected a crazier scale of inventions to pop out in the next few years.

But nothing particularly new happened. They spent the better part of fifteen years engineering increasingly sophisticated ways to sell advertisements. The Dot-Com Bubble had eventually popped. We then plateaued.

Maybe we are entering something similar now. The LLM breakthrough was generational. But are we, again, mostly engineering better ways to monetize attention? (Sam?). The cycle of innovation seems periodic.[2]

That is Silicon Valley. Here, things can go differently if we actually want them to.

In Uzbekistan, what we are still assembling is the infrastructure of belief. We need (and we actually already have) a small number of people who decide to behave as though the ceiling was already gone, before any evidence suggested it was.

Founders Circle exists to accelerate that decision.

The ideas from our sessions are uneven, sometimes rough, occasionally brilliant in ways their founders had not fully caught yet.

Hamming believed the subconscious of a great scientist needed to be given the right problems and then left alone. What accumulates over four iterations is harder to name than that, but I hope it rhymes with the same idea.

Raw intelligence is the thing experience slowly spends.

Uzbekistan has it in abundance. What happens to it from here is, genuinely, an open question.

[1] Bell Labs, by any measure, is the most productive research institution in the history of technology. It was essentially a closed environment where some of the sharpest people alive were given resources, proximity to each other, and enough freedom to work on whatever they found important. Hamming was inside that environment for decades.

[2] It is actually periodic according to Thomas Kuhn and his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” I had read it earlier, but I might need to visit my notes.

Painting: Camel Train By Moonlight, 1899 by Jean Baptiste Paul Lazerges

Growing up, I wish I had a more social dad. I never saw this man utter the word “love” or “proud.” He was always silent. Would speak only when oral communication was necessary. You’d think he had a limited amount of words he could speak in his entire lifetime.

When I was 9 years old, I started attending Judo. I was great at it. Reached this brown belt in like a few months. But frankly, I didn’t give a shit about those fancy colors. I wanted my dad to talk with me. And maybe make him say a few nice words. So Judo was a certain way to evaporate the ice surrounding this numb man’s soul. He’d show up to the contests, though. He’d just watch. I’d sometimes glance over to see if his lips would go upward. But no. He’d just keep watching and watching. The same reaction would await regardless of the outcome.

Even for my academics, he’d never scold me for getting bad marks. No reaction when I failed my admissions. No reaction after I failed it again (even after a gap year). It just seemed to me at some point that he didn’t really care at all. Whatever I did, however I did, whenever I did, I’d always confront the emotionless face of my father behind his old 2000s-style sunglasses. He didn’t seem to care an ounce.

Or at least that’s what I thought up until very recently. After failing to get into college for the second time, I took some time to reflect on my life. I needed to make sense of this situation that was slowly infiltrating my happy teenagehood. While spending time in Samarkand and detoxing from social media, I realized that my father actually did care deeply—he just didn’t show it the way I expected.

In fact, his visiting my judo matches was him showing his care. His teaching me English early on was his care. His investing tens of thousands of dollars into my education and not even scolding me when I failed twice in a row was him showing his care. His paying me 1.5k just to partake in some silly english competition abroad was him show that he cared.

My Dad thinks he couldn’t spend enough quality time with me growing up; coming to Tashkent as a new family, no house initially, a hard time finding jobs, and changing apartments times in a row, and all that crap had just made him silent, numb, and emotionless. But as I think back again, he taught me waay more than anyone else could. He taught me how to endure without breaking. How to carry weight without complaint. How to show love through action when words fail you.

He taught me that strength isn’t loud—it’s the quiet decision to keep going when everything inside you wants to stop. That providing isn’t just about money; it’s about showing up consistently, even when you’re exhausted, even when no one notices.

He taught me that emotional intelligence isn’t about expressing every feeling; rather, about reading what others need and meeting them there. Those judo matches? He knew I needed him present, even if I wanted him cheering. He gave me what I actually needed: proof that he’d always show up.

Most importantly, he taught me that men can break under the weight of survival and still find ways to love. That you can be emotionally exhausted and still emotionally present. That sometimes the most articulate thing you can say is nothing at all, being just silent.

I spent years wishing he were different, a dad who fit me. Now I wonder if I’m a fitting son for this silent, caring man.

What is a college major? It is a certain educational path you take that builds up the foundation of the career/social ladder you may want to climb later in your life.

When you declare a major, you are also declaring what some future version of you will be doing and thinking about. So you are essentially caging your future self with your current self’s keys.

Am I saying it is bad? I don’t know.

But Bohr says an expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field. On the premise that being an expert is something good, we should strive to niche down to specificities, which, of course, requires one to choose a major. Yes?

No. Not necessarily. You can still have deep dives (husanisomiddinov.com/deep-dives) into whatever field you want, not entirely limiting yourself to a certain path.

But again, I don’t know. One thing I know for sure is that one would wanna be in an institution with a multitude of options. If you can go to a university interested in law, but leave as a physicist, that’s good. That’s what a good university should offer.

I will excerpt a text below that’ll explain my point better (it is not about me, btw):

I think re-frame the what to do as --> what do I want to learn about. I think you’ll go nuts trying to craft a perfect path. People who constantly do well follow their curiosities and obsessions. Like you, I was obsessed with VC and breaking in for a bit of time. I still love it, but realized that my curiosities were currently somewhere else. So I joined a startup. Was this in my plan when I graduated? Certainly not. But it’s what gives me the most energy right now, and it just so happens that I did banking / VC to get here.

In short, the actual occupation is not what gets you what you want. It’s your curiosity and willingness to tell your story and why you are interested, and how your experience is best suited for things that will help you.

And again, I don’t know.