Mutiny on the TRG bounty

Corporate drama has lit up trading Whats App groups as investors with an appetite for the satori scripts watch TRG. The Resource Group’s founder, the tech unicorn Zia Chishti, just won a battle to regain company control in court in Pakistan. Here is a simplified version of the long arc of this story. The rise of Zia Chishti Zia Chishti made a lot of money by inventing clear plastic braces whilst he was studying at Stanford University. The braces branded as Invisalign were cleared for sale a year after he founded what became Align Technology in 1997. By 2001, the company’s value had risen to one billion dollars, which in start-up terms is the definition of a unicorn. Zia sold his share, however, and left all of this behind to conquer new worlds. He settled on forming a private equity company known as The Resource Group Pakistan (TRGP) in 2003, of which he became the founding CEO. At the same time, he made an international version of the company, TRG International Limited (TRGIL). This structure was put together by Zia with some partners. The board of directors of the two companies overlapped. Captain Chishti kept largely the same crew, for what was in effect the same ship. All was well and the captain was at the helm. At the time, TRGP was looking to provide call centre services to companies for a fraction of the price such services would otherwise cost if handled in-house. After a few years of call centre service, Zia realised he could make it all even more efficient if he added artificial intelligence to the mix. So he wrote a software which did just that, and founded a Washington-based company called Afiniti, which owned the software in 2005. Afiniti was half owned by TRGP. By 2017, it went on to become Chishti’s second unicorn at $1.7 billion. At this point, TRG Pakistan was operating as a holding company for TRG International so that assets could be held and disposed of internationally without Pakistani regulatory involvement and the proceeds could be handled int