As I told
@shriyanevatia
in my interview, I ended up on
@beondeck
Twitter despite not being involved...
And now that's going to change! super stoked to start 2022 as part of Catalyst Scouts and learn more about VC 🚀🚀scouts /
#ODC
alums, send any and all advice!!
wow I am honestly unable to talk right now - which if you know me – that’s a rare occurrence - I’ve been following
@anuhariharan
quite a long while and spent a lot of Sundays blasting podcasts she’s on (big fan of the episode with
@patrick_oshag
!!) welcome 🥹‼️
Very like me to procrastinate and tweet almost a week later but last Thursday I had the privilege of hosting my first women in tech mixer with the lovely
@meerarachamallu
💖 (who I actually met at another mixer a ~month ago!) you can tell how happy I was from the second pic hehe
✔️ran 10k for the first time!!
✔️met some really lovely people (iykyk) and kept + rekindled old friendships
✔️ greater clarity on how I work and operate personally and professionally
✔️ just kept swimming 🐠 🐟
It took a while for me to turn a weeks-long saga into this column but I'm so happy with how it turned out.
big big thank yous to
@ejpanaligan
for guidance (and lots of patience) and
@lucy__carroll
and
@nebulenaa
for helping me begin writing!!💜
RTed as well but I wanted to add – it’s really gratifying to read this when you’re early career and feel fearful of getting pigeonholed. If you’re in the right environment or honestly, if you just have a more open, generalist mindset, there’s no such thing of being boxed in
some personal news: ~6 months ago i joined tesla as a senior software engineer. as the quoted tweet below says, am doing a bit of everything, & not a trad swe role, rather "full-stack operator" building a lot of 0-to-1 really cool internal stuff i can't really talk about.
i'm
honestly could work for platonic connections too. I feel like so many of us bookmark and forget about things so it would be interesting to see what comes up.
Still thinking about how I got a big bowl of noodles for less than $9 at Incheon airport (assuming it’s inflated, as airport prices often are)
good to be back asia 🥲
signed up for my first half today. Truly leaning into the mid twenties stereotype here but pretty excited for it because I’m already nervous and ready to train up a storm 🤪
Wanted to share a post I read this year that I loved - this one by
@cdixon
on meandering early on in your career to find your “highest hill” i.e. your dream goals, instead of pushing yourself to the top of where you currently are
#SameeraReads
I talk to my mom a lot about my career and while B2B SaaS in 2023 is a specific kind of beast, GTM at a D2C CPG startup (healthy snacks! In India!) is quite another wow
feeling a bit of anger at a missed opportunity and got this text from father “no worries… things happen for a reason… and it ain’t finished yet.” 🥸
never heard him say ain’t in 23 years but the sentiment stands. four weeks left in 2023 and this is the energy we r bringing
I’m really proud of
@MaanasOruganti
and
@laurman34
’s latest! Mainly because of the effort it took – days of sourcing and following up – but also because I’m an international student and the past few weeks have been.... complicated (1/10)
Finally getting into Outlive by Dr. Peter Attia (better late than never!) and the hype was worth it for me. A lot of great research on the scientific roots to longevity - worth a read if you’re interested in the space, though slightly dense in some parts
Watched 12th Fail yesterday - probably one of the best movies for me to end 2023 on since I feel like I’ve also been hitting walls more than not this year. So good to see Vikrant in a leading role (I’ve always liked him!) and Vidhu Vinod Chopra never misses 👩🏽🍳💋‼️
remember when I ran my first 10k race? I’m now going to do my third this week 😅 and I fear I may be close to signing for my first half. Thoughts and prayers (and TIPS PLS)
since I’m going to finish my first month here TOMORROW (wow) - I’m now at
@statsig
working on all things revenue ops 🤠 clearly im a fan of all things developer and enterprise-first and very excited to be here.
might work in tech but one of my favourite founders has and will always be
@kellyxpan
– was so good to try some of
@eatimpactfood
at Sancha Sushi in sf. vegan sushi is good yall, and we might be all eating it sooner than we think 😅
happy anniversary to my first mildly viral tweet🫣🤠 thankful for how I’ve been able to connect with so many new people on this platform since then - goal for next year is to meet more of yall in person (which admittedly my extroverted introvert self needs to work on)
being back at
@UCLA
also meant I took a quick trip to Kerckhoff aka
@dailybruin
HQ - i was obsessed with the coffee house and snacks from ackerman. Probably the building where I spent the most time even when I wasn’t on staff🤠 the future is going to be built by…
feeling the urge to clean out my drafts over the weekend 🥸 I feel like I talk myself out of posting sometimes (even though they’re not spicy or anything I’m just still getting used to putting my thoughts out there)
Spent some very chaotic days back in Los Angeles after not having been back since graduating - bff did make fun of me for romanticising everything and doing all the cliches (made her go to campus and also get diddy riese) but it was all worth it to reflect / reminisce
Took me two weeks but I finally read the
@BessemerVP
on India’s SaaS market and I really, really enjoyed it. Highly recommend to anyone interested in the space 💥
@nona_uppal
this isn’t clothes but couldn’t help sharing - Coffee got a box to play in and we tried to cozy it up by swaddling him 😛💖 he is truly the loml
in the spirit of writing in public more and not holding myself back in doing so – introducing
@IshnoorSingh11
and I’s monthly newsletter ✨Overthinking Startups✨(because we do a lot of the former and talk a lot about the latter)
here’s a favourite snippet ⬇️
2023 seems like it was tricky for a lot of us - when things got choppy in March for me, I made a list of things I read/heard/watched that made me feel better. And now I have a time capsule to always fall back on 😎 highly recommend
“You have to be patient, quality oriented, disciplined, selective and prepared to play the long game.”
Holds true for the Indian ecosystem but also the global startup economy, and working in the space as a whole. Needed to read this today‼️
most readers have a book that absolutely changed their worldview/career path/life in one way or another. I’d love to hear which one is yours! (Yes I’m also trying to read more in 2024 like everyone and their mom)
Not sure if it was my habits of being chronically online and overbooking myself, but I felt stretched thin more than ever this year.
I did, however, feel fulfilled at the end of it all. Tiny takeaway below👇
I love my dad for many reasons but one is that even though he doesn’t live in the states he will constantly monitor Nordstrom rack online and send me good deals 🥲
I kept thinking about this today and how important it is – especially as someone who is single minded, it’s probably better to double down than to bottle those tendencies up
Listen to me. If there’s only one thing i could say to you right now, it is this:
If you have a “negative trait”, you can choose to change it. But never forget, you can also choose to double down.
Too obsessive? Go 100%.
Too talkative? Start a podcast
Stop dying inside
First day of work in 2024 (last night because I’m doing the IST <> Pacific flip this week) and honestly, felt good to be back at it. Ready for the growth and learning this year – and to post more about it too😎
This AND the fact that everyone around you is also still figuring it out. You might feel alone thru it all but trust that everyone is stumbling around just as much as you are (you just learn to mask w time 🥸)
@MarilynChavezDB
and I are here at a
#coronavirus
information session on the Hill, where representatives from the Ashe Student Health and Wellness Center will discuss the disease and UCLA’s procedures with event attendees. Stay tuned for live updates in the thread below.
My first scoop 🍨 for
@UnicornerNews
is out! Edtech is something I’ve always wanted to explore so glad I could start the journey by talking with
@GetSmartPass
- definitely want to write more second half of the year so lots to come‼️
Remember hall passes in elementary school? Turns out keeping track of them is pretty difficult.
@GetSmartPass
is building a digital solution for over a thousand school nationwide.
Some highlights from our latest Unicorner article👇
Spending more time delving into female founders and investors & reading Glossy (despite my misgivings of how founder Emily Weiss was portrayed) put
@kirstenagreen
, on my radar. Takeaways from
@mariogabriele
's Modern Meditations with her below👇 (1/4)
📚 Books by Indian authors in 2023
If you read a great book by an Indian author this year that you would like to recommend, reply to this and let's help Indian authors get more visibility 😊
Shared this with my father (because, yk the subject matter) and got “Great advice. Nurturing risk taking is a must. That gives you confidence to conquer the world and you will.”🥹
At times I’m reminded of how much I’m embarrassingly and extremely a city girl 🥸 was walking the dog and yelped when I saw a random blob approaching on the sidewalk… readers, it was a CAT
I took a class in undergrad with someone who, whenever we made a mistake on a pset, would say “We’re gaining an intuition.” I love this phrase so much and think of it often
Not sure why I’m already doing this but I keep saying I did things “last year” when I really did them “last week” or “last month.” My brain really wants to speed run the next two weeks huh 🥸
Got a lot of new followers off of this take so 👋 welcome!! I’ve been trying to be better about sharing my takes / what I’m up to on X (or as I say,
tw!tter)
so glad to see many people finding my weird twist on consumer social interesting 😎
@i_sudeepa
I worked as a marketing/communications associate for
@ucla
alumni association! A lot of schools have marketing departments that might need more hands - valuable if you’re interested in a more media oriented career which I was at the time :)
Whenever I’m under the weather and/or a little glum, grocery store workers and baristas always seem to know - wonder if working with people all day just makes them THAT good at sensing it
Spent a looong time shying away from audiobooks but finished one last week and may finish a second this week - largely because Spotify offers 15 hours of listening / month with premium (and they have a lot of popular names👀)
If you’re ever feeling lost or lacking in motivation and purpose, watch Season 2 Episode 7 of The Bear
Without question one of the best episodes of a show ever made
Every Second Counts
"most people are limited not by what they can do, but what they think they can do." i.e. lack of conviction, lack of self-belief/esteem and something I needed to hear today 🫡
Chatted recently with an aspiring founder and realized that two elements for success consistently stand out: intelligence and determination. IMO determination usually always wins out as the stronger factor (or stronger determinant🤠)