When designers showed the first iPod prototype to Steve Jobs, he said it was too big.They replied they couldn’t make it smaller.
Jobs then dropped the iPod into an aquarium, and bubbles floated up. “Those are air bubbles. That means there is space in there. Make it smaller”
About a year ago, I quit my job at a kickass computer vision startup in Palo Alto to build my own venture. I have, since, worked on 6 projects that I believed should exist and then decided not to pursue. Documented my learnings on 2 of those products here
So much fundraising gyaan online yet none of it focuses on the fundamental mindset you bring to the pitch: come in not to “ask for money” but to offer investors an opportunity to own a piece of your life’s work
If you’re a hypercritical / perpetually unimpressed / “everything sucks” sorta person, you must 100% build a product from scratch.
You’ll either:
1. Use this power of nuanced insight to create something truly wonderful
2. Realise how hard it is and stop cribbing
Win-win.
If you've been putting off reading Thinking Fast and Slow because you've "read all the articles on it", please use this tweet as a nudge to pick up the book - absolutely worth your time!
As the race for short video apps heats up, with all of them likely to have ad-led monetization models, "a short thread" on why the size of the prize is so enticing 👇
Dad’s been working on this for the last 12 years, official launch is 6.5 years from now. Puts into perspective the amount of time it takes to build something of immense value :)
Mum: the article you shared on product market fit was really good
Me: whaaa. Why are you reading about product market fit?
Mum: Better dinner table conversation
Me: but how many folks talk about product market fit on the dinner table!
Mum: you do, that’s enough for me
❤️
Zuckerberg convincing Kevin Systrom why syncing Instagram photos with Facebook wouldn't actually hurt Instagram. These emails have been a masterclass in communication/influence
Link:
Find the rest of them here via
@MarceloPLima
:
Unpopular opinion: we ‘hold on for so long’ due to several psychological biases: sunk cost, hero complex, etc. there’s an opportunity cost of everything you spend time on and giving up is okay. knowing when to is a critical life skill.
friday night hot take: the corp world understood the value of diversity and opened up the workplace to women but somehow got them to leave their feminine energy at the door.
most women who rose up the ranks fought men to do so and became like them in the process. so we have
Privileged to be back
@LightspeedIndia
doing what I love with a team I hold in the highest regard. So grateful to everyone who offered their time, network, office space & unwavering support. Mad respect for you all with the grit+courage to keep at it - hit me up, I’d love to help
for all the book recos we share on here: imp to caveat that purely consuming info only creates an illusion of progress. imho real life change is slow and occurs when we intentionally internalise the msg, take risk to implement what we learn, fail and course correct repeatedly✌🏼
While cold-emailing is a skill to be refined over time, the biggest delta in my life came from just realizing I can reach out to industry leaders I don't yet know and they will help. More here:
If we beat this, I think we'll send a loud message to the world. The world hasn't seen a united India. When it does, a lot will change. Forever. I'm long.
somehow always believed quizzing club junta was among the more independent-minded in college; chanced upon an old MELA quiz deck in my inbox today and only now realizing how much of it was disguised conformism (read *these* books, watch *these* movies, appreciate *these* artists)
women founders/operators of bengaluru, cubbon meetup next saturday 2nd march. we chat about the seen and the unseen, the said and the unsaid, that goes into building and scaling startups.
as much as i hate putting a gender lens on things, i'm tired of seeing two token women
“When we treat a man as he is, we make him worse than he is; when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(A thread, like most threads, that cherry-picks available data to make a point 🤭)
Ofc books are a great way to deeply understand opposing belief systems but boy does it feel good to indulge yourself in 448 pages of confirmation bias every once in a while 😄
Drawing attention to this 15yo from Jharkhand who recently launched More than any GDP growth numbers, it’s kids like these who make me bullish about India 2030 ❤️
My Mother’s Day anecdote: Had asked her for a picture, she took a dozen and I was unsatisfied with all of them. “They’re all terrible” I whined. She replied, “I can change the camera angle honey but I can’t change your face!”
To the original speaker of uncomfortable truths ❤️😂
the most common tension i see paralysing a lot of this generation that rode the tech wave is this disconnect between perceived ability and perceived impact of their work: i’m too big to do something small, too small to do something big
putting it out there that being apolitical at a time like this is a privilege that some of us just happened to be born into.
to be quiet is to be compliant.
to be indifferent is to be inhuman.
PSA: Learn programming from Stanford CS instructors sitting wherever you are. No pre-requisites. 15-20 hours a week from Apr 13-May 22 Hopefully the first of many more to come!
Unicorn status is a terrific milestone
@AnkitiB
! Representation and role models are essential to catalysing change and I’m very excited about all the little girls in India who can see themselves founding and leading large game-changing companies, thanks to you ✨
Watched the Nietzsche episode on Genius of The Modern World (
@netflix
) a few days ago and its closing thoughts are still ringing in my head. Has our pursuit of happiness come at the cost of our pursuit of greatness?
Request for engineers:
We’re building a computer vision application for enterprise. Ex-Stanford, Google founders. A16Z funded. Palo Alto, Bangalore.
8 member team, looking to add
1) Video systems engineer (streaming/pipeline)
2) Deep Learning engineer
Email: shuvi26
@gmail
Here’s an open offer to anyone who aspires to be a maker and wants to explore the BLR ecosystem: living room couch for up to 3 weeks and intros to 5 people who would be most helpful to what you’re doing.
Feel free to share with people you know (4/4)
India GenZ is 🔥 came away so inspired by the thoughtfulness of their questions and their hunger to learn!
Thanks
@nipunnyy
and
@an_napurna
for organising - can’t wait to see how the journey unfolds for all of you
From Professional & Personal Decision Frameworks to Indian Vs US Startup Ecosystem to Spilling the beans of being a VC🤫
LOVED the candid session with
@shuvi
🙌
Thank you for a Super Insightful Sunday 😍
So glad to have a chance to learn all this at this age! 😎
From 4 people in a tiny hotel office 7 years ago to ~50 people in 4 cities...such an incredible ride!
Excited to announce our expanded pools of early & growth capital to reflect our conviction and commitment to the builders of the new economy in India 🇮🇳
perpetually surprised that social media got a lot of people to believe that dunking on others can be your whole personality and that it’s somehow attractive and not deeply repulsive a trait in the offline world
Narrative violation
- BCG+MIT surveyed 2500 bosses: 70% said their AI projects had little impact
- 40% of those with "significant investments” in AI had yet to see any benefit
- PwC survey: firms planning to deploy AI dropped from 20% in 2019 to 4% in 2020
"Downturns are capitalism’s sorting mechanism, revealing weak business models and stretched balance-sheets. In the past 3 recessions the share prices of American firms in the top quartile of all sectors rose by 6% on average, while those in the bottom quartile fell by 44%"
Thoroughly riveting read, till the very end where Wall Street meets DC. Top takeaways:
1. Looong game. RenTech took 10 yrs to get to stable returns; 20 to be a market leader
2. Even for a literally quantitative trading shop, personal motivation highly influenced fund performance