Explore

One of the recent trends in twitter conversations that i am impressed about is that  influencers  on the platform starting meaningful threads and the followers sharing their perspectives and experiences. One such thread that i was fascinated about was the one started by Andrew Chen, a16z partner. Andrew asked a question on twitter:  What is your least popular but deeply held opinion on personal productivity? I found this thread relevant and hence sharing some of the responses to this thread that i found useful. Should i be organized all the time ? - Being super organized is a bad thing. Means there's no room for serendipity, deep thought, can make you overly passive on other peoples' use of your time, as opposed to being focused on outbound. (Sorry to all my super Type A friends) (Andrew Chen) Procrastinate or not ? - The ideas on which I make my most money were the result of procrastinating and being interrupted. (James Bach) Should i manage energy or time ? - The secret...

This week Novak Djokovic won the Laureus World Sports Award for Sportsman of the Year. He made a stunning comeback in 2018 by winning 3 out of 4 grand slam events. His 2017 rankings had plummeted to 12, which is not bad by any standards but below par for a man who has been ranked in top 3 in world tennis since 2007. He gave a remarkable speech after winning the award. His ~4:30 minute speech can be found here . I found the speech quite relatable, authentic and without any airs. Novak appeared completely vulnerable yet grace personified. In other words, Novak appeared entirely human almost distinct from his super-human image of a person who has a machine-like consistency and is almost unbeatable on tennis court. Reflection #1: Novak said, I live by philosophy: " Expect Nothing " Steven Covey shared these ageless lines 'Begin with the end in mind'. Most of us humans- in pursuit of something big, are always driven by an end-goal in mind. There is nothing wrong in having ...

I went through this interview article with David Heinemeier yesterday with much interest and anticipation. Before i get to the reason around my interest, here's an answer to 'Who is David Heinemeier?', just in case you didn't know: David Heinemeier Hansson is the co-founder of Basecamp and NYT bestselling coauthor of Rework and Remote. He’s also the creator of the software toolkit Ruby on Rails, which has been used to launch and power Twitter, Shopify, GitHub, Airbnb, Square, and over a million other web applications. Reflection #1: What caught my attention in this article was the below paragraph, which I also tweeted about: 'I’ve realized that the hard part about most books is not reading them but recalling their knowledge or insight when you need it the most.' This is very succinctly put up sentence. When I took up reading big time almost a decade back, I was driven by this quote from Prakash Iyer's article : "If you read for just half an hour everyd...

I was recently reading the book- Stories at Work: Unlock the Secret to business Storytelling and came across the term 'Anti Story'. What are anti-stories? Anti-stories are stories that listeners in the audience have in their heads about why a proposed lesson will not work. I had my anti-story moment just now. In my last blog , i made an argument that user acquisition ensures that users get on to the platform, but user commitment (how much time users spend on platform) is actually a bigger determinant of a platform success as it ensures that a user finds something of value that leads her to repeatedly leverage the platform. When i wrote this, it made a perfect logical sense till i came up with th is piece on the driving philosophies of WeChat, China's number 1 communication app having close to 1 billion active users. As per Wikipedia,  WeChat was launched in 2011, primarily as a messaging app and eventually evolved and grew its use cases to social media, mobile app paymen...

As was hypothesized in the case of PayPal , a frictionless user experience is a must to pull the users towards the platform. But is it enough to drive long-term success of the platform ? The answer is probably Yes and No both. To think of it, an effortless induction of user into a platform is the right first step. It ensures that the user discovers enough value to be drawn towards the platform. But what ensures a long-term success is not just the user acquisition but user commitment. I am reminded of an all hands conversation when one of the senior engineering leaders in my organization was asked what is the key metric that worries him the most ? Without losing a beat, he responded "Daily Active Use" of our products and services. Aptly, the prominence of user commitment is not just limited to consumer products but is equally applicable for enterprise products. This discussion also takes me to one of the articles i wrote 4-5 years back when i called out Google's Tooth-Bru...

I came across this story while reading the book- Platform Revolution – How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy–and How to Make Them Work for You 1. The year was 1998. One of the key events happening during this time, was the explosion of internet. Many new businesses emerged. 2. In this tumultuous atmosphere, entrepreneurs named Peter Thiel (31 years,German, philosophy/law graduate at Stanford, one of US's top ranked Chess player) and Max Levchin (23 years, Ukrainian, Studied computer science at University of Illinois, had a passion for cryptography). 3. They opened a start-up named 'Confinity' with the vision of enabling money transfers on Palm Pilot and Personal Digital Assistants, the popular mobile devices of that time. Confinity gathered around 10000 users in 2 years but eventually had to be shut down due to the lack of momentum. 4. During their Confinity stint, one of their engineers built a prototype for receiving and send payments over email. 5. Thiel and...

I have been an avid consumer of podcasts and always in search of the good ones. Like books, good podcasts helps in shaping one's opinions and perspectives. Unlike books, podcasts often spread knowledge in a conversation mode between two or more achievers. A few years back, I got hooked on to podcasts as a source of learning driven by urge to use my commute time. Bangalore is notorious for it's pace of traffic and the commute times tends to be longer. But podcasts and audio books are the perfect allies in longer lonely commutes. I often wonder why there's hasn't been many business models to help people do high value activities during commute. Well, let's keep that discussion for a different day. One of the podcast series that I am hooked on to, of late, is called " Play to Potential" by Deepak Jayaraman. A part of his intro from the podcast page reads - 'Deepak is a certified CEO Coach and is an alumnus of IIT Madras, IIM Ahmedabad and London Business...

I came across this story while reading the book- Platform Revolution – How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy–and How to Make Them Work for You Here is the summary: 1. In October 2007, there were two gentlemen named: Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia. They were finding it difficult to pay their lofts rent. After much deliberation, they came up.with a novel idea. 2. There was a design conference happening in San Francisco. These guys put up an ad in the conference newsletter about the availability of a rented space at their loft. They positioned the ad as a unique opportunity to network with conference participants in a casual setting. 3. The ad fetched them 3 guests and 1000 USD, they were all set till next month. The first taste of success made them wonder if they can routinely offer such facility to other conferences. By not just lending their space but by also enabling others in the community who wished to lend their space. 4. Soon they had a website to help facilitate this in...

I  completed Singapore full Marathon on 9th-December. This was my 17th-full marathon+ distance overall. It was a great run, unforgiving weather (hot and humid) till it rained a bit at fag end around 41 km mark. It is often said that: "Runs end, Running doesn't". Each marathon teaches you something and reaching finish line tends to make you better than when one started the run. Following are usually the phases one goes through while going through the full marathon- 0 km: I know I can do it. 14 km: It's getting painful. Did I make the right choice choosing to do it? 30 km: Why the hell did I start? Is it really worth it? 35 km: I am close to giving up. 40 km: I think I can push a little. 42.195 km: Never experienced a high like this. Does this cycle sounds familiar with anything insurmountable that was ever attempted? Oprah Winfrey was bang on target when she said- "Running is the greatest metaphor for life, because you get out of it what you put into it."

When I started reading actively years back, I developed a fascination for the self-help books. One of the early ones that I remember to have read was Dale Carnegie's classic- 'How to win friends and influence people', Norman Vincent Peale's 'The power of positive thinking" and many such. These books were classics of their time but their reach and charm really spanned across generations. Over the years, my liking for the "How to' type books really diminished as I developed interest in other areas. Self-help books also tended to be more preachy in nature. Being preachy is not always uninteresting but without a strong corresponding stories and only messages, reading such stuff tends to be boring. Fast forward to yesterday, on a long journey to the US (that brutally takes 24 plus hours, if you count the hours as soon as you step out of home for airport), my choice of book was intriguing given the background that I shared above. My book companion in this jo...