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I’m Paras Chopra and this website is my digital home.

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🌱 My knowledge garden containing notes and thoughts

🧠 Mental models for entrepreneurs (my book)

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🧵 (250+) Twitter threads I’ve written

Recent essays

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All essays and posts

2024 • 2023 • 2022 • 2021 • 2020 • 2019 • 2018 • 2017 • 2016 • 2015 • 2013 • 2012 • 2011

2024

Getting things done by not trying (Book Summary)
What bootstraps intelligence? (Philosophy, Systems)
Not everything is physics (Philosophy, Physics)
Usefulness grounds truth (Mental Models, Philosophy)
You can’t jail an AI (Philosophy)
How to be a messy thinker (Book Summary, Notes and Summaries)
Why time seems to pass faster as we age (Personal, Philosophy)
A primer on dopamine (Biology, Notes and Summaries, Psychology)

2023

Review of 2023 (Notes and Summaries, Reading Recap)
Notes from the book “Hooked” (Book Summary, Notes and Summaries)
Notes on how Facebook ads work (Notes and Summaries)
Notes on how Supercell is run (Entrepreneurship, Notes and Summaries)
How to increase wealth for everyone (Book Summary)
Notes from the book “Decoding the Why” (Book Summary)
Notes from the book “Magic Words” (Book Summary)
Why you will skim this article (Economics, Psychology)
Don’t sell your soul to the algorithm (Personal, Philosophy)
Games are problems people pay to solve (Book Summary, Mental Models)
The Anti-Productivity Manifesto (Notes and Summaries)
Wealth is not money, it’s the things we use money for (Mental Models)
You can only succeed if you know how you can fail (Mental Models)
Notes from “Ogilvy on Advertising” (Notes and Summaries)
Startups live and die in a multidimensional landscape (Mental Models)
Social media of the future will be human-to-AI, not human-to-human (Technology)
Think from first principles before you Google (or ask ChatGPT) (Mental Models)

2022

Bye 2022. Hello 2023. (Personal)
Stop assuming that your customers want things that you want (Mental Models)
Ask people what they did, not what they will do (Mental Models)
Never ask your friends or family if they like your idea (Mental Models)
Always seek disconfirmatory evidence (Mental Models)
Map is not the territory (Mental Models)
You’re probably not a good leader (because being that is hard) (Mental Models)
Notes from the book “The Shallows” (Book Summary)
How to change habits (Notes and Summaries)
Your company’s org chart is more important than you think (Mental Models)
Aim to be a cult by hiring people who obsess about the same things (Mental Models)
The number one job of a founder is to communicate clarity (Mental Models)
People don’t leave companies, they leave their bosses (Mental Models)
Don’t hire for roles, hire for a change (Mental Models)
Your team’s culture is defined by your behavior, not your words (Mental Models)
Your north star metric should be a leading indicator of profits (Mental Models)
Study your most successful customers to set your direction (Mental Models)
What kills startups is the lack of feedback (Mental Models)
Profit overpowers ethics, if left unchecked (Mental Models)
Great entrepreneurs think like investors (Mental Models)
Investors will prioritize financial returns over your ambitions (Mental Models)
Business quality is determined by one metric: return on invested capital (Mental Models)
Your business is worth all future profits it is expected to generate (Mental Models)
Recruit exceptional people by showing them a promised land (Mental Models)
Moats for deeptech startups (Entrepreneurship, Mental Models)
Raise funding by showing how you can raise even more funding (Mental Models)
Startups shouldn’t solve technically hard problems (Entrepreneurship, Mental Models)
Startups thrive under uncertainty (of the right kind) (Entrepreneurship, Mental Models)
Get press by giving journalists something surprising (Mental Models)
Your 30 second pitch shouldn’t be about you (Mental Models)
Notes from the book: “The Spike” (Notes and Summaries)
Consumers want stuff for free, companies want to pay (Mental Models)
It’s winners-take-all in B2C, while B2B is a long tail (Mental Models)
How my 2021 went (Notes and Summaries, Personal, Reading Recap)
Why we don’t have a science of consciousness yet (Biology, Physics, Technology)

2021

Consumers hate getting sold to, companies love it (Mental Models)
Consumers want to conform, companies want to differentiate (Mental Models)
Your product’s price determines your business playbook (Mental Models)
What people pay for something is determined by its perceived alternatives (Mental Models)
Generating profit requires creativity (Mental Models)
Marketing needs to deliver more than it asks (Mental Models)
People evaluate emotionally and then rationalize their decision (Mental Models)
Notes from the book ‘First Three Minutes’ by Steven Weinberg (Notes and Summaries, Physics)
All new products compete with Instagram for attention (Mental Models)
Assume most people are lazy but market to those who aren’t (Mental Models)
Notes from the book “The Mind is Flat” (Book Summary)
Market leaders get killed by non-competitors (Mental Models)
Never stop creating network effects in your business (Mental Models)
Do what’s hard (because everyone’s doing what’s easy) (Mental Models)
Use all your unfair advantages (Mental Models)
Your competitors are just like you: smart and hard-working (Mental Models)
Compete on cost or quality. You can’t do both (Mental Models)
Switching costs determine the valuation of your business (Mental Models)
Commoditize your value chain before it commoditizes you (Mental Models)
Solve the most important problem that you can personally impact (Mental Models)
How much can science tell us about reality? (Notes and Summaries, Physics)
What you build your business on doesn’t limit how big it can grow (Mental Models)
Find partners who can grow their business by building on top of your business (Mental Models)
My moral code (Personal)
Crypto is the future of our society (Podcast)
All startups belong to an ecosystem that makes or breaks them (Mental Models)
Steal successful ideas from everywhere (Mental Models)
The week rule to prevent failure (Mental Models)
Can an economy keep on growing? (Economics)
Habits prevent people from switching from the familiar to the new (Mental Models)
How we do science determines what we discover (Podcast)
Deliver value only on dimensions that customers care about (Mental Models)
Artificial general intelligence is risky by default (Podcast)
All sophisticated solutions start extremely simple (Mental Models)
Is the world becoming better? (Notes and Summaries, Philosophy, Systems)
Reality is an evolved illusion (Podcast)
People don’t like using technology (Mental Models)
Most surgeries are ineffective (Podcast)
Define your market as narrowly as possible (Mental Models)
We may be alone in the universe (Podcast)
How money works (Notes and Summaries)

2020

20 lessons from 2020 (Notes and Summaries)
Only two types of startups exist: technology-led and culture-led (Mental Models)
Don’t be a first-mover, be the first one to get it right (Mental Models)
Search for market-product fit, not product-market fit (Mental Models)
Be in the desires market, not the solutions market (Mental Models)
Evidence of desire is in people’s behavior (and not in what they say) (Mental Models)
Businesses exist to fulfil human desires (Mental Models)
Capitalism rewards rare and valuable (Mental Models)
How to be a Bayesian (Book Summary, Math, Notes and Summaries)
How to think about risk (Philosophy, Psychology)
On the strangeness of giving advice (Philosophy)
Perils of binary thinking (Psychology)
Twyman’s law (Philosophy, Psychology, Systems)
Horizon based thinking (Psychology)
The three levels of Hindu philosophy (Philosophy, Psychology, Systems)
Money, entropy and climate change (Systems)
My intellectual progress in the last decade (2010s) (Notes and Summaries, Personal)

2019

Making peace with the ambiguity of progress (Personal, Psychology, Systems)
Big ideas that I suspect to be true (Personal)
What does the soul of the Marionette say? (Notes and Summaries, Psychology)
Why are we rich but hopeless (Psychology, Systems)
Life is fractal, but markets are square (Notes and Summaries, Systems)
The meaning of life is unthinkable (Personal, Psychology)
Modes of living (Personal)
How to get rich by investing your savings (Economics)
What Gita teaches us and what it doesn’t (Notes and Summaries, Psychology)
What is truth? (Personal, Psychology, Systems)
You cannot plan for happiness (but you can discover it) (Personal, Psychology)
Writing is defragging brain (Personal)

2018

Inverted Passion 2018 in Review (Personal)
Why is enterprise software so ugly? (Psychology)
Notes from ‘Nonzero: the logic of human destiny’ (Notes and Summaries)
The Reverse Turing Test and proof-of-human currency (Economics, Systems)
Only the paranoid survive (Business, Personal)
Why do introverts get depressed easily? (Psychology)
Simpson’s paradox, or why your intuition about averages is probably wrong (Math, Psychology)
Why deep neural networks work so well? (Systems)
Logistic maps (and what they tell us about free will) (Systems)
Notes on entropy (Notes and Summaries)
Your company’s org chart is more important than you think (Economics, Psychology, Systems)
On the inefficiency of machine learning algorithms (Systems)
Evolution explains everything (Psychology, Systems)
Thinking in analogies is dangerous (Psychology)
Building mental immunity against depression and anxiety (Psychology)
How to become a leader in 10 hard steps (Personal, Psychology)
How to critically dissect a success story (Psychology, Systems)
The metathinking approach to making big decisions (Personal, Psychology)
Notes from The Elephant in the Brain (Notes and Summaries)
Cognitive biases that lead to poorly designed products (Business, Psychology)
Notes from Founders mentor Founders [SaaS edition] – April 2018 (Business, Economics)
Philosophy is politics (Systems)
Copying ideas is highly underrated (Business, Economics)
Mathematicians and startup founders (Business, Economics)
Your cold emails compete with cat pictures for my attention (Business, Psychology)
Review of Life (Personal)
Notes from Inverted Passion Unconference in Bangalore [March ’18] (Notes and Summaries)
Your first sales hire should be two sales reps, and other tips (Psychology, Systems)
Notes from ‘Skin in the game’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Notes and Summaries)
The Motivation, Emotion and Repetition (MER) framework for marketing (Psychology, Systems)
The (de)centralization continuum (Systems)
Notes from Berlin on crypto and blockchain (Notes and Summaries)
Organizations are habit maximization machines (Business, Psychology)
Reliably detecting humans on the Internet (Economics)
Reading Recap #4: The many wonders of prediction markets (Reading Recap)
Businesses get killed by non-competitors (Business, Economics, Systems)
How to create legal monopolies via network effects and economic moats (Economics, Psychology, Systems)
Reading Recap #3: Governance systems beyond democracy (Reading Recap)
Bitcoin’s value beyond hype (Economics)
Bitcoin is mother of all network effects (Economics, Systems)
Reading Recap #2: Basics of Ethereum and mental models for blockchain (Economics, Reading Recap)
Cryptocurrencies are belief systems (Economics)
Meta mental model (Psychology)
Reading Recap #1: Basics of bitcoin and blockchain (Reading Recap)
Speaking your mind is a public service (Psychology)
What fidget spinners teach about making hit products (Business, Systems)
Deconstructing startup decks: Spext (Google Docs for voice data) (Business)
Why startups need to be cult-like (Business, Psychology)
Why many B2C startups pivot to B2B (Business)
Staying relevant in a changing world (Business, Economics, Psychology)
To get good startup ideas, look for anomalies (Business, Psychology)
Details and structure matters: lessons from Facebook’s foundation in 2004 (Business, Psychology)
The winner takes all fallacy and the structure of network effects (Business, Systems)
The long (psychological) guide to achieving your new year resolutions (Psychology)

2017

Why you shouldn’t set prices based on value created (Business, Economics)
Endowment effect in business (Business, Psychology)
What food delivery companies can learn from Netflix (Business, Economics, Systems)
Librarians make more money than scientists (Economics)
Don’t go where the puck is going (Systems)
Revenue requires investment, profit requires creativity (Business, Economics, Systems)
Nobody likes using technology (Business, Psychology)
How to avoid cognitive biases when you get paid to think (Psychology)
Singapore’s foundation and lessons for entrepreneurs (Business, Economics, Systems)
Good engineers make terrible leaders (Notes and Summaries)
Why people jump red lights and what it says about startup failure (Psychology)
I turned 30 and here’s my scorecard (Personal)
The Outer Limits of Reason: A Summary (Book Summary)
Best books that I read in 2016 (Personal)

2016

Why do this? Why create? Why pursue excellence? (Uncategorized)
Welcome to India: a land where passion comes to die (Personal, Philosophy)
What is money? (Entrepreneurship, Philosophy)
Should I publish this on my blog? (Personal)
Strategy eats cool tech and culture for its lunch (Entrepreneurship)

2015

What Philosophy should be about? (Philosophy)
How increased automation could lead to a happier and more egalitarian society (Philosophy, Technology)

2013

The real use of money is to buy freedom (Personal, Philosophy)
Life as a question with no answers (Personal, Philosophy)
Existential drivel (Personal, Philosophy)
On being okay with boredom (Personal, Philosophy)
What is freedom? (Philosophy)
Everydayness and the longing for the magical (Personal, Philosophy)
Please don’t let yourself get stereotyped. You’re infinite. You’re beautiful. (Personal, Philosophy)

2012

Why time is not running out (Personal, Philosophy)
Free will, facticity and their (not-so) surprising consequences (Personal, Philosophy)
For startups: how to deal with large enterprise customers (Entrepreneurship)
A boring poem (Personal, Philosophy)
A CEO has to do only two tasks: hiring and setting vision (Entrepreneurship)
A perfectly normal life – Part I (Personal)
That thing we call happiness (Personal, Philosophy)
On (not) having heros in life (Personal, Philosophy)
It’s OK to disagree in a face-to-face conversation (Personal, Philosophy)
Why do people fall in love with nostalgic past? (Personal, Philosophy)
Defying parents is mark of a thinking man (Personal, Philosophy)
The essential startup team: content, analytics, design, engineering (Entrepreneurship)
Validate your startup idea by asking 3 simple questions (Entrepreneurship)
My Mixergy interview! Hear the story of Visual Website Optimizer (Entrepreneurship, Personal)
Pick experiences over relationships (Personal, Philosophy)

2011

Here’s the Wingify story! (Entrepreneurship)
Professional success and personal success: two independent dimensions (Personal, Philosophy)
What matters in life (and what doesn’t) (Personal, Philosophy)
Wingify nominated for Red Herring Asia 100 and NASSCOM Emerge 50 (Entrepreneurship, Personal)
Stupidity of free markets (Personal)
On Internet, you are at mercy of private organizations (Personal)
How to market your startup or new product without spending a penny (Entrepreneurship)
The kick of a startup (Entrepreneurship, Personal)
Customer service is not cost of sales. It’s a marketing expense (Entrepreneurship, Personal)
Growth startup v/s lifestyle startup: why should there be a difference at all? (Entrepreneurship)
What’s wrong with Indian startup scene? (Entrepreneurship, Personal)
How to find startup ideas that make money (Entrepreneurship)
Startup: an emotional roller coaster ride (Entrepreneurship, Personal)
What Facebook needs? A killer search engine (Entrepreneurship, Personal)
Sorry, your “cool” webapp is probably not going to make money (Entrepreneurship, Technology)

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