Welcome, my friend

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

• 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)

• 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)

• 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)

• 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)

• 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)

• 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)

• 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)

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

• 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)

• 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)

• 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)