Recently someone asked me a question about hiring and structuring sales team in India.
Hi @paraschopra – Am a big fan and been reading a lot of your thoughts on Inverted Passion. Wonder if you're coming up w/ something about hiring and structuring the sales team for the Indian market? Most content online is about sales in the US and Europe
Incidentally, someone asked a very similar question in our Inverted Passion slack group (now we’re 271 people). I shared my experience of growing an inside sales team at Wingify in India. In this post, I’m copy-pasting my answer from the Slack group and adding some more tips. ...Read the entire post →
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the famous author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, has come up with a new book titled Skin in the Game. I finished it over the weekend and here are my notes.
My sofa, my finger, Taleb’s book
Insights (and points I agree with him on)
– Human systems are systems within systems, interacting in complex ways. No article / paper / logical argument can capture all interactions of such systems and their evolution over a non-trivial amount of time. So one shot, large scale interventions (such as invasion, UBI, CRISPR) are extremely dangerous because we now have people in power who can order large scale tech-driven interventions across a large section of society. ...Read the entire post →
Our collective understanding of marketing has a massive hangover from the pre-Internet days. If you ask most people to define marketing, they’d go with definitions like “to inform about the product”, “to create brand awareness” or “to spread the word”. All these definitions are wrong because of the same reason: they serve company’s goals, not customers’.
Internet visionaries are worrying about the increased centralization of the Internet. They worry about centralization of power as most of the value on the Internet is flowing to four big companies that go by the acronym FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google). Apple isn’t on the list because they make money by selling good ol’ hardware. (Moreover, FAANG doesn’t sound so cool).
Voices encouraging decentralization are strongest in Berlin, home to the majority of upcoming blockchain projects. Last week I was there attending the BlockStack Summit. If you go through my notes, you’ll know that almost all speakers believed how decentralization is the future of humanity. ...Read the entire post →
I attended Blockstack Berlin event yesterday and here are my notes. In case you’re not very familiar with the cryptocurrencies or blockchain space, I recommend going through my reading list on bitcoin and ethereum first.
The Agenda
What attracted me to travel from Pune, India to Berlin, Germany was the impressive list of speakers. I was specifically interested in listening to Edward Snowden (the famous whistleblower), Nick Sbazo (creator of bitgold, precursor to bitcoin), and Albert Wenger (author of world after capital). ...Read the entire post →
Have you seen this famous video on Youtube where one guy dances and it keeps on attracting other people to join him? Soon enough this one person’s weird dance is a group dancing together. In case you haven’t, check it out (it’s just 3 minutes long):
Organizations grow similarly. Whether the founding team intends to or not, every startup project ends up acquiring cult-like habits. Here’s how that happens.
What makes company cultures different from each other?
Imagine your name is Paras and you’re the founder of a startup project (it could be a company, a non-profit, a religion or even a country). You have a weird habit: you like to come to office by noon and stay late (say until 8pm). You hire your first employee, and on the first day he comes to office at 9am (just like he did in his previous job). The empty office seems odd to him, and it becomes odder still when he sees you stroll by in office during his lunchtime. In the evening, since it’s the first day of his job, he waits for you to leave but the entire time, you are happily busy on your laptop. You leave office by 9pm and a couple of minutes after you, the new hire leaves. Thinking of his first day as a fluke, the new employee comes in early again tomorrow but the same thing repeats. ...Read the entire post →
Last week, after reading about governance systems that improve upon democracy, I went deeper into market-based approaches of making policy decisions. Markets and governance seem two very different things, but as you will see in this article, there are benefits of taking good ideas from both combining them.
When you consider democracy, think about a group of people with different educational backgrounds, different interest levels and, most importantly, different preferences (some like guns and some don’t). Now, all members of this disparate group decide equal votes is a good idea and what they get is an average opinion that nobody likes. That’s democracy in a nutshell. ...Read the entire post →
Entrepreneurs worry about competition all the time. And they’re correct in doing so. I think the “focus on customers, ignore competition” is a terrible business advice. Customers will never ask you to introduce switching costs, yet that’s precisely what businesses should do in order to be profitable for a non-trivial amount of time.
