All posts by Paras Chopra

We want to be successful with our decisions. Even though failure is often glamorized, nobody wants it on purpose. Everyone wishes to be successful when they’re starting a company, launching a product, hiring a leader or even while buying a house.

It may sound obvious, but the bedrock of good decisions is defining what good means before you execute on a decision.

Here’s why it’s important to define a clear, objective and unambiguous criteria before making any decision. First, without a commitment to an objective criterion, your brain will latch onto your how you’re feeling to decide whether the outcome of the project is good or bad. These emotions are influenced by all sorts of subconscious cognitive biases. In the end, you will end up picking data points that support your emotional inclination while ignoring the other data points.  ...  Read the entire post →

Startups are like heat seeking missiles, except they seek profit and live in a multidimensional world where one mistake means missing the target by a mile.

Startups are hard because they require several things to go right simultaneously. It’s not sufficient to get one thing right, an entrepreneur must solve this multidimensional puzzle perfectly.

There are many smaller but important dimensions, but here are the biggest ones that need to be just right for a business to succeed:

• Is the problem you’re solving a real one, or is it just in your head?
• Even if the problem is real, are people actively looking to solve it? There are many problems that are merely inconveniences that not many people bother to solve. Is your problem one of that? 
• Even if the problem has a high enough priority and that people are looking to solve it, are they willing to pay for it? There are many problems which people want a solution for, but they’d not pay anything or much for it because they’re habituated to expect a solution for free. For example, news and information is valuable to people, but people have come to expect to get it for free on the Internet.
• Even if the problem is real and people are willing to pay for it, do you have the required capabilities to develop a solution? Some problems may have challenging solutions that are not easy to execute.
• Even if you’re able to solve a problem that people are willing to pay for it, is there a way you can profitably market your offering to them? Marketing costs money, and often potential customers may not be aggregated at one place for you to profitably market to them.
• Even if you’ve found a distribution channel, does your business have any lasting competitive advantage that will prevent a bigger competitor or another startup from snatching your customers?
• Lastly, assuming you do everything right, will you deliver positive unit economics? Your business will struggle unless you’re predictably generating cash flow.

Remember: because so many things have to go right, most successful entrepreneurs either get lucky on all these aspects or they have a unique insight or expertise about one of the above aspects that others don’t have. ...  Read the entire post →

Like most technologies, search engines are both good and bad at the same time. They’re good because they open up vast resources of information. Today, our ability to know things instantly would seem like magic to previous generations. At the same time, precisely because searching is so easy, we’ve become habitual for googling for each little problem or doubt in our head.

In programming circles, coding by Googling is popular, but this is equally true for all professions. Because search results are so damn fast and convenient, we are now slowly getting wired to automatically and subconsciously Google any unresolved query in our head. This automatic reliance on search engines is dangerous because it is replacing our capacity for original thinking with second-hand information written by others.   ...  Read the entire post →

Mind projection fallacy happens when we assume that most other people are like us. It’s an error to assume that they have similar desires and fears towards things as we do.

Normally, this is not such a big issue. The worst that can happen in most cases is perhaps an exchange of incredulous looks (for example, when a cricket fan encounters a non-cricket who doesn’t know who Sachin Tendulkar is).

But for entrepreneurs, the mind projection fallacy is dangerous because it means they can end up working on the wrong problem. ...  Read the entire post →

When it comes to our life and decisions, we’re optimistic rationalizers. Every New Year’s Eve, we take resolutions that are grounded in perfectly valid reasons – reducing weight, quitting cigarettes, reading more books and so on. If someone asks why we want to read books, we can confidently blurt out that it will expand our worldview.

Fast-forward a couple of weeks in the new year, and we’re often back to our old ways. It’s spectacular that even when we quit our yearly resolution within weeks, we always have good reasons for why we abandoned our goals. (We’d rarely acknowledge that we’re lazy or are addicted to cigarettes.) ...  Read the entire post →

People are generally nice in person. You’d know this if you have ever gone to parties where everyone is super nice to others but as soon as the party is over, they start gossiping about the ones who’ve left. Very rarely would anyone tell a person at the party that they look like a clown (while often thinking in their head of the same).

This tendency of people not to tell honestly what they have in mind misleads entrepreneurs when they seek feedback on their idea. Even if the idea is obviously flawed, in general, people won’t tell that to an entrepreneur’s face. This means, if you’re an entrepreneur, you rarely get to hear why your idea sucks. ...  Read the entire post →

Thinking is expensive for an animal – our brain consumes almost 20% of the energy of the body (even at rest). Hence, the brain takes whatever shortcuts it can to do less deliberate thinking (that requires more energy) and more automatic thinking (that requires less energy).

There’s another name for such automatic thinking: cognitive bias.

The word bias is used because our preprogrammed ways of thinking bias us towards paying more attention to certain information at the expense of ignoring other information. So, cognitive biases are systematic errors in viewing of the world. They are very hard to correct because you literally see the world through a lens that’s painted with cognitive biases.  ...  Read the entire post →