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I’m Paras Chopra and this website, invertedpassion.com, is a home for all my projects and thoughts.

I love learning and reflecting upon what I’ve learned. Here’s a summary of what I learned in the 2010s decade. There are some big ideas I suspect to be true (but have no proof yet). And, here’s my moral code.

I like to read about a complex (and often ambiguous) topic and break it down into simple ideas without losing the nuance that’s essential for understanding it.

In that spirit, read about how money works. It covers the history of how money came to be and why the US dollar is the global reserve currency today. Even though the real use of money is to buy freedom, it is linked to entropy creation and generally accelerates the destruction of the environment. ... Read the entire post →

Define your market as narrowly as possible

January 18, 2021August 28, 2021Paras ChopraMental Models

It’s common for entrepreneurs to cast a wide net early on and imagine their market to be huge. The logic goes something like this: if the market is worth a hundred billion dollars, then even if 1% of it is captured, the company will be making a billion dollars.

All this sounds good in theory but in practice, it never works this way.

Why would the market leader – the big fish in the ocean – let you take even 1% of the market? In fact, as soon as your startup shows first signs of success, the big fish will do whatever it can to crush you and snatch whatever market share you may have won by that time. ... Read the entire post →

20 lessons from 2020

December 28, 2020August 28, 2021Paras ChopraNotes and Summaries

The most beautiful aspect of a SaaS business is that your monthly revenue is more or less stable. Unlike buying a soap, an automatic monthly or a yearly subscription means that customers aren’t frequently re-evaluating their decision for what to purchase.

However, when times are hard, people do think deeply about where their money is going. This year’s pandemic forced everyone to do such introspecting, including customers of VWO – a product that my company builds.

Even though the impact of economic slowdown due to coronavirus pandemic was not existential for our business, we did get impacted. ... Read the entire post →

Evidence of desire is in people’s behavior (and not in what they say)

October 18, 2020August 28, 2021Paras ChopraMental Models

Many people say they want to quit smoking or reduce their alcohol intake.

*The Deluded Customer, illustrated by* Aakanksha Gaur

Yet days later they find themselves smoking or drinking again. How many times your friends have told you that they want to get fitter, only to later discover them ordering a large, cheesy pizza? We, humans, are notorious for saying something but doing something else. This tendency is troublesome for entrepreneurs because when people express their desire for something, it’s a mistake to take that on its face value.

(As an aside, if you’re interested in knowing how to form good habits that you can keep for long, read my essay on habit formation). ... Read the entire post →

Mental Models for Startup Founders

Hi, I’m Paras Chopra, founder Wingify, a SaaS company known for its market-leading A/B testing product VWO. These days I’m running Lossfunk.

This freely accessible online book contains what I learned while bootstrapping my multimillion dollar, profitable business. There are 65+ effective mental models for startup founders and business leaders.

Hit me up on Twitter if you want to ask a question or have a comment on ideas in this book.

Understanding Markets

1. Capitalism rewards rare and valuable

2. Businesses exist to fulfill human desires ... Read the entire post →

How to think about risk

August 28, 2020August 28, 2021Paras ChopraPhilosophy, Psychology

1/ The most common mistake with risk is NOT differentiating:

personal, unique risk

FROM

collective, average risk

2/ Personal, unique risk arises from things that are unique to you.

For example, personal financial risk is what incurs to you because of your peculiar investments. Maybe you picked certain stocks or invested in a “hot” property

3/ Contrast this to the collective and average risk of the entire nation’s economy tanking or a bank tanking and wiping savings of millions of people like you.

4/ Usually we end up conflating these two types of risks in our minds.

Many people don’t invest in equities because it’s too risky.

Yes, it’s risky but in a collective and average way, not a personal and unique way

5/ Protecting against collective risks is an exercise in vain because the collective risk is never eliminated, it’s simply gets shifted somewhere else

6/ Collective risks are less worrisome because collectives of people want status quo

So on the realization of such risks, you can take comfort in the fact that there are millions of other concerned folks who will protect the negative impacts of risk for you

7/ Case in point: the 2008 financial crash in the US.

At that time, everyone thought the world economy was in ruts and that people lost money.

Fast forward to today and thanks to bailouts, after the dip, here’s the US stock market performance. ... Read the entire post →

Horizon based thinking

July 18, 2020July 18, 2020Paras ChopraPsychology

Whenever you’re at a crossroads and are wondering what to do next, here’s how to think.

1/ The first thing to ensure is that you acknowledge that a lot of your decision-making will be driven by how you’re feeling *right now* and not how you’ll feel once you choose a path.

The need to escape can make us choose things that we won’t like long term.

2/ The way to keep emotion-driven decision at bay is to *force* yourself to think in three horizons:

1. Short term goals
2. Long term goals
3. The path between the two

3/ Yes, I know this sounds trivial but far too often:

– We’re either hyper-focused on short term and optimize our way to getting stuck into a local-optima
– Or, we’re hyper-focused on the long term and forget that present actions is how we get to the future ... Read the entire post →

My intellectual progress in the last decade (2010s)

January 26, 2020August 29, 2023Paras ChopraNotes and Summaries, Personal

A decade is a long time, about 1/8th of an average life span if you happen to live a long life. I came across Scott Alexander’s post where he wrote about his intellectual progress in 2010s and thought it’ll be a good idea to do the same for myself. When I had turned 30 two years back, I had looked back at the goals that the 20 year old me had. If you read that post, you’ll see that overall I feel that my 20s (and correspondingly, most of the 2010s) were very fulfilling. I started a company, fell in love and made myself financially independent. ... Read the entire post →

Life is fractal, but markets are square

May 7, 2019May 7, 2019Paras ChopraNotes and Summaries, Systems

I recently read Venkat’s synopsis of the book Seeing like a state, which I followed up by an excellent blog post titled The Meridian of Her Greatness. Venkat challenged people to summarize the most important ideas from that post in a tweetstorm. He said if it gets more than 100 likes, on Twitter he’ll give away $1. I thought it was a fair deal, so here’s my attempt to distill some of the ideas into a visual essay.

1/ When humans wield their power in the world, they are limited by the linear nature of their thinking. The best example of this linearization is the top-down planning of modern suburbs. Contrast this with how nations and states emerged in a bottom-up fashion. ... Read the entire post →

How to get rich by investing your savings

March 30, 2019April 1, 2019Paras ChopraEconomics

I’ve recently relooked at my personal portfolio and realized I have a thing or two to say about investments. So here it goes:

1/ For goodness’s sake, do NOT keep your money lying in a savings account or do a fixed deposit (FD).

We generally inherit this financial laziness from parents. You can do better than them, no?

2/ Realise that you are actively *burning* money in FDs / savings account.

If you incorporate inflation and tax on interest income, your corpus is likely getting smaller every passing day.

3/ What if I told you that a couple of hours invested in pushing some buttons online can give you 13x the returns that you get from FDs? ... Read the entire post →