Be passionate about the territory, not the map
Balaji is a deep thinker on crypto and its implications. Formerly the CTO of Coinbase and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, he's seen how technologies evolve over time, which ones change the world and which ones fizzle out as a fad.
He believes crypto technologies such as bitcoin represent the former. To him, crypto will emerge as something that's as important as the Internet and influence our society for decades to come.
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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
Many people say they want to quit smoking or reduce their alcohol intake.
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). ...
Hi, I’m Paras Chopra, founder of Lossfunk and Wingify, a SaaS company known for its market-leading A/B testing product VWO.
An updated version of the book below is available on Amazon by the title: “The Book of Clarity: Building Your Dream Start-Up Using First Principles Thinking“.
Most chapters in the new book are the same as what you find below, but there are a few new ones. The book also has beautiful illustrations by Aakanksha Gaur.
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. ...
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. ...
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 ...
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. ...
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. ...