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Notes from Inverted Passion Unconference in Bangalore [March ’18]

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Notes and Summaries

After doing the first unconference in Pune, I and Roby did the second one in Bangalore on March 11th 2018. These are my notes from the event.

Fireside chat with Kunal Shah, Founder of Freecharge (sold for $400mn to SnapDeal)

Here’s the entire audio transcript on Soundcloud. My key insights and learnings from the conversation (we were taking whisky shots while chatting, so when you hear me say ‘shots’ you do the math). Also, eChai has collated many people’s tweets into one page (so you can read everyone else’s insights from our chat).

1/ First, the quick fire questions with @kunalb11 ...  Read the entire post →

Your first sales hire should be two sales reps, and other tips

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Psychology, Systems

Recently someone asked me a question about hiring and structuring sales team in India.

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 →

Notes from ‘Skin in the game’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Notes and Summaries

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 →

The Motivation, Emotion and Repetition (MER) framework for marketing

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Psychology, Systems

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’.

This error of thinking in which the entrepreneur assumes customers have same motivations as s/he has is called the mind projection fallacy. This error is very common and hard to cure. I’ve written about how it affects entrepreneurs when they design products, get excited about new technology or seek new startup ideas. ...  Read the entire post →

The (de)centralization continuum

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Systems

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 →

Notes from Berlin on crypto and blockchain

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Notes and Summaries

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 →

Reliably detecting humans on the Internet

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Economics

1/ There’s ONE big unsolved problem for anyone who’s interested: detecting humans on the Internet.

It has potential to unlock billions of dollars of value. Here’s how.

2/ Today, some of the biggest tech companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter) make billions of dollars by monetising human attention.

Digital ad industry is total of $280Bn.

3/ The reason Facebook, Google make this amount of money is because their algorithms for detecting bots are closed source.

There’s a continual arms race between click-farms / bot-makers and bot detecting algorithms at these companies. ...  Read the entire post →

Reading Recap #4: The many wonders of prediction markets

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Reading Recap

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 →

How to create legal monopolies via network effects and economic moats

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Economics, Psychology, Systems

If there’s one thing that customers dislike, it’s the barriers in switching between competitive products. As customers, we want to retain our freedom. However, as entrepreneurs, we are incentivized to curtail that freedom. As I wrote earlier, head to head competition in a market pushes profits to zero. To make a profit, an entrepreneur needs to find a way to keep customers and competition away from each other.

There are two ways this separation can happen:

  • Prevent competition from entering into your market
  • Prevent customers from switching to a competitor

Obviously, these tasks are hard in a free market (and that is why market pays through the roof for companies with a sustainable competitive advantage). Unless you sell drugs, you can’t (and shouldn’t) hire an assassin to prevent competition. Nor, can you (and should you) threaten your customers with dire consequences if they switch. ...  Read the entire post →

Reading Recap #3: Governance systems beyond democracy

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Reading Recap

Anybody who has thought about democracy even one level deep knows that a decision taken by the majority vote isn’t always a good decision. For issues of importance, such as Britain’s participation in EU or global warming, most people do not have the necessary background knowledge or motivation to cast an informed vote.

Any scientist can tell you that just because you had snow in your area, it doesn’t mean global warming is false. Most people care only about immediate and local issues, and good policies usually require second or third order analysis that’s hard to do and even harder to explain.  ...  Read the entire post →