I tweet on a lot of topics. This page is an archive of all my twitter threads organized in one place.
Here are the major categories:
- Ask me anything
- Crowdsourced wisdom
- On life
- On career and personal growth
- On games
- On human psychology
- On mental health
- On physical fitness and body
- On thinking and cognitive biases
- On reading and writing
- On environment and climate crisis
- On business
- On investing
- On startups
- On economy
- On science
- On systems
- Case studies
- On AI, ML and deep learning
- Notes from books, chats, articles and papers
- Explanations
- On bitcoin, blockchain and decentralization
- Mental models for founders
- Podcast notes
- When I turned 37
- When I turned 35
- When I turned 34
- When I turned 33
- When I turned 32
- When I turned 31
- When Wingify (my startup) turned 10
- ___________ improves life radically, but is often under-estimated by many
- At what threshold of wealth, does time become more valuable than money?
- What is that you strongly believed in that you now consider as naive?
- The time has come to give up on _________
- Whatâs advice sounds simple but is bloody hard to practice?
- Which job will be the last one to get automated?
- Whatâs the cheapest way to improve oneâs quality of life?
- What’s broken but is continued to be used because there’s no good alternative?
- What startup / product should very obviously exist but doesnât?
- Whatâs a really good online course (on any subject) that youâve attended?
- Whatâs a good, uplifting movie that never fails to cheer you up?
- Which book are you reading right now?
- What scientific / technical book that youâve read is beautifully written?
- What is that people of age 30+ know thatâs really hard to teach to people in their 20s or teens?
- Whatâs your favourite word from any language?
- What industry/tech was once hyped up and attracted a ton of venture capital but ultimately fizzled out?
- Whatâs one luxury that you spend money on that youâd recommend to anyone who can afford it?
- If you were a billionaire, what non-commercial project would you massively indulge in?
- How to achieve success without trying to shoot for it
- Not everything is physics
- Usefulness grounds truth
- How productivity enslaves you
- Me talking to my past self
- How to create value
- Why you should be curious about everything
- Is the đ world becoming better?
- Do you believe in đ progress? Here’s why you’re wrong
- Review of life
- My moral code.
- Ten big ideas that I suspect are true
- Modes of living
- Why do we keep questioning the meaning of life?
- The three levels of Hindu philosophy
- How three big (perhaps the biggest) questions might be related
- A series of unrelated, but related, thoughts on life
- Insights on mind and life from meditation
- Our âself-identityâ doesnât exist
- The fact that dreams exist prove that reality is a hallucination conjured by brain
- On why speaking your mind is important
- The Anti-Productivity Manifesto
On career and personal growth:
- I hit 100k followers đ. Some lessons and reflections.
- A short thread on đ deep work.
- Outside of oneâs main job (that pays the bills), one should work on things that are timeless.
- Some thoughts on how to rise up in the economic ladder
- On being a generalist (v/s a specialist)
- How to do mid-career switches
- Habits to form at first day of your job
- How to become a leader in 10 HARD steps
- A thread on 20 lessons I’ve learned from 2020
- Why micromanagement is a loaded term that can eaily mislead managers and founders
- How to keep new year resolutions
- How to change habits
- What makes a great game
- Philosophy of games
- Why the most addictive game is yet to come
- Notes from the book ‘a theory of fun’
- A (long) thread on human behavior
- A (massive) thread on dopamine
- How the limitations of our thinking are seen in the things we design
- Why are we impatient on the web
- How design trends follow consumer expectations
- Plutchik’s wheel of emotions
- Some random thoughts on people feeling offended / triggered online
- What’s the secret of humanity’s success?
- What you should remember if you hear news that makes you feel that the world is ending
- Why almost all the things in the universe are beyond our *definitive* understanding
- A thread on the SEVEN properties of morals đ§
- A short thread on life advice
- On the strangeness of giving advice
- Thoughts on April Fool’s hoaxes
- On emotions
- On tools and tinkering
- People are not value-maximizers
- Understanding endowment effect
- Nobody likes using technology
- Why PhD has a high dropout rate
- Why do we crave status, wealth, rank, and titles
- Evolutionary reason behind our quest for meaning
- Why do we keep consuming sugar when we know it is bad for health?
- On efficiency
- Why everyone gets more retweets than you?
- How to engage with Flat earthers?
- I bet our descendants will get bored of exploring new planets faster than our ancestors got bored of exploring new lands.
- “Code is law” only when these conditions are satisfied
- A short thread on meditation
- A thread on building mental immunity against anxiety and depression
- Why do introverts get depressed easily?
- People who are not depressed tend to underestimate the suffering caused by depression
On thinking and cognitive biases:
- How to be a messy thinker
- Donât sell your soul to the algorithm
- The truth about scientific claims
- A short thread on horizon based thinking
- All 𧟠models are wrong, but some are useful.
- A thread on decision making
- How to think about risk?
- Twymanâs law
- How to avoid cognitive biases when you’re paid to think
- Cognitive biases that lead to poorly designed products
- Thinking in analogies is dangerous
- The many levels of our thinking
- A thread on why PHILOSOPHY has no RIGHT or WRONG answers, and what can you about it
- Meta mental models
- How to critically dissect a success story
- What language reveals about how we think
- Not winning does not imply losing. (a thread on perils of đ binary thinking)
- My 4 rules for writing well
- Why do I write? (A thread on writing)
- Some tips on writing that you never asked
- How to get the most out of reading books
On environment and climate change:
- To save human civilization, we need to panic and act NOW!
- What nobody is telling you about đźđł India’s future
- A thread on India’s relationship to climate change
- How is our world’s energy ultimately produced and consumed? Can we get off fossil fuels anytime soon?
- Why planting a tree is a bad idea
- Here’s the culture I’m setting with my new startup.
- A short thread on what I’ve learned about ORGANIZATION DESIGN in the last 8 years
- Some second order consequences of running a remote team
- A thread on mathematics and entrepreneurship
- Why cold emails don’t work and what to do about it
- A framework for marketing
- Why do cultures in organizations resist change?
- Most established businesses get killed by non-competitors
- All major companies are legal monopolies
- How to avoid hiring mistakes
- Why B2C startups often pivot to B2B
- Seek market-product fit, not product-market fit
- How to set prices of a product
- Profitability = creativity
- There’s no clear boundary between product and marketing
- Notes from Seth Godin’s book: “This is marketing”
- How đž money works. (massive, 150+ tweet thread)
- Difference between wealth and money
- How to get rich by investing your savings
- Some thoughts on active investing
- When it comes to picking stocks, why is it hard to beat the market (indexes)?
- How to think about investing into stock markets?
- How investing in startups is different from other kinds of investing.
- How things acquire value
- Only four things matter in investing
- Why you should NOT invest in IPOs
- On risk v/s returns
- Why covid-19 pandemic pushed stock markets to all time high?
- How do you bootstrap a $20mn+ đ° business in 10 years? A thread on @vwo’s story
- A short thread on Venture Capital
- Stop worshipping đ€ billion dollar valuations
- A thread on increasing chances of startup success
- If you havenât started a company so far because youâre unable to find a good business idea, youâre doing it fine
- How to increase your chances of making money in business
- A 20-year-old entrepreneur asks for advice. Here’s what I tell him.
- A thread for B2B / SaaS founders
- Building an inside sales team
- On loneliness and frustrations of entrepreneurs
- What can entrepreneurs learn from climate change
- Can an economy keep on đ growing?
- How to make Universal Basic Income (UBI) work?
- [Jan 2021] With stock markets all-time high, are we in a bubble?
- How to make sense of negative interest rates
- Prediction: most countries will experiment with launching their own digital đž currencies.
- What happened during the first three minutes of the Big Bang?
- In what sense is everything connected?
- A story of our home in the universe. a visual đ§”
- Why we donât have a science of consciousness yet
- It shouldnât be surprising that our fundamental reality is describable using mathematics
- Why do fundamental entities of the universe (particles, fields, molecules) behave in a way that can be captured into neat little mathematical formulas?
- Behind-the-scenes view of the cutting edge in fundamental physics
- How much can science tell us about reality?
- Why social science results are hard to trust?
- Hereâs one useful way to think about what đ science is
- Hubble deep field, the most amazing picture of our universe.
- Why we havenât seen đž aliens visiting us so far
- 15 wonders of science and mathematics (a visual exploration)
- What is truth?
- What does progress mean when it comes to understanding complex systems?
- There is no such thing as ‘common’ or ‘generally accepted’ knowledge
- A thread on how science is done
- Hereâs one useful way to think about what đ science is.
- A thread on what does it mean to measure a property of a system
- Some resources on science of subjective experience
- I measured the speed of light using chocolate!
- A short list of âŻïž paradoxes in economics and society
- Examples of how systems that should work FOR you end up EMPLOYING you
- History in one tweet
- Why Silicon Valley works and why Denmark is the happiest nation?
- How technology + capitalism worsens life quality by converting people into commodities
- What role does innovation play in building a more sustainable world?
- A critique of Ray Dalio’s analysis of what’s wrong with capitalism
- To understand human history, understand non-zero sum games
- What are prediction markets and why they work?
- Flaws of democracies and proposals to improve it
- Network effects and bitcoin’s price fall
- How money gets value
- Understanding network effects
- Why librarians make more money than PhDs
- Don’t go where the puck is going
- On Internet
- College education is not going to survive
- This tweet will be stored forever on a hard disk
- There’s a đ drug (named Zolgensma) that costs $2.5mn (Rs 18 crore). Currently the world’s costliest drug. Why is it so expensive?
- Cancer đ drugs are expensive. Here’s why.
- Butter v/s Margarine war has an important lesson to teach for the emerging plant-based food industry.
- Why we went remote-first at my company
- On income inequality in India
- A thread on đ° financial prudence of đźđł Indian government
- A field trip to understand life and economic situation of a samosa hawker in India
- How things become popular: a case study in fidget spinners
- Case study: what food delivery companies can learn from Netflix
- Case study: why Facebook succeeded
- Case Study: Why Apple doesn’t care about torn power cords and buggy software?
- Not all economic growth is good. A case study of tobacco industry
- Reviewing đ animal-product alternatives that are available in đźđł India
On AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning:
- What bootstraps intelligence?
- ChatGPT with Code Interpreter is an INSANE productivity multiplier (my experiments with it)
- My hunches about what GPT-4 will be capable of đ§”
- Why deep neural networks work so well on “natural” learning tasks
- Why Machine Learning is inefficient
- One of the most challenging problems: reliably detecting humans on the internet
- We under-estimate the dangers of dumb AI and over-estimate likelihood of evil AI
- Why AI will never be ‘achieved’
- Deep learning seems to be more like an artisanal / handicraft process than a science
- Which jobs in web / B2B / SaaS will be the first to be automated?
- Talking to famous people via GPT-3
- Impact of code-writing AI on the world
Notes from books, chats, articles and papers:
- I read 39 books in 2023. Here’s the list.
- I read 19 books in 2022. a 𧔠recapping all of them
- Notes from the book âThe Shallowsâ
- I read 28 books in 2021. a 𧔠recapping all of them.
- Books you should read if you’ve read “Atomic Habits”
- Notes from the book “Magic Words”
- Notes on how covid vaccine was developed from the book: “A shot to save the world”
- Notes from Gita, the holy book of Hindus
- Notes from the book “Justice: what is the right thing to do?”
- Notes from “The Spike: An Epic Journey Through The Brain in 2.1 Seconds”
- Notes from Dreams of a final theory by Steven Weinberg (Physics Nobel prize winner)
- Notes on how the mind works from the book “The Mind is Flat”
- Notes on Fungi and Mushrooms from the book “Entangled Web”
- Notes on Bayes Theorem from the book “The Theory That Won’t Die”
- Notes from a book on architecture called “The Timeless Way of Building”
- Notes on questioning meritocracy via the book “The Tyranny of Merit”
- Notes from the book “Being Ecological” (that I read twice, back to back)
- Notes from John Gray’s “Soul of the Marionette”
- Lost Einsteins
- Notes on fireside chat with Kunal Shah
- Notes from Taleb’s Skin in the game
- Notes from the book “Enigma of Reason” on how human thinking works
- Notes from the book “Hackers and Painters” by Paul Graham
- Notes from the book âDecoding the Whyâ
- Crony Beliefs
- Eugenics
- What is entropy?
- Entropy and its misapplications
- A short thread on how evolution explains everything
- Things nobody tells you about probabilities
- How to think about probabilities
- What is ergodicity?
- Consciousness is a compression of reality
- Some thoughts on why describing how consciousness arises (the hard problem) seems insurmountable
- Systems that we collectively make – organizations, govts, ecosystems – also feel like conscious selves at their level
- Why most published research is false (as in being non-replicable)
On blockchains, bitcoin and decentralization:
- Future is not decentralized
- On bitcoin
- On bitcoin’s energy consumption
- Bitcoin is a virtual fortress.
- How bitcoin is different from gold.
- Collection of resources to understand bitcoin and blockchain
- Understanding blockchain
- More thoughts on bitcoin
- Blockchain as a major innovation in society
- What did I learn from not buying bitcoin in 2011.
- #1 Capitalism rewards rare and valuable
- #2 Businesses exist to fulfil human desires
- #3 Evidence of desire is in peopleâs behavior (and not in what they say)
- #4 Be in the desires market, not the solutions market
- #5 Search for market-product fit, not product-market fit
- #6 Donât be a first-mover, be the first one to get it right
- #7 Only two types of startups exist: technology-led and culture-led
- #8 Be the king of a pond, rather than a dead fish in the ocean
- #9 People don’t like using technology
- #10 All sophisticated solutions start extremely simple
- #11 Deliver value only on dimensions that customers care about
- #12 Habits prevent people from switching from the familiar to the new
- #13 The week rule to prevent failure
- #14 Steal successful ideas from everywhere
- #15 All startups belong to an ecosystem that makes or breaks them
- #16 Find partners who can grow their business by building on top of your business
- #17 What you build your business on doesnât limit how big it can grow
- #18 Commoditize your value chain before it commoditizes you
- #19 Switching costs determine the valuation of your business
- #20 Compete on cost or quality. You canât do both
- #21 Your competitors are just like you: smart and hard-working
- #22 Use all your unfair advantages
- #23 Do whatâs hard (because everyoneâs doing whatâs easy)
- #24 Never stop creating network effects in your business
- #25 Market leaders get killed by non-competitors
- #26 Assume most people are lazy but market to those who arenât
- #27 All new products compete with Instagram for attention
- #28 People evaluate emotionally and then rationalize their decision
- #29 Marketing needs to deliver more than it asks
- #30 Generating profit requires creativity
- #31 What people pay for something is determined by its perceived alternatives
- #32 Your productâs price determines your business playbook
- #33 Consumers want to conform, companies want to differentiate
- #34 Consumers hate getting sold to, companies love it
- #35 Consumers want stuff for free, companies want to pay.
- #36 Itâs winners-take-all in B2C, while B2B is a long tail
- #37 Your 30 second pitch shouldnât be about you
- #38 Get press by giving journalists something surprising
- #39 Raise funding by showing how you can raise even more funding
- #40 Recruit exceptional people by showing them a promised land
- #41 Your business is worth all future profits it is expected to generate
- #42 Business quality is determined by one metric: return on invested capital
- #43 Investors will prioritize financial returns over your ambitions
- #44 Great entrepreneurs think like investors
- #45 Profit overpowers ethics
- #46 What kills startups is the lack of feedback
- #47 Study your most successful customers to set your direction
- #48 Your north star metric should be a leading indicator of profits
- #49 Your teamâs culture is defined by your behavior, not your words
- #50 Donât hire for roles, hire for a change
- #51 People donât leave companies, they leave their bosses
- #52 The number one job of a founder is to communicate clarity
- #53 Aim to be a cult by hiring people who obsess about the same things
- #54 Your companyâs org chart is more important than you think
- #55 Youâre probably not a good leader (because being that is hard)
- #56 Map is not the territory
- #57 Always seek disconfirmatory evidence
- #58 Never ask your friends or family if they like your idea
- #59 Ask people what they did, not what they will do
- #60 Stop assuming that your customers want things that you want
- #61 Think from first principles before you Google (or ask ChatGPT)
- #62 Startups live and die in a multidimensional landscape
- #63 Solve the most important problem that you can personally impact
- #64 You can only succeed if you know how you can fail
- #65 Wealth is not money, itâs the things we use money for
- #65 Startups thrive under uncertainty (of the right kind)
- #66 Startups shouldnât solve technically hard problems
- #67 Moats for deeptech startups
- #1 Anders Sandberg â We may be alone in the universe
- #2 Ian Harris â Most surgeries are ineffective
- #3 Donald Hoffman – Reality is an evolved illusion
- #4 Kunal Shah – Status drives us
- #5 Connor Leahy – Artificial general intelligence is risky by default
- #6 Lyn Alden – The US dollar as a bleak future
- #7 James Evans – How We Do Science Determines What We Discover
- #8 Michael Corballis – Language Evolved Before Humans Did
- #11 Balaji Srinivasan – Crypto is the Future of Our Society
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