Founder. Building Leap. Sharing what I learn. Journaling the funny bits. One moment at a time
Bangalore
Joined February 2010
- Tweets3.5K
- Following541
- Followers13.5K
- Likes5K
Enterprise/B2B founders are addicted to posting content on social
B2C founders are addicted to refreshing dashboards.
Choose your addiction
This is the scariest thing about building today.
This is greatest thing about building today.
This is why building a phenomenal team is possibly, the greatest available alpha, today..
All companies should reset the bar for what "great" means for every function in the company
Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz): The laws of physics of company building changed.
You can throw money at problems now.
"If you have the data and you have enough GPUs, you can solve damn near anything."
Technical moats aren't dead. They're just turning into capital moats.
Whoever spends more on data and compute can catch up (or stay ahead).
Strong teams that are well capitalized get exponentially more leverage than before.
Building a company is oscillating between
“Look how far we’ve come”
And
“I can’t believe how stupid we were six months ago.”
And between
"We are bloody good at this"
And
"We suck. All this has just been dumb good luck thus far"
If you feel this way, it's ok.
This is how it is supposed to be.
If you’re not embarrassed by who you were six months ago, you’re probably not moving fast enough.
If you can't have a late night dessert when your loved ones have a sugar craving
< because glucose spike, kal gym hai, late night calories, I am on a diet, hyrox hai etc etc etc>
You are doing it WRONG.
Discipline is the tax you pay all year, to commit follies once in a blue moon.
And there is no better blue moon than your loved ones having a sugar craving at 11 pm
Actually the chronically negative you can identify in hiring and avoid
The real damage to startups is done by 'Smart Skeptics'
Who are smart, sound even smarter than they are, are great at raising objections, can hold great intellectual conversations, have a lot of anecdotal evidence about everything.
But can't execute/move metrics/ solve hard problems even if their life depended on it, because they are skeptical about everything.
And they dissuade the believers as well.
Avoid them like a plague
"Everyone at my 19th birthday party is a billionaire.
Everyone was either from MIT or Harvard and interning at this firm, HRT"
MIT and Harvard should make billboards out of this.
"Everyone at my 19th birthday party became a billionaire."
@alexandr_wang had an Wintership at a trading company in 2019, almost everyone else getting that internship became a founder and a billionaire.
Only two roles exist in PED (Product, engineering, design) teams
1. Slop Canon - can vibe code and experiment at insane velocity.
Completely independently
Test a crazy number of hypothesis
Land something valuable
10% hit rate
Persona - Restless, Tinkerer, Creative, polygot, loves taking control.
Dislikes giving away responsibility/delegating to another human.
Loves delegating to Agents and talking to Users
Hates building alignment with humans
Feels humans are too slow
One person army
2. Grown ups - take what the slop canon has uncovered.
Build a proper product.
Ensure the best architecture/security/growth motion/business goal alignment
50%+ hit rate on scaling up the insight
Persona - Strategic, Cross function operator, understands product, business, user persona, competitive dynamics, market structures intimately.
Comfortable talking to all functions in the company.. engineering, finance, business, customer support.
Ninja at building alignment and consensus.
Incredible at strategic calls, including capital and resource allocation.
Understands growth motions
All other roles will either go extinct (eg: I only do design, don't want to own metrics)
Or they will get very niche / super specialised (eg: top 1% data scientist, math PhD)
If you are not killing it at one of these two persona, you better be top 1% in the world at what you do
Ps: first hit when I saw a talk by the every company founder
Can't find it but credit to them
This is by far the best podcast I have heard in months.
And definitely the best with an Indian crew :)
Sidu is fantastic, as always.
Sidu is sagacious
Sidu is very rare and in a category of ONE
A rare combination of someone who's can talk strategy, software, business models, hiring, history, psychology and sci-fi.
And rarer because he is articulate, warm humble, engaging, graceful and opinionated while juggling a wide variety of topics
So glad we have folks like Sidu in the ecosystem to learn from, and emulate.
I will watch this one again
My only suggestion is that the thumbnail could be much better.
It doesn't do Sidu and the conversation justice.
@ponnappa
youtu.be/CPISElKbFFg?si=v0N-…
If you’re building a product, ask yourself every day:
1. How can I go faster?
2. How can I move my metrics without involving another human?
If you are still saying things such as
"I am waiting for X to give me an update on Y so that I can then do Z", you're ngmi
Truth 1 : Brand building has never been more important than it is TODAY
Truth 2 : Very few people 'get' BRAND.
And most of them are building their own rocketships
we put on a broadway musical about accounts payable.
slate called it "a glorified ad for a tech company." correct. it was also the most fun we've ever had as a company.
the part i didn't expect was what happened after. a flood of messages from theater folks in new york saying it meant the world to them. billy porter told the crowd that industrials like this paid his rent for decades, until they disappeared in the early 2000s.
for most of the last century, when a company had something to say, it hired composers, choreographers and actors. somewhere along the way we decided marketing should be cheap, measurable and forgettable.
i hope more companies lose their minds a little. make something people feel.
I have a love hate relationship with long weekends.
I love them because it gives me just enough time to make grander plans for life, work, health and hobbies.
But I dislike that it doesn't give me enough time to change the reality of the coming Monday..
Where things will break, life will happen, surprises will be sprung
And my grand plans will take a backseat, till the next long weekend rolls by
😃