Learnings in Life - Year 2020 Week 38 & 39
Starting up a business is one crazy ride. I have done a few but even then it surprises me all the time. Love levelling up! Sorry for missing out weeks.
On with the learnings…
Lets start this week with this wonderful art-piece. (Psst… Also substack makes the first pic as the newsletter thumbnail :)
Studying in IIT is not just about a tag. Its proof that you are willing to slog & have it in you to succeed. Also a peer-group of friends, seniors & juniors who are high performance people is just insane. IIT founders dont get funded easily just because of a tag.
One area where young IIT Founders truly have an unfair advantage in start-ups is hiring. They already know who the smartest folks are +/- 2 batches and are able to convince them to to take the plunge. Non-IIT folks have to work much harder to build a network this strong.And it's not just about finding smart folks but folks who come in with the expectation of slogging it through 12-16 hour work days. It's almost irrational to join a start-up that young, with less pay and with so much uncertainty. You would only do that for a friend you admire.The power of this is just so immense, I can’t explain it. You don’t need alignment of vision, no talk of pay or stake. Its brotherhood.
Learn to Build to Learn -> Mantra of my life.
A thing like perfection doesn’t exist. Once you go deep into a field, you figure there are so many layers that achieving absolute perfection is just impossible, a myth. Keep moving, keep doing & keep breaking is the mantra.
A confused user always says no. Have you made sure the user is not confused by the end of it?
People throw such awesome Animation art using html, css & js that it just blows me.
Ever found an wikipedia article to be too complicated? Here is a simple way of accessing a simpler version of it.
From Reddit
replace the "en." on Wikipedia with "simple." to get a far less complicated version of the article like it was written for five-year-olds
Example: https:// en .wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics is super complicated.
https:// simple .wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics is way easier to understand
This really helps when you want to understand complex subjects without slogging through pages of details that you don't want. It's like ELI5 but for Wikipedia. It doesn't work on every article but the vast majority have a simple English version.
It is better for brands to engage multiple microinfluencers, rather than one macroinfluencer.
This study probably ignores that Brand is established at the top & conversion happens on the way down.
Hustle, Keep hustling & never giveup. Giving up is death.
Paytm was temporarily removed from Playstore & reinstated soon. There is a lot of misinformation on why it was removed in the first place.
We berate socialism & censorship but what about checks, balances & favouritism enforced by private players, esp the ones who are almost a monopoly.
Shapoor Pallonji Group decides to part ways & disinvest from Tata Group. Hate it when a multi-decade partnership breaks at such a sour note.
There is nothing that is scam & gameable proof. Humans have the tendency of figuring out the niches.
What confident strokes by this number-plate painter.
Great work should be the only constant. Always do work you are proud of.
Always do work you are proud off. The work you would brag about like in this tweet. Do it every single time. Not everything will hit off but something will.
Excellence comes from doing the mundane work. You need to be able to grind it to come out shining the other end.
Having read the above, I still agree to this. The best way to get somebody to learn something is to surprise them. Surprise invokes interest & your ability to create surprise is what generates trust.
iOS features a Indian App on its homepage for the first time probably. Amazing feat achieved by the team.
The best job pitch there is. Show your investment in the product. Founders would kill for such an involved team.
Transcribe your newsletters & edit them later. I’ll probably start using Otter.
"Set a three minute timer, pretend like you're talking to a friend, and explain what you want to write. As you do, transcribe your words with Otter."Learn to write fast. At most, it will increase your earnings power because fast-moving companies need people who think fast. At the very least, it will make your writing process more efficient. To help you do it, here's my short article. https://t.co/jQXwMAuISu
David Perell @david_perellCame to know about this amazing Indian startup, Log 9 materials - which is probably revolutionizing the Battery-tech. Our future tech progress highly depends on battery-tech. Loving the energy of this country.
As much this is about how great indian language/scripture is. This definitions also help in figuring out with specificity for what you are looking.
Amazing thought… You need to see the sweat to be sure that your workout is working.
Instant feedback loops are important for products with delayed gratification.
This site is a goldmine of memos. Its time travel. Here is the investment memo of bvp on shopify along with latest review of the same. The thing is that the company should be riding on a bigger underlying developing wave. Whats that wave of the future? Whats the new industry coming into existence?
What stage is your company in? When new, focus on distribution, along with but on a lower priority comes making the best product. Once there are multiple products with similar quality, brand wins.
Its a really small set of outlier people & companies who are leading the world & driving the direction of change. Its so mind-blowing thinking about the effect that fat-tails have.
In 2018, Amazon drove 6% of the S&P 500's returns. And Amazon's growth is almost entirely due to Prime and Amazon Web Services, which itself are tail events in a company that has experimented with hundreds of products, from the Fire Phone to travel agencies.Now see this, just one country can do more than enough to keep global warming at check.
A single announcement from China is keeping the world's chances to restrict warming to under 1.5°C alive!China has signaled intent to go to net-zero CO₂ emissions by 2060. This would be remarkable & keeps 1.5°C alive... The 2030 target to peak was likely going to happen just on (weakening) GDP trends. Net-zero in 2060 is impressive, but unclear if this may include carbon sinks. https://t.co/NtYTwx8LKY
Glen Peters @Peters_GlenWhat amazing marketing strategy. Driving value out of every single penny. Hats off to the team that conceptualised & pulled-it-off.
Sponsor the jersey for the cheapest team & use it to pull off a social media stunt out of gamers! Wowsome!
Now see this crazy stuff by Disney. They are going for their target consumers even before they are born by having a positive association with the customer/purchaser. Crazy & lovely hack.
Look for search terms which have suddenly broken out. This is something that people are actively searching for and will lead to the best product ideas.
& ofcourse optimising SEO like above is God level stuff. The thing is, the competitor would not even realise this unless they stumble on it & have the vision to see whats happening.
Start a newsletter for a niche. One of the simplest, cheapest & probably the easiest way of developing a market & distribution.
One of the strategies for b2b saas played niche is to do a weekly newsletter for sales compensation professionals in industry X (say insurance)... It has to be the world's best newlsetter in the space though..I actually *do* think this trend can go on forever, minimally for areas where the subscriber base is well-monied and looking for signal-not-empty-calories. Tech is an index case for a reason here. If journalism wants to attract talent that could be a PM, it needs to pay like PM. https://t.co/MwlVQh7RFT
Patrick McKenzie @patio11Well the world is moving towards niches & influencers.
Soon enough all industries will start targeting the niches & the specialists. Remember the ‘Burger King’ ad above?
Esp read the below with the eyes of crypto-currency & similar market. We already have in-game coins which can be redeemed.
I wonder if we’re going to start seeing what are, effectively, community banks over the Internet. It will be less crazy than that sounds.Think of any large, engaged tribe on the Internet and ask yourself: “Why doesn’t X have a bank?” Why doesn’t HN have a bank? Why don’t Beyoncé fans have a bank? Why don’t ... I don’t know, furries have a bank?Wonderful stats with tranparency shared by Zomato on the state of F&B industry atleast from home-delivery prespective. In the thread, there is region wise breakup.
I dont know about $0 charge in US but India really does make doing business difficult esp if foreign currency & investments are involved.
Just navigating the maze is difficult. Would also like to acknowledge that steps are being taken in the right direction would just love them to be faster & bolder.
It costed me $0 and minimal paper work to start a company in US in 7 days. It has already cost me Rs 25k in bank fees, Rs 70K in legal fees, 2 months, gazillions of docs to tell RBI that I allotted myself $10 worth of shares in US company. Still pending. Ease of doing what?This from another founder.
100% agree. Unfortunately, India is a terrible place to start a company. Ironically, it's gotten worse since "Make in India" launched. 🤷♂️ God forbid if you shut a company down. It's ridiculous. Smartest thing I did was outsource all paperwork to my co-founder @arey_abhishek 😜It costed me $0 and minimal paper work to start a company in US in 7 days. It has already cost me Rs 25k in bank fees, Rs 70K in legal fees, 2 months, gazillions of docs to tell RBI that I allotted myself $10 worth of shares in US company. Still pending. Ease of doing what?
Gaurav Sharma @sharmag88Harley Davidson plans on moving out from India. I doubt its just because of the govt, but I guess that had a role to play in it.
The stuff is completely broken at the government level. How much of it is incompetence & how much delibrate is anybodys guess.
Yes Sachin is God of cricket in his own sense but Dhoni is the leader people will follow blindly into a war. This is what worship looks like.
A new kind of scam seems to have come into market where using the company database, they request each other for money. Be aware!
Being a generalist is overhyped. You need to specialiase in something, anything.
Vernacular / Local language content is huge in India. The most unexplored probably.
A Hindi channel with access to lesser gadgets has 50% more subscribers than the most popular English channel with access to more gadgets and people. And this is gadgets, not movie reviews.Just realised that @TechnicalGuruji has 7M more followers than @MKBHD 🤯 Power and scope of vernacular content in India is 🚀
Anirudha Basak @bankonbasakZomato now allows for voice snippets for delivery instruction along with address. An amazing hack.
Somebody in the thread also asked to allow a picture of the building, the problem is you can’t click a picture of the building sitting inside it.
Coding is not easy.
For reference a Book on average has 64,531 words. & Even if we keep 10 words on average in a line. Facebook is equal to 10,000 books being written & Google is 3 times of that.
Some resources…
Here is the list of best free wordpress themes.
Naval Ravikant’s almanack is available now.
The Almanack of
@Naval
Ravikant is now available!
- Read/download for free on http://Navalmanack.com
- Purchase on Kindle, Paperback, or Hardcover on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3gz3btY
Access the complete database library of all ISBN books with Author names for free.
Free pure CSS ICON sets for developers.
If you want to scrape sites with lazy load, use puppeteer in nodejs.
Learn to make a complete app on flutter for free on freeCodeCamp.
If you are confused about what online course to take.
Cool way to use css, which uses conditions-check for styling.
For animations & transitions using css.
RoamResearch note takers is becoming a cult, backlinks is their biggest feature. Here is a tool if you want to shift your notes to Roam & create backlinks automatically.
🚨 it's time!! After being inspired by @balajis, the PoC webapp RoamNERd is now live at roamnerd.com. RoamNERd performs [[Named Entity Recognition]] - you can paste or upload text and our algorithm will generate, sort and count relevant backlinks for you. thread 👇
Thats it for the week folks. Stay Safe! & Unmask your Smile.