Learnings in life - Year 2021 Week 45
I missed the Sunday deadline again. I will become better at it.
On with the learnings…
This is a great small clip. Its made by an agency from Ahmedabad. Look forward to meeting them someday. Get me an intro & the coffee is on me :)
Truer words have never been spoken. We learn this quote, “Failure is the stepping stone to success”, as a child but I think its true meaning is understood only by the inspired ones, the builders.
Here is the right way to create any feature in an app, it’s equally true for starting a company or doing anything.
This cracked me up like anything.
A wonderful thread on his personal learning’s by the founder of pratilipi.
Thread of some the most important lessons I have learnt over the last few years. Disclaimer; Most of the points may be obvious or even useless in your context, read them all but focus on the ones that make sense to you. <0>You should definitely check out the whole thread. I strongly recommend it but here are a few gems anyways.
To be able to see the long term you have to survive in the short term. 👌
Growth happens incrementally, Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Long term is the only thing that really matters (the magic of compounding), but to be able to see the long term, you have to survive in the short term. Hat tip @naren_nexus <7>Be fair & generous is a good life motto.
Learn and internalize that life is a long, multi-turn, multi-player game. It is almost always better to be fair and generous and wherever possible only work with people who are fair and generous. <12>There is a great stigma to failure. Everybody wants a 100% strike ratio., esp from people we come to idolize. Somehow we forget that they are also humans.
The right approach is to look at the world probabilistically & take shots that have asymmetric returns.
Be aggressive in scenarios which have asymmetric returns i.e. capped downside but unlimited (or very, very high) upside. <13>In the end this. 90% of all work that matters is boring, repetitive, paper-pushing type. That’s just how the world works.
The way this logistics problem is ballooning, it looks like will lead to a big bubble & breaking of it. I wonder what would happen to companies that are not able to source supplies & products either perish, expire or go out of fashion.
What would happen to insurance companies which have insured these shipments, orders, debts? Add to it the coal shortage & hence the energy shortage. This is chess with million moving pieces.
Also what happens when there would be nobody to accept these shipments when they ultimately arrive. I know they have disposal rules but it just adds to the jam in the meanwhile.
Due to severe container shortages, Freight rates has surged to record highs. India Depends on China for the empty containers. But now Modi Govt has launched an ambitious Container manufacturing plan which will manufacture 2.5 lakh containers to meet the India's export requirement
See how businesses are staring at crazy price increases with no delivery visibility whatsoever.
Last 30 days for our business: 1. $33k container got delayed (likely won't make xmas) 2. 2 containers from vietnam will arrive after xmas 3. Key warehouse team-member injured 4. 70% of our China orders delayed b/c no⚡️ If we have debt in this situation we go bust. 1/2I don’t think it gets crazier than this. If children receive gift cards rather than gifts for Christmas, can it get any worse?
@Molson_Hart @BarbarianCap How likely is your Jan/Feb being strong as many in your industry are heading into the same challenge and most kids will be getting gift cards?The world lacks decisive leadership it seems. Read this thread on what’s wrong with US ports. Which is the epicenter of this logistics Armageddon.
This thread is a valuable insider's explanation of what has gone wrong with shipping into US ports. It sounds like much of the problem could be fixed, but no one is on it.Yesterday I rented a boat and took the leader of one of Flexport's partners in Long Beach on a 3 hour of the port complex. Here's a thread about what I learned.
Ryan Petersen @typesfastIt’s basic space management 101. Is it that we have come so far with Advanced technologies that we have forgotten the basics?
It seems that everyone now agrees that the bottleneck is yard space at the container terminals. The terminals are simply overflowing with containers, which means they no longer have space to take in new containers either from ships or land. It’s a true traffic jam.Resources management. Who would have thought that the unavailability of a few thousand chassis could literally jam the whole world’s supply chain! And freeing up these chassis is just needs overriding a simple local law temporarily.
Right now if you have a chassis with no empty container on it, you can go pick up containers at any port terminal. However, if you have an empty container on that chassis, they’re not allowing you to return it except on highly restricted basis.Looks like this fight for the cheapest labor across the world would come to end & this will prompt people to Go Local.
The way the crisis is being handled is not by working on the ground but by managing the optics & controlling the narrative. All this logistics jam & inflation is being turned around as a wake-up call for reducing consumption.
This came up in a chat just today. We're now demonizing consumption, the very driver of human happiness for 10,000 years. Yes, we need to make consumption sustainable and equitable. But there's no moral failure in *wanting stuff* - even radio umbrellas and glowing selfie sticks.lol why are people objecting to this article? It's the truth. Open up those containers in ports and they contain umbrellas with radios in them or selfie sticks that glow in the dark, all made by poorly paid people who will never even dream of a gap year https://t.co/YCSVp9724U
Athena KILL-blenu @athenakugblenuWhile we are waiting for the VR world to scale to see the crazy stuff online. What if the crazy stuff seeps into the real world. 🤯
Last week Ali talked about how the deal with Apple didn’t go through. Here he talks about why the same deal didn’t go through with Yahoo. They ultimately did end up doing a deal with Google. When you are in a sector with tailwinds, the market allows you a few screwups.
Go through the whole thread, these personal anecdotes are really interesting & insightful.
Step by step actionable work on how to set up an eCommerce brand.
Zomato initially was known as FoodieBay & was renamed much later. Here are the initial logos of the big brands of today.
Founders often obsess about their first logo design & color. There is no point obsessing about the name & logo at the start. They can be changed at any time in the future.
I wish to be in such a startup villa being able to help these founders. If there is heaven in this world, it’s in such startup villas.
The biggest upside of such startup watering holes? Meeting & making friends with people who are changing the world. These are the places where magic happens.
This thread is on the rampant online scams prevalent in India. What is the point of all this KYC mess if there is zero conviction for online fraud?
RBI just made it messily difficult for consumers to start & primarily continue subscriptions. Innovation is often stifled by legalise.
If RBI did this on the back of complaints it received, would really be great if they share it transparently.
Diesel & Aviation fuel consumption is still lagging in the country. How are we reporting record tax collections? Energy consumption & Economy are highly co-related. How are the tax collections at record high levels with Energy consumption at low levels? The world stopped making sense to me long back. Is it just hyperinflation???
Google Pixel makes menus on calls readable. No need to wait groaningly to listen to the whole EVR stuff, just to be able to talk to a person. This is great 👌
Most companies wouldn’t have their email security setup is my guess. This is a great step-by-step thread on how to rectify a security threat company faced because the email wasn’t set up securely enough.
This thread is pure GOLD. Yes, pulling this off isn’t going to be easy but I’m definitely trying this someday.
One of my mentors raised over $500 million and went public. He taught me one remarkable fundraising tactic: He wouldn’t accept term sheets. He only SENT term sheets TO VCs with a hard deadline. I raised over $100 million using the same technique. Step by step 🧵👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻Founders are spending insane amounts of time just trying to find investors & with negotiations. There has to be a better way of doing this.
Don’t think it’s this simple 🤔
It’s difficult to collaborate if people don’t agree to something & no growth can happen without collaboration.
As more people resign in these times to rethink their life choices, this moment in history is also called “The Great Resignation”.
One of the examples of what’s happening… Don’t miss reading this. See the growth in the last bit (I have set it in bold for emphasis)…
“In February 2020, a Venezuelan woman wrote a Medium post about how she could earn more playing Axie Infinity for just a few days than she could earn working her previous job for a full month. This was especially important given Venezuela’s hyperinflation. As she wrote (excuse my rough translation from Spanish):
In Venezuela, there is a hyperinflation crisis that has literally destroyed our fiat currency. For this reason, earning in foreign currency became a necessity. But since Venezuela is blocked from many traditional payment systems, such as PayPal, my options were limited. I thought the best idea would be to get paid in cryptocurrency.
Back in the spring, I wrote about how workers in the Philippines were earning a living playing Axie Infinity, a crypto game in which you breed creatures called Axies and send them into battle against one another.
In Axie Infinity, you breed creatures called Axies and have them battle one another When I wrote that piece, Axie was doing $100K per day in revenue and had 38,000 daily active users. Six weeks later, Axie was doing $18 million per day in revenue, a 180x increase. Today, Axie has 1.85 million daily active users, up 4,768% since spring.”
The state of today’s medicine. In all fairness, a job of a doctor is insanely difficult. Also, the legalization around this makes its mind bafflingly crazy.
Once another doctor frowned when I described how an earlier doctor had treated me. Then he looked at the CDC website and was like "oh nvm the CDC updated its recommendation, you're fine." Did he even look at WHY it was updated? Did he AGREE with it? Ir-fucking-relevant.Medicine probably doesn’t have all the answers. We need to have a more holistic approach.
With per capita income decreasing & corporate tax collections at record levels, I guess the income gap has only increased. This is definitely not good.
It really is time for fuel taxes to be cut. Corporate tax collections are through the roof, they can give people at least 10% room hereSo here is one out-of-the-box explanation for high tax collections. Governments’ effort to end conflicts with businesses is good but they aren’t really giving anything away. Businesses probably just have to factor this in as a cost.
This thread is great. It seems you don’t need to age to become wise. These children definitely are wiser than me.
I asked a group of 6 year olds to come up with a mantra to help us through life. They had some ideas. A THREADHere are a few from the thread. Please do read the whole thing.
Rory - "Don't stop running" The other day I grunted when picking up my keys from the table. If I didn't stop running, i'd die. Rory has gone for the Forrest Gump approach here. It seemed to work for him. Forrest that is. I've seen Rory run into multiple trees. Persistent tho.JJ - "Only be friends with people who you want to be friends with" This gets forgotten about in adults. Sometimes we are friends with people out of convenience or history. Look around and ask yourself, "does this person positively impact my life?". JJ has his head screwed on.Emma - "The people who don't talk, still have something to say" Empty vessels makes the most noise. Emma is quiet and has grown in confidence since I've known her. She is an advocate for letting people be themselves. A true woman of her time. She'll make an excellent leader.I literally want to put the whole thread here.
But then we often add subtext to everything :P
This is a great opportunity for founders to get some funding & support both.
Live commerce in China is crazy. What a single influencer sells there is probably not done by whole eCommerce channels here. 🤯
Two Chinese streamers sold 18 billion RMB (about $3B) worth of goods in a half-day livestream yesterday. 🤯🤯🤯 That's almost as much as Twitter's annual revenue ($3.72B).I am just not able to wrap my head around these numbers.
That’s it find your gift & enrich the world with it. You feel the most contended when you pass on knowledge & are able to help others. After all, we are all standing on the Shoulders of Giants, we need to pay forward.
This is again a great note on what really matters in life & what’s a good ballpark of what matters the most.
Most change first comes slowly & then all of a sudden. Its dependence on cryptocurrency on electricity is what worries me the most.
This is a great tool for traders in the Indian bourses but this thread is mostly about how there is opportunity everywhere, lying in plain sight, just waiting to be picked up & worked on with commitment.
Are you looking to capture attention with your writing? Use one of these words, they grab attention immediately.
This is as good as advice if any. Everybody needs to start taking responsibility for their actions.
Great marketing hack by this company called Fast. 👌
That’s it for the week guys. See you next week.