What I read and found interesting this month, along with my thoughts on them.

Podcasts

The Sushi documentary that is actually a philosophy lesson

David Senra on Jiro Ono on the Colossus Founders

‘Jiro Dreams of Sushi’ is one of my favourite movies. On the surface, it is about a food documentary about a 85-yr old sushi chef and his award-winning restaurant. But like all great art, it transcends itself. It is not a food documentary as much as a portrait of an artist and his continual search for perfection. Jiro’s philosophy is something that inspires me and his life philosophy is something I keep in mind continually. So, I loved this episode where David Senra does his take on Jiro’s Sushi restaurant, and what it teaches him about craft and striving for perfection. So many quotes that inspire me to be better at my craft, and deeply move me here.

Jiro: “Once you decide on your occupation, you must immerse yourself in your work. You have to fall in love with your work. You must dedicate your life to mastering your skill. That is the secret of success and is the key to being regarded honorably.”

Jiro: “All I want to do is make better sushi. I do the same thing over and over, improving bit by bit. There is always a yearning to achieve more. I’ll continue to climb, trying to reach the top, but no one knows where the top is. Even at my age, after decades of work, I do not think I have achieved perfection. But I feel ecstatic all day. I love making sushi. That is the spirit of the shokunin. I have never once hated this job. I fell in love with my work and gave my life to it. Even though I’m 85 years old, I don’t feel like retiring. That’s how I feel.”

Senra: Another part of being a shokunin is you have to pass what you know on to the next generation. And in this case, it’s through decades of apprenticeship. So it says, when you work for Jiro, who teaches you for free, but you have to endure 10 years of training. If you persevere for 10 years, you will acquire the skills to be recognized as a first-rate chef. When you first sit down as a customer at Jiro’s, they give you a hot towel. Well, those towels are prepared by hand. So an apprentice must first be able to properly hand squeeze a towel. At first, the towels are so hot that they burn the apprentice’s hand. And this part was fascinating. It is a very painful training, which is very Japanese. Until you can adequately squeeze a towel, they won’t let you touch the fish. Then you learn to cut and prepare the fish. After about 10 years, they let you cook the eggs. And so one of the apprentices, they interview one of Jiro’s apprentices and he talks about the fact that they were trying to teach him how to make egg sushi. And it was just iteration after iteration after iteration. They would just reject it over and over again. He says, “I made over 200. Every single one was rejected. When I finally did make a good one, Jiro said, ‘Now, this is how it should be done.'”

Excerpts from the podcast episode I found interesting here. Too many though!

The hierarchy of employee and customer needs

Chip Conley on the Lenny Rachitsky podcast

Chip Conley, ex hospitality founder, Airbnb operator (joined in his 50s), author, and now founder of the Modern Elder Academy, had an interesting episode with Lenny, covering ageism in tech, how to be a high productivity and well-accepted operator in your 40s and 50s in tech, the hierarchy of compensation -> recognition -> meaning as what the employee needs in their role, and detailing the philosophy behind the Modern Elder Academy. Good one for anyone in their 40s or 50s like me!

Chip: “So, you know, Maslow’s hierarchy, basically five levels later in life, he had a six, seven and an eight level model, but you know, uh, at the base is your physical, uh, you know, the kind of physical water, food, air, and you move up to self actualization at the top.

So to use this model as a hierarchy of needs for employees, customers, and investors is what the peak model is about, the peak, my book. The employee model is really simple. It’s money or compensation at the base. recognition in the middle and meaning at the top.

Now, there are some industries and some kinds of jobs in which money is 90% of the pyramid. So just because it’s at the base doesn’t mean it’s not the dominant part of the pyramid. But the differentiation often is in recognition and meaning. In nonprofits, usually the money piece of it’s rather thin and the recognition is this and meaning is huge. So understanding how do you create an organization?

And I gave a TED talk in 2010 about this topic as well. How do you measure the intangibles of meaning? And how do you create an environment where people feel a sense of meaning?

The customer pyramid, briefly, I’ll just say that one, is meeting expectations is the base, meeting desires is in the middle, and then meeting unrecognized needs. And I think one of the things that we did at Airbnb about a year after I joined and when Jonathan Mildenhall was joining is we really tried to ask ourselves, are we in the home sharing business or are we in some kind of business that is even bigger and broader than that? And ultimately, we came up with the idea that we were in the belong anywhere business. Airbnb was not in home sharing. We were in belonging anywhere.

Once you have that down, that was sort of the unrecognized need at the top of the pyramid. Then that becomes an organizing principle for how do you teach your hosts to create a sense of belonging? How does our marketing and advertising play up the belonging piece, especially, and the everywhere piece?

Because hotels are not everywhere, but homes are. And so I would just say that, you know, this model, the idea of hierarchies is I think very helpful. And yeah, my book Peak has been out for 18 years, but I still have asked to give 20 or 30 speeches a year on it.

Lenny: Oh, man. This pyramid of comp recognition meaning is really interesting, especially these days, because with all this AI researcher poaching, there’s all this talk of just like, will people just go work wherever they get the most money? Or is there a mission and meaning to the work they’re doing that will keep them not taking a $100 million offer? And it seems to be happening in a lot of cases, which shows you the power of meaning.”

Excerpts from the episode I found interesting here.

The six levels of wealth

Nick Maggiuli, author of The Wealth Ladder, on Infinite Loops podcast with Jim O’Shaughnessy

Nick Maggiuli categories U.S. households into six levels

Here are the six levels (data for US)

	Net Worth	Median Household Income	% of US Households	Spending Categories
LEVEL 1	<$10KLower Class	$32,000	20%	Lives paycheck-to-paycheck
LEVEL 2	$10K – $100KWorking Class	$48,000	20%	Grocery freedom. Can buy any kind of grocery.
LEVEL 3	$100K – $1MMiddle Class	$83,000	40%	Restaurant freedom. Can eat at any kind of restaurant.
LEVEL 4	$1M – $10MUpper Middle Class	$197,000	18%	Travel freedom. Can travel anywhere they want.
LEVEL 5	$10M – $100MUpper Class	$724,000	~2%	House freedom. Can buy your dream home
LEVEL 6	$100M+Super-Rich	$4,300,000	<0.01%	Impact freedom. Can contribute to any causes you wish to.

Why the wide ranges?

Nick: “I came up with this because I was like, hey, I realized that like small amounts of money don’t really change people’s lives as they gain wealth. Like once you have a million bucks, an extra 10,000 is not going to change your life at all. Like, you can do one nice thing with it, that’s it. But your lifestyle is the same. To really change your lifestyle, you need like a logarithmic, a 10x jump to get there”

An interesting point Nick makes is about Level 4.

Nick: “But level four is what I call the no man’s land of like wealth building. Because the things that get you into level four are very different than the things that get you out of level four and into level four five, right. Like you can have a good salary, save money, invest, etc, you’ll get into level four, 1 to 10 million, right. … But to get to level 5, 10 million plus, I think it fundamentally takes a different path …. And that usually means creating your own business and selling it or starting a startup early where you get enough equity and then that startup sells for a ton of money, right?…So, you know, going from level four, that’s like a good professional making 200k a year (income). Like, that’s your typical, like, solid, you know, managerial profession. That’s how you get to 1 to 10 million. But to get to level 5, you need an income of $724,000 a year. And it’s very difficult to get there in corporate America unless you are a business owner and you have equity or have something that’s paying you in addition to that, right?”

How Revolut found a wedge into the market

Martin Mignot, Index Ventures, on the 20VC Podcast w Harry Stebbings

Glimpse into Index Ventures, a European-American fund that has seen some big wins of late (Wiz, Figma etc.) from the perch of Martin Mignot one of the partners. Useful for the venture nerd. This one passage on Revolut and how they found a wedge into a competitive market is a useful one for founders.

Martin: “But the reasons why I had a lot of conviction on Revolut was I came in with a prepared mind, meaning that I had been looking at the space for a little while, had looked at a company in the US called Simple. And the main reason was people don’t want to switch bank accounts. It’s a pain. Why would you switch bank accounts? Oh, it’s going to be on mobile. But like, well, my bank has a mobile app. Why do I care? And so I had met, you know, I looked at Simple. I had met Monzo as well, actually. And I was looking for a trigger, like what would convince people to switch bank accounts, which is such a pain.

And what I really loved with Revolut was a simple trigger with FX. They didn’t sell people, oh, you’re going to switch bank accounts. They sold, oh, you’re traveling to Portugal for a stag weekend. You know, you’re going to get fleeced by your bank. Why don’t you get a Revolut card? And I thought that was such a clever insertion point. And then from that point, Nick’s view was from the beginning was that he wanted to be the global money app for every product.

But the insertion point was, I thought was really effective. And that’s how they managed to grow so quickly and organically for the longest time because they had this very clear value proposition that was a lot easier than saying, oh, you need to sign up with a new bank, which no one wants to do. I remember chatting to Antoine Lanel there and he was like, you know, we won in many respects because we offer snacks to start. So don’t try and convince you for the main meal. Just have a little snack and come back for some more and more. And then suddenly you want the main meal.”

Excerpts from the podcast episode I found interesting.

How Lightspeed Commerce increased pricing by 4x and found success!

Dax Dasilva, Lightspeed Commerce, on the PMF Show w Pablo Srugo

Enjoyed this podcast episode on how Lightspeed Commerce (not the fund but a Canadian retail SaaS co) found PMF. The problem or pick arose out of Dax Dasilva’s personal experience and hence was extremely sharp and rooted in a genuinely pressing usecase – the core audience was Mac resellers, a community he intimately new. Product to Problem Fit or PPF was sharp and that eventually made PMF too easier. Good passage about how a conversation led him to understand that he was leaving a lot of value on the table, and led him to increase prices 4x, and that led to an unlock as well as created a generous margin profile that attracted resellers and helped him create a reseller-led motion, that powered the co to success.

Dax Dasilva: “Probably the most important part of this whole exercise was pricing. In those early days of Lightspeed, there was a couple of companies I really admired. Like there was not a lot of business software on the Mac, right? Like we were really creating a new category. There’s an amazing CRM package that was for, like, more like an entrepreneur that was, like, on the road, and they were keeping their contacts and building their business. And we were different, right? Like that was a multi-user system, and so were we, but we were kind of like multi-user and running the whole operation. So, you know, they were charging $140. Okay, let’s try to charge $170, you know, per user. And I showed this to my dad’s business partner, one of my dad’s colleagues that was interested in becoming a reseller of ours. And he was like, x4 (4 times). And I was like, x4. I’m like, where did you get that from? And he’s like, first of all, if you try to buy a PC black plastic system out there, people are paying a ton of money. You’re running the whole business. Don’t look at what your competitor or what you think is somebody in your category is charging. You’ve got a x4. And he was thinking maybe it’s a bit selfish for him because he was going to get.

Pablo Srugo: He’s got to get margin. Yeah, yeah. Which is the lesson in itself because If you don’t have that, then you don’t have resellers, which is a whole other.

Dax Dasilva: And that’s like the second part of the story. That, x4. When I flowed that through a three-year spreadsheet, and it showed. The ability for the company to actually fund more developers, more salespeople, we would not be here today if we didn’t times four. There’s just no way. That allowed us to build the software that ended up being adopted by all of those users on a large level. And if we had kept the software cheap and had the same number, of nothing would have added up. We would not have been able to expand and scale the company. So that was a huge, huge important lesson. But of course, you’ve got to have that product market fit where people need the solution. They can’t run their business. They have to have it. And then that’s where you have. The ability to do times four, because they’re thinking, okay, I’m going to pay this, but I know a lot of other people are paying this too. I’m thinking of, like, as one of the Mac dealers at the time, they were taking a bet on my one-year-old company. They’re like, okay, if everybody’s paying five grand for this, and we’re also paying an annual maintenance fee. Then this person has real money to build something real for my needs. And so it also gives them comfort that, okay, if I’m paying the guy only $170 or a few hundred bucks per user, there’s a bit more risk for me. This guy’s not gonna be able to pull it off, or he’s not gonna be able to do, build out a team. So it taught me a lot about the value, right? The value that you deliver with your software. And then ultimately, when they became, you know, after seven years of bootstrapping, because that was our journey. A seven year of bootstrapping, we got to $10 million of annual revenue, which was all software. All of that was driven by 400 resellers around the world, making 25% on times four pricing.”

Venture humility as venture strategy

Greg Rosen, Box Group, on Uncapped Podcast w Jack Altman

Really interesting podcast, especially for the venture nerd, in how you can create a venture firm around a strategy of widening the top funnel for as many great companies as you can. If venture is a strong power law business, then you don’t want to miss those 1-2 generational companies a year. Hence you need to see all the (potentially) great ones, and play as many as possible. And if you are in one of those then your stake size really doesn’t matter. And hence Box Group optimises for access more than anything – that is, getting into as many of these companies that they think can be large outcomes. To do so, with a finite fund size, it eschews any stake considerations, follows a philosophy of partnering with larger funds but never leading deals, and tries to invest as fast and with as low overhead as possible. Clever strategy. In that regard, this is as much a strategy podcast as it is about a venture fund.

Rosen: “…if you look at the math formula of venture, the like seeing, picking, and winning a deal, and then equals enterprise value output… and everyone says venture has gotten harder. I don’t know how to be 50% better at picking, let alone 2X, let alone 10X. I just think it’s like a fool’s errand to think that you’re magically going to become better pickers. And so for us, we’ve said, okay, venture has gotten harder; we don’t know how to be better pickers. Let’s take winning aside. We are going to be really focused on seeing how do we see more in order to counteract how much more difficult it is.”

…

“Josh Kopelman came on your podcast and talked about the venture arrogance score. I would say this is our like venture humility score, which is we don’t know how to have a basket of 20 companies in, you know, a fund or, you know, in a year and pick the most important ones given how competitive and hard it is. So for us, we’re saying we need to do more. We need to see more. We see on average about 5,000 to 6,000 qualified or referred opportunities a year. And then we at BoxGroup end up making about 70 to 80 investments a year. And like, that’s our humility is like, if I could at the extreme make one investment and I would know that that investment would be OpenAI, of course I would do that. I’d have the best performing venture fund of all time. We don’t know. And so we take more shots on goal because it’s much harder so that we can counteract how much more difficult and competitive venture has become.”

Excerpts from the podcast episode I found interesting here.

Vibes investing for a vibe coding world

Peter Fenton, Benchmark, on the Uncapped Podcast w Jack Altman

SPW: Nothing terribly new, but interesting nonetheless for the venture nerd, on how Darwinism applies to venture (he describes venture as operating in a nutrient-rich world without any selection pressures!), and how Benchmark’s distinctive early stage picking has navigated well to the AI world – vibes investing for a vibe coding world. This passage on how they intentionally didn’t look at HeyGen’s data room before investing was quite funny!

Peter: “Benchmark is completely ephemeral, like the line up is completely ephemeral, no names on the door. It is designed to be destroyed from within and reborn, but the mechanism is the same. The adaptive mechanism is all those things we talk about, core design principles, shared identity, there’s clarity across all the partners in exactly what we’re doing, fast and inclusive decision making, the idea that each of us is an owner gives us a sense of autonomy, another core design principle.

And there’s not quality control and overhead and processes, and there’s no memos. When someone shows us a data room, we tend to laugh. I’m like, oh god, I have an example.

This may come back and haunt us, but we invested in a company called HeyGen. Joshua said at the end of the process, he’s like, well, we’re talking to a lot of other firms, and they’ve all gone into the data room, and we want to cross this threshold with you. We feel this is the full potential partnership for us, but you haven’t gone to our data room yet.

And, you know, our LPs may not like me saying this, but I said, there’s nothing good that can come from that. It’s like, because I’m going to go in there and ask a bunch of questions that undermine the commitment you’re getting from us, which is to say that you, Joshua, at HeyGen, with Wayne and your team, are building a generational company, and that I’ve seen what I’ve seen from how you’ve talked about the product roadmap, how we’ve brainstormed about where you’re going to go with the next set of releases, and whether or not you’re retaining a learning and distance training user that isn’t the long-term goal for the business doesn’t help me. And I think that value proposition is different to entrepreneurs, and it’s somewhat, it’s not a reiection of these other models.”

Excerpts from the podcast episode I found interesting here.

Other podcasts I enjoyed

Graham Duncan on the Village Global podcast w Ben Casnocha talks about reference calls / checks and how to do them well. I have the same view and now try to do as many blind refchecks in advance of an interview. Though I don’t know how he can pull off an hour long reference call but I guess his reputation helps I guess.

Military Historian Sarah Paine’s lectures, getting released on the Dwarkesh Podcast are riveting. The first of the six-part series that was released is on how Japan became a dominant power in the Far East defeating China (1890s and 1930s) and Russia (the famous 1904-05 war). The second, on Germany vs UK, and more broadly WW2, was published as I was writing this.

Historian Srinath Raghavan’s interview (not a podcast strictly) with Rohan Venkat in the context of his biography of Indira Gandhi has a good explanation of the structural forces in the Indian political and legal system that led to the Emergency. Illuminating read.

The latest episode of the Blume Podcast features Razorpay founders talking about their 0 to 1 journey. Really enjoyable listen (of course I am conflicted!) and notable that the host and guests all were IIT Roorkee alums. Link to podcast + transcript; excerpts I found interesting here.

Reading

Reverse Demo or solving a customer problem in your product demo

The GTM Inflection Points That Powered Clay to a $1B+ Valuation by First Round Review

Salestech co Clay started as a horizontal productivity tool a la Airtable and meandered for a while but it was only when they decided to focus sharply on an “incredibly narrow wedge — data enrichment for cold email agencies” that they saw Product to Problem Fit and then eventually PMF happen. This is an illustration of the challenges SISP (Solution in Search of a Problem, a YC term) products face. They are hesitant to identify a clear problem + persona coupling to go after, thinking that they will reduce their TAM if they do so. But it is only when they get specific and narrow their usecase, that they see a tight Product to Problem Fit (or the first part of PMF) emerge, making eventual PMF easier. This article describes what happened after they decided to narrow their product offering, and how they hit on a GTM motion (initially PLG then enterprise) to grow revenues.

This passage on their reverse demos was interesting to read. More founders should use this.

“As Clay started chumming up more interest from agency owners, Anand and Nowoslawski were constantly hopping on the phone to show them the product — usually powering through at least eight of these calls a day. But this was no ordinary product demo. Here’s how Clay’s “reverse demo” flow worked:

“Let’s say you signed up for the waitlist. I would review the list in Clay every morning, and if you fit our ICP I would trigger an email that said, ‘Hey, book some time with me and come prepared for this conversation with a dataset you want enriched or a problem that you wanted solved in this 30-minute slot,’” says Anand.

If they showed up empty-handed, for the first five minutes of the call Anand and the potential customer would come up with a personalized use Case. Here’s where, if this was an ordinary demo flow, you might expect Anand to take over the steering wheel and walk them through the product and the key features with a canned script. But instead, Anand acted more like a GPS, with the customer’s hands still firmly planted on the wheel. If you’re learning how to drive a car, you don’t sit in the passenger seat while the instructor lectures you. You take the wheel while the instructor safely guides you. The customer would share their screen, Anand would give them a Clay signup link, and then use Zoom’s annotation features to guide them through which buttons to click to help solve the problem at hand.

Our goal with every reverse demo was simple: Solve the customer’s stated problem within 30 minutes — and try to blow their minds in the process.

This reverse demo structure worked for a few key reasons:

• Customers gained the confidence to come back. “Now they were equipped to do all sorts of other things in Clay. In the beginning, we had to do probably seven demos to convince someone to pay us $200-300 a month. But eventually, we got it down to one call or even none.”

• He got a UX masterclass. “I got to see up close what was wrong with the product because I was seeing exactly where new users were going wrong and I could pass that feedback along to Eric Engoron and other engineers to fix.”

• New ideas unlocked. “Occasionally someone would have an idea for a use case that we would immediately act on that would unlock the next stepping stone,” says Anand.

Instead of running a scripted demo, imagine the insane amount of feedback you get seeing how new users interact with your product. Imagine how 8 calls a day compound over 7 months.”

Dan Wang on reading better

Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang

Dan Wang, a technology analyst based in China, became popular for his long annual letters giving a peek into China. He recently published Breakneck, a book about China which is now well-known for comparing China’s engineering state with USA’s lawyerly society. The below is from a recent essay of his about the book, and the process of writing it. It is a fun read, and the following two passages stood out.

Dan Wang: “I became a better reader, too, over the course of bookwriting. I’ve learned to detect when writers attempt the difficult and when they succumb to laziness. There are parts of every book where writers cover a topic they have little interest in (out of some obligation), at which point I try to figure out how many pages I need to flip before getting to the parts they care about. I’ve learned to pay more attention to books in which authors say something in their acknowledgments. That doesn’t mean I like gushiness — rather, that tends to be a negative signal. A good acknowledgment is a sign that an author has put some care into their book.”

…

Dan Wang: “Working with the publishing industry has also made me more discerning about which books to read generally. Before I do anything to a book, I take a look to see if it’s from an academic press (like Yale or Oxford) or a trade press (like Norton or Penguin). It doesn’t determine anything. Rather, I am more alert to pitfalls. At a first approximation, academic books are written for the benefit of their authors, while trade books are written for the benefit of readers. There’s also a needle to be threaded between the former, whose failure mode is to deliver narrow arguments while bogged down with proving small points, and the latter, whose failure mode is to deliver small ideas in flamboyant prose, often packaged in bite-sized chapters. I look for books that manage to transcend the limitations of these categories.”

When should you launch into a crowded market?

The untold story of Where is My Train’s 100M users by Dharmesh Ba

India consumer observer Dharmesh Ba had a fascinating article about an app called Where Is My Train? (WIMT) That grew to 100m users and was acquired by Google in 2018 (its first product acquisition in India). WIMT is the canonical example of a made for India app that use ingenuity and engineering smarts to make it possible to track a train on the move without using the internet. How they did so is detailed in the article and makes it a must read.

I found the passage below instructive in terms of advising founders how to think about launching into a crowded market. It says you can launch into a crowded market if the products are not great and you believe that you have something special (and there is some validation from your beta users).

Dharmesh: “There were multiple train tracking apps before WIMT, why did you have to build another one?”

Nizam: “Everyone was subpar, actually. They were scraping NTES (National Train Enquiry System) data, scraping data from Indian Railways. They were just a shell holder of that same data. But at the end of the day, the problem is we need second-by-second updates of these trains, just like Uber. And that was not there with any of these apps.

The NTES is an official service provided by Indian Railways that offers real-time running information for trains across India. This includes updates on train schedules, live train status, estimated arrivals and departures at stations, delays, and train movements.

When you look at this public transport market itself, it looked like there was a lot of fragmentation and nobody was doing a great job at it. In India itself, there were 50-plus apps that show some demand in the market, but there is not a good app in that space. I have this philosophy: if an app in a category doesn’t have a 4.6 or 4.7 rating with a huge number of downloads, that category is still not solved. You can go after it.”

Social media is designed to make you forget time

How Social Media Shortens Your Life by Gurwinder Bhogal

Well-written post by Gurwinder on how social media is engineered for mindless scrolling. Lack of ‘UI right turns, and digital ‘curvilinear mazes’, like in casinos, he says, spur addictive scrolling leading you to lose track of time. Lots of interesting ideas and concepts explored in this piece through the lens of these themes; one concept that stood out was emplotment, i.e., how we construct information into stories to remember them better etc.

“Now here’s the issue: your social media feed resists emplotment because it’s the opposite of a story. It’s a chronological maze. It has no beginning, middle, or end, and each post is unrelated to the next, so that scrolling is like trying to read a book in a windstorm, the pages constantly flapping, abruptly switching the current scene with an unrelated one, so you can never connect the dots into a coherent and memorable narrative.

Thus, not only do you forget time while scrolling through posts, but you also forget the posts themselves. We have no problem recounting the plot of a good book we read or movie we saw last year, yet we can barely remember what we saw on social media yesterday.

For instance, when faced with a choice of experiences, choose the option that’s most likely to lead to a good story. Read books instead of scrolling social media feeds. Go on adventures instead of staying home. The more stories you experience, the richer your memory will be.”

VC content as ‘power transfer technology’

I am joining A16Z by Alex Danco

Interesting hire by A16Z. Alex Danco wrote some interesting posts towards the latter part of the last decade but had gone AWOL post joining Shopify. He joins A16Z as Editor at Large, responsible for the written output of the firm. Some good ideas in this piece, most notably how VC content is ‘power transfer technology’ which helps founders draw on the VC’s power and legitimacy to create their own legitimacy. The other interesting idea is that there are two audiences for any content, a smaller primary audience that reads and interprets the writing and recasts or expresses it anew or simplifies it for the larger secondary audience, who may not ever read the original piece of writing but hear it from the primary audience. In that sense, the writing is jointly enabled by the writer + primary audience both.

“Power transfer technology” is what the business of VC is. Why does a VC firm care about content? It can’t just be to advertise the firm; or promote their partners and their theses. Those are both consequences of success, but they can’t be the actual goal. The primary objective of a VC firm’s content, particularly their written output, should be to give founders power. The goal is to give them writing that transforms them into someone with more legitimacy, which is what power really is about.

…

I remember some days when I was a founder and no one would take me seriously, except for when I could produce a blog post from someone like Paul Graham or Semil Shah and speak to that idea. Something incredible would happen in those moments – people would actually listen to me, as if I’d suddenly become magic. Magic works because it is communication. The founder equipped with the VC’s writing should communicate something higher-signal than the founder alone. Ask, “what must be true of the content for this statement to become real?” and you’ve got a good guide for what kinds of things to write.

This relationship between VC and founder scales all the way up to real power-politics: the job of the VC firm is to be the “legitimacy bank” where founders (and other high-agency people) can go to take out legitimacy on credit, or make a legitimacy deposit. I find this to be a wonderful way to frame the founder-VC relationship because it does NOT imply the VCs are the “grownups” in some patronizing sense: it celebrates legitimacy as a thing that VCs and founders incept together, just like how blogging is thing that the writers and their primary readers incept together.

This is why VC blogs were such a good product in their heyday. As the “free tier” of the VC, it naturally frames the relationship as one where legitimacy is jointly incepted (by the writer and primary reader), not as one that’s benevolently bestowed.

How to pick your dream job

Face it: you’re a crazy person by Adam Mastroianni

Fun essay on how you should try to unpack the daily routine in any job and then determine if this is really what you want to spend the next few or rest of your lives doing. For instance running a coffee store is really selling hot bean water; being a YouTube creator is releasing a video regularly, and formatting your life to enable the same, such as on days you are unwell too.

“I meet a lot of people who don’t like their jobs, and when I ask them what they’d rather do instead, about 75% say something like, “Oh, I dunno, I’d really love to run a little coffee shop.” If I’m feeling mischievous that day, I ask them one question: “Where would you get the coffee beans?”

If that’s a stumper, here are some followups:

Which kind of coffee mug is best?
How much does a La Marzocco espresso machine cost?
Would you bake your blueberry muffins in-house or would you buy them from a third party?
What software do you want to use for your point-of-sale system? What about for scheduling shifts?
What do you do when your assistant manager calls you at 6am and says they can’t come into work because they have diarrhea?

The point of the Coffee Beans Procedure is this: if you can’t answer those questions, if you don’t even find them interesting, then you should not open a coffee shop, because this is how you will spend your days as a cafe owner. You will not be sitting droopy-lidded in an easy chair, sipping a latte and greeting your regulars as you page through Anna Karenina. You will be running a small business that sells hot bean water.”

To do well in any job you have to endure or even love the dreary aspects of the job. Someone who is exceptional in the job is someone who finds it easy to do the dreary part of the job well – for instance preparing the same dish twice a day every day for the next five or so years for a chef – because it matches a certain unique capability or ‘craziness’ that they possess. All of us have certain eccentricities / craziness, obsessions or unique capabilities in certain areas that help us do something easily or endure something that the other won’t. You need to match the unpacked tasks with what your crazies are, to find the job that you love, the one which is play for you but work for others.

Pair this essay with ‘The Mundanity of Excellence’ in which they found that elite swimmers were able to put in crazy long hours of practice (and thus outshine the others on competition day) because they rather enjoyed the tough practice sessions. They had the right kind of ‘crazies’ that would help them endure or even made it enjoyable to tolerate those punishing hours of practice.

Kerala as a simulacra (copy of an original that doesn’t exist)

Param Sundari and the unbearable lightness of being Malayali (may be paywalled)

Journalist MK Nidheesh wrote a fascinating article on how the Hindi movie Param Sundari’s caricature of Kerala, and the resultant outrage from Kerala media / social media exposes two themes. One, he says it reveals the position that Kerala occupies in the Indian heartland – the easy exotic, all nuance flattened out for easier consumption. Second, he hints at the tension between the greater visibility of symbols of Kerala’s culture, and the simultaneous disconnect of non-Keralites and even the locals from the complexity and nuances of the language, as well as the messiness of life as it is lived in Kerala. He says Kerala seems to now exist in our minds, or we experience it rather as a series of social media tropes.

“Where did the filmmakers get their idea of Kerala, that they thought audiences would recognise? More importantly, why Kerala at all? They could have set their cross-cultural romance in any place metropolitan audiences treat as distant and picturesque. The choice suggests that Kerala occupies a peculiar position in today’s national imagination. Kerala is not simply exotic, but familiar enough to be instantly recognisable, yet distant enough to be flattened without consequence. In other words, Kerala can be consumed without being known. It is an irresistible quality to an industry like Bollywood that deals in shorthand.

But perhaps unknown even to the makers, what Param Sundari has done, unwittingly, is to crystallise a cultural anxiety that has been building for years: the sense that Malayali identity, once dense with historical weight and political consciousness, has been progressively hollowed out into a series of consumable gestures.

…

French theorist Jean Baudrillard is long dead; otherwise, he would have described this as simulacra: copies without originals, references that circle back only to other references. This is the paradox that defines contemporary Malayali existence now: unprecedented visibility coupled with ontological weightlessness.”

Interleavings: Notes & thoughts on recent reads, 12 September ’25