4 January 2025
1/ Shruti Rajagopalan, who hosts the Ideas of India podcast, did an annual retrospective highlighting the podcasts they did in 2024, with her reflections on it. I like this format which was begun by her celebrated fellow Mercatus podcast host Tyler (link for his retro). Link to my highlights.
What I found interesting
I read 22 books this year, of which three were works of fiction. Now I have kept stats of what I have read over the past two decades; I average 23 books a year, about a quarter of which are fiction. Two goals I have set for myself a few years back is to read more fiction, and read older books. On both counts I failed this year. Far too …
Podcasts are having their moment today, given the outsized role they had in the US 2024 Presidential election. It is impressive how some of the larger ones, such as the Joe Rogan Experience, have emerged as counterweights to mainstream media. While podcasts have hit the cultural zeitgeist and have broken into the mainstream, they …
This was written by me circa 2020 for a Notion page of podcast highlights that I used to maintain. I have sunsetted that page and moved mosts of its content to this section on this site. Thus this piece is a tad dated; still I thought it would be useful to have this here, given how often I reference my thinking on this topic, and felt it would be …
Regular readers would know that I overindex on podcasts as a format for media consumption. I try and consume 2-5 podcasts a week and post my learnings on this site and on Twitter / Linkedin. I thus get a lot of questions on my preferred podcasts and for podcast recommendations. Hence this piece. Please find a list of the podcasts I consume most frequently. I do consumer others outside …
Long-time readers would know that I have been deliberately reducing consumption of articles in favour of podcasts. It is a journey that I began a few years ago, and I have stuck to that path since. 2024 was no different.
The few articles that I read this year were either from newsletters I subscribe to (Generalist, Lenny, Newcomer etc), or recommended by a few trusted curators (Diff’s Long Reads, or …
TL;DR: PMF or Product-Market Fit is not a singular fit, but in fact two sequential fits. First, you need to achieve Product to Problem Fit or PPF (where you validate that your solution is able to address problems for a set of customers), and then you need to achieve (Go-to-Market) Motion to Market Fit, or MMF (where you can reliably, affordably, acquire lookalikes of the above customers to build a …
Enjoyable listen this, as Harry Stebbings interviews Cem Sertoglu, an elite European seed investor, who led, very likely the single best seed deal on the continent, the UiPath investment, where he has turned $16.5m invested (the last $10m written as part of the Series B round “with our hands shaking at the time”) into $2.1b. Whoa! Cem (pronounced as Gem) shares a behind the scenes look at the UiPath investment …
12 November 2024 | Link to podcast episode
Surprisingly good podcast episode. I encountered Chris Paik first on a Invest Like the Best podcast episode which was interesting as well, and then again recently when his post ‘The End of Software’ went viral. He is an interesting thinker as you will see from the highlights of this episode.
A few points which stood out:
In my latest PMF Convo interview, I spoke to Romita Mazumdar, founder & CEO of beauty products co Foxtale. Romita is a VC analyst turned founder, who started Foxtale during the COVID-19 pandemic, speaking to 900+ women and 100+ brands to figure out the specific sub-problem she wanted to attack in the beauty space. Her earned insight was that Indian customers want instant gratification, and efficacy, and she designed …
