Like any soul adrift in this world, I've wrestled long with the meaning of life, and I reckon it boils down to two simple words: create and play.

Everything that gives life its pulse—from the very act of living, to the strokes of art and strains of music, to the spark of innovation and the rise of empires—each is a testament to creation.

To own our destiny isn't just to navigate life's currents; it's to harness our strength of will, to carve our own path through the wild terrain of existence. It's about liberation, not from life's tragedies—failures, heartbreaks, setbacks—but from the tragedy of not striving to live our truest selves.

As men in our mid-thirties, we can all run 6-minute miles and it's an effort. We are proud we can all run sub 6 miles, but none of us has attempted to break the 5-minute mile in a decade (I have never attempted it in my life), and it felt like an absolutely impossible feat—but so are most of our ambitions for love, family, work, and community.

Imagine, if you will, a team as a finely woven tapestry of human connections. In this intricate fabric, each thread represents a team member, a node of potential and skill. To transform this potential into success, these nodes must not simply coexist but collaborate, weaving together through consistent and dynamic exchanges of information, ideas, and responsibilities. It's a dance of dialogue

As a kid, I loved math, I think I had not lost a single point on my exams till I was 10 or 11 yrs old and loved being part of our math olympiad team. I almost considered getting a degree in maths and till date love doing math problems. So years ago, at Stanford when I tried to write down all my life lessons, I found math to be the best language to write them down.

To understand great products, we must differentiate between the tool and the product. A cup is a great tool, so is a car for getting from point A to B.

But Stanley Cup is a product and Porsche is a product. I am not talking about branding it but a product must transcend its mere utility to provide a certain sense of aesthetics, communicate a relationship and inspire something in a user, and it often transcends the very purpose it was built for.

All moral decisions should be viewed from the lens of these individuals. Thats our only moral obligation.

The line from my first books of hers that still stands out to me is when Howard Roark is in his deans office and the dean asks "My dear fellow, who will let you?" To which he says, "That's not the question. The question is, who will stop me?"

This is the short read. It is purely just a collection of reasons I love to build and why I am extremely supportive of people chasing their passions and curiosity.

In the bustling tech hubs of San Francisco and the Bay Area, there's a mantra that echoes through the corridors of startups and the tweets of Silicon Valley influencers: avoid status games.

This piece of wisdom, often attributed to Naval Ravikant, has become a guiding principle for many in the tech community. But what exactly does it mean to avoid status games? And more importantly, how does one navigate the nuanced landscape of reputation and status?

For a select few, happiness is a peculiar concept. I would wager that most creators do not chase happiness; instead, they live for something more profound, deeper, and enduring. In the second part of this discourse, I will delve into this further, but first, let me share my personal relationship with the concept of happiness.

As a child, around the age of ten, I struggled to grasp the concept of happiness. When asked if I was happy or what brought me joy, I found the questions baffling

Every so often, I wake up with this burning urge to level up - eat cleaner, push harder, show more heart, grind like there's no tomorrow. I craft the perfect plan for the week, the month, setting goals and challenges to become that person. I'll throw down a monster goal to get my act together - run a marathon, conquer an Ironman, hit a business milestone. I often hit them but it is somehow not because I got better, but because as the deadline of loomed, I am able t tap into a frenzied energy, a maniacal drive to succeed, only to revert to my old self.

Discounting is a great tool and nobody loves discounting more than the sales team. It really helps for sales people to do price discovery and offer the best clearing price for your product for that particular customer. It helps create a sense of urgency by claiming that this price is only available till X date.

It also helps the customer feel like they are getting a “deal”.

My hot take is negotiating pricing, discretionary discounting is highly inefficient, time wastage, bad way to conduct business and an absolutely the least effiecient way to price discovery.

Conviction refers to a state of being sure about a particular idea, principle, or viewpoint. Conviction isn’t a passive state; it is not a default state, rather it is an active process of commitment to one’s principles, decisions, and actions.

Conviction is different from belief. A belief is a passive state where we hold something to be true, very often a result of

Stonehenge. Pyramids. Moai statues. Nazca Lines. Monuments of ancient wisdom, standing against the sky, their secrets lost. We look back and wonder. How were these built? The answers have slipped, like sand, through the fingers of time.

In this ever-spinning globe of ours, art's been riding shotgun, morphing, and roaring through centuries. Let’s hitch a ride through this kaleidoscope, not for the glory of its past but to get a glimpse of where it is headed. These are my musings on how art has been evolving over the last 500 years and where its waltzing towards.

Start-ups default path is towards death.

The only way to steer off this default path is through speed. It is the single most important vector for the company. Your team should enable this.

Many successful founders capture this ethos

Larry page famously came up with the “Toothbrush test” for building product at Google i.e. build products that can be used at least twice per day by users. subtext is that more frequent the product is used, possibly higher the value it generates for the user.

E.g. Food (survival), bathing/washing (disease free, socially pleasant), clothes (protection, socially pleasant).

Most of life is a game. You can play multiple game at once - having a great family is a game in itself. Having influence on millions of people is another game, having lots of money is be another game. One can play multiple games together and most people do. They just don’t articulate it. So at any given point, they don’t know which games they are playing - what the levels are, what is the core objective in that moment, and how to have fun in that game.

As we chase all the goals we set for ourselves - love is the one word answers to life I have found.

Don’t discard it as some hippie bs, read on! Almost all extra-ordinary things we achieve as individuals is one of two loves:

Modern AI models are a black box and tasked with a specific function or functions. The AI model studies millions and billions of data inputs to produce outputs and based on feedback and more data - it refines its own parameters.

Imagine if the AI model was tasked to “Kill bacteria X” or “Save the planet” or “ending war through infiltrating media” - all of this could lead to humanity being extinct.