Category: Life Lessons

On Who Really Shows Up When It Matters

Support at critical moments rarely comes from where we expect. Familiarity, expectations, and timing often shape who really shows up.

I have observed this weird phenomenon across both my professional and personal lives. In fact, it keeps surfacing every year or so, and therefore, I am compelled to blog about it today. Here’s how I would describe it:

At every important turning point in my life, where I desperately need a few (what I would consider) extremely close relationships to step up for me, almost all of them have failed to show up.

But at the same time, a few connections, whom I don’t have any significant shared history with and wouldn’t consider “close” by any stretch, end up stepping in and backing me at these key moments.

It has happened so many times now that I feel this is some random rule of nature that should have a name. Here are some personal examples:

  • When I moved to the Bay Area in 2014, having never studied in the US, with no job in hand, and with literally 2 bags, the person who gave me what turned out to be one of the most significant breaks in my career was…the then-husband of my wife’s ex-colleague.
  • One of my most important backers, who was an extremely small angel in my startup but ended up becoming a key influencer in both my decision to come back into venture as well as a major tangible supporter in many ways since then, is the husband of the 1st cousin of one of my past venture collaborators (interestingly, I lost touch with the original person who connected us many years back).
  • While we as a family were going through challenges on multiple fronts during the pandemic years and hit several low points, the people who saved us were not our oldest friends but a family we met through our older son’s first daycare.
  • The person who ended up giving what turned out to be an incredibly strong referral to my wife at Google more than 8 years back was someone I had overlapped with at a startup for barely 3 months and had no direct work history with.

I have many other examples that are unfolding as we speak, and which I hope to add to this list after a few years.

I don’t know if you have experienced something similar in your lives, but I have been thinking hard for at least a year now about why this happens repeatedly. Here are a few underlying things that I have noticed:

1/ Familiarity bias – when people have been too close to you over an extended period, they see all sides, moods, emotions, and fallacies in your personality. Because of this, I feel they end up subconsciously discounting your skills on many occasions.

I see this play out in venture all the time. Existing investors usually see the sausage being made, and therefore, are often more pessimistic on a portfolio company’s prospects compared to new investors evaluating the same opportunity.

For those who understand Hindi, there is a grandma’s saying on this phenomenon – “घर की मुर्गी दाल बराबर”.

2/ Expectations bias – humans have a tendency to keep very high expectations of people they consider close, especially if they are family or have been known for a long time. So whatever these relationships do at the crunch moments, it’s perhaps impossible for them to live up to the high bar they are being held to.

3/ Timing – the quality & extent of human collaboration depends a lot on timing. Where are each of the subjects in their own life arcs? What is their mind space looking like then? What is the macro environment in which the collaboration is playing out?

In almost all situations, humans are essentially acting in their own self-interest first. So, while to the “receiver” (me in the initial examples), it ends up being a game-changing intervention, the act is also delivering a major utility for the “giver”.

A parallel idea is seen in a key principle of marketing strategy – the job is not to convince uninterested prospects, but to be in the consideration set of leads when they are actively looking to buy a product. Sounds like a simple idea from a b-school course or Kotler’s book, but I have only learned its power at this stage of my career.

Translating this to the core idea of this post, best collaborations happen when both givers and receivers are in the market, and are a great fit for each other’s needs at that specific point in time. This has nothing to do with how close the people have been previously.

Given that I have now observed this core phenomenon, I am trying to do a few small things differently so that I can be on the right side of this rule of nature more often and with a much lower emotional toll. These include:

  • Instead of meeting the same set of people all the time, strive to continuously meet new folks and add them to an ever-growing funnel of relationships.
  • Be present and show up strongly even in first meetings with new people.
  • Following my guru Charlie Munger’s age-old advice, have lower expectations of close relationships and replace that emotion with gratitude that they choose to include me in their lives.
  • For major turning points every couple of years, instead of just repeatedly putting “asks” in front of the same set of people, cast a wider net out into the universe using a combination of cold outreach and warm intros.

Anyway, I know this post is a bit all over the place. In fact, I was struggling to even think of a title for it. But these ideas are from my lived experience, and are important enough to be put in front of you.

The 3 Overlapping Drivers Of Long-Term Success

Avoid pushing a boulder up the hill, becoming a drunk painter or a depressed actor.

I met a famous VC at a recent event. Multiple exits as a founder, multiple unicorns as a VC, and a thriving media business. On a sweltering SF afternoon (this week saw a massive heat wave across the Bay Area), his face had an extremely tired look and he could barely keep his eyes open. Yet, he took the time to patiently answer my questions.

I wake up the next day and see the same person doing a live stream discussing everything SaaS at 8 AM PT with all the passion and energy of a 20-year-old. Having seen his exhausted version just 12 hours back, I could never have imagined him bouncing back early the next day and bringing his best self to the game.

I was discussing this observation with my better half and in the flow of the conversation, outlined that this person was demonstrating what I saw as three key elements that when coming together, create a high likelihood of long-term success in any area of life:

Three Overlapping Drivers of Long-term Success
©An Operator’s Blog – by Soumitra Sharma

1/ Desire – Massive internal motivation to win, to be the best at something, to become the best version of yourself. In his all-time classic ‘Think and Grow Rich‘, Napoleon Hill calls Desire the “Starting Point of All Achievement”.

2/ Energy – Backing up Desire with raw physical and mental horsepower to do the work, put in the daily reps in your field, outwork competition, and practice enough (the 10,000-hour rule) to become world-class in your area.

3/ Natural Strengths – When Desire and Energy are channeled in an area that aligns with your Natural Strengths, the ROI on the effort becomes massive. This amplification creates a snowball effect, leading to rapid daily progress which over the long term, shows up in high rates of compounding. PS: I have covered a specific facet of this snowball effect in my posts ‘The Success Flywheel‘ and ‘The Success Flywheel – Part 2 (Superhuman, Perplexity)‘.

There is a reason why I have depicted these 3 elements as a Venn diagram. They have to necessarily overlap to enable long-term success. Even if one of the elements is missing, the snowball effect might never kick in. Here’s why:

Case 1: Desire + Energy BUT no Natural Strengths

In today’s age of near-zero information asymmetry and high leverage, which leads to intense competition in any given field, the key to standing out amidst all the noise is to focus on your unique and differentiated strengths. In the context of both startups and individual careers, I call this the right-to-win.

In Case 1, while this person has the Desire to succeed and the Energy to do the work, the ROI on the effort is low given it’s not being directed in a field where the person has differentiated strengths. It, therefore, reduces the odds of them being able to grow fast and grab market share against competition in their chosen field.

Think of Case 1 as the ‘Pushing A Boulder Up The Hill’ phenomenon – requiring enormous efforts daily but without commensurate rewards in terms of progress and rate of compounding. Essentially, it’s a case of having the right intentions and ability to do the work, but with poor strategy and direction.

PS: I see this at play a lot when strong founders choose a market where they have a weak fit and therefore, an unclear right-to-win.

Case 1 persona: Pushing A Boulder Up The Hill

Case 2: Energy + Natural Strengths BUT no Desire

This case reminds me of many sportspersons who couldn’t live up to their potential over the years – the likes of Vinod Kambli and Prithvi Shaw in Cricket, Maria Sharapova, Mark Philippoussis and Richard Krajicek in Tennis, Daniel Ricciardo and Fernando Alonso (to some extent) in Formula 1.

All these sportspersons had natural strengths in the sport and had high energy due to which they got initial success, but then, the internal motivation just wasn’t strong enough to sustain it.

Desire is crucial because it leads to discipline, which is critical for continuous improvement and growth. As I had written in my post ‘Willpower is a reservoir, and that’s why focus is important!‘ many years back, humans have a finite amount of willpower. Having discipline ensures that this willpower is carefully and optimally allocated in the right direction on a daily basis.

A Case 2 persona that comes to mind is ‘The Drunk Painter’ – talented and charismatic, but long-term lazy. When this person creates, it’s magic, but unfortunately, that’s too few and far between to make this person an all-time great.

Case 2 persona: The Drunk Painter (Image Source)

Case 3: Desire and Natural Strengths BUT no Energy

This case underlines the importance of fitness (physical and mental) to back up Desire and Natural Strengths. Without fitness, one can’t show up every day with their best game.

This, of course, becomes very obvious in sports. The hugely talented English cricketer Marcus Trescothick had to prematurely end his career due to mental health issues. Despite being the fastest bowler in the world of his time, Australian cricketer Shaun Tait could never reach his potential due to fitness issues. Australian tennis ace and Wimbledon winner Lleyton Hewitt had to end his career early due to a string of recurring injuries.

Similar examples also exist in other fields where fitness might not be traditionally considered a central pillar of success. Just after delivering an Oscar-winning performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight, which should have resulted in a Jack Nicholson-like long career, Heath Ledger died from drug abuse perhaps from prior mental health issues. Despite being one of the legendary stars in Friends for a decade, Matthew Perry dealt with perpetual alcoholism and depression, leading to an underwhelming career and ultimately, a sad end.

A Case 3 persona that comes to mind is ‘The Depressed Actor’ – this person loves to act, and is pretty damn good at it, but doesn’t have the physical and/or mental fitness to regularly bring their best game to auditions, and to keep improving and doing their best work over decades.

Case 3 persona: The Depressed Actor (Image Source)

TLDR: to summarize, if you are looking to set yourself up to chase long-term success in any aspect of life, focus on parallel-processing three things:

  • Inculcate a deep Desire to succeed.
  • Develop Energy to provide fuel to the Desire.
  • Lean into your Natural Strengths using this combination of Desire and Energy.

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Federer at Dartmouth

Recapping “tennis lessons” from Roger Federer’s 2024 commencement address at Dartmouth.

I am a big believer in collecting mental models from various disciplines in life, and as part of that, I look to learn from top sportspersons. So I naturally found the “tennis lessons” Roger Federer shared in his recent commencement address at Dartmouth to be particularly insightful.

In addition to capturing some defining experiences and approaches from Roger’s life, the speech was also filled with some amazing one-liners. I always find these to be really useful as they help us cognitively index, remember, and recall powerful concepts that others have experientially learned.

Here are some powerful ideas from the speech that stayed with me:

1/ “Effortless is a myth”

The truth is, Roger had to work really hard to make it look easy. A lesson for all of us chasing excellence in our respective fields – you have to embrace hard work before you become an expert.

2/ “Everybody can play well for the first 2 hours”

The real game starts after that, when the body is tired, the mind wobbly and the discipline fading. This highlights the importance of stamina, and of grit, in life.

3/ “My warm-ups at the tournament were so casual, people didn’t think I was training hard. But I had been working hard…before the tournament…when nobody was watching”

The importance of prep, putting in the reps, breaking a sweat. Excellence during the most crucial moments in life is a result of all the work put in during the years prior.

Reminds me of the famous General Patton quote – “He who sweats more in training bleeds less in battle”.

4/ “Belief in yourself has to be earned”

Roger didn’t explain this thought much, but my interpretation is this – self-belief is a by-product of the work you put in to go deep into a skill, and of the chances & risks that you take to make yourself better.

5/ “I beat some of the top players I really admired by aiming right at their strengths”

Roger tried to beat the baseliners from the baseline, beat the attackers by attacking, and beat the net-rushers from the net. He did this to amplify his game and expand his options, preparing for scenarios where one strength breaking down could be replaced by another one.

6/ “In tennis, there can be many types of talent”

Roger cites some of them – grit, discipline, patience, trusting yourself, embracing the process, managing your life, managing yourself. Also mentioning that everyone has to work on these things.

I would add that these are talents not just for tennis, but also for life.

7/ “You can work harder than you thought and still lose”

Tennis is a brutal game where at the end of a tournament, only one player gets a trophy while everyone else gets on a plane, thinking “how the hell did I miss that shot?”.

Life is going to be a roller-coaster for all of us. It’s how you manage and behave after losing a game, is that defines how big you will eventually win.

8/ “In tennis, perfection is impossible”

Roger shares some really interesting stats from his career – in the 1,526 singles matches he played, he won almost 80% of these matches. BUT he only won 54% of points across these matches. So, even the greatest of all time tennis players barely win half of all the points they play!

Why is this important? Roger says it teaches players to not dwell on previous points and to play each point on its merit. In other words, stay in the moment and play each point as if it’s the most important point in the world.

PS: like me, if you love learning from sportspersons, then I highly recommend Open – Andre Agassi’s autobiography. It helped me through some of the lowest points in my life.

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Leading With Grit

Grit needs not just perseverance, but also passion for a long-term goal.

Loved this talk on “Leading with grit” by Angela Duckworth at the recent Norges Bank Investment Conference 2024. This is a particularly interesting topic for me given scouting gritty founders is one of the pillars of my venture strategy.

Some interesting insights from this talk:

1/ Definition of Grit

GRIT is sustained passion and perseverance for especially long-term goals.

Grit needs not just perseverance, but also passion for a long-term goal.

2/ Talent & IQ has NO correlation with Grit

Grit actually unlocks the latent talent of people.

3/ A nuance of the 10,000-hour rule

It’s not just the quantity of practice that makes a world-class expert, it’s also the quality. High-quality practice can be called “deliberate practice”. Low-quality practice will only take you to the plateau of “arrested development”.

4/ “Dropping out” can be valuable in certain cases

If you start something and with some practice, realize that you aren’t enjoying it, or that the opportunity cost is too high, or things are just not working out for some reason, it’s perfectly acceptable to drop out.

Essentially, mindless grit should be avoided.

5/ Three elements of deliberate practice

(a) Decide on a small sub-skill to practice.

(b) Practice with 100% focus (the opposite of “multi-tasking”).

(c) Feedback and reflection.

While the best at this practice alone, they also work with a coach to show them the results of their practice and get feedback.

6/ The hierarchy of goals

Important to have a top-level goal that is long-term. But then, this goal should be broken down into a set of mid-level goals that in turn, are broken down into extremely tactical low-level goals with a daily/ weekly cadence.

Leading with grit means being extremely stubborn with the top-level goal but highly flexible and agile with low-level goals.

PS: if you found this intriguing, check out one of the all-time best TED talks by Angela on Grit.

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Curiosity As A Networking Cheat Code

Do you struggle with creating an instant connect with a new person during events, dinners, or warm intros? Sharing the cheat code for cracking this problem.

Whatever career you might be pursuing, there is a core aspect that never changes – every business is a people business and our success depends on being able to create an authentic connection with employees, customers, partners, and investors.

Creating this connection is the easiest when there is some sort of shared history or commonality. However, this tends to be a relatively small circle of people that can get tapped out pretty quickly. Our professional and personal growth depends on continuously expanding this circle by being able to connect with and influence a fresh set of people, perhaps each week if you are in sales or are a founder, but every few months at the minimum for most of us.

We meet these new folks at events and conferences, through warm introductions from shared networks, and in many cases now, establishing the first contact on social media. Given the noisy world we live in, each one of us barely gets a few minutes during a first meeting to establish chemistry with a complete stranger. If we fail to create a positive vibe during these initial minutes, it’s unlikely that this relationship will ever enter our professional funnel for a possible collaboration later on.

As a venture investor, I am at the mercy of this problem statement every day. Being able to quickly bond with a new set of founders, LPs, co-investors, and operators is a core part of the job. I totally concur with this thought from Semil Shah (Haystack):

Venture capital is a people-flow business.

Semil Shah (Haystack)

Personally, going to events and mixing around has given me unprecedented ROI (I previously shared my events playbook – “Networking at Events for Introverts“). I have also made some wonderful friendships by doing 1:1 meetings via warm intros.

During these conversations, I have tried various mindsets, approaches, and mental models to deconstruct interacting with strangers. I keep running experiments across mixers, dinners, and 1:1s, introspecting what worked well and what didn’t in a particular context. Essentially, I have been trying to distill it down to whether there is something fundamental that seems to work across contexts, and which, therefore, merits being incorporated as a core behavior.

One such element I have seen work really well is demonstrating a natural curiosity during the first few minutes of interaction with a new person. With each passing year, I have come to believe more and more that:

The cheat code for faster career growth is having the ability to influence strangers by demonstrating curiosity.

We live in a highly egotistical, self-absorbed world where everyone is a creator, trying to market their personal brand and posting content about themselves. Most people love to talk, and talk only about their stuff!

I have observed very few people taking a genuine interest in another person’s journey. Asking interesting questions of someone you have just met has become a lost art. The social conditioning of this era drives people towards talking more and listening less.

However, humans have a basic yearning to be heard. Have you noticed that when someone appears to be taking interest in what you have to say, you feel a natural pull towards this person? In this attention-starved society, when someone devotes that scarce currency to a first conversation, it’s extremely powerful.

I see this working in so many situations. When pitching to a potential customer, the key to closing a deal is taking the time and devoting attention to understanding their pain points and concerns, instead of mindlessly plonking your product on them.

An investor can leave even the most seasoned founders with a warm feeling during the 1st meeting if they take the time to go beyond superficial pitching theatrics and truly try and understand their journey, their backstory, and what they have painstakingly built.

The key to a successful partnership is listening to the other side to understand their goals, motivations, and what they care about, including the personal journey and incentives of the individual championing the deal.

Genuine curiosity can be incredibly disarming. It’s about putting the constant internal self-talk to the side, being in the moment, and focusing on understanding the other person. If this becomes a consistent part of your personality, you will automatically see this translating to a bunch of new meaningful relationships each year.

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One Year Of Writing (+ Top 15 Reflections From 2023)

Sharing my experience of uninterrupted weekly writing for a year, as well as general reflections and learnings from 2023.

Ahh…writing the last post for 2023. I intend to take a break for the next 3 weeks and recharge my writing brain. Hopefully, it makes the posts next year even better!

First, I want to thank all my readers out there for supporting An Operator’s Blog. Late last year, I committed to writing every week about my observations and learnings related to Building (startups), Investing (venture capital), and Life (parenting, marriage, and urban mid-life,) and doing it as candidly as possible. The idea was to share research, notes, experiences, and anecdotes from my life, in the hope that each post helps at least one person in their quest for seeking answers.

I had no way to predict (and still don’t!) what the reader persona of this blog would find useful and entertaining. Hence, I used the golden rule of creativity – create for yourself first. Each week, my endeavor has been to write about things I personally find interesting, covering topics I have a natural curiosity about.

Standing today, I can see that this blog has become some unique mix of a personal journal, professional notes, analysis memos, whiteboard, and scratchpad. I don’t know whether this is ideal or not, but am consciously not forcing a specific structure on it. I try and follow my natural flow of curiosity, keeping the writing as organic as possible. Hopefully, it then has a better shot at resonating with a certain section of the audience.

Even with niche topics like venture capital, public markets, mental models, and building startups, An Operator’s Blog has touched ~7,000 active readers in the last year.

I also write a weekly newsletter where in addition to long-form posts, I share curated content, fresh ideas, and other thoughts to consider and reflect on. The subscriber base now includes some of the top founders, investors, and operators in their respective areas. PS: if you find this intriguing, subscribe to the newsletter here.

This traction, combined with the qualitative feedback I regularly receive, tells me there is something of value here. Some of my friends have asked how I manage to gather the energy to write about diverse and intense topics every week. The secret is the above – getting feedback from readers about how a particular post impacted their thinking is the ultimate reward.

An Operator’s Blog is both my product and my art. One of my core life pursuits is to keep improving it and with each new post, make it more useful and interesting for you.

Closing out this year’s last post by sharing my top 15 personal and professional reflections from 2023. Just something for you to chew on during the holidays!

#1 Interest rates impact our lives much more than we imagine.

#2 Operating under scarcity leads to better capital allocation decisions.

#3 Entry price matters in venture investing.

#4 No one is going to share their best deals with you. Having your own proprietary deal flow is critical.

#5 Attending events is unscalable, yet extremely high ROI.

#6 When the sun is shining, make sure you make hay. The clouds are always around the corner.

#7 The best way to sell is to “not sell”. Instead, do Inception.

#8 Children don’t do what they are told. They do what they observe.

#9 Everyone gives you money when you don’t need it. No one gives you money when you desperately need it.

#10 The best things in life happen organically. Let the natural flow of life take its course.

#11 Charlie Munger’s quote: “The key to happiness is low expectations” is unbelievably true.

#12 Having a high income isn’t enough. The key to wealth creation is owning assets.

#13 It’s important to start early to ensure you are on the right side of compounding in anything.

#14 A good way to bond with new people is to be genuinely curious about their journeys.

#15 Even the smallest achievements of your child give unmatched satisfaction to the soul.

Wishing you all a happy new year. See you in 2024!

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Sports And Humility

Sports can be a cruel teacher for even the best of us, as India’s recent heartbreaking defeat in the Cricket World Cup final showed. However, if approached with an open mind, there are none better ways of practicing and getting better at humility and grit.

One of the reasons I am a big believer in playing sports is because it’s one of the few things in life that forces a player to accept defeat with humility. Every sport is a microcosm of how life actually plays out – the best plans don’t work out, huge highs are quickly followed by huge lows, the Davids often end up beating the Goliaths, and given all this, the best players focus on process over outcomes (read my post: Conquering Uncertainty, Dhoni & Vinod Khosla Style).

The recent soul-crushing defeat of India at the hands of Australia in the final of the 50 overs Cricket World Cup was a perfect example. A rampaging team full of superstars, playing in home conditions and backed by the richest and biggest cricketing engine the world has ever seen, was comprehensively outstrategized and outplayed by a team that had most of its stars way past their prime, whose innate strengths were unsuited to the local playing conditions, and which had scrapped its way to the final.

Having grown up seeing many of the previous World Cups, 2003 in particular, there were a few things that were making me nervous about India’s chances even before the final game. Classical cricket analysts have always talked about the Law of Averages being particularly strong in cricket. Being a student of investing, I also believe in Mean Reversion and therefore, this Law resonates with me. India was coming into the finals with a 10-win streak, the longest winning streak ever at a World Cup. This stacked the Law of Averages against it, and ideally, I would have liked to see them have a bad game before the final.

There is another reason why India not getting challenged at all during this unbeaten run bothered me. Regular readers of my blog would know that I am a believer in overcoming failure via grit as being the #1 leading signal of success in life (read my post: Storyteller vs Scrapper Founders). As Mike Tyson’s famous quote goes:

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

Mike Tyson

Success in life boils down to having the muscle memory to throw counter-punches once your Plan A has failed. This is where most people give up. Unfortunately, in my experience, the only way to build this strong muscle memory is to go through repeated failures, to operate in scarcity, to be the underdog in the shadows, essentially – “to get repeatedly punched in the face by life”.

As opposed to India, which won 10 games on the trot with a specific Plan A largely working each time, Australia got punched in the face many times at the beginning stages of the World Cup. This forced the team to develop ways to counterpunch, even while dealing with unfamiliar playing conditions and a set of aging players. Having the agility to come up with Plan Bs and Cs on the spot during game time perhaps became a necessity rather than a luxury.

The beauty of adversity is also that it brings people together, creating deep bonds and trust under conditions of high pressure. Look at how Pearl Harbor united the US like never before, ultimately creating the likes of the Manhattan Project in record time. This is likely what happened within the Australian team too, unlike India, whose team dynamics never really got pressure-tested before the final.

Of course, teams can only overcome adversity when they have a basic foundation of grit in place. This is where the national sporting culture of Australia built over generations comes in. A healthy sporting culture gives importance to systems and processes, has a high tolerance for failure, and puts teamwork over individual brilliance. More importantly, the fans and general audience also imbibe this spirit, having the maturity to spot these aspects and applaud them over one-off wins and losses. This leads to the entire engine, from players and coaches to sporting boards and fans, being aligned on a particular philosophy of playing sports, what a company would call ‘Values’.

Admittedly, a lot of this analysis has hindsight bias and emotions baked into it. I don’t want to be too harsh on Team India, as they actually played superb cricket over several weeks, displaying strong leadership, courage, and individual brilliance. However, this unexpected defeat does highlight that more work still needs to be done in crafting the right sporting philosophy within the country’s national fabric. A set of values that frees players from the pressures of winning and losing, and rather than dealing with public expectations and the dreaded “what will happen if we lose?” fear, helps them unlock their individual skills while also bringing them together as a team to deal with unexpected punches in the face.

Closing out with another story. We attended the Thanksgiving Warriors vs Spurs game yesterday. As part of a youth program, my older son got the opportunity to do one post-game free throw on the Warriors court. He ended up missing the shot and spent the next few hours whining about it. As I comforted him while talking through how missing and making these key shots is the beauty of sports, it took me back to the World Cup final heartbreak that happened 8,000 miles away a week back. Hence, this post! And why I will continue to actively encourage my kids, as well as our entire household, to devote significant time and resources to the pursuit of sports.

PS: enjoy this awesome reaction from Giannis Antetokounmpo, star player of the Milwaukee Bucks, when a reporter asked him on his “failure” at winning the championship.

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Views On India…From A Belgian

Over a breakfast of dosa and piping hot filter coffee in Bangalore, here’s what a total stranger from Belgium told me about India.

On my recent trip to Bangalore, I ended up sharing a breakfast table with this fine Belgian gentleman. He works for a Belgian vegetable oil company and has been sourcing ingredients from India for more than 20 years.

Basically, he is the first Belgian I have ever spoken with in my entire life. On top of that, he is as far away from my world of US-India tech startups and venture capital as one can imagine. Being the collector of obtuse insights and mental models that I am, I started asking him questions about his experience and observations over 2 decades of coming here.

Here are some quick scribbles from the conversation that you might find interesting:

1/ Hubli

The first thing he mentioned was that he spends a lot of time sourcing from Hubli. During this trip, he was surprised to see a startup incubator on one of the local roads.

Even as someone who spends a lot of on-ground time covering the Indian startup ecosystem, this was an eye-opening observation for me. It just goes to show how deep the pan-India social buy-in into startups has gradually become.

2/ Professionalism

He mentioned how in his initial years of sourcing from India, he felt like his suppliers were these small, unorganized, and resource-poor family businesses. He was sourcing from what he saw as a largely poor country.

Over the last 2 decades, he has seen how the same suppliers have become more professional, their manufacturing floors have become more sophisticated, and now, he feels they are comparable to similar businesses in China and SE Asia.

This was heartening for me to hear. SMBs are the backbone of India’s economy and key to its resilience. Improved productivity in this part of the economy will unlock a lot of value that will also percolate down much better.

3/ Flexibility

Given rising global risk and uncertainty (eg. the Ukraine war near his region), having supply chain optionality has become more important than ever before. This person wants a sourcing network that is spread across multiple suppliers in different countries and is, therefore, resistant to global shocks.

He believes this trend is going to significantly benefit India, given it is one of the few countries globally that has scale in manufacturing capacity. While European and Chinese suppliers tend to operate in ‘boxes’ with rigid rules, he loves that Indian suppliers tend to be more flexible, thinking on their feet and problem-solving on the fly.

In my eyes, while the Indian business hustle (‘Jugaad’ mindset) is key to survival amongst a web of local complexities and inefficiencies, it has been a liability in terms of doing business with the world.

However, combine this hustle with strategic thinking, focus on quality, and a strong work ethic – and Indian entrepreneurs can create magic!

4/ Perception

He mentioned that very recently, a major national newspaper in Belgium published a story talking about the decline of China and predicted that India would be the next global powerhouse. It was essentially prompting Belgium to do more business with India.

However, he has also seen the flip side where there is a negative legacy perception around doing business with Indian companies, particularly across Europe and even in Asia. Apprehensions like nothing will get delivered on time, quality will be inferior, manufacturing guidelines won’t be followed etc.

He felt that for India to take its rightful place in global trade, its businesses need to make a conscious effort to break this perception.

I see similar biases at play all the time even with respect to the Indian tech and venture ecosystem. Things like:

“India can only do IT services and can’t produce a global software product company” – Freshworks changed that.

“India is the back office of the world and can’t do real innovation” – Chandrayaan, Covaxin, and Brahmos are changing that.

“Indian tech companies can’t dominate in developed markets” – Paytm’s Japanese product is already amongst the top payment apps in the country.

“Indian airports are the worst in the world” – check out New Delhi T3 and Bangalore T2.

We are now sitting on a generational opportunity to break these biases in almost every vertical. As a venture investor, one of my core thesis is around breaking the bias that “India can’t export cutting-edge innovation”. I see companies like Flytbase, Playto Labs, and Tydy in my portfolio that make me believe!

Closing thoughts…

So, my main takeaway from this convo with a Belgian stranger, over a plate of dosa and piping hot filter coffee, was this – India is changing…fast, and everyone globally is noticing it and experiencing it. We are, however, fighting against legacy perceptions, and it’s our collective responsibility to proactively change that by delivering the highest quality in whatever touch points each of us has with the rest of the world.

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The Success Flywheel

Do you know what’s common between Shaq’s investment in Google, Ryan Reynold’s success as a marketer, the business dominance of Ivy Leagues & Peter Thiel’s investment in Facebook? A phenomenon I call the Success Flywheel.

In this post, I unpack this concept, including ways you can kickstart your own Flywheel.

Let me share a story that has 2 of my most favorite things in life – NBA and tech investing. Did you know that Lakers legend Shaquille O’Neal invested in Google’s Series A round in 1999 at a $100Mn valuation? Which, as we all know now, has turned out to be the biggest venture outcome of the last 25 years. So, how did an active basketball player get access to the deal of the century alongside Sequoia?

Shaq revealed the story behind his Google investment during his appearance at TheEllenShow a few years back. Apparently, he was hanging out at the Four Seasons in LA & started playing with a bunch of kids at the next table. In his own words – “I felt like I was babysitting this guy’s kids while he was in a meeting”. As it turned out, this stranger (Shaq didn’t disclose who he was) eventually let him into the Google deal.

Now, knowing Shaq’s storytelling skills, am sure this story is a bit jazzed up. And given he was already an NBA star in 1999 (he would go on to win his first ring in 2000), obviously this stranger must have recognized him. But even discounting for these possibilities, it’s clear that some amount of serendipity was definitely involved – meeting an important investor in a famous watering hill located in a powerful city led to him accessing a once-in-a-lifetime deal.

As you digest this, let’s cut to a similar story of another star, this time in Hollywood. Ryan Reynolds is now considered one of the savviest marketers & investors around. Look at his track record:

  • Became the brand personality for Mint Mobile, reportedly taking a 25% stake in the company. Mint recently got sold to T-Mobile for $1.35Bn!
  • In 2018, started promoting Aviation Gin and also took a stake in the company. The company was purchased two years later by Diageo for $600Mn.
  • In late 2020, co-bought a struggling fifth-division Welsh soccer team for 2Mn pounds. Used his marketing chops, including creating a Hulu documentary, to turn around the club’s attendance & revenues. It is now a thriving organization.

So, how does an active movie actor get access to deals that would be the envy of major private equity funds? And not just one-off – he keeps getting invited to the best deals one after another.

This is what I call the Success Flywheel at play. While the above are outlier examples related to top celebrities, I have seen the Success Flywheel working countless times both in my own career as well as those around me:

  • Repeat founders with prior success get access to the most venture dollars from the best investors. The other side of this coin – VCs with successful track records keep getting preferential access to the best founders.
  • The best recruiters (consulting, banking, investing, big tech) visit only the top campuses in each country for placements. So, these students get preferential access to the best jobs. And the flywheel doesn’t stop there – once you have any of these top logos on your resume, they act as preferential filters for subsequent jobs.
  • Early success brings folks to major economic centers like the Bay Area, NYC, London, Bangalore & Shanghai, either to study or work. Just by participating in the natural flow of information & people in these hubs, they get exposed to the best opportunities.

Morgan Housel of Collaborative Fund has a similar observation in his awesome post “Tails, You Win“:

The Success Flywheel is like a law of nature because it stems from fundamental human behavior. Across countries, cultures, sectors or even historical eras, at a fundamental level, humans are wired to maximize risk-adjusted returns while doing deals. Very crudely, there are 2 ways to do this – increase the numerator (return) and/ or decrease the denominator (risk).

Equally importantly, time is finite so people are looking to get to the most optimal risk-adjusted option, as efficiently as possible. This gives rise to the concept of “access” – how does one get in the flow of these people looking to do the best deals? ‘Cos they will quickly choose from people in their natural flow.

Having a prior event of success helps in getting repeated access to this flow as it creates a strong credentialing signal that plays really well to a crude heuristic that the human brain often uses – “if the person has been successful before, they are more likely to succeed again”. This signal drives 3 kinds of access: (1) Inbound (“I should talk to X”), (2) Referrals (“you should talk to X”) and (3) Serendipity (“have you met X?”).

1/ Inbound

The more socially-visible & externally-validated the prior event of success is, the more broad-based inbound access it drives to various kinds of flows. People looking to do deals proactively reach out even without any significant outbound effort (trying to sell yourself). Hence, visibly successful founders, investors, leaders, celebrities & experts keep getting access to opportunities.

This is also why conventionally successful professionals in any field still continue to productize & distribute themselves, building their personal brand & constantly growing their reach via networking, blogging, tweeting or starting podcasts. Putting oneself out there drives familiarity, which is key to inbound flow.

2/ Referrals

Everyone in these flows is typically in a consciously-cooperative mode, trying to optimize risk-adjusted returns for each other via referring opportunities, in the hope of future reciprocation. So, if a person has a prior event of success & on top of it, is also well-networked, it turbocharges referral-based access.

There is also a mini-flywheel at play here where a success event attracts people to your network, which drives referrals & more preferential access, thereby leading to more potential success & so on.

3/ Serendipity

Finally, even if you are not proactively looking for certain kind of opportunities (am sure Shaq wasn’t sourcing venture deals full-time), just being in the right flows puts you in the vicinity of serendipity that can take you in directions you never imagined. Shaq being at the LA Four Seasons at exactly the right time was the result of his outlier success as a basketball player, not his proactive networking skills.

The halo effect of success in one field generally transfers to other adjoining fields as well, which can drive massive serendipitous upsides. For eg. Peter Thiel’s track record as a co-founder of Paypal put him in the flows of Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, helping him become the first investor in Facebook. Or Jeff Bezos was able to invest in Google while it was still in the garage, courtesy of his success with Amazon.

Now the million dollar question – how does one leverage the Success Flywheel?

It starts by putting in the work to get your first event of success. The sooner the better so a sense of urgency goes a long way! And the good news is – unless one is born to privilege, most people start from scratch and build towards their initial success.

An event of success could be anything from cracking a top university, getting a coveted internship in a hot field, hustling into a brand-name job, hitting milestones with your business, creating a new product with buzz, publishing a paper, joining a board, building a social media following or just about any accomplishment in your context. Big or small matters less, it’s about getting a win on the score board to get the flywheel going.

While you are putting in the work towards your goal, also build a distribution network in parallel. This includes deep relationships & loose networks, both in the physical (IRL networking) & digital world (social media).

Once you get to that event of success, leverage your distribution network to amplify its impact. Make sure your success is visible, validated & shared in the ecosystem.

  • As Inbounds start, connect with people authentically, leave a good impression & look to solve problems for others.
  • To jumpstart Referrals, start using the tools & resources that typically come with success, to disproportionately give back to the network.
  • To leverage Serendipity, follow the golden rule of “showing-up” everywhere – meetings, events, calls, webinars, conferences, mixers, even birthday parties. PS: if you find networking at events a huge pain like me but still want to get better, check out my post “Networking at Events for Introverts“.

TLDR: the way to get a Success Flywheel going in your life is to first put in the work with a sense of urgency, and create an event of success, big or small. Once you get this event, make sure you “distribute” it well and ensure its compounding by continuous learning & effort.

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The 3Cs of career leverage

As I started experiencing both time & mental bandwidth constraints, especially post becoming a parent, I started thinking through the golden question – “How do I get more leverage in my career?”.

Sharing 3 main forms of leverage that I have identified during my journey in tech as an investor, operator & founder.

The way I design my career completely changed when my first son was born in 2017. From the day I graduated from IIT, I implemented what I call a Brute Force strategy to climb the career ladder. The idea was to basically outwork everyone – worked deep into the weekend during my investment banking days, did every possible hustle during the venture capital gig, and was on a plane 15-20 days a month for 5 years at Alibaba, literally doing a round trip of the world (SF – Hangzhou – SEA – India – back to SF via EU).

Everything changed once a parallel day (& night) job landed on my plate – that of being a parent. Relative to Asia, raising kids in the US is especially hard given there are no support systems to fall back on, especially for a 1st gen immigrant like me.

The easy choice, of course, would be to step off the gas a bit, realign professional goals & essentially, accept the trade-off of more personal time & lower professional outcomes. And many at this life stage end up choosing this option.

But then, I have never been the guy who loves the easy way out. I set out to answer the golden question – “How do I get more leverage in my career?”. Essentially, figuring out ways to significantly improve the ratio of output (value created) to input (time & mental bandwidth invested).

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

Archimedes

As I churned on this topic in my head for a year or so, Naval Ravikant posted his now legendary “How to get rich (without getting lucky)” tweetstorm in 2018, where he wrote about leverage as one of the key ideas.

Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).

Naval Ravikant

Having worked in tech as an investor, operator & founder, I had the opportunity to observe various forms of leverage at play from close quarters. Some examples that hit home hard for me over the years included:

These examples highlight 3 main forms of career leverage I have come to identify in my journey. I call them the 3Cs – Code, Capital & Content.

1/ Code

Code is the strongest form of leverage that has come into existence in the last 50 years. It started from the days when one had to have access to a University with a Punch Card machine, just to run simple programs. Then, Apple and Microsoft together brought computers to regular homes, but coding languages were still complex & needed expertise. As personal computers got more powerful, the open-source ecosystem of programming languages started thriving, creating much broader access to software programming across the world (from s/w products in Silicon Valley to IT services in India). Now, with the rise of generative AI, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that almost every knowledge worker can code & create products without deep expertise in specific languages.

Code provides game-changing leverage. Over the last 20 years, anyone with a decent laptop and an Internet connection could build a SaaS business, become a freelance developer, or get hired by a large tech company at extremely attractive salaries irrespective of location, background, or past credentials. As opposed to hourly jobs in the industrial age, coding just for more hours doesn’t necessarily translate into better outcomes. Quality of problem-solving matters much more than the quantity of hours, which is what gave rise to the 10x engineer phenomenon.

As someone who had neither the skillset nor the mindset to code, this extremely powerful form of leverage has always been out of my reach. That’s why I am particularly excited about how AI will make coding so much more accessible. At the minimum, it will both increase the global base of developers, as well as significantly enhance the productivity of the best ones (the 10x engineer now becomes a 100x?).

Given coding hasn’t been available to me as a leverage point in my career, I have had to double down on the other 2Cs, as I will explain below.

2/ Capital

Using capital to own assets is the oldest form of leverage that continues to stay powerful. The Vanderbilts made their fortune owning railroads, Carnegie in Steel, the Waltons & Jeff Bezos in retail, Buffet & Munger in owning full businesses as well as investing in stocks, Jobs & Gates in tech, Templeton, Soros & Jim Simons in public market investing, Stephen Schwarzman & Henry Kravis in Private Equity investing, and Don Valentine & John Doerr in Venture Capital investing.

Capital can be used to buy ownership in Real assets as well as businesses. The former benefits from scarcity (land is finite on this planet) & gives double-dip benefits of monthly cash flow + equity appreciation. But personally, I find the latter more interesting, purely because great businesses become long-term compounding machines, providing the prospect of exponential returns that Real assets can’t match.

As an example, Microsoft’s market cap has grown from ~$270Bn to $2Tn+ in 20 years. For any part owner via stock, everyone from Bill Gates to Steve Ballmer & now Satya Nadella has been putting in the work to give shareholders ~17% annualized returns.

Of course, the most powerful route would be to use your “sweat equity” & start a business, but that’s typically not an optimal option for most people.

Given my significant experience in banking & venture investing, I have gotten the most exposure to Capital as a form of leverage & ways to harness it across asset classes. In addition to developing expertise by working across institutions, investing in both public & private markets has also become my personal passion over the years. In a very organic way, I have always turned to the lens of markets & investing to decode life & human behavior.

As a result, I have doubled down on leveraging Capital to acquire ownership in businesses as a core form of leverage. I have been investing in tech startups for more than a decade, & plan to keep doing it for the rest of my life. My simple pursuit is to identify the best founders out there, & I believe this is where my professional Alpha is!

Compared to Code, Capital-based leverage is relatively hard to acquire. Accumulating own capital takes time & being able to manage other people’s money has a really high bar of trust, reputation & accountability.

The good news is – you can start young & with small amounts of capital. Compounding is your friend and as long as you are determined to save & deploy on a continuous basis for decades, every small step adds up. And sooner or later, my favorite model of “you only need to get a few right” kicks in, wherein a smart decision every few years will create a step function in your portfolio.

The first $100,000 is a bi**h, but you gotta do it. I don’t care what you have to do – if it means walking everywhere and not eating anything that wasn’t purchased with a coupon, find a way to get your hands on $100,000. After that, you can ease off the gas a little bit.

Charlie Munger

3/ Content

This is the newest form of leverage, & one of the most exciting ones. Pre-Internet, there were many gatekeepers in the way of getting ideas heard. Most regular people had almost no access to traditional media. One needed relationships with publishers & power brokers to put anything out in the market. Participating in a high-quality exchange of ideas happened within tight cliques – scientific, university, neighborhood, racial, socio-economic, etc. Essentially, the common man was blocked by “access”.

The Internet changed everything. Anyone could build a website to publish their ideas. With search engines, this content became discoverable by anyone across the world. As social media got created, distribution became turbo-charged with authors able to create holistic personal brands & interact with very specific audiences for their work. Now, powerful phones & software have transformed authors into “creators”, arming them with light-weight studios to create various forms of media, from vlogs & podcasts to tweets & reels.

I started writing online in 2011, mainly via blogging & tweeting. Over the years, my conviction in Content as a powerful form of leverage has only increased with time. As anyone who has taken a new product to market knows, it’s just not enough to have a great product. Communicating with your audience in a way that makes the product resonate in their minds matters the most. Case in point: Apple’s legendary 1984 Super Bowl commercial introducing the Mac (& in the process, convincing the audience that IBM is obsolete!). Even a product genius like Jobs spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about marketing (check out this snippet from Jobs on how he simplified Apple’s marketing message).

To me, the ability to influence human minds with your ideas is a superpower like no other. Writing & putting content out there helps me engage with people I would have never met otherwise. It helps me attract people with similar values, with whom I can solve problems. It helps me have a conversation with them even when one of us is asleep, or in a different time zone, or even when the encounter happens many years after the actual writing.

Early-stage investing is a long-tail game, with thousands of new startups getting created across the globe & tens of founders in the pipeline at any point in time. I realized very early that real-time meetings are unscalable, especially at my life stage, & that demand-gen is key.

Content is arguably the most scalable form of human interaction, with its engagement & subsequent impact reverberating for years & sometimes, generations (in the case of the best books). In fact, this post itself is a perfect example, wherein I have shared links to an Apple commercial from 1984, a Steve Jobs speech on marketing from 1997, and a Wall Street Journal article from 2000.

My belief is that Content in many ways provides more potent leverage than Capital – money can’t buy the best ideas, but the best ideas can attract money. And this friends, is why I write!

To summarize, employing various forms of leverage is key to creating large professional outcomes. As you design your career, think about proactively layering in one or more of Code, Capital & Content into it & equally importantly, commit to doing it over many decades.

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