Aswath Krishnan

These two quotes, from Jeff Bezos on business risks and Sam Altman on personal career risks, convey the crux of this post. "If the size of your failures isn't growing, you're not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle. Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures." - Jeff Bezos in the 2019 Amazon shareholder letter "It’s useful to focus on adding another zero to whatever you define as your success metric—money, status, impact on the world, or whatever. I am willing to take as much time as needed between projects to find my next thing. But I always want it to be a project that, if successful, will make the rest of my career look like a footnote." - Sam Altman For something to make a difference to us, its significance should be proportional to our current situation. When we are kids, earning $10 can be a big deal, as it opened up options that...

It's nearly the end of the year. This is when we celebrate, reflect, and set resolutions for the next year. To set resolutions, we have to figure out what we want to do. The best lever we have for a good life is taking care of our health. If we can stay healthy - physically, mentally, and emotionally - until, say 80 instead of 60, we have increased your healthy adult life span by 50%! That's 50% more life time to enjoy, learn, continue our careers, make mistakes, try new things. Taking care of our health is largely in our control and a very worthwhile thing to prioritize. There's a lot of good advice on how to be healthy. Good diet and consistent exercise significantly bolsters physical health. We can develop your mental health with challenging and creative mental activities, managing stress, and by taking time to relax. Buddhist principles and loving family/friends help with emotional health. Then the question is how do we want to spend our time. How we spend our tim...

We were at a couple of cafes and restaurants in Seattle this weekend, and remarked how hip they are, and how hip the people are. We concluded the hipness of these cafes had to mainly do with the decor - usually a combination of exposed brick wall, indoor plants, wood, and bold colored walls and furniture. The fashionable baristas and the single source, $8 drip coffee selection contributed as well. Something is hip when it is unique, interesting, and potentially worth emulating. It is the cutting edge of fashion, decor, or culture. Hip-ness is an idea generation and selection mechanism for a society. Hipsters explore and extend the edges of these fields - by being opinionated, bold,  and willing creators and perpetrators of new ideas. There is a constant cycle of what's hip. As a hip thing becomes popular, then the industrial efficiencies kick in. The big brands step in, the products get manufactured and sold at scale. Then the hip thing becomes mainstream, and something ...

Seeing a flower Makes me wonder Why such beauty Has to naturally end From bud to bloom To an inevitable gloom Perhaps it is To make us Appreciate it more Perhaps it is To give life To some things new Perhaps the end Is just an illusion There never is one As our lives just continue as many different ones -Aswath

We often get frustrated when "something doesn't make sense" - when your wife is annoyed for a seemingly frivolous reason, when an unqualified president is elected, when your boss decided to pass you up for promotion, when a business makes their customers' life hard etc. In reality, "when something doesn't make sense", it simply means that we don't understand why it happened and how you could have influenced different outcomes.  We'll be better equipped in the future and happier if we approach these situations with curiosity and figure out why, rather than get frustrated. The expectation of "something to make sense" itself assumes you know everything, and that things are always predictable and rational - both of which are mostly false. The world is complex. Don't pick a fight with reality. When something doesn't agree with your expectations, be curious, deeply understand why, and update your mental models. 

A colleague told me an interesting story about Progressive insurance. Progressive started out by offering insurance to riskier drivers, who were turned down by other carriers. To do that and survive as a business, they had to get way better at underwriting - predicting risk and pricing these policies - than other insurance carriers. Fast forward many years, Progressive is now one of the largest insurers in the US and has expanded beyond this market to serve all drivers. Progressive's early (and necessary) investment in best-in-class underwriting gives it a definite competitive edge against other carriers. In my previous company, we signed on our first Japanese client, after nearly 100+ US client. The Japanese customer had a significantly higher bar on product quality and data security requirements. It was hard to keep them happy - we had to redo our technical architecture, add more compliance procedures, improve our product reliability, and QA processes. Our CEO had to fly over ...

Let me be blunt, There is none Trust no one who Says they know one No one knows  Why we are  Or where  We go next But since we are  And since we feel I say it’s better  To feel peace, joy  and love  Than sorrow  Or hate  How you do that Is up to you Here’s a clue -  It’s all in you. Spread it around With the golden rule Aswath

I wrote this a week before starting a new job as a Product Manager at Lyft. Every new job is an opportunity to do things better. This is a reminder to myself on what it means to be a good product manager. It boils down to three main things: 1. Product Strategy: Bring clarity to what your team is working towards, how and why As a PM, your key responsibility is to layout and communicate the game your team is playing, how we should keep score, and the strategy and path to winning. What success looks like : All members of your team and the exec team can articulate, defend and feel confident and excited about what your team is doing and why. Key deliverables : Team mission and vision, key metrics, goals and OKRs over different timeframes, roadmap over different timeframes, current metric values and dashboards, user feedback/insights/journey, project or feature specs.

In 2018, I started and led the growth function at Quizlet, the most popular study app in the US. We managed to hit a new milestone of 50M monthly users (up 66% from 30M in 2017)! This was my first experience in growth (I have been a product and a platform PM in the past) and I’m very glad I did it as it helped me understand a key aspect of scaling a business. This post is a summary of what I have learned. What is growth? Imagine you have a shop selling products. The product teams help improve the products or create new products. The growth team has a different role. They get more potential customers into the store, match them with the right products and help them understand the benefits, get more visitors to purchase the products and come back for more. Growth is a scaling function — you should invest in growth only after you have evidence of a product-market fit i.e. your product solves a need for a target user base. The tactics that you use for getting to product-market fit or t...

I was recently advising a couple of friends who were considering leaving larger companies to join startups. Sharing the main points of our discussion here.  Before diving in, I'll lay out some definitions. Pre-Series A startups are typically those that are still figuring out product-market fit. A Series A startup is one that has found product-market fit and is starting to scale growth and develop a business model. A Series B startup has a working business model and is starting to scale revenue. A Series C startup starts to resemble a regular, mid-size company - it's scaling growth, revenue, and maybe investing in some new product lines. When I say startups in this post, I refer to Series A or B startups. 4 questions to consider before joining a Series A or B startup.   1. Are you interested in the startup's space and mission (not just your functional role)?  You can succeed in larger companies by focusing just on your function. In startups, you succeed by mak...

1. Invest in developing a strong foundation -  long-term vision, frameworks, principles, etc. Often times, a strong foundation can make decisions easier. 2. Learn to discern which decisions are consequential (range of possible outcome) and irreversible, and which aren't. Be more deliberate making the former and quick to make the latter. Use a maximizer approach for the former and a satisficer approach for the latter.  3. Bring clarity to decision making by identifying key decision factors , laying out distinct options and how they perform against those factors. Learn to create new options that make things better. 4. Understand the first, second, third-order consequences ; and how this will play out in different time horizons - short, medium and long term.

A friend and I were sharing experiences on how we both had trouble sustaining new habits. I recounted how long breaks punctuated my "daily" exercise and meditation practice and she shared how she has to repeat courses to get back to good time management practices. Unless you are superhuman, change is hard. Developing new skills and habits is hard. Consistent focus and practice are hard. These are hard because you are trying to change your default nature and programming. So assume you are not superhuman. Assume you won't have focus and energy to do all you want, you will not follow through on some days, you will make mistakes, sometimes you will give up for months or altogether. This will help you avoid feeling guilty or bad when the inevitable happens, and instead adopt strategies that can work for our non-superhuman selves - like focusing on fewer things at a time, planning for how you will restart when you give up, for how you correct and grow when you make mistake...

Peace or equanimity is the acceptance of your current reality. Joy is the appreciation and celebration of your current reality.  By these definitions, peace and joy are entirely in your mind's control. Peace and joy are better to experience and share than disturbance or sorrow. But we often let outside factors determine our peace and joy, and make it conditional. "I'll be happy if I get that promotion", "if people are nice to me", "if I have enough money", "if my health is good" etc. Why hold our own peace and joy hostage? We think outside factors - people, environment, or events - disturb our peace or joy. When someone yells at us or cheats us, when there's an accident, when something doesn't go as planned, when losing something you like etc. In reality, our emotional response to these factors - anger, frustration, sadness, jealousy, fear - disturbs our peace and joy. Our emotional responses originate from our expectations...

This post describes a system that I'm using to plan and use my time effectively to execute towards my goals. This is part of a series of posts that I'm writing on systems that can help us live intentionally and effectively. Philosophy 1) How you spend your days is how you spend your life . If you want to spend your days effectively, you need to plan. Planning requires time and effort. Block off time to plan, reflect and process.  2) Have an intentional list of priorities and tasks; otherwise, your time is going to be spent on whatever comes your way.  Have a source of truth for all things to be done (to-do list) and events (calendar) Break up projects and larger, ambiguous tasks into specific and actionable tasks 3) Focus on only a few priorities every week and every year.  Protect your time and calendar. Say no to tasks and events that aren't important to you.  Allocate time and energy proportional to opportunity.   4) Your plans should include ...

This post is a living collection of laws and concepts that I find interesting.  Occam's razor states that the simplest solution is most likely the right one Miller's law states that to understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of. Metcalfe's law states the effect of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n2) Pareto principle states that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their "level of incompetence". In other words, an employee is promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another. Conway's law states that organizations which des...

I enjoy learning about counter-intuitive models and about examples where well-intentioned and logical solutions fail (cobra effect). I heard Bill Gurly, a famed VC, talk about "regulatory capture" in an interview. It's a term for a phenomenon where regulatory agencies that are introduced to protect consumers from businesses, can end up being advantageous for the businesses and worse for consumers. The reason for this is that businesses, because of their higher vested interest, resources, and expertise, end up influencing the regulators, regulations, and execution. This Wikipedia article has several examples of this. The lesson here is that introducing sustainable change isn't easy. A complex equation of several variables resulted in the current situation and trying to change the situation requires changing the equation and the variables. You should think about long-term incentives and dynamics and build in mechanisms for checks and refinement if things don't...

I enjoyed my third day of snorkeling in Hawaii’s Big Island today. Peering into an alien life system while floating in cool blue waters is both amazing and meditative. On my first day, I’d often get water into my mouth, sputter-struggle and ultimately swallow a bunch of salty water. I tried hard to figure out how to block out the water, but the regular struggle and uneasy anticipation leading up to it made it difficult. On my second day, I stopped trying to not get water into my mouth. Instead, I figured out how to recover quickly when it did. After some trial and error, I could surface, stay afloat, then remove my pipe and empty the water from my mouth and the pipe, and go back into snorkeling. This worked out pretty well. It kept me snorkeling longer and that helped me improve my breathing patterns and my grip on the pipe, which helped block out the water. Sometimes, fixing the root problem is hard and takes time. Figuring out how to cope with the problem can help you stay in ...

Our lives are summations of our experiences. Our experiences are a function of signals we receive from our environment, our minds, our bodies and how we interpret the signals from these sources. Experience = Environment X Mind-Body The environment refers to all the external forces, including other people, that act on us and that we connect with through our five senses. Mind-Body are signals that we receive from our mind and body, and how we interpret all the signals. It is a product of our mental and physical well being. A fit body, healthy mind and good attitude can do wonders. For a positive experience, we’ll have to combine a positive environment with a healthy mind and body. Both can be cultivated with deliberate practice.

Most of us have a dominant arm that’s stronger and more dexterous. This can be because of genetic, nurture or simply the arm we chose to use as babies. When we have to lift or pull, we naturally use our dominant arm as it’s easier and less painful. This is true for mental and soft skills as well, but it is not as apparent. For example. some of us are good at problem solving but not so good at collaborating with a team. So when we have to solve a problem, we naturally tend to problem solve individually and not collaboratively. Using your stronger muscles is easier, but can also limit you to a local maxima. The outcomes can be better if you can use all your muscles or the muscles best suited for the job at hand. Leaning on your strong muscles prevents you from identifying the weak muscles and from developing them, and that can hold you back in the long run. One of my previous managers gave me the feedback that I had gotten far in my career with raw smarts, but if I wanted to get fur...

A founder of a successful consumer subscription app shared this succinct nugget of wisdom about subscription businesses: only two things really matter - the cost of acquiring customers (CAC) and the lifetime value per customer (LTV). I'll throw in a third one - total addressable market (TAM). If LTV > CAC now and in the foreseeable future, you likely have a healthy business. When you are evaluating a business, evaluate if this is achievable. When you are optimizing a business, focus on how you’ll decrease CAC and increase LTV. Here are some examples of tactics that I have seen work well. What will work for you depends on the specifics of your business. Some tactics for reducing CAC

Money is an IOU from society. A twenty dollar bill can be redeemed for twenty dollars worth of services or goods. Money is useful as it helps you stay comfortable, feel secure, experience things that make you happy and sustain or heal yourself during tough times. Here are 5 broad thoughts about making money. 1) Typically, you earn money by providing others services or goods that they value . People value goods and services that either help them make more money or help them feel better. People aren't completely rational, and that extends to how and what they value. They are willing to pay more for things they perceive as higher value and that could be influenced by a number of factors. 2) If you want to make more money , then provide more value - by serving more people or by providing higher value goods or services. To scale the value you offer, you can use technology or capital (to hire more people or invest in other areas). To provide something that is perceived as higher va...

One simple advice for professional success is to think and act like a founder. Before you take a job, think like a founder.  Would you start a startup in the same space, with the same business model? Do you think there's a good opportunity for  impact?  Are you are the right person to do it? Are you excited about it? Do you have the right team or the resources to hire the right team? Is your team's charter relevant to the company and supported by the company? Do you think you have the investment and support (from the company) to make you successful? Do you agree with the company's values and culture? Are they meritocratic, rational and not political? If your answers are not a yes and if your situation allows for it, keep looking for another job. It is usually hard to change these factors in an established company. After you take the job, continue to think and act like a founder.  Make the business, customers and your "investors and board members" (...

Growing up, I loved listening to my grandmother's stories - an eclectic mix of folk tales, mythology, tales about her life and family. She is a gifted story teller and when she enters story mode, her audience of young kids and adults alike are thoroughly drawn into the experience - listening attentively, sharing laughs, astonishment and scares (my grandmother loves the horror genre, much to the chagrin of the parents). For the last fifteen or so years, I moved to a different country and have lived quite far away from my family. My interactions with my grandmother reduced to monthly phone calls and yearly visits. Our phone calls were simple check-ins, with similar patterns - my grandmother advising me to eat more or get married; and me enquiring about my grandmother's health, tv shows or daily routine. Yesterday, I broke that pattern. When we were about to be done with our usual check-in and when my grandma was advising me to have babies soon, I changed course and asked her...

I have two stories to share from last week. On Monday, I lost my keys and was upset about the effort and cost to replace them. Out of the blue, on Wednesday, I received an email from my local library saying that they have my keys. A kind stranger had found my keys at the train station, had noticed the library card and then taken the effort to return them to the library. The librarians took the time to look me up, notify me and hold on to the keys, despite the liability. I was elated and very thankful to these kind strangers. During the same week, I remarked to some colleagues about how our building's receptionist always welcomes me with a cheerful greeting every morning and then opens the elevator door for me. All my coworkers chimed in with deep appreciation of how she brightens their days too. One person said he brought in his baby during his paternity leave just to say hi to her. In Silicon Valley, impact and success is often defined and celebrated by its scale - "ho...

Yesterday, I was watching the Oscar winning movie, Green Book, which has some really wonderful music. I wondered about some things that we all take for granted - music, sounds and hearing. What is sound? How is it created? How do we hear it? Do we all hear the same thing? Sounds are vibrations that travel through a medium. Our ears have tiny hairs that convert these vibrations to electrical signals that the brain interprets as whatever we hear. How do these hairs work? What do the electrical signals looks like? How does the brain interpret the signal? Do some people hear music better? Why do we get so much pleasure from some sounds and irritated by others? There are so many questions, so many interesting details for every single thing that exists or happens around us. What motivates people? How does a television work? How did capitalism come about? How do financial markets work? How does your brain store memories? How do cells in your body age? What is the secret to great relati...

A few years ago, I became curious about figuring out how to learn effectively. I read a bunch on the topic, built an app and talked to my friends and coworkers about it. One day, a coworker casually mentioned that a mutual friend works at an education startup that was hiring. I now work for that company! I too have referred friends to jobs, shared articles, invited them to events and made introductions based on what they seemed genuinely interested in. I have worked for good managers who consciously look out for opportunities that fit their team's stated and demonstrated interests. I know people who are so into sports or their hobbies that others initiate insightful conversations and share tips or leads with them. There is a lot of upside to identifying your interests, acting on them passionately and expressing it to the world (you don't even have to as it'll be noticeable). Genuine passion shows and magically attracts opportunities. Put it out in the universe and th...

Every time I exercise, I feel like an idiot for not doing it more often! The boost in energy, happiness, clarity, stress relief lasts for an entire day. Daily exercise is a no-brainer and clearly improves our quality of life and yet, most of us find it hard to do. I’m still working on this habit, but a few tricks have helped me.  Do something every day, even if it's really small. If you don’t feel like going to the gym, take a brisk walk, go up and down your stairs for 15 mins, do the 7-minute workout, etc. Just move and break a sweat. Integrate exercise into your lifestyle. Bike or walk to work, take the stairs, use a stand-up desk, walk around during your thinking time, do chores at work.  Do something that's fun for you. Enjoyable and consistent activity is better than the most perfect or effective routine that you won't do.  Make it social. Work out with a friend, sign up for a class, play sports.  Sign up for a half marathon (or some other fitness event) th...

Stress is caused by worrying about a problem that isn't within our control - an impossible project, a sick family member, a hostile coworker, inability to pay the bills, politics, uncertainty about the future etc. Often times, these worries are subconscious - your monkey brain initiates and feeds these thoughts incessantly. 1. Catch yourself when you are getting anxious.  Take a pause - a few deep breaths - and think about what you are worried about. Maybe write it down. Does the worry make sense? Are you being too pessimistic or blowing it out of proportion? Why is this important to you? Most worries are unrelated to your immediate safety and have something to do with status, identity or questionable future aspirations. These are abstract, made-up concepts that don't really matter, especially if they are affecting your happiness now, which is way more real . 2. Remind yourself that there is absolutely no upside to worrying . It impacts your happiness and your ability to...

We spend a bulk of our life and energy in our jobs and careers, so it's really important to be intentional about choosing the right job career.  Here are some steps that can help: 

1. First rule of fishing is to know where to fish - Is the target market opportunity reasonably large, growing and underserved? - What matters to the business? What is the strategy to get there? - What are the biggest opportunities and most pressing problems to be working on? 2. A well-understood problem (and user) is half the solution - Who is the user(s)? What is the job to be done? Why does this matter to the user/persona and how much? Is it an aspirin or a vitamin? - What's their hiring criteria and which ones are important? Where and does this job fit into their lives? How do they solve the problem today? - Do plenty of user research - ask them to describe their problems, ask questions, show mocks, watch them using the prototypes/products

I recently completed a manager training with Lifelabs and learnt a few useful tricks for coaching and giving feedback Coaching someone through a problem 1) S uccess : Ask what success would look like. 2) O bstacle : Ask them to list out the obstacles that are blocking them. 3) O ptions:  Ask them for possible options to get around the obstacles. 4) N ext actions:  Ask them for a concrete next step they can take. Ask them when and how you can follow up with them. It's better if you simply play the role of a guide, listener and reflector to enable the person to think through these on their own. Most people, with some structure, clarity and help, can come up with a good solution for problems at their competency level. For situations that are critical or above the person's current competency level or where you know the right answer, you can step in more. Giving feedback 

Jeff Bezos famously said that it's better to invest more into what we expect to not change, rather than what we expect to change.   "I very frequently get the question: "What's going to change in the next 10 years?" And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: "What's not going to change in the next 10 years?" And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two -- because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. ... [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even...

During the late 80s and early 90s, there was an alarming increase in New York City's crime rate. The head of police and mayor at that time were able to make dramatic improvements using new policing policies based on the " broken window " theory: "Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside. A successful strategy for preventing vandalism is to address the problems when they are small. Repair the broken windows within a short time, say, a day or a week, and the tendency is that vandals are much less likely to break more windows or do further damage" It strikes me that the broken window theory can apply to our personal selves as well. The broken windows in some parts of our lives, like not keeping our home tidy, dressing shoddily, not foll...