Aswath Krishnan

Even the most ardent free-willers will have to confront the origins of their will at some point.  Have you ever wondered what shapes your mind and behaviors? The influences that nudge us towards success or failure, happiness or despair? What makes our life unfold in the way it does? Let me share a mysterious experience from my high school years that puzzled me for a long time and only started making sense to me years later. MAX  When I was in grade 10, I went to a large book fair with my family. Like all events in India, it was bustling with people and energy. In the midst of the chaos, my family and I were drawn towards the stage that was particularly abuzz. The stage banner displayed the name ‘MAX’, short for 'Madras Academy for Excellence'. A group of people, who were national memory record-holders no less, were captivating the audience with their ability to quickly memorize long lists of words or facts and answer any questions about them. I was impressed and intrigued beca...

As Product Managers or entrepreneurs, we often have multiple good ideas and an exciting vision. That's necessary but not sufficient.  It's easy to come up with a large collection of many capabilities and features that can together make a product compelling to users and produce business impact. But that isn't practical.  Most individuals, startups, or teams within larger companies get defunded or lose steam before they can do everything they envision if they don't produce results along the way. The complexity of more also confuses users and overwhelms teams.  A startup founder wisely told me, "Startups don't starve...they drown." What's really important is identifying and prioritizing the minimal set of ideas or bets that are going to have the largest impact, and then distilling them to their core essence . The 20% of work that'll produce 80% of the results. You need to have the conviction and discipline to say no to everything else. Only if you do ...

Traditional software simply executes explicit instructions provided by Human Intelligence. This blog is powered by software. And like most software we use, it functions based on explicit instructions. When you are on a blog post, the code explicitly specifies to deliver content from a CMS or database that's tied to the blog post and then styles it as per explicit HTML and CSS-based instructions. When you are on the home page, the code explicitly asks to display the list of 50 recent blog posts from the database.  This software is really useful as it can execute more precisely, quickly, cheaply, and on a larger scale than humans. But it is also simply doing what the human developer explicitly instructed it to do.  Enter - Software powered by Artificial Intelligence. Human instructions not needed.  Let's take this ChatGPT Plugins demo.  ChatGPT is able to:  Create a meal plan Generate a visual of the meal Shop for the ingredients Tweet about it.  No explicit ...