Aswath Krishnan

I enjoyed all three of them this week :) Cooking is remarkably more efficient when done in bulk. Cooking for 6 people or for a week isn’t that much harder than cooking for 2 or for a single meal. This is because the bulk of cooking involves “fixed cost” activities - researching the recipe, buying ingredients, combining them, and cleaning up - that don’t vary much with quantity.  Cooking and eating are essential, universal, and time-consuming. So I’m a fan of companies and inventions that leverage this efficiency of “cooking in bulk” but also preserve the affordability, freshness, and satisfaction of homemade food. Typically they achieve this by doing 80% of the cooking and leaving the last 20% to the consumer. Packaged foods and food delivered from restaurants are too close to 100% and have the downsides of being too expensive, unhealthy, or stale.  Tea bags are perfect. 

Every few weeks, I stumble upon yet another think piece warning against starting B2C software businesses. The argument often boils down to this: B2C is a financial black hole—a worse gamble than a lottery ticket. Even Y Combinator, the quintessential startup breeding ground, seems to have shifted its focus toward B2B, a trend that many see as a reflection of market realities. But let’s pause here. Doesn’t this advice feel... odd? Take a look around your home. Most of what you own—your clothes, gadgets, kitchenware, and maybe even that Peloton collecting dust—are B2C products. Your credit card bill? It’s dominated by B2C expenses: groceries, subscriptions, travel, and entertainment. If consumers are spending so much, why is B2C suddenly considered an entrepreneurial minefield? Let’s unpack this. The Real Scope of B2C Success First, the anti-B2C sentiment overwhelmingly targets software startups , not physical products or services. And even within software, it tends to exclude "hybr...

The CEO of Coinbase shared this advice to pre-PM fit startup founders and it really resonated:  https://twitter.com/StartupArchive_/status/1738905209093468459 Low certainty pursuits and decisions, like your life purpose or philosophy, career or startup idea to pursue, who’d be an ideal life partner, where would you like to live, etc. are often the most impactful and the most challenging aspects of our lives.  They are unique in the sense you don’t have enough information to make a rational choice. The options and their outcomes are unknowns. So we can get stuck in analysis-paralysis trying to figure them out intellectually. But that doesn’t solve the core problem - the lack of information and certainty. The way to get more information is to act - go explore, ask around, and try things out. Keep an open mind, your cycles fast and, learn from them.  The best way to see through the fog is to take a few steps forward into the unknown. 

  I applied for a grant this year and the granters shared that 90% of the applications were submitted just 2 days before the deadline!  This isn't uncommon. The majority of people are deadline-driven. We do a chore whenever it's urgent and absolutely necessary (unless it's a recurring habit or routine). This is why creating urgency and setting a deadline is key for your own personal endeavors and when you expect others to do something. But our brains aren't that easy to trick. They know when a deadline is fake. So you need to make it as real and consequential as possible.  This is why retailers have limited-time offers and sales - to force a buying decision or miss out on a great offer. This is why it's important to set a target response date whether you are fundraising or hiring someone. This is why you are more likely to succeed if you sign up for half marathons or business targets.  Deadlines convert something that's only important to something urgent and imp...

A recent survey showed that more than half of Americans hate their jobs. Probably another 30% feel pretty neutral about them. r/antiwork is one of the largest communities in Reddit and growing. So many people are looking to retire early (or FIRE). The common complaints against work are the lack of a decent pay and benefits, potential for growth, work-life balance, meaning, respect, etc. Many people also justifiably think they can’t have a good life like their parents did despite working a job. There’s a pent up negativity against evil and heartless corporates and middle managers that treat workers as expendable resources.  Maybe work was always seen as a necessary evil, but it seems like the relationship has become more negative in the last few decades. It feels like the capitalistic machinery has taken a wrong turn. Perhaps attitudes have also changed to want more leisure and comfort for less work, thanks to the unrealistic lifestyles popularized on the internet and the Cambrian e...

Dobby, the lovable elf in Harry Potter, is often filled with so much self-loathing that it’s hard to watch. You want to hug him and reassure him that he’s okay and he’s loved. It’s even harder because Dobby isn’t just a fictional character in a made-up magical world. Dobby is very real - we all have one within us.  Our inner Dobby is often our meanest boss, negligent carer, and harshest critic. Inner Dobby is often upset or unhappy with us. Inner Dobby never thinks we are good enough. Inner Dobby never thinks we deserve a break.  I want to hug mine and everyone else’s inner Dobby, and reassure them with this short poem - 

The popular wisdom is to learn from failures.  And I agree, you should. We are going to make a number of mistakes, especially if we pursue unpaved paths and risky ventures. Without bold risks and mistakes, we as humanity will not stand where we are. So being open to risk, mistakes and learning from them is crucial. Mistakes are also humbling - they force us to take a pause and reflect, whereas success can breed ego and complacency. But I’d posit there’s more learning in successes. Take a founder who has attempted 4 failed businesses vs a founder who has 1 successful business. Who do you think has more valuable knowledge? I’d argue that the second founder knows at least one way to succeed and can replicate that. But the first founder can avoid a few ways to fail they have learned and has probably built up resilience to failures, but they are still left with hundreds of other ways to fail. They still don’t know a single path to success. There’s a tongue in cheek wisdom - “Most happy ...

If you think the Buddha is a religious leader and Buddhism is a religion, you are somewhat mistaken.  Buddha was the first prolific DIY psychologist. He spent years observing his own mind, experimenting, and coming up with astute observations and techniques to alleviate suffering and increase joy.  According to the Buddha, the root of all unhappiness is just one thing - "tanha". You can think of it as the quick grabby feeling that arises when we just can't accept a situation and when there’s disharmony between reality and our (mostly subconscious) selves. It manifests in many forms - fear, craving, anger, desire, worry, etc.  I think of tanha as “mental clenching" arising from “knots” or sore spots. Similar to muscular knots or kinks in a hose, they prevent the natural flow of movement and life. Almost every person in the world is knotting and clenching thousands of times every day in different ways. Reducing the knotting may be the most powerful lever to improve our...

A few years ago, two different friends of mine started startups with nearly the same idea - a coaching/mentorship marketplace for professionals. They had similar backgrounds and teams. Their products also were functionally identical. One friend has shuttered the business, and the other seems to be growing strong. How did that happen? The friend who's still in the game was heavily focused on building a social following and community. She did multiple LinkedIn posts a week, attended events, met people 1:1, and hosted events. Eventually, she developed a community of over 50,000 professionals. She knew the community was the heart of the business and started with a community-first approach. She was also good at it and enjoyed doing it. The other friend was simply focused on building the software product. He was also more introverted and didn't enjoy posting publicly or organizing communities.  A lot of tech founders make the critical mistake of assuming that building a startup means...

I have used this product called Mudwtr for a few months.  Mudwtr is a powdered mix of supplements like Lion’s mane, Reishi, Turmeric, etc. Most people have probably not heard of these or are convinced about their benefits. But Mudwtr didn’t position their product as a wellness supplement or nootropic. That’d appeal to an enthusiastic but very small market of body and mind hackers.  Instead, they did something brilliant. They mixed masala chai (tea) with it and positioned it as a coffee alternative. They started talking about how this is better than a coffee, instead of trying to sell people on wellness benefits of taking dried mushroom supplements.  It’s much more familiar and easier to understand. It’s an easier purchase decision to try a different coffee vs taking a mushroom supplement. It fits into their current lifestyle. 75% of the world drinks coffee - so suddenly their target market is 100x! Nearly the same product, but with much more effective positioning.  L...

This paragraph from Ayn Rand's "Philosophy - who needs it?" speech and especially the remark on the nature of the subconscious resonated with me. "A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence. As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation — or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind's wings should have grown." The subconscious mind is quick, intuitive, and emotional. The conscious mind is deliberate, logical, rational, and unemotiona...

This is a trick question. Most of you would say no; definitely not even the smartest chimp. Then I’d say - aha! relative to the scope and complexity of the universe, humans aren’t that much smarter than chimps. So humans can’t decipher the universe either!  It's a humbling and eventually comforting thought. We pride ourselves on being the most intelligent species on Earth, yet when it comes to the scale of the universe's mysteries, are we that much more enlightened than our chimp cousins?

I have long been interested in the mind. Why wouldn’t everyone be?! Everything we perceive as life is through the mind. So much so that you can even hypothesize that the entire universe is conjured within the mind, rather than the other way around.  The mind remains a mystery to us. But luckily, we don’t need to fully understand how something works to be able to operate it sufficiently well. Anyone who drives a car, browses the internet, uses a microwave, or relies on gravity to stay put would agree. We have discovered several techniques to alter this black box of mind to be more pleasant and effective.  This is my semi-organized brain dump of some of those across 3 broad realms -