Aswath Krishnan

A cousin shared his 5 year rule with me recently - if you want to be successful at something hard and probabilistic, commit and do it for 5 years. Success = Execution x Opportunity It takes a few years to learn, make mistakes, understand the game, know the players, become known, and build trust in any new domain. The longer you play the game, the more skillful and “luckier” you become. Overnight success is a myth. You have to risk it and work it to get the biscuit. Such commitment isn’t easy, especially during the early years when nothing seems to work out. You need to pick a game that you enjoy, have high conviction in, and leverages your aptitude, resources, and talents. You need to drop many other games that are also enticing. You need staying power (money, time, emotional fortitude, support) to sustain the 5 years.

Solve  valuable and underserved problems or desires  exceedingly well and sustainably  while accumulating advantages . Let's break it down! (1) Valuable  = It's very important and top of mind for enough people.  I have heard someone describe these well as "hair-on-fire" problems. These are problems that people are actively google searching for or complaining to others about. Some examples of valuable problems from companies I have worked at: losing weight (Noom), getting to/from the airport (Lyft), passing a school test or interviews (Quizlet), satisfying energy efficiency requirements (Opower), buying anything conveniently and quickly (Amazon), and tools to make a living (Microsoft).   (2)  Underserved   = there is no good alternative. Customers dislike available options. My belief is that there are tons of problems that are underserved. But if you only look at a very high level, you will think there aren't many. You find more underserv...

In spiritual practice, enlightenment refers to the experience of seeing the light by unlocking a deep, revealing insight about your reality.  Enlightenment also actually lightens your life and how you interact with the world by eliminating unnecessary burdens of cravings and aversions that you carry and by increasing your equanimity, ease, and love. 

Wayfair announced their 3rd or 4th big round of recent layoffs last week. The CEO's email explained how they are trying to "right size" the organization in the face of a tough economic situation. Simply put, their online furniture retail business isn't panning out to be as large of an opportunity as they were hoping it to be and they are now painfully rolling back. They aren’t alone - there have been over 300,000 layoffs in tech since last year. Many startups have dropped to a fraction of their previous values or shut down completely.  2015 to 2021 was a hype cycle of irrational exuberance in tech. We had seen huge successes from the previous wave of internet and mobile startups, like Facebook. Every startup and founder imagined they could also 10 or 100x their business. VCs and their LPs were willing to invest millions at extraordinary valuations, blinded by FOMO and free money. There’s smart risk and there’s stupid greed. Startups could sell $10 bills for $9, and s...

Tinkering is simply working on projects we enjoy or are curious about. It could be a home improvement project, a newsletter, hosting events, a piece of art, or a software tool. You do what you want, the way you want. You may take pride in showing it, but you aren't doing it for others. And you certainly are not expecting to earn from it. It's mostly for your own pleasure; for the joy and energy of doing and creating. Entrepreneurship is aimed at creating a sustainable business. You have to deliver solutions that customers want, in the way they want. You need to do a lot of external exploration, test, and pivot often to find the right idea. Even then, you can't just create; you need to do a bunch of extraneous work like marketing, customer calls, research, hiring, pricing, budgeting, fundraising, invoicing, taxes, etc. There's also a lot of uncertainty, pressure to succeed, ups and downs. Entrepreneurship can have fun aspects, but it will also have a lot of not-so-fun ...

I try to pay more attention when ideas keep coming back. They highlight something important and usually add more depth.   Day before yesterday, I was running in a sub-zero weather after an intense weight training session, and a familiar idea “ Embrace doing hard things ” resurfaced.  I’m new to athleticism and this isn’t normal. The exercise was tough! Breathing in the freezing air was hard. I was losing feeling in my fingers and toes. And my legs were still screaming from the deadlifts.  But I felt alive, strong, and joyful! More so than I did sitting on my couch inside my house and scrolling on my phone an hour before.  The traditional wisdom is to pursue comfort and safety to enjoy a good life. And that’s what we have done. Now, at least in rich societies, we have incredibly predictable and cushy lives. But mental health has surprisingly declined, not improved, in this transition.  Without regular exposure to controllable stress, we aren’t building our physic...

Culture, simplistically, is a derivation of what we believe and how we think and act, which in turn are derivations of the information we are exposed to. In the past, information was limited by geography to a large extent. Local newspapers, leaders, and intellectuals. With the Internet, it is not. You can have different information exposures and consequently, different cultures, between neighbors. You can find polarization within a street, rather than just between states, countries, or continents.  This has interesting implications for governance, which is still geography-based. Governance, which is simplistically what strategy and policies should we collectively follow, largely derives from culture. If culture is no longer geographic, how can we govern geographically? While this is short-term problematic, I think it is long-term positive as it unlocks a degree of freedom for people - to align themselves with whichever belief and culture they prefer. We still exist in the physical ...

I don’t know if many billionaires will read this blog, but this is still an important principle for the rest of us too.  Almost every game in life - sports, business, career, academia, family and friendship, hobbies - is played in levels. For example, in car racing, you have to compete in your school clubs, then inter-school, then regional, then F4, F3, F2, and then finally F1.  Seems reasonable, but most of us want to jump to the final level right away. We regularly see inspiring and glamours videos of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Sam Altman, so we also want to aim high and start a space or AI company. We don’t want to work on a silly job or start a small business; we just want to change the world doing something way more important and shinier! But what we don’t see as often is that these folks only got where they are because they worked through many lower levels of less glamorous jobs and business for decades. Elon Musk built and sold 3 businesses before he could start SpaceX. ...

I'm realizing that a large percentage of my bad days start with bad sleep.  I wake up tired. I try to get more sleep, so wake up late and skip my morning ritual of puttering around slowly and planning the day. I'm more irritable, more anxious, and less lucid. I eat more junk food. I skip exercise. I'm on my phone more. I have more restless energy and thoughts. I stay up late and can't sleep. The cycle repeats.  If you are caught in this cycle, your main priority should be to get out of it by getting a good night's rest. Drop everything else that you can and dedicate most of the evening to just that. Put away your phone, exercise go for a walk, have a light dinner, and dim the lights. Have night-time tea, magnesium, or melatonin. Go to bed earlier than usual. If you can't sleep, meditate or listen to relaxing music.   

I have written about how peace and joy are in our control. Peace comes from acceptance of reality, and joy comes from appreciation and celebration of reality. So both are technically in our mind's control, I concluded, annoyingly.  But it isn't that simple. We are human and emotional, and life throws things at us, so it is very natural and inevitable that our peace and joy get upset. If we stay upset over multiple days, we spiral into what I call a "funk", where our upset mind makes itself even more upset. Getting into funk sucks. It means losing several days or even weeks of peace and joy and is hard to get out of because your mind is compromised.  Why do we get into a funk Here are some of the main reasons why I get into a funk:  1) Overthink things out of our control Something in the past (what-ifs and only-ifs), or something that someone else did, or some bad luck or random event upsets us. We then obsess about it and our minds tend to become negative.  We exper...

I grew up in the 1990s in a bustling city in India. The country was mostly poor, but everyone, through a few rich friends, media, or travel, knew there was a better life - one where you don't have to worry about the basics and can even indulge in luxuries. Every person aspired and craved for that better life - if not for them, at least for their kids.  For middle-class kids like me, a hopeful but difficult path emerged. If you study hard, get better test scores than everyone else, and get admission to top colleges, you either get a good career, or even better, you get to pursue a life abroad. This is the path to not only wealth, but also to being celebrated and liked by your friends, relatives, teachers, and community. Some of us took this seriously. The achiever virus was etched into our brains - keep working hard and keep progressing - to more prestigious institutions and more lucrative opportunities. We did it, over and over again. And the more we did it, the more the virus mult...

"The modern devil is cheap dopamine" - Naval Ravikant Throughout history, each generation has been ensnared by a distinct addiction. Alcohol, tobacco, and processed foods trace a familiar arc: celebrated innovations morph into pervasive vices. Initially hailed for their pleasurable effects, these substances soon trigger a race to enhance their potency and availability. This cycle of desire and overindulgence, fueled by profit-driven peddlers and consumers alike, inevitably collides with the limitations of human biology, leading to widespread harm before an eventual and slow course correction. The Dance of Pleasure and Pain