Aswath Krishnan

I don’t think there are many shoulds in life— because who really knows? But if there’s one  should , it’s this: radically live how you want to . Whatever that means to you. It sounds obvious, yet almost no one actually does it. Let’s step back for a second. We spawned into this mysterious universe with zero instructions. No clear purpose. Just here, suddenly, like magic. And one day—just as suddenly—we’ll be gone. It’s like we all woke up stranded on some cosmic island with strange matter, life, and laws, Lost style. It's quite mind-blowing and absurd (and equally bizarre that we barely talk about it). If you haven’t had at least one phase of extreme confusion, fascination, or existential crisis, you probably haven't thought enough about the unknowns of our reality. And even for those who have dwelled on this situation and  get this intellectually, there’s a massive gap between knowing life is absurd and living like it is. That’s because life is  so  real and im...

If you are a farmer, you want a high yield from your crops. But if you are not a professional, you plant trees just because. You want the tree to take root, grow, bloom, and be healthy. You don’t have expectations about how tall the tree grows, what shape it takes, or how much fruit it yields. You don’t compare it to other trees. You just want it to be, and you take joy in its being. You care, but you don’t control. You enjoy the presence, not some performance.  Unless you are a professional child-rearer, the same philosophy applies to parenting. It’s about creating the right conditions for growth rather than dictating the outcome. When you parent with this mindset, you nurture without imposing, support without shaping, and trust the natural course of development. This feels like a more fulfilling and less stressful parenting experience. Instead of anxiously measuring milestones or comparing achievements, you can simply enjoy the unfolding of your child’s unique journey and be...

Nearly all companies ossify as they grow larger. Product, organization, and operations become more unwieldy, more complex, less agile, and less innovative, Newer and nimbler competitors slowly steal market share, and the cycle continues.  The most resilient and durable companies - say, Apple, Facebook, Google, United Healthcare, LVMH, etc. have one essential quality to outweigh the forces of ossification - powerful and inherent flywheels to get better and more competitive as they scale.  These “accumulating advantages” can come in many forms - as network effects, economies of scale, brand and marketing efficiencies, IP, data, deepening product or operational expertise, capital, regulatory capture, etc. Google’s search becomes better as more people search and more publishers follow Google’s standards; Facebook gets better with more people and content; LVMH’s brands become more popular with more customers; and United Healthcare can offer bigger networks and better pricing. ...

We are out of the ZIRP era, and Ubers and Lyfts are now back to costing the same as a taxi ride. As I’m taking more taxi rides, I’m noticing that taxi drivers drive much more recklessly than rideshare drivers and are also more distracted on their phones. Car cleanliness and politeness is also a hit or miss.  I theorize the main driver of this difference is feedback. Rideshare drivers get a feedback rating after every single ride and are de-platformed if their rating goes below a threshold (I believe 4 or even 4.5 stars). Taxi drivers have no such feedback loop.  You can similarly compare restaurants and medical providers. Restaurants are a brutally hard industry - ones that don’t get consistently good reviews from patrons and critics fail inevitably. This also improves the overall quality of restaurants that do survive. Hospitals and doctors, on the other hand, have no such feedback loop. Patients have no good place to check a provider's ratings or even know if a doctor is tre...

We were doing a major renovation last year and a lot of rearrangement in our home this year.  Both followed the same pattern - initial excitement, then a trying period of effort, doubt, and despair as things got messy, and finally light and joy at the end of the tunnel.  This is true with many things in life - career transitions, relocations, starting a family, new business, hobby, or health journey.  Getting to a higher maxima often requires you to climb down from the comfort of your current local maxima. That’s always difficult and uncertain.  But if you don’t risk it (and endure/enjoy the process), you don’t get the biscuit. 

Longevity is having its moment, thanks to the growing influence of thought leaders like Bryan Johnson, Peter Attia, and Andrew Huberman. Yet, it’s an unfortunate term, often misunderstood and criticized. For many, it seems like a futile and even vain fight against death, a sacrifice of the present day for questionable benefits in the far-off future, or dragging out life into decades riddled with frailty, dependence, and pain. It’s a PR problem for what is actually an essential and transformative idea. The real goal of this movement isn’t about living longer or defying death. It’s about staying younger and healthier, and reaping the benefits now. Our physical health peaks in our late 20s and begins to decline after 30. Staying younger means maintaining vitality, lucidity, resilience, and avoiding disease and pain every day. It’s less about stretching life to 120 and more about feeling 25—even at 30, 50, or beyond.  Living longer and staving off death are simply side effects of stayi...