Aswath Krishnan

There’s a certain pressure to have goals and wants; to do and achieve something with our lives. We make it a point of asking kids and adults what their goals are. What do you want to be when you grow up?! What are your new year resolutions?! Where do you see yourself in 5 years?!  There are benefits of having a future vision, but it comes at a price. Every want and goal can take up time and mind space, and make you defer contentment and just be-ing. So you need to be more intentional about the wants you pick up consciously, or often, subconsciously. I know at least a handful of people who have wanted to be managers, advisors, or startup founders. They like the idea of it - the title or the perception of being a leader. But they end up disliking the job. I know people, myself included, who want to have a good community and circle of friends, but hate the process of meeting new people. Most people want to look fit but dislike the routine of exercise and diet.  For all your curre...

I don’t think there are many shoulds in how to live life— because who knows, really?  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. Most haven’t even thought deeply about why and how they want to live. 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, really. And equally bizarre that most of us go through the motions of our lives confidently and seriously, without regular confusion and fascination about the unknown nature of our reality and existence. And even for those who have dwelled on the situation and  get  it intellectually, there’s a massive gap between knowing life ...

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...