Aswath Krishnan

When Saudi Arabia revealed their plans for “The Line”, a 105 mile long skyscraper city, a lot of people scoffed. I have to admit I didn’t think much of it either, and may even have laughed it off.  But now, as they are actually building it and making progress, I’m wow-ed by both how unique the idea is, and the audacity and conviction to pursue such a huge and innovative project. 9 million people in one connected complex in the middle of the desert, mirrored exterior and other features for clever temperature control, 100% renewable, underground water desalination, no cars, everything you need within 5 mins, a train that can go end-to-end within 20 mins, and a whopping $1T budget. That’s straight out of a science fiction novel, and I’d love to visit or even live there for some time! What a cool and interesting experiment for humanity! When people propose and pursue bold ideas, we need to default to cheering them on; not criticism or mockery. We want to live in a world of wonder and a...

Supabase announced today that they raised $200M at a $2B valuation. They offer “Backend as a Service” or BaaS. Essentially, building blocks like auth, database, push notifications, etc. so that you can focus on developing the unique aspects of your app instead of all the standard and annoying scaffolding.  I used their competitor, Firebase, about 10 years ago to build a couple of side projects. I really needed what they offered, but it was painful to use because they only offered a document DB queryably with a clunky graphql.  That’s a perfect startup opportunity - a product that you really want to use and are willing to invest weeks of effort and money into, but has a major and fundamental flaw, that can be easily fixed by starting afresh. Somehow incumbents get stuck to their path and can't backtrack to solve the issue.  I clearly didn’t recognize or pursue that opportunity, but Supabase did and launched in 2020. Their pitch was literally “Firebase but with Postgres dat...

15 years into my career, it’s clear that peer groups are a powerful force. Many peers from university and from early/mid career roles at high performance companies are in key leadership roles, with influence, network, and insights to share. They have also become friends, advisors, and confidants.  People want to bond with those who are higher up in the chain. But the leaders above you aren’t as incentivized to reciprocate, and they will probably be retired when you are mid career. Your peers, on the other hand, have to and want to work closely with you; you form camaraderie and friendships, learn and shape each other, grow together in your career, and even become life-long friends. Peer relationships outweigh every other kind, except maybe a handful of mentors or managers.  It’s natural but also silly that people are most jealous of their peers. It stems from a scarcity mindset around limited opportunity in the particular environment and wanting the same scarce thing. But the ...

It’s typically much easier to upskill on procedural or declarative skills (just follow these steps/checklist or memorize these facts), compared to cognitive or creative skills (like analyze a situation and come up with a solution, or to compose great music). The path to developing higher order general intelligence is murky and abstract; probably a mix of natural ability and years of varied exposure and practice. Therefore it’s harder and longer to train and change.  Good news is that with GenAI, intelligence has become procedural now. Just ask ChatGPT to analyze the situation, suggest relevant frameworks and analogies, effective ideas, or to critically improve your approach. And lo…you’re immediately operating at a higher cognitive level! This was simply not possible before. It’s similar to how arithmetic turned from a mental ability to punching numbers into a calculator.  Most people use Chatgpt to improve their writing (with mixed results), but I think the bigger application...

Our media and information ecosystem isn’t optimized for truth. Or for helping us understand the world better. Or for calm. It’s optimized for engagement. And what gets the most engagement? Drama. Just think about it: which headline do you think gets more clicks—“Man landed on the moon” or “Man did not land on the moon”? It’s obviously the second one. It’s more provocative. It stirs doubt. It’s not about truth; it’s about traction. Drama gets attention. Attention gets clicks. Clicks make money. And because of that, everything we see—on social media, on the news, even in casual conversation—feels dialed up to 11. And the media cycles? They move fast. Tweets are flying every second. Hot takes drop every hour. Our grandparents might have heard one juicy piece of juicy gossip a year in their village. Now we get multiple scandals a day, from all over the world. The rate of drama has skyrocketed. And that has consequences. A society built on drama isn’t a thoughtful one. It doesn’t seek truth...

On weeks like this, as stocks plummet 20% because of a senseless trade war, you see clearly that currency and stocks are just fiction. Intangible entries in a ledger, and only of value because of our fragile shared imaginations and agreements. This isn’t the first time. In 2022, the market crashed because of inflation and interest rate hikes — an after-effect of the COVID shutdowns and stimulus. In 2009, it was the banks — over-leveraged, peddling toxic financial products dressed up as safe bets. Every time, the cause is different. But the outcome feels familiar. You wake up one morning, and the number in your brokerage or savings account — the one that’s supposed to map to something real, like a countdown to retirement or savings for a college fund, just doesn’t anymore. You realize that you're perched atop an economic Jenga tower. It's swaying, and your control is an illusion.  At the very base, there’s geopolitics — the invisible tectonic plates. Oil supply shocks. Wars. Sa...

When you consume information, you collect dots. But collecting dots isn’t enough. In fact, it can be confusing—especially when those dots are scattered, shallow, or incorrect. To make sense of them, you have to connect them. That’s where insight—and eventually wisdom—emerges. Connecting takes time. It requires thinking, pausing, synthesizing. This blog serves that purpose for me. But even that’s not the end of the journey. Collecting and connecting dots only matter if you do something with them. You also have to traverse the path—take action, test ideas, build, practice. That’s where you experience personal growth or material outcomes.  We live in an information-dense world. Everyone and their grandmother has a podcast, newsletter, or Twitter thread. And most of us fall into the trap of overconsuming—collecting way more dots than we need, often low-quality and redundant ones. It feels productive. But most of the time, it’s just addiction and procrastination—an avoidance mechanism t...

Most capable and healthy people enjoy their autonomy and boundaries - a way to exercise their own way of being and creativity. It tends to bring out their best and make them feel good. Conversely, most people have a visceral reaction to domination and authority.  Demanding and commanding may be apt when the situation is dire and answer is somewhat clear; like during a war. Or with a low-trust and low-agency audience where you have some leverage, power, or authority.  But in most cases, asking and influencing well will have higher ceiling and longer-term outcomes. It’s also more pleasant for everyone involved. “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

Why do you like people or music instantly — and not others? You didn’t do a structured analysis. You didn’t create a pros-cons list. You just felt something click — and that was that. The same goes for cities, coffee shops, relationships, products, and even presidents. Why Brad Pitt over Chris Evans? Why Tokyo over Paris? Toyota or Mercedes? Claude or GPT? Why does one place feel like home and another feel… off? When I asked a sales lead for our B2B software what makes us win or lose a customer, I expected to hear about features, pricing, or buyer personas. But he shrugged and said, “Honestly, it mostly comes down to whether product managers or execs are on the call.” There’s a pattern here. And it isn’t logic. Most of us pretend we live like Spock, but we make decisions like jazz musicians — improvisational, intuitive, all feeling. From friends to lovers, brands to beliefs, the throughline in our choices isn’t reason. It’s resonance . It’s mostly vibes. “Vibes” is the best word w...

They used to say you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. That was before the internet hijacked your attention span and filled your brain with digital sludge. Today, your closest companions aren’t friends, mentors, or thoughtful voices. They're algorithmically boosted, attention-seeking strangers yelling into the Internet void—clickbait journalists, TikTok dancers, Twitter thinkbois, clout-chasing grifters, promiscuous influencers, silly comedy Reelers, and conspiracy-peddling uncles in WhatsApp group chats. In short: idiots. And the worst part? They’re shaping you. Your brain—like an AI model—is plastic. Moldable. Continuously trained on whatever data you feed it. And right now, you’re feeding it junk. Doomscroll long enough and you’re not just consuming idiocy—you’re becoming it. Look at your feed. Really look. Out-of-context quotes. Shallow outrage. Celebrity gossip no one will remember in 48 hours. Fake experts selling fake solutions. Outrage bai...

If your goal is exceptional compensation, then you need to cultivate talent that's rare, in high demand, and visible and legible to hiring managers and execs. This typically involves deeply specialized or cross-discipline training, continual practice, and public demonstration of your skills through recognizable achievements, projects, or networking within your industry. But that isn't sufficient.  You also need to strategically position yourself at a company and a role with the machinery, team, capital, and market to effectively translate your specific talent and energy into revenue, or at least to attract investment; companies that believe that quality of talent can make or lose millions of dollars, so they don’t mind paying top dollar for top talent. Imagine you are a brilliant mathematician or computer scientist -- your earning potential will be far greater at a well-functioning quant trading firm like Jane Street than, say, at a local bank, Walmart, or the US government. O...

I wrote earlier about the absurdity of reality . But paradoxically, this absurdity operates according to strict and predictable laws and mathematical formulae, like gravity, electromagnetism, or thermodynamics. Why these laws? Who or what defined them? Consider evolution: No one sat down and designed creatures, yet living beings have intricately fine-tuned features—eyes, wings, intelligence—purely because only those possessing useful traits survived to reproduce. Evolution doesn’t create; it filters. What if the universe works similarly, not designed but naturally selected? Imagine an infinite primordial landscape of universes, each born from some cosmic chaos, each bearing its own randomly tossed dice of laws.  In most of these universes, randomness reigns supreme. Gravity randomly fluctuates, electromagnetism never stabilizes, and quantum effects rip reality apart before atoms even form. In some universes, gravity was slightly stronger, collapsing space into black holes immediate...

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...

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...