Humans’s minds are like chameleons. We like to compare ourselves with our surroundings and try to fit in by mimicking it. We see a peer getting promoted or a friend buying a big house or a competitive product building a new feature and we try to copy. …

You may have seen “Steve Job’s Stanford speech” video. But if you haven’t, then I strongly recommend it. It’s one of my favourites. I have seen it maybe 50 times in the last 10 years. In this speech, he shared 3 stories of his life. Here is why I love…

A few months back I had a 1:1 with a senior colleague. It was morning time. I was somewhat worried about the number of things I have to do that day. As the meeting started, I straight away jumped into my discussion points. After that, my colleague asked me why…

Our tiny startup is growing. We had one new engineer join our team every Monday for the last 3 weeks. The new hires were thrilled to join and wanted to start contributing right away. But much to their disappointment, they could barely get to setting up code repository on the…

I let my side projects fail. For the last 10 years, I have worked on 10+ side projects. I worked on many of them for months. Lot of them were good and had real users e.g. I had built a privacy friendly transliteration keyboard app — Minglish for Android in…

Last week, I asked my wife — “What do you think I am good at?” She replied, “I think you have a really good work-life balance”. This was so pleasant to hear. After all, who is more qualified to attest this than one’s spouse? I have a ~2 year old…

Are you looking to join an early-stage startup? If you have not worked in a startup before, then choosing one cannot be more confusing. There are so many startups out there with interesting ideas, hype, different valuations, etc. So how do you determine if a startup is right for you…

There is a popular saying — an idea can change the world. I disagree. Ideas are powerless. They cannot move a grain of sand by themselves. What really changes the world is — ideas set in motion. Without anyone acting on the idea, nothing really changes. I was fortunate to…

Last week, I received a shipment of a table from Ikea. Along with it came in a assembly instruction manual. The steps were somewhat complex. Without the manual, it would have been quite a challenge to assemble it. It got me thinking, when did instruction guides become so important in…