Can't stop thinking about this.

Elon Musk has raised Mankind's ceiling for ambition. You can't put a price to that. This will be his legacy.

Elon Musk may be remembered for electric cars, reusable rockets, AI, brain-computer interfaces, and perhaps one day, Mars. But his greatest contribution may be a complete reset of human ambition. He reminded an entire generation that it is still possible to attempt absurdly difficult things, risk public failure, and pursue goals measured in decades rather than quarters. Whether his bets succeed or fail, he has expanded humanity's sense of what is worth trying. Every generation inherits a ceiling on what it believes is possible. Musk's greatest contribution to mankind will be that he has raised this ceiling a million miles higher. Almost like the SpaceX Starship rocket lifting the collective ambition of mankind

👍👏

90% of good leadership is just building this culture. Just remember this and you won't need leadership books. Or leadership coaching.

Is there a good course/article/book/video on how to be top 0.1% teacher on the internet? Very curious to see if someone has distilled learnings from the best and put together a course.

The second-best gift you can give your kids in the AI age is curiosity. The best gift is still generational wealth. I'm only half joking.

Ask the CTO to talk to users. "Absolutely." Follows up 3 weeks later. Ask the CTO to ship a nerdy feature. Done before lunch. Ask the CTO to buy a domain name. Already bought 7 alternatives and redirected them all before you finished the sentence.

A decade ago, a product pod looked like 5 engineers 1 Product Manager 1 Product Designer QA Increasingly, it looks like 1 Product Engineer 1 PM/Designer And the new pod ships better, faster and finds PMF much faster. This is the future. But this means Software Engineers must adapt to the new reality. As AI compresses the cost of building, the bottleneck shifts from coding to judgment. This will push engineers to become better at product—understanding users, prioritization, distribution, and business outcomes. That's a great thing. An engineer who can build is valuable. An engineer who can build the right thing is 10x more valuable. A pod that has a product engineer moves much faster. No hand offs, fewer discussions, fewer stakeholders. The best software engineers will become product engineers. The rest will find it harder and harder to command any premium.

The world will meet you where you think you belong

The Indian masculine urge to say YES to "Tum kya Tata Birla ho?"

Saturday night plans

Pragg and Gukesh are such wonderful role models More more more power to them ❤️

The only way to settle a score with VCs who mistreated you is to become part of their anti-portfolio. Do that or die trying. Winning heals everything. Winning is the only thing that matters. Also, money is increasingly a commodity for the right founders. Money is abundant in this world. What is scarce is courage and skill to turn one dollar into ten dollars or a hundred dollars. So don't fret about a VC mistreating you. You have bigger problems to solve, namely building a machine that turns 1$ into 100$

No Your CEO should be resourceful charismatic Your CTO should be eccentric, preferably an insomniac Your COO should be wicked, cunning, of mysterious origins, fluent in the dark arts, blurry in pictures, non-muggle

We will now see a generation whose whole personality is Hyrox . But it is much better than the generation whose whole personality was travel and food.

One of the great mysteries of company building is what happens to caps of these whiteboard markers. 4 markers and no caps in sight. Like what are Y'all building with cap markers? Is there any underground black market for marker caps?

Of all roles, product management has the greatest correlation with academic achievements (test ranks, college tier) It is just the unfortunate harsh truth. There will always be exceptions, but it just seems harder to find great product managers outside of top colleges. That is not the case with other roles, including engineering and design. There is something about Product Management that makes this correlation strong. Maybe it is the unbounded ambiguous nature of the problem. Maybe you need a very large context window to be good at it. Maybe you have to be good at many things to be a good PM. Maybe you need to be good at contradictory things (be great at technology but also be good at stakeholder management and user psychology) Maybe you need to be in the top 1% in structured first principles thinking I don't know what it is In my experience this correlation is very strong. I am not a big believer in ranks and pedigree was never an important consideration for us, but I have been proven wrong when it comes to Product Manager hiring Obviously if you disagree you can prove me wrong by applying for a PM role Or by referring great people As a product manager I am always happy to revisit my assumptions when presented with opposing data points

Of all roles, product management has the greatest correlation with academic achievements (test ranks, college tier) It is just the unfortunate harsh truth. There will always be exceptions, but it just seems harder to find great product managers outside of top colleges. That is not the case with other roles, including engineering and design.

Right now, I go to the gym only for this

The best thing about being a founder is that you don't have to ask for permission. You can pour all your love, attention, craft, will, energy, emotion and trauma into your work. This is the gentle, nurturing part of entrepreneurship that attracts misfits and the crazy ones. The worst part of entrepreneurship is that you don't have to ask for permission. Which means you can work 20 hours a day for weeks and still feel you are not doing enough. You can feel like a perpetual imposter. Not smart enough, not hard working enough, not passionate enough, not crazy enough, not ambitious enough, not creative enough. This can be a long list of loathing. This is the corrosive psychological burden of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is uniquely hard because there are no limits and boundaries to this vocation. An athlete will not practice more than 4 -6 hours a day. Anything more is bad for their body. An artist will not create art all day. They know that is not how creativity works. A sales whiz will maybe take two high stakes meetings in a day. A factory worker will work their shift and log off. All jobs, all sports and all creative endeavours have well set natural limits. Except entrepreneurship. The psychological poison of entrepreneurship stems from its lack of natural limits. An entrepreneur will often do creative work, do product, write code, do sales, make high stakes decisions, design operation systems, do people management, do unpleasant conversations, review others' work, and more... All in a day. They will do it for 20 hours and still hate themselves for not doing enough This is the scary aspect of the permissionless nature of entrepreneurship. There are ways to manage one's psychology to avoid these corrosive, harmful aspects of entrepreneurship. But it takes a lot of work and a certain mindset shift. This is especially important for young, first time founders. Maybe I will write about that mindset in another post. If what I wrote rings a bell, lmk and I will write an article 😊