During Meta Connect 2023 this year, I got the wonderful opportunity to represent Fynd and talk about our work with Llama 2 – Meta’s open-source LLM.
I documented the experience in detail in Fynd’s blog. You can read it here.
If you would like to see the talk in its entirety, you can do that below.
Read more about Meta’s Llama 2 here.
Read one of my previous articles if you are in the mood.
You cannot build a restaurant business without caring about serving good food to customers. You cannot run a successful boutique if you don’t care about making your customers look good. The only way to achieve sustained long-term success is to care deeply about the right things.
A business exists because there is an unmet need. Serving this unmet need efficiently while providing a superior customer experience is the bedrock of a business. Both efficiency and experience are critical parts of the equation. To provide a fantastic customer experience, you must care deeply about the customer and their needs. The ability to spot opportunities and milk them are critical traits for an entrepreneur. But your long-term success will depend on how much you care about the customer.
Simply thinking of a business as a transaction and optimising for margins will bring you short-term success. However, you will always live under the fear of being disrupted by someone who can undercut your margins.
Similarly, thinking of a business as a constant set of KPIs to be tracked and achieved will not bring you long-term success. VC-funded startups place an inordinate emphasis on growth. Metrics like M-O-M and Q-O-Q growth are tracked religiously. It is nearly impossible to reach and maintain sustainable growth rates when there is constant pressure for growth at all costs.
All entrepreneurs worry about their business. In the short run, worrying causes us to care for the wrong things. Worrying about your next fundraise makes you care more about vanity metrics and how your business looks in the eyes of the investor. Their short-term concern drives them to make short-term choices, whereas caring for your customers and adding value to them will help you build a long-lasting business.
In short, care deeply about the right things, and you will worry less about many things.
All organisations want to hire smart people. Hiring pipelines are a constant battle between quality and quantity. When you demand both, the first solution offered by HR consultants is to jack up the pay and perks. You are told to match ‘market standards’. Sure, it solves the problem, but only temporarily. Because hiring smart people is only the first part of the problem, the second part is retaining them. One of the learnings I have had after going through this cycle many times over the last 10 years is this.
Smart people levitate towards where growth is. Growth happens in places where hard, relevant problems are solved and where the most economic upsides are created. So if your organisation is not working on hard problems, you will mostly have a difficult time hiring and retaining smart people and building high performance teams.
This month, I got my hands on a copy of Amp it up by Frank Slootman, the CEO of Snowflake. The book is a follow up to his LinkedIn post with the same title. It was one of those articles, I shared with my team as soon as I read it. Based on the book, I created a small manifesto for high-performance teams in the modern workplace.
How you do anything is how you do everything. Whether you are building a product or cleaning your desk, do it to the best of your abilities. Hold yourself to the highest standards and take pride in your work.
The easiest way to get an item checked off your list is to lower the standard. This gets easier especially for tasks where there is no supervision.
There is a famous story about how Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple got his first lesson on raising the bar and caring deeply about ones work. Jobs was once helping his father build a fence around their family home in Mountain View. While working, his father, Paul shared a piece of advice with Jobs: “You’ve got to make the back of the fence, that nobody will see, just as good looking as the front of the fence, even though nobody will see it, you will know, and that will show that you’re dedicated to making something perfect.”
There is a simple question you can ask to help your team raise the bar in everything they do. Whenever someone presents you with a proposal, note, feature etc ask them what they think instead of telling them what you think. If It is nothing short of ‘100% love it’ then everyone knows the bar is not being met.
For a boat to reach its destination, everyone should row in the same direction. This happens when everyone in the team is aligned with the same goals and vision. In misaligned teams, people start rowing in all directions. They will invent new personal metrics, side quests and optimise for those.
The easiest way to align everyone to the mission is to set OKRs at the start of a quarter. This is even better if the OKR setting is undertaken as a company-wide activity and not just at the leadership level.
“Priority” should ideally only be used as a singular word. The moment you have many priorities, you actually have none.
There are 24 hours in a day and there is only so much you can do in this time. A team that tries to do everything they can think about or get their hands on will probably do none of it exceptionally well. If you want to raise the bar, sharpen your focus and work on fewer things at a time. Constantly re-evaluate your priorities and when a new task pops up, ask about the consequences of not doing it.
Have the same focus and clarity while you communicate the priorities to your team. Distil things down to their essentials and be crystal clear. Vagueness has a tendency to multiply as it moves down the org tree.
Parkinson’s Law states that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
Leaders in an organisation set the pace. When someone tells you they will get back by next week, ask them, why not tomorrow? This is a mindset change and once it happens the team gets an infusion of energy and urgency. Top performers crave such a culture. Every now and then, apply pressure to move things along.
There is a great article by Ben Horowitz titled Do you feel pressure or do you apply pressure. Give it a read.
“To stand still is to fall behind.” Mark Twain
In the modern workplace, the fastest way to fall behind is to stand still. Things change on a daily basis. Just take a look at the tools, systems and processes you are using today compared to two years back. There is a simple test to check whether you are falling behind. Ask yourself, “am I doing the same things I was doing a year back at work”. If the answer is yes, then you are falling behind
Learn, constantly reinvent yourself and move forward in both work and life.
“I wish I could clone this person.”
If you have ever built a team, this thought would have crossed your mind at least once.
Most teams have that one superstar – a bar raiser who excels in her work and sets standards for the whole team. The rest fall somewhere in the spectrum between excellent to average. How you wish you could fill your team with Superstars. Well, building a team is filled with compromises – budgets, timelines and more often than not you end up with people who are excellent in some aspects while just average in others. Is there a way for you to make them go from average to excellent in all aspects? Can excellence be taught? Is it something that comes naturally? Can you find some common principles for having an excellence mindset?
Here are some of the common traits I came across people with an Excellence Mindset.
People with an excellence mindset care deeply about their work. In fact, they care deeply about everything they do. Even, when no one is watching. There is a famous paragraph in Walter Issacson’s biography of Steve Jobs.
‘You gotta make the back of the fence — that nobody will see — just as good looking as the front of the fence. Even though nobody will see it, you will know, and that will show that you’re dedicated to making something perfect.’ Paul Jobs to his son, Steve Jobs.
Thinking and acting like everyone else is the shortest path to mediocrity. Whenever you come across a problem, here are a few questions to force yourself to think different.
When you have an excellence mindset you try to push the limits in everything you do. Even things as simple as optimising your daily schedule by 1%. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to keep pushing the limits
Measure twice, cut once
Perhaps the hardest but the most trainable quality in Excellence Mindset is ‘Attention to Detail’. Attention to Detail simply translates to being more precise in your work and being less shoddy. You can get 90% of the way there by simply checking your work once before sending it across. If you are a writer, careless mistakes, typos, grammatical errors, alignment issues are some of the most basic things you can catch in one round of revisions.
80% of success is just showing up
We all have come across one-hit-wonders and people whose performance fluctuates between highs and lows. To be truly excellent, you need to be able to repeat your performance every single time. If anything it needs to become better each time.
There is a quote by Woody Allen that says “80% of success is just showing up”. Consistently showing up every day. following through on plans and making progress every day are the easiest ways to cultivate an excellence mindset.
Excellence cannot be achieved by dabbling in things. It requires time, patience, effort and the will to go in-depth to gain deep expertise in an area. Expertise cannot be created over weeks or months, It takes years of work, one day at a time. Often people with deep expertise in an area gain it at the expense of something else. You must have come across lone geniuses and solo warriors who are really good at one thing but basically suck at everything else. If you really want to cultivate an excellence mindset it will serve you well to gain exposure to things outside your area of expertise. It is when you develop this sort of a range that you can truly push the limits of your expertise by bringing in newer perspectives to your area of expertise.
A new Covid variant emerges every now and then threatening to throw the world into another lockdown. Low vaccination levels, especially in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMIC) allow the virus to mutate freely. There is every chance that a new variant might emerge which is both highly transmissible and deadlier than the previous ones.
Soon after their case load drops, countries try to go back to normal forgetting that there is a large percentage of the world population who don’t have access to vaccines. When a new variant emerges from these forgotten lands, everyone gets a rude reminder.
The lesson Covid is trying to teach us is simple. ‘No one is safe until everyone is safe’. It is time for the world to work together as one. We have to start sharing vaccines and other resources with each other. The sooner we learn this very simple lesson the sooner we can come out of this crisis.
WHORecently in our company blog, we published an article titled Top 10 Leadership & Life Lessons from Tokyo Olympics 2020. While it touched upon my learnings from the game of cricket briefly, this post is essentially a long-form version of it.
Cricket is one sport that I have enjoyed watching and playing growing up. The game has undergone many changes in the past few decades, some good and some bad. While it has 42 written Laws and a 1000 nuances, at its core, it is simply about putting bat to ball. These are some of the lessons I picked up from this game which has helped me in both life and business.
Cricket is a sport that requires a lot of patience. The longest format of the game is played over 5 days. It teaches you the value of patience and staying in the game till the last ball. Playing and watching the game over so many years has taught me to be patient and play the long game in life.
Momentum is significant in sports. You will not be able to see it in the score sheet at the end of the day, but momentum can swing a game in your favour or against you very quickly. In life, too, you can use momentum to your advantage to seize the day. Something as simple as getting the small items checked off your To-Do list at the start of the day can give you a lot of momentum to take on the more daunting tasks.
In Cricket, a good batsman is always aware of where his off stump is. It allows him to leave deliveries that he shouldn’t be poking at. A parallel to this in life is knowing your risk appetite when it comes to decisions regarding your finances or career.
First day, first session on the swinging pitches of England, you don’t go out thinking about smashing every ball to the boundary. You wait it out. You leave balls in the 4th stump line and bide your time till the ball gets old. Once you have survived the morning session, then you start scoring. Tired bowlers and an old ball will give you plenty of opportunities to score runs. In business, market conditions can throw you off your growth trajectory. It doesn’t help if you stay stubborn and try to outspend and buy growth during these times. You have to respect the conditions, cut costs and wait it out sometimes for the condition to improve. Survival is key.
Test matches are played session by session. Each session gives you a chance to start fresh. If you lose a session and carry over the impact to the next, you are sure to lose that session as well. Getting into the right mindset – a positive frame of mind at the start of each session is important to get back in the game. In business, you might have a tough few days or months or a quarter. However, if you let that affect the company’s overall morale, you will soon descend into a tailspin. The key for you as a leader is to get your team in the right mindset no matter how horrible things have gone previously.
Whenever a team tours a country, they play practice matches with the local teams as part of their preparation. One such match played is worth watching 1000 hours of footage of opposition bowling and strategising through the night. Nothing beats match practice. Similarly, you can read all the books and theorise as much as you want in life, but actually rolling up your sleeves and doing the work will give you a better perspective.
Cricket has a Decision Review System where if you feel that the umpire is wrong, you can challenge their decision. If you are right, the umpire’s decision gets overturned. Just because a decision comes from a figure of authority doesn’t mean that it can’t be challenged. In fact, encouraging a culture of dissent and questioning in your teams can help you build a stronger team.
Cricket has 3 established formats. The 5-day game or the Test, the 50 over game or the One Day International and the 20 over game or the T20. All these formats demand a certain set of skills from the players. There are very few players in international cricket who play across all three formats. Many teams even have different captains across formats. A horses for courses policy is at play here. When we build teams, we tend to hire people who think along similar lines. While this ensures that there are hardly any conflicts within the team, this might not be the best way to build a team that delivers results. You need to onboard people who bring something different to the table and add to the team’s strengths rather than filling it with people who all think and act the same way.
Outside edges that fly over the slip cordon are a common sight during the slog overs. This happens when a batter goes hard at a ball with full conviction but fails to middle it. Half measures and indecision can cause more pain in life and business than being wrong. Sometimes it is essential to make a decision and throw the kitchen sink at it rather than doubting yourself.
When you are out on the field, you play hard. You give your everything, but once the last ball is bowled, you must move on from the game and not carry the baggage with you. When all is said and done, it is just a game.
If you enjoyed reading this article, here is a similar article on my learnings
Over the last 12 years, I have worked with hundreds of people. Here are some of the top traits I have seen in people that are true professionals.
If you are interested in similar articles, here is one I wrote a while back on ‘Learning from my life’
Ruchir Sharma, in his book ‘The 10 Rules of Successful Nations’, talks about ‘bad billionaires’ and ‘good billionaires’. Bad billionaires owe their wealth to rent-seeking industries like minerals, petroleum, real estate etc. Good billionaires owe their wealth to innovative industries that boost productivity and improve the overall quality of life. Technology, e-commerce, manufacturing are some examples of this. I have covered more on this topic in my article on India and The 10 Rules of Successful Nations.
What happens when a so-called ‘good industry’ starts to become rent-seeking?
In his article, Why is China smashing its tech industry? Noah Smith writes
…the profits of companies like Alibaba and Tencent come more from rents than from actual value added — that they’re simply squatting on unproductive digital land, by exploiting first-mover advantage to capture strong network effects, or that the IP system is biased to favor these companies, or something like that. There are certainly those in America who believe that Facebook and Google produce little of value relative to the profit they rake in…
This monopolistic tendency is definitely worth pondering. Industries and companies that start with the promise of solving inefficiencies, saving time and money and improving productivity also fall into the same traps of rent-seeking industries. This crushes existing competition and prevents new entrants from breaking through, thus stifling overall innovation and growth. Even worse, it leads to more intervention by the government in the form of regulations. This further increases the cost of compliance for new entrants.
Last month I read ‘The Psychology of Money’ by Morgan Housel. These are the highlights I made.
Therefore, focus less on specific individuals and case studies and more on broad patterns. Studying a specific person can be dangerous because we tend to study extreme examples—the billionaires, the CEOs, or the massive failures that dominate the news—and extreme examples are often the least applicable to other situations, given their complexity. The more extreme the outcome, the less likely you can apply its lessons to your own life, because the more likely the outcome was influenced by extreme ends of luck or risk.
There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don’t have and don’t need.
A tilt of the Earth’s hemispheres caused ravenous winters cold enough to turn the planet into ice. But a Russian meteorologist named Wladimir Köppen dug deeper into Milanković’s work and discovered a fascinating nuance. Moderately cool summers, not cold winters, were the icy culprit. It begins when a summer never gets warm enough to melt the previous winter’s snow. The leftover ice base makes it easier for snow to accumulate the following winter, which increases the odds of snow sticking around in the following summer, which attracts even more accumulation the following winter. Perpetual snow reflects more of the sun’s rays, which exacerbates cooling, which brings more snowfall, and on and on. Within a few hundred years a seasonal snowpack grows into a continental ice sheet, and you’re off to the races. The same thing happens in reverse. An orbital tilt letting more sunlight in melts more of the winter snowpack, which reflects less light the following years, which increases temperatures, which prevents more snow the next year, and so on. That’s the cycle. The amazing thing here is how big something can grow from a relatively small change in conditions. You start with a thin layer of snow left over from a cool summer that no one would think anything of and then, in a geological blink of an eye, the entire Earth is covered in miles-thick ice. As glaciologist Gwen Schultz put it: “It is not necessarily the amount of snow that causes ice sheets but the fact that snow, however little, lasts.” The big takeaway from ice ages is that you don’t need tremendous force to create tremendous results.
Good investing is not necessarily about making good decisions. It’s about consistently not screwing up.
No one wants to hold cash during a bull market. They want to own assets that go up a lot. You look and feel conservative holding cash during a bull market, because you become acutely aware of how much return you’re giving up by not owning the good stuff. Say cash earns 1% and stocks return 10% a year. That 9% gap will gnaw at you every day. But if that cash prevents you from having to sell your stocks during a bear market, the actual return you earned on that cash is not 1% a year—it could be many multiples of that, because preventing one desperate, ill-timed stock sale can do more for your lifetime returns than picking dozens of big-time winners.
40% of companies successful enough to become publicly traded lost effectively all of their value over time. The Forbes 400 list of richest Americans has, on average, roughly 20% turnover per decade for causes that don’t have to do with death or transferring money to another family member. Capitalism is hard. But part of the reason this happens is because getting money and keeping money are two different skills. Getting money requires taking risks, being optimistic, and putting yourself out there. But keeping money requires the opposite of taking risk. It requires humility, and fear that what you’ve made can be taken away from you just as fast. It requires frugality and an acceptance that at least some of what you’ve made is attributable to luck, so past success can’t be relied upon to repeat indefinitely.
A mindset that can be paranoid and optimistic at the same time is hard to maintain, because seeing things as black or white takes less effort than accepting nuance. But you need short-term paranoia to keep you alive long enough to exploit long-term optimism.
Controlling your time is the highest dividend money pays.
But if there’s a common denominator in happiness—a universal fuel of joy—it’s that people want to control their lives. The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, is priceless. It is the highest dividend money pays.
Having a strong sense of controlling one’s life is a more dependable predictor of positive feelings of wellbeing than any of the objective conditions of life we have considered.
But doing something you love on a schedule you can’t control can feel the same as doing something you hate. There is a name for this feeling. Psychologists call it reactance. Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania, summed it up well: People like to feel like they’re in control—in the drivers’ seat. When we try to get them to do something, they feel disempowered. Rather than feeling like they made the choice, they feel like we made it for them. So they say no or do something else, even when they might have originally been happy to go along.
John D. Rockefeller was one of the most successful businessmen of all time. He was also a recluse, spending most of his time by himself. He rarely spoke, deliberately making himself inaccessible and staying quiet when you caught his attention. A refinery worker who occasionally had Rockefeller’s ear once remarked: “He lets everybody else talk, while he sits back and says nothing.” When asked about his silence during meetings, Rockefeller often recited a poem:
A wise old owl lived in an oak,
The more he saw the less he spoke,
The less he spoke, the more he heard,Why aren’t we all like that wise old bird? Rockefeller was a strange guy. But he figured out something that now applies to tens of millions of workers. Rockefeller’s job wasn’t to drill wells, load trains, or move barrels. It was to think and make good decisions. Rockefeller’s product—his deliverable—wasn’t what he did with his hands, or even his words. It was what he figured out inside his head. So that’s where he spent most of his time and energy. Despite sitting quietly most of the day in what might have looked like free time or leisure hours to most people, he was constantly working in his mind, thinking problems through.
The letter I wrote after my son was born said, “You might think you want an expensive car, a fancy watch, and a huge house. But I’m telling you, you don’t. What you want is respect and admiration from other people, and you think having expensive stuff will bring it. It almost never does—especially from the people you want to respect and admire you.”
The first idea—simple, but easy to overlook—is that building wealth has little to do with your income or investment returns, and lots to do with your savings rate. A quick story about the power of efficiency. In the 1970s the world looked like it was running out of oil. The calculation wasn’t hard: The global economy used a lot of oil, the global economy was growing, and the amount of oil we could drill couldn’t keep up. We didn’t run out of oil, thank goodness. But that wasn’t just because we found more oil, or even got better at taking it out of the ground. The biggest reason we overcame the oil crisis is because we started building cars, factories, and homes that are more energy efficient than they used to be. The United States uses 60% less energy per dollar of GDP today than it did in 1950. The average miles per gallon of all vehicles on the road has doubled since 1975. A 1989 Ford Taurus (sedan) averaged 18.0 MPG. A 2019 Chevy Suburban (absurdly large SUV) averages 18.1 MPG. The world grew its “energy wealth” not by increasing the energy it had, but by decreasing the energy it needed.
A question you should ask as the range of your competition expands is, “How do I stand out?” “I’m smart” is increasingly a bad answer to that question, because there are a lot of smart people in the world. Almost 600 people ace the SATs each year. Another 7,000 come within a handful of points. In a winner-take-all and globalized world these kinds of people are increasingly your direct competitors.
Intelligence is not a reliable advantage in a world that’s become as connected as ours has. But flexibility is. In a world where intelligence is hyper-competitive and many previous technical skills have become automated, competitive advantages tilt toward nuanced and soft skills—like communication, empathy, and, perhaps most of all, flexibility. If you have flexibility you can wait for good opportunities, both in your career and for your investments. You’ll have a better chance of being able to learn a new skill when it’s necessary. You’ll feel less urgency to chase competitors who can do things you can’t, and have more leeway to find your passion and your niche at your own pace. You can find a new routine, a slower pace, and think about life with a different set of assumptions. The ability to do those things when most others can’t is one of the few things that will set you apart in a world where intelligence is no longer a sustainable advantage. Having more control over your time and options is becoming one of the most valuable currencies in the world.
One is volatility. Can you survive your assets declining by 30%? On a spreadsheet, maybe yes—in terms of actually paying your bills and staying cash-flow positive. But what about mentally? It is easy to underestimate what a 30% decline does to your psyche. Your confidence may become shot at the very moment opportunity is at its highest. You—or your spouse—may decide it’s time for a new plan, or new career. I know several investors who quit after losses because they were exhausted. Physically exhausted. Spreadsheets are good at telling you when the numbers do or don’t add up. They’re not good at modeling how you’ll feel when you tuck your kids in at night wondering if the investment decisions you’ve made were a mistake that will hurt their future. Having a gap between what you can technically endure versus what’s emotionally possible is an overlooked version of room for error.
Napoleon’s definition of a military genius was, “The man who can do the average thing when all those around him are going crazy.”
“It’s not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important,” George Soros once said, “but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.” You can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune.
