A personal note
Getting laid off, starting Scatter Brain, and a new links roundup
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Earlier this year, I got laid off from my startup job during a phase I was dealing with a few events in my personal life. Im very online on Twitter but also very offline when it comes to my personal life. The side most people see is the only side Im comfortable sharing publicly.
As your stereotypical startup workaholic millennial whose identity is tied to work, not knowing what’s next on personal and professional fronts was a big shock to my system. I went through a short phase of an identity crisis, which I now look back on as a silly overreaction to what my brain knew was an inevitable event.
Right after the layoff, I foolishly decided to find a new job quickly while still dealing with the shit in my personal life. I didn’t need to, but I just wanted to for peace of mind and a need for stability. After a few weeks of pursuing the obvious paths, I stopped my search. I was frustrated, insecure, and confused throughout the process, to say the least. I took a few weeks off and traveled a bit.
I knew I first needed to regain my self-confidence in a professional sense (also in the personal sense, but we won’t talk about that here), which had taken a hit over the prior weeks. Over the last six years, I have blogged every now and then. That was oddly satisfying. I had built up the thick skin needed to write online and not let the internet bring me down. I resumed writing a few months ago. The sporadic informal blog turned into Scatter Brain, named after my dumb directionless brain.
I am not the best writer. I’m also not skilled at growing my audience. I’m a decent analyst who can connect the dots. I think I can ask good questions and earn trust quickly to get people to open up about the details of what they do and how they think. I sense having worked at startups at different stages and intuitively looking at the landscape like an investor might help with that.
I pursued areas I was interested in and talked to people I wanted to learn from. I have over-indexed on people who are not famous. I believe that curating under-the-radar great folks is valuable. Not great for building an audience, though! My goal is to meet a threshold for new ideas or perspectives that the guest hasn’t shared before. I don’t always meet that bar. I have gotten feedback that people want more of my takes. I have no idea how common that view is amongst my readers. I will write more, regardless.
I wonder if I should send a quick note (less than 5 min read) on whatever is top of mind multiple times a week and 1-2 chats weekly. The new version is a hybrid of interviews and profiles instead of pure conversations. If you have any thoughts, please email me!
Anyways, it looks like there’s some appetite for a roundup of interesting reads along with my takes, so I’m doing that today.
Here’s a scattered assortment of things not related to the Current Things (Elon’s Twitter Files, OpenAI’s breakthroughs, Lensa’s retouched pictures, The Good Billionaire interviews)
A French village is rethinking about we support people with Alzheimer’s. Its approach is predicated on the idea that society should look at the elderly less like children who need to be protected from everything to keep them safe and more like adults looking for a life worth living. If that means not sacrificing their freedom to do marginally unsafe things, then so be it!
One of the longest-running controversies around Airbnb has been about the composition of individuals versus professional property managers (who manage lots of listings) in Airbnb’s supply of hosts. Airbnb has always told the story of how staying at Airbnb means being around a local in their homes. Third-party researchers & critics have said that Airbnb is not transparent enough and understates the percentage of individual hosts with 1 or 2 properties on the platform. Here’s a Skift explainer on the latest on that debate.
End of last year, I crowdsourced thoughts from founders and investors about what they thought about Tiger Global. After the market went south this year, I went back to some of them to get their latest perspective. I haven’t talked to folks about Tiger in the past few months, but here’s what the press says: They visited India to reaffirm confidence in the local ecosystem, are raising a new smaller fund, have gotten more aggressive with series A investments more than I had expected, and got blasted by the first Indian-American to take a venture-backed company public in the US for acting like late stage investing is like early stage investing (I mean, fair!). A famous alum is raising a new fund, and of course, the joke is he’s offering tax loss harvesting as a service.
I did not grow up having much coffee in India. I became a coffee drinker after moving to the States. India went through a cultural change in how it views coffee as a beverage, a business, and an experience over the past decade. Reading this thoughtful essay on the history of coffee culture in India was fun.
I believe much of our greatest problems come from insufficient supply in the face of overwhelming evidence of outsized demand. Producing more stuff would lead to economic growth and make people happy. For example, is rental housing expensive? Yes. Just build more apartment buildings. It’s not rocket science. Artificial scarcity hinders prosperity, and demand subsidization creates more problems. Here’s a great post on the abundance agenda.
I binge-watched Inventing Anna on Netflix earlier this year. It was like modern-day White Collar (the show) but very real and more glamorous. Anna Sorokin, the protagonist and con artist is creating an interview podcast, per Semafor, during her house arrest! She’s a gift that keeps giving, and I’m here for it.
Avatar and James Cameron are back. Here’s a take on the franchise from one of my favorite bloggers MG Siegler. Avatar’s amazing to watch at the moment but totally forgettable right after. I can’t think of many movies that are so popular in the zeitgeist, yet so many fail to recall any details.
For Hindi speakers, I recently watched Monica O My Darling on Netflix, Criminal Justice on Hotstar, & Breathe on Prime. Im a sucker for crime dramas. They might not be the best, but they are great one-time watches.
NYT’s list of best movies of 2022 is out. And it’s dumb? I haven’t heard of half the movies. Which is fine! But it doesn’t mention Everything Everywhere All At Once and Top Gun Maverik. Cancel the list.
If you are into the streaming world as a business nerd, I recommend conversations with one of my favorite analysts Julia Alexander (Im bringing her on Scatter Brain soon!) on Nilay Patel’s Decoder and with former NBC Entertainment Chairman on
Dead Cat. Of course, you should also check out my chats with the founders of a dialect-based streaming service and a digital content production studio focused on the entertainment world's business and product sides in India. If you have seen the Netflix show Little Things and want to learn about the story of the studio behind it, read the second link. My recent chat with Wrapbook’s CEO is about the administrative side of how payroll works in Hollywood.Warner Bros. Discovery is in the same league as Google in naming things very badly. For the former, it is streaming services. For the latter, it’s the million communication apps. Looks like the much anticipated combined service with HBO and Discovery content would be called…..Max?
Some India-related stuff that caught my attention: One of the OG homegrown seed firms, Blume raised a new fund, Central bank RBI hiked rates, Apple’s considering starting iPad manufacturing in India, Space entrepreneurship continues to be an underrated story (I will have the founder of Pixxel Space on Scatter Brain soon), VCs investing in actual real banks, stupid H1 system doing dumb things in a bad climate.
When the bullying activist gets a taste of his own medicine: Blackrock gets pressured by an activist investor to replace the CEO. If you want to learn about the ESG drama, there is no one better than Bloomberg’s Matt Levine to read.
It is a law of physics in the fintech world these days that a high-profile and largest private player in every region worldwide must go through a valuation cut, layoff, or both. The latest victims are Chipper Cash in Africa and Plaid in the States. Yet to see counterevidence. It sucks. It was also inevitable.
This an insightful, history-aware essay on the euphoric exponential growth of fintech over the past decade and growing fraud problems becoming more obvious as the ecosystem has matured and amassed millions of customers.
VC blogosphere: Haystack’s Semil Shah on investors having hard conversations with founders, Homebrew’s Hunter Walk on less talked about consequences of startup implosion, Precursors’ Charles Hudson on investors’ feelings about the euphoria of last year impacting their decisions and behaviors today. Anything from them becomes a must-read for me.
Suppose you are a self-proclaimed climate change activist who loves to scold others about the environmental impact of everything humans do. You are a vocal critic or passive opponent of using nuclear energy. In that case, I have no respect for you because your passion for the topic is mere ideological aesthetic, and you are not interested in science or intellectual honesty. Here’s a definitive essay on the past, present, and future of nuclear energy from Julia DeWahl (who was one of the earliest guests on Scatter Brain).
One of my favorite economist bloggers, Noah Smith, on whether and how we could replicate the magic of Bell Labs (I find his proposal whacky), whether US antitrust picked the wrong target (Yes they did, FB is not a monopoly in the minds of anyone with a few brain cells), and on rearranging of the global trade and alliances in the light of West re-evaluating its relationship with China.
Podcast / Talk Show recommendations :
India’s CRED founder Kunal Shah and India’s national football (in India / British sense) team’s captain Sunil Chhetri on CRED Curious
Kara Swisher and Emily In Paris’ creator Darren Star on On with Kara Swisher
India’s SUGAR Cosmetics’ founder Vineeta Singh and Rohin Dharmakumaron The Ken’s First Principles
India’s Blume Ventures’ Sajith Pai and Romeen Sheth on Return on India (a sister podcast of Invest Like The Best)
Annie Duke and Russ Roberts on EconTalk
Stephen Wolfram and Tim Ferris on The Tim Ferris Show
Noble Prize winner Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi and Kara Swisher on On with Kara Swisher
Jim O’Shaughnessy and Liberty PRF on Infinite Loops
Product launches:
Robinhood announced a Wealthfront offering with a 1% match. As a longtime Wealthfront user, I’m looking forward to trying it out.
Square partners with Amex to launch credit cards for merchants, a segment that venture-backed high profile ~charge card~ players who pretend to be credit card players don’t serve. Good luck to vertical card players going after Square customers!
Klarna launched a marketplace to connect brands and influencers. Why not? The founder recently defended BNPL against the “how is this different from credit cards?” critique and the dumber version, “don’t pretend to not be in unsecured loan biz!”.
Some bright spots in the fundraising world: Andruil, Cacheflow, Maven, X1, and Fanatics. All of them are in different sectors and different stages!
In this interview, Epic Games CEO says he is willing to do whatever and however long it takes to fight Apple and is unwilling to back down without Apple conceding to a whole host of its demands (consumers should be able to download apps from developer websites, open competition for in-app purchase vendors and Apple can’t take any cut from revenue from the apps.) I don’t see Tim Cook agreeing to this anytime soon.
This is a thoughtful post on Web2 versus Web3 (that the advocates would hate, cynics would love, and skeptics would resonate with) from the CTO of Zerodha, India’s largest and bootstrapped brokerage.
If you have come across something interesting, please email me the link! I might feature it in the next roundup!
Eden is the all-in-one hybrid workplace software suite to make your flexible office run easily and efficiently. With tools built for desk and room booking, a better lobby experience for office visitors, managing deliveries, and more, Eden is used daily by great companies like Wealthsimple, IDEO, and Noom. Learn more by signing up here.