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China has long been a manufacturing powerhouse, excelling in industries from electronics to textiles. Its ability to produce goods at scale and lower costs has fueled its dominance. However, in industries requiring advanced technology and strong brand recognition, China has historically lagged behind. That is now changing—fast. 
 Rise of Chinese Automakers 
 The automotive industry is a…
First mover advantage. The problem Netflix solves for consumers is entertainment. Netflix solves this problem for a large base - 200m+. While competing services will come up, customer acquisition will be challenging. Young folks who have had Netflix and Amazon Prime Video for years will not want to pay for another third service. They might subscribe to HBO Max to watch one show/movie like Dune and…
System for Continuous Improvement 
 James Clear’s book Atomic Habits talks about idea of continuous improvement i.e., 1% better every day. The trick is to form habits. 
 Focus 
 Sam Altman on How to Successful . 
 Number 5: Focus is a force multiplier on work. Part of it is to just Say No To Things. 
 Do the 10k Work 
 Khe Hy on The magic of doing 10k work 
 Amp…
The reason for writing this post is the recent actions by Chinese regulators like banning afterschool tutoring, the ban on video games for kids, Alibaba and Tencent crackdown, etc. 
 The Chinese model of Capitalism, also referred to Socialist Market Economy is a form of government where the state takes significant interest in managing the
economy. This is quite different from India or the…
Reflecting on my time at IB, some of the key lessons I learnt (in no particular order) 
 
 Use Jira 
 
 Thats it! use jira if you have more than 1 team. Give the team a goal using epics, track all feature rollouts, bugs, contributions per employee, etc. 
 
 Employee Morale and Churn 
 
 Startups go through waves. Sometime it feels like you are killing it.
Close…
Sam Altman in his How To Be Successful had the following to say about focus 
 6. Focus
 
 Focus is a force multiplier on work.
 
 Almost everyone I’ve ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on. It is much more important to work on the right thing than it is to work many hours. Most people waste most of their time on stuff that doesn’t…
AWS has made it easy to get the latest and greatest hardware. You can easily get machines O(TB) of DRAM for a few dollars per hour. r5.16x large instance for example has the following specs: 
 r5.16xlarge	64vCPU	256ECU	512 GiB	EBS Only	$4.032 per Hour
 TPC-H benchmark is a standard dataset is a popular OLAP benchmark. Scale factor 1000 of TPC-H benchmark generates 1TB…

 Over the years, I have had the good fortune of travelling to many countries - one of which is Italy. Italy is a beautiful country with many historic cities - Rome, Vatican, Florence, Milan, etc. The travel and tourism industry is the largest industry in Italy - accounting for ~13% of Italy’s GDP. 
 The coronavirus pandemic has torpedoed the travel industry. Large parts of Italy are…
Credit score is a number almost every individual in the country cares about. Your credit score determines if you can get a particular credit card, how much interest you pay on a loan, etc. Credit scores are calculated based on your credit report, an exhaustive account of all your past dealings with financial entities. 
 There are 3 major credit reporting agencies in the US: Equifax, TransUnion…
Elections are a treat for data enthusiasts. This elections, even more so ! Every single poll in the US predicted a landslide for Hillary Clinton. Below is an infographic from the New York Times: 
 
 The chances of Trump winning Presidency before results started coming out was around 15% ! Everyone got it wrong and in the end he won 306 seats. Being curious, I download the data from AP and…