Leadership Here’s a distillation of traits I have admired about great leaders I have studied, worked or interacted with, in no particular order. I intend this to be an evolving list. Leaders maintain a high talent density. They hold a high bar during recruiting and aggressively let go of low performers. They are willing to live with the pain of an empty seat over a mediocre hire Leaders typically…
Thorn The book, The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer, is one that I have re-read the most. Every time I decide to read this book, I inadvertently start with the chapter, Removing the Inner Thorn. Suppose you have a thorn embedded in your arm, not just superficially but deep enough to stimulate a nerve each time it’s brushed against. You could devise all sorts of mechanisms to prevent the touch.…
How to critique? Feb 14, 2020 I chose to say “critic” vs just saying “feedback” because feedback can be appreciation too, but rarely viewed that way. Criticism is generally disapproval of something. It’s engineered in our DNA to gain social acceptance & hence critiquing is generally hard to do. In most cases, we keep quiet with the pursuit of a harmonious outcome. However, holding back does two…
Startup Learnings Jan 3, 2020 I wanted to share some of my startup lessons that I have learnt over the last 7 years. I wasn’t sure of the exact format – is it a blog post or a tweet storm or a combination? So, I decided to just split it up into different sections, make each of them useful but didn’t follow a structured format in each of them. It’s probably like a Tarantino movie. There is no…
Building strong teams Feb 10 2019 Here are 5 counter-intuitive things (at least to me) I learned about building strong teams over the last X years of building the company. This can be used if you are a first-time manager/entrepreneur or as general leadership principles. Great people want to be pushed Everyone wants to retain great people. However, the general inclination to retain them is to…
Raising the bar June 6 2017 We all want to hire great people. Hiring is a skill. It involves two parts – selling the candidate on the opportunity & the ability to assess in a short amount of time. The height of ambition is a direct function of this skill. I have documented almost every interview I have taken in the last two years and what I learned from each of them. I’ll publish a blog post on…
Beautiful excuses 02 Feb 2017 There’s always a reason. There’s always an excuse for something to not get done. We weren’t able to raise money because the external market was bad. We couldn’t ship the product in time because an engineer fell sick or we did not have enough designers. We lost a deal to a competitor because they offered a lower price. And so on.. I call these “beautiful excuses”. They…
#Competitive programming & business 06 Dec 2015 Programming contests usually follow a format where you are given a set of interesting problems and a fixed time to solve. I used to participate a lot in programming contests & some of the things have helped me in running HackerRank. Sub problems The problem statement in a programming contest is usually daunting, but the first thing you do is to split…
#SaaS 29 Nov 2015 The future of enterprise SaaS software is going to be very different from what it is right now. Companies will build software but will sell something else - data or intelligence or any defensible asset that’s created because of signing up a lot of customers. You can already see Zenefits following this. Coming to think of it, this is such a huge potential for the entire SaaS…