Recent content in Home on Siddharth Shekhar Jha
In the age of AI, I wonder how humans and organizations will perceive productivity. During the onset of the Industrial Age, productivity was defined by efficiency. The more you did and faster you worked, the more productive you were perceived to be. Today, we talk about new large language models in similar terms — how fast they are at complex tasks and how much they get done. Call this the widget…
Now that summer is nearing an end, I wanted to share a bit about a product I’ve been working on. I’m not entirely sure what it is yet, so I’m calling it a productivity app. It’s called Solarday . I started building it at the end of July, inspired partly by being fed up with todo list apps that were either too ugly and complex or too limited and wanting to see a macro- and micro-view of my day…
I’ve got a gut feeling. More often than not, I’m right about these things. Venture capital is headed for another reckoning. As if 2022 wasn’t enough. The mega VC funds that have over-inflated the tech funding landscape are in for a historical course correction over the next decade. AI is here to stay, but the valuations for AI companies are wildly unjustified. There’s no scenario where this ends…
Today’s frontier LLM companies have the same product strategy and sell a slightly different encapsulation of same capabilities with switching costs still very low. They all seem to be converging on long context windows, tool use & APIs, chain-of-reasoning, summarizing, coding, translations and more with subtle differences. What that means is that differentiation comes down to one thing and one…
This morning, I read a fascinating conversation . It was between two philosophers — Orlando, an academician at the Lucerne School of Art & Design and Oliver, the founder of iA Inc that created the simple software that I use to write nearly every piece of writing I do. It made me wonder about what it means for AI to evolve from a technology that helps you think faster to a replacement for thinking…
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, declaring in an internal memo leaked to The New York Times a few weeks ago that employees should work a lot more to win the “race to AGI” is frankly bizarre. As quoted by the article, there are some absolute gems in this memo like “60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity” and “the final race to A.G.I is afoot”. Months ago, another internal Google memo…
We’ve all heard of the next big thing. Society is obsessed with the next big thing. But you may not have heard of the next small thing. The next small thing is a smaller, better solution to a real problem faced by you or a business you know. The next small thing is lightweight and simple. The next small thing may not be a business but surely deserves to exist even if there are 10 other similar…
Lately, I’ve been enjoying coding with AI. I wasn’t an early mover in AI by any means. Publicly available consumer AI models have been around since 2022. I took ChatGPT, Dall-E and others for a test drive when they were released, but I’ve only started using AI for my daily use cases since autumn of last year. Perhaps, the turning point for me was delving deep into the workings of Transformer…
The Promise of Apple Intelligence This week from Benedict Evans : Apple has built an LLM with no chatbot. Apple has built its own foundation models, which (on the benchmarks it published) are comparable to anything else on the market, but there’s nowhere that you can plug a raw prompt directly into the model and get a raw output back - there are always sets of buttons and options shaping what you…
I’ve been “quiet quitting” Twitter for many years now. I got on it in 2008 and after the first 6 years or so, the service was just never nearly as appealing. Personally, the net value the service brings to my life has gone lower and lower these last few years. There’s some good stuff on it but you’re better off reading newspapers, books or watching TV. I can see why a…
Ideas can outlast human lives, last for generations and spark revolutions. Steve Jobs is no more but his ideas still live on in the tools many of us use daily. I interact with his ideas every day. Thomas Edison’s ideas live on whenever we turn on the switch every evening to illuminate our living spaces. Ideas of Ancient Greeks around democracy live on as people vote during midterm elections…
September went by too fast. I couldn’t find the time or the mental wherewithal to publish anything more than fleeting tweets. I spent some time on the West Coast. Of late, especially the last two months, despite my efforts, inner peace has been elusive. In fact, that’s been the theme of this year so far. For most of the year, I’ve felt incredibly off-center. Lots of anger, lots…
Late last year, I was looking for a timer watch I could use during workouts. An Apple Watch or Fitbit seemed like the default option for many. Even though, in the early 2010s, I was a user of the Pebble watch (RIP) way before smartwatches went mainstream, I never really had a thing for smartwatches. I don’t think I ever wore my Pebble after the first few days of trying it. There wasn’t…
Album art looks really good on iOS 16’s Lock Screen. I like how it takes up most of the screen and how the background blends in. Album art plays such a key role in exuding a record’s vibes. Over the last 5 years, in the previous releases of iOS (iOS 11 to 15), the now playing on the lock screen was pretty boring. Album art was tiny. It just didn’t do justice to the artist. But…
Today, I went to an art gallery. There was a cool exhibition on one of the floors that had on display, among many artifacts, an assortment of Polaroids, typed letters, handwritten notes and a few home videos. These tidbits had been collected from the lives of well-known artists like David Hockney, Andy Warhol and also from just regular people around the world. A paper copy of a script and other…
I recently unearthed on YouTube an absolute gem of a conversation held at a Vanity Fair event about 7 years ago between designer Jony Ive, film director JJ Abrams and film producer Brian Grazer — three individuals who are true legends of the creative domain. The convo delivers a volume of timeless creative insights you will rarely find distilled anywhere else in such a free-flowing fashion. There…
Several months ago, I did a big switch from Spotify to Apple Music due to the savings from the Apple One bundle as I was already paying for other stuff like News+, iCloud separately. I do miss the quality and variety of playlists on Spotify, but as long as there are cost savings (~$20/mo), I think I can live without it. Plus, I ported all my Spotify playlists over anyway. Apple Music offers the…
I wouldn’t be alone to admit that one of my most important possessions is my Gmail archive. I’ve used Gmail since it launched in 2004 as my primary personal email. This information isn’t public so I don’t know for sure, but Gmail probably had users in the low millions that year. Well over a billion people use the service now. Paul Buccheit , the former Google employee who…
Late last year, I decided to try Matter . Matter is a fairly new reading app that lets you save a URL of interest to read later. I’ve been using ‘read it later’ services for longer than I can remember. IIRC, it was my good friend Aareet that introduced me to Instapaper back in 2009 after we had brainstormed our own idea for an ‘interesting links manager’. I think I…
I saw this chart in a The Wall Street Journal piece today called If This Is a Recession, We Might Not Know for Months : Official acknowledgement of recessions in the United States is the responsibility of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). However, their timing is often too late as we can see from WSJ’s graph. During the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, the official call was…
There’s a social app that’s having a big moment. You’ll find it trending at the top of the App Store. It’s called BeReal. But how long will the hype last, for real? At what point do you get exhausted from seeing mundane photos of your friends’ computer screens and views from the couch/bed? The app is reminiscent of a phase I had on Snapchat several years ago where I…
Emerging in the tech world this week is a story about Google firing Timnit Gebru and providing a pretty bad excuse for doing so. This is the kind of stuff that makes me very angry. During my teen years, I’d look up to a company like Google or Facebook as the kind of company I wanted to be part of or create someday. I often thought they were innovative and made great products, but my respect…
After several years of intermittent social media usage, a few months ago, I decided to enforce strict limits on some apps. When the pandemic of 2020 started, I found myself browsing social media excessively. What seemed like an innocent desire to connect to people in a period of isolation quickly turned into act of feeding the frenzy. I’m introspective enough to tell the difference between…
Today, I’m publishing a new page on my website: Request for Startups {:target=’_blank’}. It’s my personal list of opportunities that I’d like ambitious and talented individuals to pursue by building products. I’ve kept this list internally for a while now, but there’s no reason it should just collect dust in my file hierarchy. I have a gut feeling that…
There’s much ado about fairness creams all of a sudden. As of the writing of this post, consumer goods behemoth Unilever is rebranding its well-known fairness cream brand, Fair & Lovely {:target=’_blank’}. The Oxford dictionary defines ‘virtue signaling’ as “the action or practice of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one’s…
Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference happened earlier this week. The conference was held virtually for the first time, due to obvious reasons. Most of it felt pre-recorded, but it was nonetheless packed with some major updates. I’d like to briefly talk about some of them. App Clips This aims to radically change how you discover apps. App Clips are small versions of existing apps…
This week, the EU formally opened antitrust investigations {:target=’_blank’} into Apple’s questionable business practices around the App Store and Apple Pay’s unfair advantage in the world of mobile payments. The former deals with software distribution and the latter deals with preferential hardware+software coupling. I want to share some thoughts on software distribution.…
India’s Northeast is a land of immense history, beauty and courage. Northeast India consists of 8 states: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura. Together, these states are home to over 50 million people of India. Despite being such a big and important part of India, it is oft-forgotten by India. India attained freedom from the British over 70…
Just over 6 months ago, in November of 2019, I embarked on a mission to build a new kind of map experience that’s social by design. I began the dance of the oft-repeated philosophy “real artists ship” by picking a starting point — build a socially curated map of places you and your friends want to explore. There was a lot of uncertainty in where I was headed but I had a lot of…
In the first half of this 2010s decade, I built two startups. During this, I shipped almost a dozen web and mobile apps. They were mostly consumer internet products, with the exception of a couple which were enterprise. All in the hope of creating a product loved by 1 million or more monthly active users. However, nothing seemed to ever stick, and despite lots and lots of trying, I failed to hit…
A few months ago, I covered my favorite picks from Y Combinator’s Winter 2019 batch . I got some good feedback on that post, so I decided to do it again for the latest batch. Y Combinator is arguably the world’s most esteemed startup incubator. I’ve always admired their penchant for ideas in spaces that aren’t always “hot”. What’s also respectable is that in recent years, they’ve accepted more and…
I think a lot about the history of the consumer internet industry. The big structural shift of 1990s was the internet. The trick to finding startup ideas and getting funded in this era was to think of something you do on a daily or weekly basis, then prefix it by “online”, and voila, you’ve got a startup idea! What were some consumer ideas that emerged on the internet in the 90s, and the defining…
Recently, TechCrunch covered Y Combinator ’s (YC) Winter 2019 Demo Day, giving the world a glimpse into the companies launching from the world’s top incubator for startups. It’s the largest batch of startups ever launching at this Mountain View-based incubator started in 2005. YC-incubated companies include Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, Reddit and Instacart, with a combined valuation of all YC…
Every week, I stumble upon startups or products with intriguing missions in the areas of my personal interest. Here are 16 of them from the first quarter of 2019. Names & Faces : “Fast, visual employee directories” Side : “Best freelancers and independent contractors for your company within hours” Superhuman : “The fastest email experience ever made” Movable Ink : “Reinventing Personalization for…
The world wide web turns 30 today. It has come a long way. The majority of things you and me take for granted today are possible because of the web, whether it’s writing or reading blogs, sharing a video on Snapchat, reading the news from around the world, trading stocks or buying cryptocurrency, tweeting, looking up restaurant reviews, ordering that Uber, or IM-ing your friend. We owe a lot…
As I write this, at this very instant, across the universe, galaxies move, stars are born and stars cease to exist, supernova explosions occur, more than a thousand suns burn, meteorites accelerate, satellites zoom by, all while the universe itself moves.. an immense amount of cosmic activity just happened since you started reading this post. Here on this planet, at this very instant, somewhere,…
Pain, but I won’t let it turn into hate No, I won’t let it change me — Youth, by Shawn Mendes ft. Khalid Most, if not all, humans carry pain of some kind. One of the dangerous things about pain is that it is prone to turning into hate. If the feelings of pain over time are not kept in check, they can stealthily transform into hate. Hate is the most negative sort of energy you can…
I’ve been wanting to write this one out for a while, and sitting at LaGuardia Airport in New York City waiting for my delayed flight, I felt an urge to finally put it into words and share it. Over the last few years, I have often thought about the idea of a “Complete Man”. No, not the classic Raymond TV ad I grew up watching in India, but the idea of a man being complete, in…
Early-stage investing is complex. Usually, you’re making bets on companies on sheer gut feel. It’s slightly easier to invest in companies generating revenue from day 1 on a trajectory of growth. But considering investing in companies with just a product or idea, maybe some users and no revenue is incredibly difficult. I believe early-stage investing is more of an art than a science.…
Over the last year or so, I’ve found myself constantly checking the feeds of the social apps on my phone. It escalated to a point where I felt it was taking time away from things I wished to do in my free time — read books, research, think, strategize for world domination betterment. I would pick up a book, but 5 mins in, I’d put it down to check my Snapchat feed or reply to WhatsApp…
I believe there are 8 defining qualities for a good CEO. Here they are, in no particular order: Confidence in the vision and in themselves leading the vision You can’t convince people to invest or work with you if you don’t have confidence in the vision. In order to convince people to invest or work with you, instead of for someone else with a similar vision, you need confidence in…
Successful products are first and foremost wants. Over time, they can become needs. If you want a cool startup idea and go looking for needs, you’re probably going to hit a wall. Take Uber, for example. Up until 2010, hailing a cab on the streets or calling up a taxi company was inconvenient, but not painful. It usually worked just fine. Then, one fine day, Uber let you hail a cab through…
Somehow I believe that everything is 0 or 1. If we can build sophisticated computer systems and graphics on simply this combination of 0 and 1, then what’s to say that the real world that we experience and feel is not simply built on the same 0 and 1? How does 0 and 1 display such striking features of the world? What is the nature of reality behind what we see, experience and feel? The concept of…
The internet is the real-world equivalent of roads. Roads are how you get from your current place to a destination, like work, a shop, a restaurant, or home. The internet is the space you enter to get somewhere too — a news website, an online store, a picture. Travel time on roads is measured in minutes or hours. Travel time on the internet is measured in milliseconds or seconds. You’re probably…
The fragility of humankind is often overlooked. Humans are fragile creatures, who need guidance at every step along the way. The weaker ones (most) need to be pulled up by the stronger ones (very few). I wish there was more talk in the open about matters of the mind.
I met a man in the elevator today who is about to get married. Today is his wedding day. He doesn’t look very happy. He says he has butterflies in his stomach. What should I have said to him? Would it be a lie to say that he’ll be fine? Would it be right to ask if he wants to do it? There’s a 99% chance he won’t have the balls to back out if it’s not. It’s just too late. Or should he be told to…
I got my first pair of Warby Parkers this week. Overall, my experience with them has been pretty good. It made me reflect on why Warby Parker works. It works primarily because they’re inexpensive. For most of us in North America, buying any half-decent pair of glasses is usually an expensive ordeal which can easily amount to several hundreds of dollars. Enter Warby Parker. The price point was the…
Blogging needs to come back, in a big way. Or maybe it already has — Medium et al. Yeah Twitter is cool. It did “disrupt” blogging. What was an offshoot of blogging has become a protocol for communication in less than a decade. Directly or indirectly, it permeated everywhere. Hashtags, @mentions, following people, short updates — these features make up most social services we use today. And…
These are things I really want but don’t see myself building — thus, a wishlist. A cheap (sub $20) app to collect snapshots of web pages : Sort of like LittleSnapper or Ember (which I think is way more expensive than it should be). It should have a colour eyedropper and should let you take full-page snapshots of web pages. It would really aid my design inspiration workflow. If it can add…
Exactly two months ago, I embarked on a retreat from Twitter. The decision was a result of a belief that the 140-character essays had changed the way I consume information, for the worse — it had killed my attention span for long-form. I just couldn’t focus on reading lengthy articles any more. I’d find myself rapidly skimming through them. I just wanted to get to the next one —…