Beyond Exam Charades

During the compulsory military training in Taiwan, recruits are seemingly trained with a singular objective – to pass the exams. When practicing the bayonet drill, you practice a chant for each movement, which is what they will test for in the exam. But unfortunately,...

Simplest hack to grow in life

When I was leaving my last job to do a startup, my family asked me to reconsider because ‘doing business is not in our genes.’ Do genes predispose us toward some professions? At first blush, this hypothesis seems fairly tenable. In the US, I saw that a lot of motels...

Do the right thing

To put it politely – the startup world is messed up. Big time. And we need to fix it. In my last startup, when we were fundraising, we met a particularly aggressive (‘sharky’) investor. During our discussions, they constantly told us to follow the model of an investee...

Mastery Demands Commitment

In 1998, we went for our first counter-insurgency patrol in Nagaland very excitedly. We were a bunch of IPS trainees attached to an army unit fighting militancy. Unlike in the Police Academy, the dangers here were very real. So we put on heavy bulletproof vests and...

Meaningful Work

Years ago, during my first startup, I took a shared office space in Bandra (Mumbai). Every morning, on the way to work, I would see a retired-looking person (in his early sixties) idly sitting in his house by the window, with some jazz music playing in the background....