The world may not like honest people immediately, but they sure remember them. So I’ll try being honest, at least in the world of business and what I want out of it.
I’m an internet native kid, like the rest of my generation. I also didn’t take too long (18-20 years is still small in the grand scheme of things) to realize that there’s a whole wide world outside of it. That making friends is perhaps more important to me than learning the next programming framework. And maybe as much important as getting good grades in school, if not more. Thanks to my mom, I was addicted to excellence from an early age.
When I entered college, my perspective shifted but somewhere deep down the hunger to chase excellence remained. I drove myself insane by the constant pull of being a different Samyak to different people, and had a proper breakdown in the process. It took me some time to realize that my body doesn’t adapt too well to stress (might talk more about this later) and also that I stressed over the wrong things. I liked pushing myself, but often not to the extremes.
It takes some figuring out to realize what is worth caring for, as the things that you care for also bring you the most amount of headaches. This is a reasonable tradeoff as with most things in life. But one thing I realized is that I had to care about something to live well; and the more intentional it is, the better I’ll feel about myself.
One way that I’m gauging it for myself, and I’m compelled to talk about it today as I prep for an investor meeting, is that I want to increase the radius of what/who I care for step-by-step. I’m doing this in a way which whets my appetite for risk and reward and helps me understand myself better. That, as opposed to suddenly jumping the gun one fine day, chasing planets and distant galaxies but knowing nothing about them beyond the ChatGPT summaries.
In other words, I’m penny-testing my mettle for building products.
What is penny testing, you ask?
During my product stint at Atlassian there was an interesting exercise that I got to do at least once a month, and if I’m lucky, about four. Since I worked in Commerce, penny testing was a test on the production environment (basically the non-test, real billing platform where real transactions happen) through a teeny-tiny amount (hence the “pennies”) on our own credit cards before we did a full-blown rollout to customers affecting millions, if not billions, of transaction volume. 7/10 times we were successful in our rollout, but there was always those 3 times that could’ve been much more expensive (we’re talking millions of dollars a quarter) if not caught at the right time.
When you start small, you have a chance to fall back and go back to the drawing board quickly. If you try being overly glorious too much too soon, you may crash and burn. And if you’ve ever experienced burnout, I don’t have to tell you how bad they are.
When I look back at it, the pattern speaks for itself. I’ve been fascinated by the world of products - both digital and physical. I explored the physical realm through robotics, dialled back a bit and started finding something craft-worthy in the digital. My product management gig taught me things that I needed to know before I go off building something with my own bare hands (with a little help from kind people on the web and the “transformers” ofc).
I dream of doing big things. It may not seem so immediately, but I really do. But buliding something is as much a discovery of yourself as the ether around you (or what we call “product-market fit”). Through the process of building something, we understand what motivates us and what did we take for granted. What saps our energy and that one obvious thing that nobody understands. Translated for the world of tech startups, it’s something similar to “founder-market fit” but with a bit more existential oomph.
The potential upsides of building in today’s day and age are HUGE. They really are. But at the same time what’s big and what’s “big enough” for different people may mean different. Does chasing unicorn valuation get you to feel good about yourself? Maybe. But what if it doesn’t? Maybe trillion dollars would do it. Or perhaps a checkpost that you passed was that perfect camping ground that you didn’t notice because nobody told you to slow down and look ahead.
Maybe you don’t care about all of that. Valuations and profits, impact and glory, beautiful spouses and flashy cars. All you care about is propping up to your desk, toiling hard every single day and coming back home with a beer Masala Dew in your hand and watching TV1 with your family.
As for me, I don’t really know what’s pulling me to build everyday. All I know is that I’m really enjoying the process. Maybe it doesn’t entertain me in the next 2 years, or maybe my next 120 are already sorted.
I don’t know; it will take some building to figure it out. And I’d like to penny-test my own scale, my routine, my risk appetite to get to good answers, or maybe better questions.
For all I know; you discover what pulls you towards itself by firstly crawling towards it and then running after it as though your life depends on it.
A hard pill to swallow perhaps - but you don’t build for the universe, you build for you. Or maybe they’re one and the same thing, who knows...
I’ve been watching the new season of Gullak (Sony LIV) lately - it’s facing the same “ah-new-season” syndrome as most other TV shows do. But it still maintains its charm and simplicity and takes me into an India everyone once lived but nobody liked talking about.