The Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009 was awarded to three people including Venki Ramakrishnan. Ramakrishnan is an American-British-Indian scientist who played a key role in discovering the atomic structure of ribosomes. He wrote a book titled Gene Machine, chronicling the ribosome breakthrough, which was published in 2018. Ribosomes are present in cells of living…
Notes from How Will You Measure Your Life by Clayton Christensen
I had written down these notes/excerpts in Aug 2012 while reading the book How Will You Measure Your Life by Clayton Christensen. He wrote the book around the time he was battling illness. While he’s known for books on innovation, in this book he shares business and life advice. I enjoyed the book. Notes from…
Notes on Smart People Should Build Things by Andrew Yang
In late 2014 something clicked in my head. It was a year in which I’d read a few books on starting a startup, and started entertaining thoughts of founding a startup. A year later, I quit my job and jumped full-time into working on a startup. One of the books that influenced me was Smart…
Learning Stuff on YouTube
In rare moments of calm when my two year old nephew is not racing up and down the house on his scooter, he settles down to watch YouTube. He’s a YouTube “early adopter.” He’s been watching YouTube from when he was one. He now has a little inkling of all kinds of things — animals,…
How to make short videos and raise a $1 Billion seed round
Startups raising seed rounds rarely make the news but this one did, for a reason. In October 2018, a US startup called Quibi raised a massive $1 billion seed round, which is 1000x the average seed round for startups. You might be thinking how and why they got so much funding. To find out I…
What startups can learn from Jeff Bezos’ letter
Published on April 14, 2017 on LinkedIn A cool thing about Jeff Bezos’ recent letter to Amazon shareholders is the universality of his advice. The advice is relatable to startups as it is to corporate behemoths. Here’s a link to the letter: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312517120198/d373368dex991.htm. A few snippets from the letter that are relevant to startups: “customers are…
Snapchat in a nutshell
Published on March 10, 2017, on LinkedIn Most people I meet think Snapchat is only good for frivolous uses and are dismissive of the app, but as someone who studies social apps I see something quite the contrary. I see Snapchat as a bellwether for the future of communication and it has shown how amazing…
Whatsapp, we have a problem
Published on Oct 2nd, 2016 on Medium I’m a WhatsApp power user. I spend about an hour on it every day, most of the time viewing photos and videos that others have shared. But the video experience on WhatsApp leaves a lot to be desired. I’ve noticed the following problems on the Android app. The…