Annual letter to peers, mentors and benefactors — 2019
Letter 2 of 25
2017 and 2018 were pretty good years for me. They were filled with personal growth. One of the best things that happened to me in that period was that I finally discovered the profession I enjoyed, something where going to work was not a drag. In the 21 months (Jan’17 — Sep’18) I spent at SlicePay managing their customer facing product, I felt immensely satisfied work-wise. There were failures and breakthroughs, but all in all it felt like something I could master, something I would enjoy mastering. So in 2018 I started thinking about the next step. I had already found “what” I wanted to do for the bulk of my working career, now the important question was “where” do I want to do this? What is next?
Some of my ex-colleagues were trying out some new things in the crypto domain, and they asked me to join them. I took the jump in 2018. At worst, I was willing to write it off as a sabbatical year. My rationale was that I could always get back to my Product Management career in the budding tech startup scene in India.
I have written about this experience in a separate post — One year break, but the summary was that it was too early to build such companies in the crypto field, especially from India. The market is young, technology is explorative at best and regulations are restrictive. I kept exploring for 12 months and when nothing worked out I took up a position as Senior Product Manager at Swiggy in Sept 2019.
Although this year has been a humbling experience through and through, some of the positive highlights of this year were -
- I completed 4 half-marathons (longest distance PR is 28kms)
- I learnt to create REST APIs for basic CRUD operations using Nodejs
- I launched 2 side projects — An Alexa skill that lets you play hand cricket with Alexa (with the help of an ex-colleague), and a WhatsApp chat service to answer career related questions
What got you here, won’t take you there
2019 is the end of a decade. 10 years back, the only purpose of my life was to increase my living standards. I saw my parents struggle. I didn’t want that life. As this decade ends, I am happy to say that the bedrock has been laid. It happened in 2 phases — phase 1 was going to a tier 1 engineering college, and phase 2 was finding a profession that felt natural to me and also paid well. Of course not everything is great, and I am seriously lagging behind where I wanted to be by the end of this decade, but I take some comfort in the fact that I am on the exact path I wanted to be on.
I graduated from college in 2014 and the past 5 years seem to be like a management consultancy job where I worked on 4 client projects across different verticals — a year in eCommerce helping small hotel owners sell their spare rooms online, 3 years in online consumer lending (first with my own startup and then with Slicepay), and finally a year exploring the crypto market. In fact, since the beginning of this decade I don’t remember a single year when I was not working on something all consuming.
- In 2010, when I was in first year at college, I was trying to write a book on the preparation strategies of top 1000 All India Rankers of AIEEE. I was interviewing batchmates, writing transcripts, editing into the night and looking for publishers.
- In my second year at college I was building a management club in my engineering college and for that I was running pillar to post creating the core team, getting files approved from college administration, looking for sponsorship and creating the vision and values for the club.
- In my third year at college I was pitching the respectable Mr. KV Kamath, Mrs. Chanda Kochhar and the senior executives of ICICI Bank (India’s 2nd largest private bank) to implement a software solution we had made for managing queues in branches.
- In my final year, I was trying to sell ICICI a mobile game which was a precursor to the “sponsored content” wave we are so familiar with now.
- Even in the last months of my college life I was busy convincing everyone in my branch that they should pay me for making the annual yearbook, collecting profiles of 153 students, getting a printer to print them at a low price, editing the profiles and pics of 153 students and then distributing the yearbook to everyone on the last day of college.
The summary of my story till now is that I said yes to everything that came my way. Every opportunity. I didn’t care about losing because I had nothing to lose. That approach worked well in college and in the early years of my career, when I had 0 experience, no skillset, network or assets. Of late I am realising that this approach won’t scale. What got me here, won’t take me to the next level. I hope to find the right strategy in the coming decade, but I don’t know yet what it will be. I do know that I want to take less number of bets and be more sure of every bet I take.
Brian Chesky’s question to his early employees (allegedly) is my starting point for this exploration: “If you had only 10 years left to live, would you do this?” From that lens, I won’t do a lot of things I ended up doing.
The difference between running a marathon and being a marathoner
While I was preparing for marathon this year, I realised something significant. It took me 6 weeks to go from running a distance of 1.2kms to 21.1kms, and then I started training for the full marathon. After 4 weeks of intense practice, the longest I had run was 28kms. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t maintain motivation past 22–24kms. I was running alone, and I had no trainer. My motivation was never to become a long distance runner, I just wanted to run a marathon. After 4 weeks of humiliating failure, I quit out of frustration. All I was trying to do was run 32kms 3 times before the actual marathon. Every time I ran, I promised myself I wouldn’t stop until I achieved my target for the day. Sundays were the long run day, and every Sunday I failed. The repeated failure was too much. I had never challenged myself before to something as explicit as a marathon. There are no trophies, no referees and no crowd. It is just you. Against yourself. I kept thinking about the whole experience. I realised that I was trying to achieve a very hard goal very quickly. And since I was not able to get it, I stopped enjoying the process itself. The frustration was killing my motivation and eventually it started feeling like I was just doing it for the status — a marathon finisher.
Everybody wants to become a famous artist, a sports star, a billionaire, a scientist or whatever. But if you are doing it for the status, you will never be great. Doing hard and rare things requires practice over a long period. As they say, the path to mastery is a goal-less path. The key seems to be to put in the effort every single day without any expectation of some “end goal”. Putting yourself through the ordeal everyday evolves you and not having a goal protects you from the early disappointment that is inevitable. To be honest, running a marathon is not impossible. And I actually enjoy running 10kms. Maybe someday I will complete the 42.2kms race. But the bigger point I learnt from all this was to not be in a hurry to get things done. Choose few. Go long. Have patience.
The freedom to do things v/s the freedom from doing things
One last thing that clicked this year was that I realised my approach towards money was wrong. Till now, I never did anything for more money. I did it because it looked fun. I justified this approach by saying that I was prioritising learning over earning. But the more mature I become, the more I realise that you don’t actually have to choose between money and learning. Both can happen together.
The embarrassing thing is that I consider myself a capitalist but I don’t own any assets. I don’t have any debts too, but my cashflow is completely dependent on me working long hours. The importance of capital becomes even more stark when you try to start your own enterprise and you realise that you don’t even have a 18 month runway to run the company while you seek external funding. This severely restricts your ability to take risks.
Till now, I have used money to only up my living standards. After I achieved a certain level, I didn’t care much for a better lifestyle and hence I stopped caring for more money too. I thought money gave you the freedom to “do things” and I am already doing everything I wanted to, so I don’t need more money. Let’s focus on other things. I was wrong. Naval puts it brilliantly. Money is important not because it allows you to do a lot of things (eg partying, travelling, owning things, etc) but because it allows you to not do things that you don’t want (eg taking up bad jobs, betting on unlikely events, spending time with people or in environments you don’t want to). In my one year break, I realised how different I would have approached everything if I had at least INR 30L saved up. It is true that more money will not make you happier, but when you don’t have cash in your bank account, your whole thinking changes. You take whatever opportunity is offered to you. When you have money in bank, you do what you want to do.
If life were a game, it would not be a marathon or football or whatever else is the popular opinion. It would be a resource allocation game. If I have learnt one thing in the last decade then it is that I have sucked at this game for the last 10 years. I desperately need to up my game. I have no idea how to do it, but I will figure it out in the coming years.
What’s next?
As mentioned earlier, I have already found the direction I want to sail in. In the next 2–3 years, I plan to just focus on steadying my ship. No speed racing and no exploration, just getting 3 things right:
- Start building capital
- Keep working on capability
- Don’t lose sight of physical, mental and spiritual fitness
Read my first annual letter to understand the meaning of these 3 points.
Other than these, 2 things I will focus in 2020 itself are meeting more people in the Indian consumer tech space and travelling more. Since I was cash strapped in 2019, I broke one of the promises I made to myself while leaving college — to travel to one new country every year. In 2020, I will travel to 3. And although I was in Bangalore for the past 3 years, I never met more than 3–4 people physically outside of my workplace. I kept my neck down and worked on the problems at hand. In 2020, I plan to do physical meetings with interesting people in my 2nd and 3rd degree network.
If you are around, let’s catch up.
As a practice, I am attaching my first annual letter here.
