Tag: personal development

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The Letters and Passages #1 – Room by Emma Donoghue

Note: I don’t know how many of these book reactions I’ll write. I don’t know how frequently I’ll write these either. But I do know that when I do write one, it’ll have changed my life, my thoughts… me – in a meaningful way.

The Preface

My friend, an extremely well-read fiction purist, highly recommended this book to me, a non-fiction purist, one beautiful Monday evening. She said if there was only one book I had to read when it came to fiction, it had to be this one. I asked her what it was about. She said only one word: “Perspective.”

Moreover, she prohibited me from doing any research online (as I like to do) or even reading the summary on the back cover. To date, it is the only book I’ve read not having done any homework on it whatsoever. And I’m glad I didn’t.

What I learned was much more than I could have ever hoped for. Throughout my read of Room, I had a constant reminder of what Josh Waitzkin, author, chess champion, and martial arts champion, said February this year on Episode #412 of the Tim Ferriss Show:

“When I studied Tai Chi for a year, I thought I knew what I was doing. And I thought I was really started to understand it. But after 2 years, I realized everything I thought after a year was wrong. It was just wrong. But now I understood.

And then after 4 years, I realized everything I thought after 2 years was wrong. And he went on with this story and this pattern, but now I understood. And after 8 years, everything I thought after 4 years was wrong. And now I’ve been training for 16 years; everything I thought after 8 years was wrong. And now, I finally understand…

It’s easy to think we’re in the dark yesterday, but in the light today. But we’re in the dark today too.”

Room by Emma Donoghue

I will warn that in this section, I will reveal some light spoilers. If you want to save that experience for yourself, feel free to jump to the epilogue of this post.

“‘Scared is what you’re feeling,’ says Ma, ‘but brave is what you’re doing.'” (116)

The first 100 pages were cute and endearing. Slowly, but surely, over the course of a week, I learned of the world inside an 11-by-11-foot space, from the eyes, ears, and the imagination of young Jack. To me, they were slow. Yet, each time Jack’s Ma shared one additional layer of perspective – another reference point, another anchor – I felt thrown back into square one. Seeing the 11-by-11 world again in new eyes.

The next 100 pages happened before I had a chance to blink. All before the hour was up. Yet only a mere 48 hours passed in the timeline of Jack’s world.

The final 100 pages, for the first time, I began to contextualize Jack’s world to mine. How much I take for granted. The small things. The ephemeral nature of life. But also how quickly I, like much of the world, tend to jump to conclusions when given only a fraction of the bigger picture. The me was exemplified in all the other characters in these 100 pages.

It’s a beautiful story – one I didn’t think I’d like. 10 pages in. It was just another book. 20 pages. It was just another book. 30. 40. 50. And so on. But on page 82, it went from another book to THE book.

The Epilogue

Perspective. It’s something I think the world could always use a little more of. There’s 7.8 billion people on this planet. One of eight bodies in this solar system. One of many interstellar objects and phenomena out there.

I’m writing in one of 6909 languages used in the world today. A participant in one, maybe two, of over 3800 cultures in this world. Both I’m sure are underestimations. Yet, everyone’s living a life I seemingly know nothing about.

Once again, I’m reminded of the answer one of my high-schoolmates wrote in his college application. A brilliantly concise one, to the question: What is a problem that exists in the world right now?

He wrote: “Ignorance. I know nothing about it.”

While the book doesn’t aim to answer all your existential questions, it does shed light into the simplicities and complexities in our world. And how often we tend to overlook each. Taking each as granted.

The world is in turmoil these days. A revolution of emotions. A war on beliefs. We spend so much time speaking our thoughts. Yet, not as much time listening to others’. As someone in the intelligence world once told me, “The most effective kind of communication is listening, not speaking. And listening is not just hearing.” Hearing is just letting audible sound transmit through the air. Listening is paying attention to the words and the context that follow another’s intentions.

So, I’ll end with Ma’s words on page 217. “That’s why God gave you a mouth to breathe through.”

Room, by Emma Donoghue, a book that reminded me that in exhaling I often forget to inhale.

The Letters and Passages is a series where I share my raw thoughts on the books, letters, passages, and the literature I come across. Those that inspire me. Those that change my perspective. And those that resonate the most. So much so, you might realize that the headings are in violet rather than the usual cyan blue.

Stay up to date with the weekly cup of cognitive adventures inside venture capital and startups, as well as cataloging the history of tomorrow through the bookmarks of yesterday!

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#unfiltered #30 Inspiration and Frustration – The Honest Answers From Some of the Most Resilient People Going through a World of Uncertainty

A few weeks ago, around the time I published Am I At My Best Right Now?, I started noticing more and more that my friends, colleagues, and people that I’ve met since were going through tough times. Two lost a family member. Some were laid off. Two were forced to leave this land I call home. Four broke up. Three burned out. Countless more told me they were stressed and/or depressed, and didn’t know how to escape this limbo. After I published that post, another handful of people also reached out and courageously shared the troubles they are going through now. How it’s been so hard to share with others. And yesterday, while editing this blog post, I found out that one of my high school friends had passed.

Inspiration and Frustration

During this time, I had a thought: Frustration is the absence of inspiration. There were many times in my own life when I was beating myself up because I couldn’t think of a solution. And a small percent of those times, I didn’t even bother to think of a solution since I was so engrossed in my frustration with myself.

In these unprecedented times and inspired by the conversations around me, I decided to show that we’re not alone. So, I asked people who I deeply respect and who could shed light as to what it means to be human. I asked just two questions, but they were only allowed to answer one of them:

  1. What is the one thing that inspires you so much that it makes everything else in life much easier to bear?
  2. What is stressing/frustrating you so much right now that it seems to invalidate everything else you’re doing?

In turn, they responded via email, text, or on a phone call. Of the 49 I asked, so far, 31 responded with their answers. 4 politely turned me down due to their busy schedules. Another one turned me down because she didn’t feel like she could offer value in her answer.

26 responded with what inspires them. 5 with what frustrates them. All of whom I know has been through adversity and back.

Admittedly, the hardest part about this study was how I was going to organize all these responses. Unlike the one about time allocation I did over a month ago, where I knew exactly how to organize the data before I even got all the responses, this one, I really didn’t know how to best illustrate the candor everyone shared. In fact, I would be doing a disservice to them, if reduced their honesty and courage to be vulnerable to mere numbers. So, in the end, below, I let everyone speak for themselves. Sometimes, simplicity is the best.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to making this blog post happen, including Brad Feld, Mars Aguirre, Shayan Mehdi, Thomas Owen, Chris Lyons, Mark Leon, Jamarr Lampart, Christen Nino De Guzman, Louis Q Tran, Sam Marelich, Dr. Kris Marsh, Quincy Huynh, DJ Welch, Jimmy Yue, and many, many more heroes who helped me and the world around us behind the curtains.

Continue reading “#unfiltered #30 Inspiration and Frustration – The Honest Answers From Some of the Most Resilient People Going through a World of Uncertainty”
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#unfiltered #26 Am I At My Best Right Now?

I’ve been debating for the longest time whether I should put out this post or not. Not only does it require me to “open up about the potholes“, as Jeff Wald puts it, I’m not sure how I should be feeling. Or maybe I do, but I’m just not willing to admit it to myself.

Last week, I read Brad Feld‘s post, “Are You At Your Best Right Now?“. And it was the final push that gave me the courage to write this. After all, this wouldn’t be a member of the #unfiltered series if I wasn’t sharing my raw thoughts.

Am I at my best right now?

I’ve had the long standing belief that if I’m not making any new mistakes, then I’m not taking risks.

And if I’m not taking risks, I’m not improving.

For the past 6 months of quarantine, I haven’t made any mistakes… neither ones I’m proud of nor severely regret. Half of which I believe most people could do without. Though I don’t set myself up for mistakes that I think are foolhardy from the get-go, I am not learning if I don’t make any mistakes at all. I’m not talking about mistakes that I make without a second thought of regret. Like drinking 7 cups of water today, rather than 8. Or forgetting to put up the toilet seat. Or a grammatical error in my writing.

I’m talking about mistakes that have defined, define, and will define my life’s trajectory. Inflection points that draw our life’s story on a once blank canvas.

My pursuit of ‘the best’ prior

In my first two years of college, I made many mistakes as an operator, as a friend, and to my promises. I over-promised and under-delivered. I let a friend I really respected and cared for down. To the organizations I was lucky to be a part of, I juggled too many things at once, thinking multi-tasking was an attribute of pride and prestige.

In my third year of college, I took networking to a new level. And along the way, burned bridges in my persistence and lack of awareness.

In my fourth year, drained from the relentless ego contest, I took a step back to reflect and be more candid than I gave myself the liberty to previously. In my pursuit of honesty, once again but in a different context, I didn’t consider the impact of my words with a handful of friends.

In graduating, I took a risk to not accept the offers I had on the table – some of which I know people would fight for. I chose a path that I felt I wouldn’t regret in the then amazing upside of the economy.

In the years following, I made bets to be at places, to be with people, and to learn from them that I had doubts other platforms would provide. In retrospect, some more foolish than others. Placing trust and hope that some of my friends who knew considered in ill faith.

But every time I learned.

I became a stronger person than when I went in.

Now

These days when friends, colleagues, and strangers ask “How are you doing?” or “How have you been?”, I’ve become my own worst nightmare.

“I’m fine.”

“I’m okay.”

While I’m not lying, I hate myself the moment I utter those words. First how much it’s become a knee jerk reaction. But secondly, and more importantly, how much hasn’t changed since the pandemic.

Like many of my friends and colleagues, and I’m sure, many more on this planet, I had 2020 plans. Plans to take risks and make mistakes. Unfortunately, for one reason or another, many of them have been put on a stalemate. At the same time, I know many of my friends aren’t doing well. From breakups to layoffs to the impending doom of deportation to deaths in the family, I feel like I should be the last person to complain.

In closing

I want to be clear. I’m not looking for pity here. But I want you to know. It’s okay. You’re not alone. While we all are feeling a different magnitude of emotions now, you’re not alone, when “I’m okay” belies what we’re all feeling right now. I can’t speak for others, but I am not at my best right now.

If you need someone to talk to or just someone to listen, I’m here.

Photo by Bruno van der Kraan on Unsplash

#unfiltered is a series where I share my raw thoughts and unfiltered commentary about anything and everything. It’s not designed to go down smoothly like the best cup of cappuccino you’ve ever had (although here‘s where I found mine), more like the lonely coffee bean still struggling to find its identity (which also may one day find its way into a more thesis-driven blogpost). Who knows? The possibilities are endless.

Stay up to date with the weekly cup of cognitive adventures inside venture capital and startups, as well as cataloging the history of tomorrow through the bookmarks of yesterday!

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Brand as a Moat

startup brand, moat, defense, defensibility
Photo by Keith Johnston on Unsplash

What is the underlying notion that makes this product work?

It’s the question that almost every investor, especially early-stage startup investor, tries to answer when they’re entertaining potential investments. Some close cousins include:

  • What social, economic, or political trend is enabling this technology/business to work?
  • Why will people want to continue using this product? Consciously? Subconsciously? How much will they regret not being able to use this product?
  • Why is this idea crazy good, and not just crazy?
  • Is there a predictable road to traction? Product-market fit? $1M ARR? etc.
  • Is this a scalable business?

Needless to say, when I chat with founders, their business’s defensibility often comes up. Every business – small or large – needs to be defensible. Grandma’s cookies are just that good ’cause of that ‘secret’ brown butter element. Or Sally’s lemonade stand sells better than her neighbor’s down the street since she can keep her drinks cool for longer. Just like every good medieval castle has a moat, possibly filled with alligators, every good business has to have that one (or many) unfair advantage, as they call it in B-school. Not that I ever went, but I’ve heard from friends and professors who have. And this is even more true if you want to build a scalable business.

Those who have gone generally claim that their moat is their experience at X Fortune 500 company. Those who have a technical background often claim that their moat is their IP – patents owned and pending. Neither are wrong. And frankly, there are a multitude of factors that come into play when arguing for a business’s defensibility. And most of the times, it’s a permutation of the above and more. But the purpose of this post is to focus on an often discounted notion of brand as a moat. Both the company brand and the personal brand.

Disclaimer:

I should mention that before you even consider your business’s defensibility, and subsequently, brand, first, make a damn good product. I’ve seen too many founders take that leap of faith before they even have a product. They pitch the dream of them making a better world – the company vision – before they even figure out the first steps they need to take to get there.

The only ‘exception’ to this rule, at least from a fundraising and pre-PMF perspective, is if you have an amazingly robust personal brand. Though that may help with early traction, it won’t be enough to sustain a scalable business in the long run.

The startup brand

Your startup’s brand is a collective composed of the:

  • Company mission,
  • Company vision,
  • Internal culture,
  • And, the openness and responsiveness of the team.

The vision is that ultimate dream. The mission is what you’ll do now to get to that dream. Back in college, someone I really respect put it to me like this:

“The vision is the Sun. The mission is that ladder up. You can’t get to the Sun without building a ladder. If you only stare at it, you’ll eventually blind yourself. And if you just build a ladder, or else you might up on Mars instead, poorly equipped to survive there.”

Culture is something that you can set at the beginning, but know it’ll be an evolving beast with every new hire and every new incident. What you let happen defines the new culture. Although I share my thoughts in a post earlier this year, Ben Horowitz puts it into a much better perspective in his book, What You Do is Who You Are: How to Create your Business Culture. Quite a story-filled read, especially when you’re looking for something to do at home now.

And, the above three culminates into how your team acts.

  • Do your current customers/users feel like their concerns are either addressed or at least, valued?
  • Do they feel they are a valued member of your community?
  • What is your customer satisfaction rate? NPS score?
  • How do you prioritize and act on customer feedback?
  • Are your users engaged? How do you reengage them, if they become inactive?
  • For apps, what are they saying on the App Store/Play Store?
  • And, how are new customers hearing about your product? What do they hear? What are their explicit and implicit assumptions when using your product?

Why it Matters

Together the 4 elements answer the fundamental questions:

  1. Why would a potentially great customer want to use your product?
  2. Why would a potentially great hire want to join your company?

In the past few months, many VCs have been shifting their investment focus from consumer and towards enterprise/SaaS. There’s the argument that consumers are (1) more expensive to acquire (increasing CAC; the average number of apps a person downloads a day is zero), and (2) harder to retain. (For a more in-depth explanation, I would recommend you to check out the “Consumer App Conundrum” section here.) Aka, it’s more competitive than ever in the consumer markets. When we get closer to perfect competition over a saturated market seeking attention, having a great product just isn’t enough anymore. When some of the most active and vocal consumers happen to be people on the younger spectrum (millennials and Gen Zs), to fight for their attention, you need a brand that resonates with them on causes they care about – whether it’s diversity or climate change or another social cause.

We see this notion affecting two other verticals: the public sector and enterprise.

  • The privatization of X (let X be education, healthcare, transportation, etc. for all that were empirically public sector functions)
  • The consumerization of enterprise

For the purpose of this piece, let’s look at the consumerization of enterprise. What does that mean? Before enterprise sales worked from a top-down approach. A founder of an enterprise/SaaS startup pitches to a senior executive at a Fortune 500 (or similar) company. And the executive makes the call and the budget allocation towards their team’s usage of said product.

Now, many startups/companies, like Slack, Trello, Lever, and Soapbox, are taking the bottom-up approach, garnering brand loyalty among the people who will be/are using the product itself. And I predict that’ll be so in the near future for Superhuman, the fastest email client, and Woven, my favorite calendar app, as well. After all, progress happens at the most junior level. If you take it in relation to a tech startup of 200 in its growth phase, the founders or executives can make a plan and set deadlines. But if your most junior developer isn’t working on it, the whole business halts to a stop. All this makes me quite bullish on products in the low-code/no-code space, as well as in towards the future of work.

Moreover, this has led enterprise products to be heavily personalized, constantly updating, and has paved the way to multi-modal business models (i.e. subscription and pay-per-use). All this maximizes user satisfaction, which in turn affects their productivity, and transitively, the business flow.

Although the job market looks wildly different now than it did 3 months ago, when I assume the average founder is looking for cash preservation over growth, you still should be cognizant about the latter going forward.

Your Personal Brand

Your personal brand as a founder, or just as a professional, really matters. If you are a founder or thinking about becoming one, start building a public voice. Get people excited about you and what you’re all about.

Why?

Personal brands are extremely scalable and have built-in virality. You put one post out. Some percent of your followers engage with your content by liking or commenting. Then either by social media’s algorithms or by their innate excitement, they’ll share your content with their friends. Subsequently, new folks discover you and your content. And this becomes a virtuous loop, or network effects, as we call it, that helps get you scalable traction. This is why celebrities, like Dr. Dre and Maisie Williams, and their ventures garner quite a bit of traction among consumers and among investors. This is also why influencer marketing has been so bullish over the past few years.

At some point in your company’s lifespan, your personal brand will become the company brand. And that’ll become either shining beacon or the downfall of your company. More than just the followers you have on social media and in public, you are judged by everyone constantly on your aptitude and behaviors. How open, conscientious, agreeable, extroverted, and neurotic are you? (Yes, I took the 5 traits from the Big 5/OCEAN test.) Each and more have an impact on your personal brand. If we look at the culture behind Facebook, we see how large of an imprint Zuckerberg has on it. For Apple, Jobs.

In closing

The best thing about brands as a moat is that it’s effectively free! But both take years of work in building. As someone on the investing side, I love stellar brands. And it’s one of the elements of a business I weigh heavily on for its potentiality in network effects, summarized in the “Why you?” component of my NTY investment thesis (why Now, why This, why You).

Hmmmm, now thinking about it, personal brand may be the biggest reason I’ve been changing my handwashing habits in the past week… after watching Gordon Ramsay, Alton Brown, and Conan O’Brien‘s tutorials on it.

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What Does Personal Progress Look Like?

In the past two weeks, through conversations on my birthday resolution and what my success metrics are, my friends inspired me to write this post . That’s when you know I’m in Silicon Valley! Or startup Disneyland.

So, how do I measure my progress? This is by no means proprietary or original. In an annual email exchange, my mentor had me ask myself one question:

How ashamed do I feel about myself one year prior?

Although not comprehensive, I find it to be a great litmus test for evaluating personal development. If I don’t scoff at my former self for being dumb, I’ll know I haven’t progressed. At the same time, I put myself in the shoes of my future self, abstracting myself from my status quo, and ask two questions:

  1. What aspects of my past self am I embarrassed to see?
  2. What strengths of my past self would I find extremely unimpressive to show off?

This acts as an ego check and helps me look at myself more objectively.

I started this practice two years ago where I keep a checklist (on Google Keep) of wins I keep track of throughout the year. It included any magnitude of achievement, like:

  • A successful deal close;
  • Joining as a guest on a podcast;
  • An art piece I’m proud of drawing;
  • Cooking a meal that pleased my parents;
  • And, sleeping 8 hours a night.

Then one week prior to my birthday, Google Calendar reminds me to go through that checklist and review what I still feel proud of and what I find to be ‘normal’. I check all the ones I no longer gain contentment from. All that’s left are “My Proudest Moments at Age XX”. Then my goal for the following year is to make those moments feel ‘normal’. I’ll get to this step eventually. But I plan to review the annual lists every 5 years to see if I still feel the same.

In a way, this blog is also designed for me to reflect on earlier iterations of myself through my writing. As much as this one question has enlightened me, I hope it may act as your heuristic for your growth.

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