Aswath Krishnan

Nearly all companies ossify as they grow larger. Product, organization, and operations become more unwieldy, more complex, less agile, and less innovative, Newer and nimbler competitors slowly steal market share, and the cycle continues.  The most resilient and durable companies - say, Apple, Facebook, Google, United Healthcare, LVMH, etc. have one essential quality to outweigh the forces of ossification - powerful and inherent flywheels to get better and more competitive as they scale.  These “accumulating advantages” can come in many forms - as network effects, economies of scale, brand and marketing efficiencies, IP, data, deepening product or operational expertise, capital, regulatory capture, etc. Google’s search becomes better as more people search and more publishers follow Google’s standards; Facebook gets better with more people and content; LVMH’s brands become more popular with more customers; and United Healthcare can offer bigger networks and better pricing. ...

We are out of the ZIRP era, and Ubers and Lyfts are now back to costing the same as a taxi ride. As I’m taking more taxi rides, I’m noticing that taxi drivers drive much more recklessly than rideshare drivers and are also more distracted on their phones. Car cleanliness and politeness is also a hit or miss.  I theorize the main driver of this difference is feedback. Rideshare drivers get a feedback rating after every single ride and are de-platformed if their rating goes below a threshold (I believe 4 or even 4.5 stars). Taxi drivers have no such feedback loop.  You can similarly compare restaurants and medical providers. Restaurants are a brutally hard industry - ones that don’t get consistently good reviews from patrons and critics fail inevitably. This also improves the overall quality of restaurants that do survive. Hospitals and doctors, on the other hand, have no such feedback loop. Patients have no good place to check a provider's ratings or even know if a doctor is tre...

Many people lament about Elon Musk's outspoken views on government inefficiency and his plans for DOGE. They point to how government programs and regulations are helpful, and how his estimates for cost savings are overblown. They are technically right , but Elon is directionally right . It's more likely than not that the government has lots of wasteful spending and unnecessary bureaucracy. In closed systems — predictable and well-understood environments — being technically correct can lead to optimal outcomes. Precision matters when variables are limited and controllable, and the consequences are dire. Engineers designing a bridge, for example, must calculate loads and stresses with exactness to ensure safety. But most of the world is not a closed or critical system. It is an open, infinite, and inherently chaotic environment. Variables are countless, and conditions change rapidly and unpredictably. In such a world, you find answers and progress by doing stuff . Consider how su...

Much like life itself, most things have a beginning, middle, and end. Consider a song, a fashion trend, the rise and fall of civilizations, the quiet evolution of a relationship, or the flow of a regular day. All of them follow the natural arc of existence—the S-curve. Beginnings rarely rush. They are slow, clumsy, and uncertain. When they find a rhythm, it gives way to a glorious middle - a period of exciting growth and flourishing. Eventually, even the best days and songs, slow down and fade. While the speed and length of these phases may differ, the pattern holds true for most things. Though the ends poignantly clear the stage for fresh beginnings, you can't deny the personal impact of these S-curves. Most of us are vulnerable to the emotional and pragmatic fallouts of an exciting or lucrative thing slowly and suddenly disappearing. When a once cherished hobby or career is no longer fulfilling, a profitable product turns obsolete, or a thrilling relationship loses its spark, it ...

Many boo-ed and ridiculed Zuckerberg when he pivoted the company to VR and pummelled billions of dollars into it. The lukewarm reception of Oculus and Quest added fuel to their naysaying.  But that didn't stop Zuck. Today, after years of persistence, criticism, and perceived failures, Meta launched a product and form factor that is showing this vision has legs to be as ubiquitous as smartphones, and perhaps even more useful.  If you take a step back, the vision is easy to get behind - of course, it'd be much better to augment reality with digital artifacts instead of staring into 5-inch phones. Of course! And the company that invents it would herald a significant platform shift and can benefit immensely, as Apple has from smartphones. The challenges are mainly capital for R&D and technical feasibility, which Meta has realized through many iterations.  It is better to follow difficult but obviously true and impactful visions, than easy but low conviction and reward pro...

I love a good metaphor, and someone shared the perfect video metaphor to capture an entrepreneur's journey:  A fish escapes a tank, makes a treacherous journey on land, and finally ends up in open water.  What caught me most by surprise when I tried being an entrepreneur for the first time was the fish-in-land feeling. I have heard colorful descriptions from entrepreneurs about how this is like chewing glass or jumping off a cliff and making a plane on the way down. But nothing prepares you for that level of discomfort, fear, and uncertainty than actually doing it .  Nearly everyone just stays in the tank. Most of those who do escape don’t survive the journey. For the few that take the risk and make it, a  nice river (or ocean) , significantly better than a tank, awaits. 

As a leader and manager, you have responsibilities to fulfill, outcomes to achieve, and personal boundaries to protect.   You can try to do that with obnoxious aggression. But it’s unkind and unpleasant, and people around you will leave you or never rise to their potential. You may be able to go fast, but you won’t go far.  If you swing the other way and be a nice pushover, you will not achieve your goals and be taken advantage of. The tolerance for mediocrity, lack of progress, and bottled-up frustration will eventually catch up to the people who work with you, your customers, your performance, and your business.  There's a better way - be firm on standards, but be fair, kind, and respectful. You can't fake this. You must authentically and deeply care for the mission, business, quality of work, and yourself, and for the well-being and success of the people you work with.  Appreciate and reward great work. Give everyone a fine reputation to live up to. Be straig...

In our recent renovation project, the contractor brought in a new tile guy they hadn’t worked with before. Unfortunately, the guy turned out to be a complete amateur and botched the job. This misstep was avoidable with some straightforward practices: Vetting thoroughly. Check their track record, skills, and references. A quick but deliberate evaluation can save a lot of headaches later. Clarifying expectations upfront. Make sure they understand the scope and standards of the work. A simple conversation about their approach can reveal a lot. Testing with small projects first. Start with low-stakes tasks to gauge their ability before handing them the keys to something bigger. Providing active oversight. Supervise early and often, especially at the beginning. Offer feedback and course corrections as they go. Here’s the key principle: When you delegate, you’re not off the hook. You’re still responsible for the outcome. If they underperform and you didn’t manage them effectively, the ri...

My entire career has been in software, and I have taken it for granted. Only when I recently started considering brick-and-mortar businesses, I truly appreciated the magnificence of software businesses.  If you know how to code, you can create and sell software from your bedroom, with little investment or risk. You don’t have to sign leases, buy expensive tools or materials, or hire many people. It's so much easier and quicker to go from idea to MVP.  Software also has tremendous leverage. Once written, it can serve millions of customers with little marginal cost and high margins. Aside from dealing with the occasional fires, you are free to direct your time and resources to innovate (or chill). Compare that to running a restaurant where you (or an employee) have to bake a pizza for every single customer, over and over again.  And the reach of software is limitless! You can live in an idyllic village in India, like the CEO of Zoho, and sell your software to the Fortune 50...

"Sparks of inspiration" is an astute metaphor. A spark can turn into a glorious fire, but only if it immediately gets in contact with some kindling, which can burn and produce enough heat for bigger logs to light up.  Think of how many times you have had compelling ideas, but didn't act on them. Most of our sparks of inspiration just die, without kindling and logs. Eventually, we even stop paying attention to the sparks and the sparks just stop. Why bother?  What a tragedy it is to not follow our inspiration and to not engage our uniquely extraordinary capacity for creation!  I have my share of unrequited inspiration, but I like how a recent spark turned into a fire.  Last week, I had an idea to build a newsletter that automatically summarizes top Hacker News posts and comments. A spark!  If I had tried to develop a full program to do it with my rusty programming skills, it'd have been too overwhelming and a slog, and the spark would have died. Before throwing i...

I shut down a startup within a year and closed a position on a stock within a day. In retrospect, I folded earlier than I should have.  Many high-reward business and life opportunities start as bleak, lonely, and hard but pay off over the long run.  You don't have to play these games. You can fare well with low/mid-risk-reward opportunities. But if you do decide to play these games, you might as well play to win. Don't half-ass them!  The only way to win is if you commit for a long time. You can only commit if you have (a) deep belief, passion, and rationale in the thesis, outcomes, project, and yourself, (b) staying power to sustain losses and bad case scenarios, and (c) emotional resilience to weather failures and naysayers In my recent, prematurely ended ventures, I was missing more than one of these factors. 

There's no surfing without waves.  Surfers need skills to balance, maneuver, and ride the waves as they break towards the shore. But it's as important for them to have waves! And to know where and when the waves will be swelling.  Business is no different.  We all know how Bill Gates and Steve Jobs surfed the microprocessor wave to create humongous businesses around personal computers, operating systems, and applications. That caused the internet wave, which shifted consumer behaviors online and led to the creation Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Youtube, and many popular web businesses. Then came the smartphone wave, which led to the rise of the likes of Uber, Instagram, and Robinhood. The fourth-degree and third decade ripples of the humble microprocessor led to an explosion of creator tools and businesses like Canva. All this explosion of digitized knowledge, data, and compute has resulted in the latest AI wave.  The largest opportunities emerge from shifts in ...

You can make fully rational decisions in a small, closed, predictable universe.  But most situations aren't that. There are too many variables, unknowns, and unpredictability. The source and purpose of life itself are on shaky grounds, causing any rationality on top of it to be baseless outside a defined scope. Evolution through randomness, not logic, is the nature of our reality.  Most big and hard decisions are based on some rationality but largely by instinct or circumstances. When a decision succeeds, there's post hoc rationalization and further success. When it fails, as most do, they disappear and are forgotten. This gives an illusion of a rational and deterministic universe.  The best you can do is reason and decide on the high-order bits and then go with your gut for the rest. Make bets proportional to your risk tolerance and resources, make multiple bets, bias toward action, and course-correct along the way. As John Von Neumann said, "Truth…is much too complicate...

Our contractor hired a tiler who quoted 1/4th of the usual price for our remodel. It seemed like a GREAT deal until 3 days later.  We noticed many fundamental problems - the tiles weren’t lining up, the spacing was uneven and incorrect, the shower floor wasn’t sloped correctly, and one of the installed tiles was cracked.  So the contractor had to bring in a more competent and expensive tiler who had to undo and redo the entire work, get another handyman to spend hours cleaning up the tiles for use again, and buy some new tile as well. Overall, it cost us more money, time, and frustration than hiring a more reputed and expensive tiler upfront.  The lesson here isn’t to pay more. Not everything that’s expensive is good and not everything that’s cheap is bad; sometimes you can get a good deal. It’s to prioritize quality and risk as well when making consequential purchases or hiring decisions. 

We are in the middle of a bathroom remodeling project. There are so many possibilities, it's an expensive project with long-term implications, and I had never done something like this before, so I was having a tough time figuring out the layout. Though warranted, I realized I was struggling more than necessary because of 3 reasons:  1. Not having clarity on goals and priorities. We wanted a better bathroom, but we hadn't really articulated and ranked our main priorities. When we decided that our main goals were a larger shower, access from the bedroom, and a larger vanity, it was so much easier to come up with options and rank them against the clear criteria. This simple and nifty trick has helped me with every major decision like picking jobs or buying a home.   2. Not having clarity on constraints.  When I understood that we couldn't place the vanity in a spot because of a window, or place a shower in another spot because of the low ceiling, it eliminated more opt...

Wayfair announced their 3rd or 4th big round of recent layoffs last week. The CEO's email explained how they are trying to "right size" the organization in the face of a tough economic situation. Simply put, their online furniture retail business isn't panning out to be as large of an opportunity as they were hoping it to be and they are now painfully rolling back. They aren’t alone - there have been over 300,000 layoffs in tech since last year. Many startups have dropped to a fraction of their previous values or shut down completely.  2015 to 2021 was a hype cycle of irrational exuberance in tech. We had seen huge successes from the previous wave of internet and mobile startups, like Facebook. Every startup and founder imagined they could also 10 or 100x their business. VCs and their LPs were willing to invest millions at extraordinary valuations, blinded by FOMO and free money. There’s smart risk and there’s stupid greed. Startups could sell $10 bills for $9, and s...

Every few weeks, I stumble upon yet another think piece warning against starting B2C software businesses. The argument often boils down to this: B2C is a financial black hole—a worse gamble than a lottery ticket. Even Y Combinator, the quintessential startup breeding ground, seems to have shifted its focus toward B2B, a trend that many see as a reflection of market realities. But let’s pause here. Doesn’t this advice feel... odd? Take a look around your home. Most of what you own—your clothes, gadgets, kitchenware, and maybe even that Peloton collecting dust—are B2C products. Your credit card bill? It’s dominated by B2C expenses: groceries, subscriptions, travel, and entertainment. If consumers are spending so much, why is B2C suddenly considered an entrepreneurial minefield? Let’s unpack this. The Real Scope of B2C Success First, the anti-B2C sentiment overwhelmingly targets software startups , not physical products or services. And even within software, it tends to exclude "hybr...

The CEO of Coinbase shared this advice to pre-PM fit startup founders and it really resonated:  https://twitter.com/StartupArchive_/status/1738905209093468459 Low certainty pursuits and decisions, like your life purpose or philosophy, career or startup idea to pursue, who’d be an ideal life partner, where would you like to live, etc. are often the most impactful and the most challenging aspects of our lives.  They are unique in the sense you don’t have enough information to make a rational choice. The options and their outcomes are unknowns. So we can get stuck in analysis-paralysis trying to figure them out intellectually. But that doesn’t solve the core problem - the lack of information and certainty. The way to get more information is to act - go explore, ask around, and try things out. Keep an open mind, your cycles fast and, learn from them.  The best way to see through the fog is to take a few steps forward into the unknown. 

  I applied for a grant this year and the granters shared that 90% of the applications were submitted just 2 days before the deadline!  This isn't uncommon. The majority of people are deadline-driven. We do a chore whenever it's urgent and absolutely necessary (unless it's a recurring habit or routine). This is why creating urgency and setting a deadline is key for your own personal endeavors and when you expect others to do something. But our brains aren't that easy to trick. They know when a deadline is fake. So you need to make it as real and consequential as possible.  This is why retailers have limited-time offers and sales - to force a buying decision or miss out on a great offer. This is why it's important to set a target response date whether you are fundraising or hiring someone. This is why you are more likely to succeed if you sign up for half marathons or business targets.  Deadlines convert something that's only important to something urgent and imp...

A few years ago, two different friends of mine started startups with nearly the same idea - a coaching/mentorship marketplace for professionals. They had similar backgrounds and teams. Their products also were functionally identical. One friend has shuttered the business, and the other seems to be growing strong. How did that happen? The friend who's still in the game was heavily focused on building a social following and community. She did multiple LinkedIn posts a week, attended events, met people 1:1, and hosted events. Eventually, she developed a community of over 50,000 professionals. She knew the community was the heart of the business and started with a community-first approach. She was also good at it and enjoyed doing it. The other friend was simply focused on building the software product. He was also more introverted and didn't enjoy posting publicly or organizing communities.  A lot of tech founders make the critical mistake of assuming that building a startup means...