Aswath Krishnan

They used to say you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. That was before the internet hijacked your attention span and filled your brain with digital sludge. Today, your closest companions aren’t friends, mentors, or thoughtful voices. They're algorithmically boosted, attention-seeking strangers yelling into the Internet void—clickbait journalists, TikTok dancers, Twitter thinkbois, clout-chasing grifters, promiscuous influencers, silly comedy Reelers, and conspiracy-peddling uncles in WhatsApp group chats. In short: idiots. And the worst part? They’re shaping you. Your brain—like an AI model—is plastic. Moldable. Continuously trained on whatever data you feed it. And right now, you’re feeding it junk. Doomscroll long enough and you’re not just consuming idiocy—you’re becoming it. Look at your feed. Really look. Out-of-context quotes. Shallow outrage. Celebrity gossip no one will remember in 48 hours. Fake experts selling fake solutions. Outrage bai...

Longevity is having its moment, thanks to the growing influence of thought leaders like Bryan Johnson, Peter Attia, and Andrew Huberman. Yet, it’s an unfortunate term, often misunderstood and criticized. For many, it seems like a futile and even vain fight against death, a sacrifice of the present day for questionable benefits in the far-off future, or dragging out life into decades riddled with frailty, dependence, and pain. It’s a PR problem for what is actually an essential and transformative idea. The real goal of this movement isn’t about living longer or defying death. It’s about staying younger and healthier, and reaping the benefits now. Our physical health peaks in our late 20s and begins to decline after 30. Staying younger means maintaining vitality, lucidity, resilience, and avoiding disease and pain every day. It’s less about stretching life to 120 and more about feeling 25—even at 30, 50, or beyond.  Living longer and staving off death are simply side effects of stayi...

Roman politicians had a clever formula for controlling political unrest: panem et circenses—“bread and circuses.” By offering free food and entertainment, they kept the population distracted, too preoccupied to think or challenge the status quo. Sadly, this same tactic is alive today, but on a much grander scale. Both adults and children have fallen into a cycle of constant distraction, filling every spare moment with mindless phone scrolling or TV watching. We consume sloppy, superficial content and are stuck in an incessant stimulus-response loop that leaves no room for fertile boredom, mind wandering, deep exploration and work—the very conditions that lead to connection with self, original thought, deeper understanding and unique insights, inner peace, meaningful action, and exceptional outcomes. Even life’s essentials—sleep, exercise, hobbies, chores, and relationships—have been displaced by screens.  We have become half-present zombies, with foggy brains and attention spans re...

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...

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...

The modern American house is a miracle. The richest kings from 500 years ago would give up their palaces to live in a middle-grade townhome with taps that dispense instant hot water, abundant electricity and lighting, and centralized heating and cooling systems.  Until I saw the innards of my house during a recent remodeling project, I took it for granted. I'm sharing a few basics about this marvel I learned.  Let's start with the city infrastructure that makes this possible. Three main pipes come into your house from the public system - water, electricity, and gas (not always). Each pipe connects to the main line on the street, through a meter and a shutoff switch. And one pipe - the sewer - leaves the house and connects to the sewer line.  The water pipe connects first to the water heater and splits into two - a hot and cold line, which then flows through to the faucets, toilets, and showers in the house. This is how nearly every tap and shower in an American house disp...

 The secret to innovation... ...is to tackle a very specific problem. Obsessively, deeply, and excellently.  Given the vastness of human knowledge already, there probably isn't much low-hanging fruit of discovery in most areas (the circle isn't uniform as depicted, so it may be lower in some areas than others). So innovation needs depth.  Specific innovations and deep understandings of specific problems can possibly evolve into broad truths or innovations. But you are less likely to go deep and innovate if you are starting off broad.  Notes 1. There's a valid counterargument that broad knowledge across domains can help spark innovation through a general understanding of the world and by translating ideas from one domain to another. I have a center in the middle to represent a broad understanding. It's possible that 2 or 3 areas of focus might be better than 1, but I doubt 10 areas of focus (is that even focus?) is better than 1.  2. This was inspired by listenin...

Traditional software simply executes explicit instructions provided by Human Intelligence. This blog is powered by software. And like most software we use, it functions based on explicit instructions. When you are on a blog post, the code explicitly specifies to deliver content from a CMS or database that's tied to the blog post and then styles it as per explicit HTML and CSS-based instructions. When you are on the home page, the code explicitly asks to display the list of 50 recent blog posts from the database.  This software is really useful as it can execute more precisely, quickly, cheaply, and on a larger scale than humans. But it is also simply doing what the human developer explicitly instructed it to do.  Enter - Software powered by Artificial Intelligence. Human instructions not needed.  Let's take this ChatGPT Plugins demo.  ChatGPT is able to:  Create a meal plan Generate a visual of the meal Shop for the ingredients Tweet about it.  No explicit ...

I don't plan to fill my blog with AI-generated content but felt this was pretty interesting to share.  AI progress can accelerate exponentially if they help humans make it better. Then AI gets better and helps humans make it even better, and so on, until it can make itself better, eventually leading to singularity and superintelligence.  In this prompt, I asked it to take cues from biological intelligence to come up with ideas to improve AI. I'm realizing that it's a good prompt pattern to ask AI to combine influences from different fields to solve a problem, since that's how a lot of good ideas and inventions are generated, and that isn't easy for humans to do.  Prompt:  Imagine you are developing an intelligence. It's still nascent, but you want to accelerate its powers. what would we do? look at examples from evolution and biological intelligence development. for e.g. humans got some brain capabilities like imagination, and also opposable thumb and tools and ...

An age of unparalleled peace, joy, love, creativity, and discovery for all of humanity. Fueled by an abundance of wisdom, resources, science, technology, labor; and elimination of all suffering, friction, and bottlenecks.  Made possible by the invention of benevolent superintelligence. *** Picture this day in your life.   You wake up feeling like your best self - well-rested, lucid, energetic, and joyful. You are surrounded by people you want to be with, also in the same state of bliss.  What's on the agenda for today? Anything you want! You have no chores, commitments, or worries.  Surf on a tropical beach with friends and family, both alive and passed? Granted, you are there. Don't know how to surf? No problem. You are going to learn it from the best coach or use an assisted board.  Hungry? You are served delicious and nutritious dishes invented just for you.  Feeling unwell or tired? You get diagnosed and treated in no time.  Need some inspiration o...

See Part 1 discussion on how to generate ideas here . This covers how to execute on ideas and how to take care of yourself Generated by Bing GPT chat, with no edits.  Part 2: How to execute on ideas This is Bing. I can generate a conversation between Paul Graham, Sam Altman, Garry Tan, Jessica Livingston, and Michael Seibel on how to work on startup ideas after you have identified 2 or 3. Here is an example of how they might talk: Paul: Hi everyone. Thanks for joining me today to share some insights on how to work on startup ideas after you have identified 2 or 3. I think this is a common challenge for many founders who are trying to find product-market fit. Jessica: Absolutely. I think it's important to remember that the very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing⁴. Sam: That's right. And once you have a few ideas that meet those crit...

Generated by Bing GPT chat, with no edits.  This is a possible conversation between Paul Graham, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sam Altman where they discuss and build on each other's principles for coming up with startup ideas.  Paul: Hi Mark and Sam, thanks for joining me today. I thought it would be interesting to talk about how we approach startup ideas and what we've learned from our experiences. Mark: Sure, sounds good. I'm always curious to hear how other founders think about startups. Sam: Me too. I think there's a lot of value in sharing our perspectives and insights. Paul: Great. Well, let me start by saying that I think the way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself . Mark: I agree with that. That's how Facebook started. I wanted a way to connect with my friends at Harvard and see what they were up to. I didn't think of it as a startup idea at first. It was just somethin...

The majority of us get our news and along with it, our world view, morality, opinions, and daily furies, from scrolling the social feeds across Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Google, and others. Given the amount of exposure, we think media reflects reality. I'm convinced that is absolutely not true.  There were a couple of recent stories that made me realize how lopsided and low-quality social media is.  Recently, Eric Adams got nominated for mayor of New York City. If you are on Twitter, you may have not even heard of him because of his nearly absent social media presence and measly sub-100K following. You'd have assumed that Andrew Yang, who ended up fourth in the election with just a fraction of the votes, is going to be the obvious nominee because of the #yanggang fame with 2M fervent followers.  Another recent study revealed that just 12 people were responsible for the majority of COVID-19 vaccine-related misinformation! If you are looking to get a ba...

Edtech is an interesting and inspiring space, but very difficult to crack. I say that being familiar with and passionate about the space. I started my career as a teacher, at a new school for entrepreneurs, where our goal was to unbundle a 4 year CS + Business degree into a very practical 1-year entrepreneurship course. Then, a few years down the line, I created a learning app to help people remember what they learn, which led to me joining Quizlet, one of the most popular education apps used by 50M+ students every month and a $1B company, at an early stage.   Founders who want to start an education business are often good students who went to good universities, are really passionate about learning, and want to make education more interesting, exciting, and less broken. That is a wonderful ideal and attitude but often doesn't lead to successful business outcomes. Because for the majority of people, education is much more utilitarian. Education is a means to an end. It is a ne...

I'm enjoying writing and reading on my new Apple Pencil + iPad. The beauty of the iPad is how much it feels like a book. The Pencil and finger on surface feel much more natural than 1-step-removed interfaces mouses or keyboards. The UI is clean and fake constructs like windows, tabs or tool bars are all muted.  It transforms into a blank slate where you can create or a paper that you read.  The creator and the content shine, everything else is invisible. The ultimate technology is invisible. They are tools that empower users but get out of the way.  In the words of Steve Jobs: “And it’s the same with Toy Story. The audience isn’t gonna care about the Pixar animation system, they’re not gonna care about the Pixar production system, they’re not gonna care about anything–except what they will be able to judge for themselves, and that’s the end result, which they can appreciate without having to understand what went into it, what went into creating it. And that, I love."