Category: reading list

reading list

Highlights from my Reading List – Week 8

Rahul R

Articles

  1. A letter to the 80-year-old me
    Being 30 years old, I’m thinking more and more about how it will be to get older. Not like worrying thoughts, but I really want to experience aging, notice the small things and become older in a good way. I’m starting to think more about what character I want to build and what kind of person I want to be. I want to remind myself of those thoughts when I’m 80 years old.
  2. Facebook’s Story Problem — and Opportunity
    That’s the thing about Stories, though: while more people may use Instagram because of Stories, some significant number of people view Stories instead of the Instagram News Feed, or both in place of the Facebook News Feed. In the long run that is fine by Facebook — better to have users on your properties than not — but the very same user not viewing the News Feed, particularly the Facebook News Feed, may simply not be as valuable, at least for now.
  3. Nothing Into Something
    Imagine the weight you would place on your decisions if you thought about the impact they would have on you and your offspring over the next hundred years.  This applies to not only your investments, but all of your life choices.  Why?  Because these choices will compound through the decades and into the centuries.  They will show up in your family’s wealth, in your children’s behavior, and in how you will be remembered long after you are gone.
  4. What I learned from Flipkart
    This is one of the largest transactions in e-commerce and in the internet space globally, with Walmart deploying US$16 billion to obtain an approximate 77 percent shareholding at closing. As part of this transaction, my company, Naspers, exited fully, selling our 11.18 percent stake for $2.2 billion. 

    I was fortunate enough to have had a front-row seat at Flipkart for the past six years, leading our various investment rounds and being Naspers’ appointed board director. Here are some of the key lessons that I will remember moving forward.

  5. Reinventing Education
    Nevertheless, Bezos talks about Amazon like it’s a giddy startup that just closed its Series A. “For all practical purposes, the market size is unconstrained,” says Bezos.
    If Jeff Bezos is already the world’s most feared businessperson, the prospect of him “unconstrained” should sober every corporate leader. Yes, he’s ruthless and a master of the long game, but Bezos’ greatest strength, borne out over the past few years, has been his ability to shape-shift Amazon into adjacent businesses—some of which were adjacent only in retrospect—on a massive scale.
  6. Tech’s ultimate success: Software developers are now more valuable to companies than money
    A majority of companies say lack of access to software developers is a bigger threat to success than lack of access to capital.
  7. Pinterest Is a Unicorn. It Just Doesn’t Act Like One
    Pinterest, by Mr. Silbermann’s design, is the opposite: the web’s last bastion of quaint innocence. Having de-emphasized its social media elements years ago, Pinterest aims to be a safe and happy place for inspiration, self-improvement and salted caramel cookie recipes. It also rejects Silicon Valley’s typical unicorn formula of moving fast, breaking things, chasing growth at all costs and bragging about every victory.
  8. Making Private Public
    Private companies are eschewing public markets for longer, and growing larger than they have ever before.
    In a related but tangential matter, the number of publicly traded companies in the United States has been cut in half over the last twenty years. These two facts, and they are facts, have led to to a few arguments which are far too simplistic and warrant closer examination:
    1- There aren’t enough public companies (too few IPOs)
    2- Dollars are accruing to the venture capitalists who represent wealthy investors, and therefore…
    3- Mom and pop investors are being robbed of returns
  9. The Wired Guide to Quantum Computing
    Everything you ever wanted to know about qubits, superpositioning, and spooky action at a distance.
  10. I Thrive In Chaos, Says Edelweiss CEO Radhika Gupta
    Imagine leaving a career at Wall Street, at age 25, and moving to India to start a mutual funds business; and we’re talking about the early 2000s. That’s Radhika Gupta for you. Fifteen years ago, Radhika came to India with this dream. She is now the CEO of Edelweiss Asset Management Limited, one of country’s largest mutual funds company.

 

 

reading list

Highlights from my Reading List – Week 7

Rahul R

Articles

  1. The Next 10 Years Will Be About “Market Networks”
    Market networks are also unique from a monetization standpoint. They combine the strong network effects defensibility and scalability of direct networks like LinkedIn or Facebook together with the lucrative revenue models of SaaS or marketplace businesses.
  2. The Principal Agent Problem
    The Principal Agent Problem occurs when one person (the agent) is allowed to make decisions on behalf of another person (the principal). In this situation, there are issues of moral hazard and conflicts of interest.
  3. I’ve been stuttering for 25 years and it’s the reason I became an entrepreneur
    While stuttering for many years has been something I’ve hated and been angry about, coming to terms with it has also made it clear for me, how big a positive impact it has had on my life.
  4. Want to Be More Creative? Take a Walk
    For millennia, writers and artists have said that they develop their best ideas during a walk, although some of us also do our best procrastinating then.
  5. Bezos Unbound: Exclusive Interview With The Amazon Founder On What He Plans To Conquer Next
    Nevertheless, Bezos talks about Amazon like it’s a giddy startup that just closed its Series A. “For all practical purposes, the market size is unconstrained,” says Bezos.
    If Jeff Bezos is already the world’s most feared businessperson, the prospect of him “unconstrained” should sober every corporate leader. Yes, he’s ruthless and a master of the long game, but Bezos’ greatest strength, borne out over the past few years, has been his ability to shape-shift Amazon into adjacent businesses—some of which were adjacent only in retrospect—on a massive scale.
  6. What other countries can learn from Singapore’s schools
    Where other countries often enact piecemeal and uncoordinated reforms, Singapore tries to look at the system as a whole. It invests heavily in education research. All reforms are tested, with the outcomes diligently monitored, before being rolled out. Close attention is paid to how new ideas and results should be applied in schools.
  7. Why Amazon Is The Best Strategic Player In Tech
    More than any other corporation of the Internet age, Amazon embodies the emerging culture of business strategy. 
    With Amazon though, you get the sense that you are watching a chess game unfold, in which Amazon is thinking multiple moves ahead, along several fronts. The opponents seem to fumble, rant and rave like so many headless chickens, while Amazon continues to systematically dismantle them.
    Structure follows strategy, as Alfred Chandler famously said, and you can see this most clearly with Amazon. The entire company is organized around a gigantic chess game. Every asset is a piece on the board.
  8. A Few Principles for Thinking Clearly
    Read widely, with maximum curiosity.
    Put reality first and theory last.
    Keep money and status out of it.
    Manage your identity.
    Skin in the game.
  9. Tweets Pay Off
    I don’t think I have even a speck of doubt in my mind as to why I use Twitter and why I give it a disproportionate amount of my time and attention. There’s so much negativity around Twitter. Get into a growth mindset, and you will discover Twitter is brilliant as is.
  10. The gift of use – why it’s the best way of honoring it
    My mom probably has gifts I’ve given her that sit unopened and unused. Bottles of nice perfume or an expensive dress. It’s not because she doesn’t like or value them – quite the opposite actually. It’s her impulse to treasure and “save” something special.
    But I believe that you honor something by using it, by keeping it close, by interacting with it constantly.
    It’s how I’ve approached everything from favorite pieces of jewelry to a favorite pen, to even the English language.

 

 

reading list

Highlights from my Reading List – Week 6

Rahul R

Articles

  1. When You Change the World and No One Notices
    Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood. You do something that you genuinely believe in, that you have conviction about, but for a long period of time, well-meaning people may criticize that effort … if you really have conviction that they’re not right, you need to have that long-term willingness to be misunderstood. It’s a key part of invention.
  2. Reframing entropy in business
    Once again, the key idea here is that the decay of entropy flows from chaos to order – not from order to chaos – and that the imposition of ‘order’ is itself the key driver towards decay in the usefulness of systems.
  3. What doesn’t seem like work?
    If something that seems like work to other people doesn’t seem like work to you, that’s something you’re well suited for. The stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidence they probably are of what you should do. When I was in college I used to write papers for my friends. It was quite interesting to write a paper for a class I wasn’t taking. Plus they were always so relieved.
  4. Why Being First Is Overrated.
    Today we overvalue being first. First to market. First to raise money. First to have a higher valuation. First to garner attention. Being first feels good. It gives you an undeniable sense of accomplishment, fleeting recognition and euphoric bursts of dopamine. However, after that’s all done, there is still a tremendous amount of work to do. The obsession with being first takes away from what truly matters, perfecting your craft, which is a neverending process.
  5. Ode: How to tell a great story
    It is so easy to overlook how powerful it can be to take something small and hammer away at it, year after year, without stopping. Because it’s easy to overlook, we miss the key ingredients of what caused big things to get big. How can most of Buffett’s success be attributed to what he did as a teenager? It’s so crazy, so counterintuitive. And since it’s crazy and counterintuitive we overlook the right lessons. So we write 2,000 books on how Buffett sizes up management teams when the biggest and most practical takeaway from his success is, “Start investing when you’re in third grade.”
  6. People as a Moat: What Startups Can Learn from McKinsey About Building a Strong Company
    Most companies that survive the tests of time and tide are built on a strong moat — a competitive advantage enjoyed by first movers in a particular industry. For example, back in the day, Unilever had an enviable distribution channel; IBM built unique IP. McKinsey, however, proved to be the most fascinating case study. As a management consulting, people-centric business, McKinsey lacked the traditional moat, and yet it achieved unquestionable industry dominance.
    This is where McKinsey has created one of the most formidable moats the world has seen — a talent factory that is almost impossible to replicate.
  7. Claude Shannon: How a Genius Solves Problems
    Shannon’s reasoning, however, was that it isn’t until you eliminate the inessential from the problem you are working on that you can see the core that will guide you to an answer.
    Creative thinking is a little different. It, too, makes connections, but these connections are less logical and more serendipitous, allowing for what we think of as new thinking patterns.
    One of Shannon’s go-to tricks was to restructure and contrast the problem in as many different ways as possible. This could mean exaggerating it, minimizing it, changing the words of how it is stated, reframing the angle from where it is looked at, and inverting it.
  8. Why Complexity is Different
    The key, it turns out, is figuring out how to identify which properties are important, which itself is a dynamic property of the system.
  9. Curiosity and What Equality Really Means
    Regarding people as having lives of equal worth means recognizing each as having a common core of humanity. Without being open to their humanity, it is impossible to provide good care to people—to insure, for instance, that you’ve given them enough anesthetic before doing a procedure. To see their humanity, you must put yourself in their shoes. That requires a willingness to ask people what it’s like in those shoes. It requires curiosity about others and the world beyond your boarding zone.
    Once we lose the desire to understand—to be surprised, to listen and bear witness—we lose our humanity. Among the most important capacities that you take with you today is your curiosity. You must guard it, for curiosity is the beginning of empathy.
  10. The Case for the Fat Startup
    Here is my central argument. There are only two priorities for a start-up:
    Winning the market and not running out of cash. Running lean is not an end. For that matter, neither is running fat. Both are tactics that you use to win the market and not run out of cash before you do so. By making “running lean” an end, you may lose your opportunity to win the market, either because you fail to fund the R&D necessary to find product/market fit or you let a competitor out-execute you in taking the market. Sometimes running fat is the right thing to do.

     

Books

From Third World to First World – Lee Kuan Yew

High Output Management – Andy Grove

reading list

Highlights from my Reading List – Week 5

Rahul R

Articles

    1. Bodies Remodeled for a Life at Sea
      On Thursday in the journal Cell, a team of researchers reported a new kind of adaptation — not to air or to food, but to the ocean. A group of sea-dwelling people in Southeast Asia have evolved into better divers.
    2. An alternate ending to the tragedy of the commons
      Elinor Ostrom’s work deals with common pool resource (CPR) management, for which she won a Nobel Prize in economics in 2009. She argues that current game theory doesn’t explain why some commons are, in fact, sustainably managed.
    3. Distribution vs. Innovation
      The battle between every startup and incumbent comes down to whether the startup gets distribution before the incumbent gets innovation.
    4. The Designer Who Changed Airbnb’s Entire Strategy
      At the time, like a lot of tech startups, we called the website and the app “the product” — which was both limited and limiting. Suddenly, we were looking at a journey through these sticky notes, imagining our customers booking, and we saw that the moments that mattered most were offline. This offline experience — this trip to Paris or stay in a treehouse — is what they were buying from us, not a website or an app. That’s when we started to say, “the product is the trip” and began shifting our perspective. 
    5. The Freakishly Strong Base
      It is so easy to overlook how powerful it can be to take something small and hammer away at it, year after year, without stopping. Because it’s easy to overlook, we miss the key ingredients of what caused big things to get big. How can most of Buffett’s success be attributed to what he did as a teenager? It’s so crazy, so counterintuitive. And since it’s crazy and counterintuitive we overlook the right lessons. So we write 2,000 books on how Buffett sizes up management teams when the biggest and most practical takeaway from his success is, “Start investing when you’re in third grade.”
    6. 475 KMS HIKE FROM MANALI TO LEH, THE JOURNEY OF A LIFETIME
    7. Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates
      What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year?  Try to put a number to it — 1 in 100?  1 in 10,000?  Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now.
      This startling fact was first noticed by the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz in 1825 and is now called the “Gompertz Law of human mortality.”
    8. Geoffrey West on the Life and Death of Companies
      As a biologist, he was particularly interested in scaling—the underlying laws that govern life in all forms as they grow, live, and die—and the fundamental role it plays across nature and the evolution of the universe.

      For instance, cities and companies have much in common with organisms, West said.”The question was, can that the same kind of the math and the theory be applied to cities and companies? Are there underlying laws that are constraining the underlying growth of cities and companies?”

Books

Thinking in Systems: A Primer – Donella Meadows

Shoe Dog – Phil Knight