Things I believe

This one is simple.

I genuinely believe most people stop too early. Things can look completely dead right before they start working: businesses, careers, relationships, ideas, yourself.

That doesn’t mean blindly doing the same thing forever. Change the plan. Change the product. Change the approach. Take a break if you have to.

But if something genuinely matters to you, don’t give up easily.

I’ve had enough moments where things looked completely fucked and somehow worked out later to believe this very deeply.

You can spend three months thinking about whether an idea will work.

Or spend three days building the simplest version and find out.

Reality is usually much more useful than your assumptions.

Building is not enough.

You can make something incredible. If nobody knows it exists, nothing happens.

If you’re building a business, learn how to sell. Not sleazy selling. Understand people. Understand their problems. Explain why what you made matters. Ask for money.

That skill will save you again and again.

A great product with no distribution is still invisible.

An audience. A community. Partnerships. Sales. SEO. Content. Word of mouth. Relationships.

These compound.

Distribution is not something you add after building the product. It is part of the product.

I don’t think networking is collecting phone numbers.

The strongest relationships I have came from actually doing something with someone: helping them, building together, solving something or showing up when there was nothing in it for me.

Relationships compound too.

Money matters. Obviously.

But how you treat someone matters just as much.

Give people ownership. Give credit. Listen. Be transparent. Don’t make someone feel small just because you happen to be paying their salary.

People remember respect much longer than they remember a ₹5,000 difference in salary.

I’ve ignored my gut while hiring more times than I should have. Usually because the resume looked good, or because replacing someone felt painful.

If very early on you repeatedly feel that someone isn’t right for the team, pay attention.

Be fair. Be respectful. But don’t drag obvious mistakes for six months.

Technology keeps increasing how much one good person can do. AI is accelerating that even more.

I would rather have five excellent people who care deeply than fifty people waiting for instructions.

I like keeping burn low. I don’t like spending money just because startups are supposed to.

But some things buy back huge amounts of time: good tools, good people, better hardware, a better working environment.

Spend aggressively on things that genuinely increase output. Cut aggressively on things that don’t.

Founders love saying, “I’ll take money later.” Sometimes that is necessary.

But you also have a life. Parents. Rent. Loans. Health. Relationships. Personal goals.

If the company survives while your entire personal life falls apart, that probably wasn’t a great trade.

This is something I’m still bad at.

When work gets intense, health is the easiest thing to push aside. Sleep later. Workout tomorrow. Eat whatever. Keep working.

The problem is eventually your body sends you the invoice.

Building anything for a long time requires energy. Treat health like infrastructure.

A billion-dollar company is cool. So is having control over your time.

I’m increasingly interested in businesses that give you freedom: to choose, to experiment, to take care of people, to walk away and to work because you want to.

I like money. Pretending otherwise is stupid.

Money solves a lot of problems. But mostly what I want money to buy is optionality: time, security, experiences, the ability to say no and the ability to take care of family.

After a point, the scoreboard itself gets boring.

A lot of my life has happened because I said yes slightly before I knew what I was doing.

You figure things out. Most people are figuring things out.

The ones who move usually just start earlier.

Mistakes are inevitable. Slow mistakes are expensive.

Try something. Find out it is wrong. Admit it. Fix it. Move.

Protecting your ego is much more expensive than admitting you fucked up.

A full calendar feels productive. Twenty Slack conversations feel productive. Seven meetings feel productive.

Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is sit alone for two hours and solve the actual problem.

When there are two reasonable options and no obvious answer, I usually prefer doing something.

You get new information by moving. You rarely get new information by staring at Notion.

Being nice and being kind aren't always the same.

Sometimes being kind is telling someone the thing nobody else wants to say. Sometimes it is firing someone instead of dragging things out. Sometimes it is saying no.

You can be direct without being an asshole.

The internet makes the world surprisingly small.

People remember: Did you do what you said? Did you pay on time? Did you disappear when things went wrong? Did you take credit for someone else's work? Did you help when you didn't have to?

Protect your reputation. It takes years to build and five minutes to destroy.

Life is too short to spend twelve hours a day with people you dislike.

Talent matters. But so does energy.

I want to build with people I respect and genuinely enjoy being around.

Strong opinions are useful. Being emotionally attached to them isn't.

New information should be allowed to change your mind.

Including everything on this page.

This one took me time.

Companies change. Co-founders leave. Products fail. Markets move. You are still you.

Build something you care about deeply. Just leave enough of yourself outside it that you can survive if it disappears.

This sounds stupidly obvious. But somehow ambition makes people forget it.

A lot of your life is going to happen while you're trying to reach whatever goal you've picked.

If you hate every day on the way there, maybe the destination isn't worth that much.