What does it mean to be confident, or feel confident, or have confidence?
There seem to be so many contexts.
I had the insight recently that confidence is in how much knowledge your brain thinks it has of what will happen in the future.
In other words, “I know this is what will happen” or “I know this is the truth we will discover” is the only, fundamental source of all kinds of confidence.
You feel unconfident about driving a car in the mountains, or about going up to a beautiful girl in the subway and saying hi, or about a martial arts competition, because you don’t know what will happen. The more you know or think you know, the more confident you feel.
“I will steer the car and it will stay in control and I will get through the mountains without issue.”
“I will walk up to my opponent, and I’m most likely going to beat them because of X or Y.”
“I will say hi to that girl and we will have a lovely interaction; at worst, nothing bad will happen to me, I will feel safe and happy throughout the day.”
The different effective ways of acquiring confidence, whether it’s to manipulate your brain using visualizations and affirmations, or through sheer action and collecting practical experience, or through diligent study and preparation, all have the same basis.
They give you the sense that you can predict the future in that area. It also goes to show why confidence is so subjective. Nobody can be confident about everything.
You may be confident about going on dates women but not about picking stocks (or vice-versa), because with one you can predict the likely outcome, but not with the other.
You can become confident in your ability to do anything, by keeping your promises to yourself everyday. Over time, your brain thinks it has knowledge of the future: that what you say you’ll do will get done.
The word “ruthless” conjures for most people the image of someone who’s evil, brutal, and sadistic.
It’s real meaning, is someone who acts without any pity or compassion for someone’s misery. They are ruth-less.
Another way to see being “ruthless” is someone who acts without taking other people’s opinions and inconveniences into account.
The lines between ruthless, selfish, and egoistic get more and more blurred the more you think about it.
Does it take ruthlessness to win a world championship, when it means denying everyone else who showed up to the tournament, regardless of how much they and their families sacrificed for the opportunity?
Does it take ruthlessness to get selected for a job that only has one opening, when it means denying all other applicants who could have made something of their lives with the job you stole from them?
Does it take ruthlessness to go into business and prevail against a competitor — through better products and marketing — even though their competitor may have some wonderful employees with pregnant spouses whose livelihood depends on their consistent employment?
Does it take ruthlessness to take the life of another plant or animal, for the purpose of one’s own nourishment?
The very act of self-assertion – from smallest to largest — is ruthless.
The least ruthless man in the world probably cannot achieve anything in his life, out of fear that he may inconvenience someone else. He would carry a soul-crushing load of self-doubt to every aspect of his existence, living a pitiful life devoid of hopes or dreams. And in living that way, he is ruthless towards himself.
As we live in a society of other people, our ruthlessness is a reflection of how dependent we feel on others’ opinions for our happiness.
Perhaps “compassion” is, in the end, a front for co-dependence. Compassion for others is, in some ways, our way of saying, “I need to be more ruthful, because it furthers my agenda — being compassionate towards others is the way to be compassionate towards myself.” How much compassion are we inherently born with? Is it an evolutionary trait, or is it something that’s instilled into us? I’m inclined to think it is a bit of the former, but mostly the latter.
I believe that in general, as you become more compassionate towards others, it directly means being compassionate towards yourself. But there is an intersection, a tipping point, where your compassion towards others supersedes compassion towards yourself.
The key to healthy coexistence – with oneself as well as others – is to never cross that intersection of compassion.
Depending on the world you live in, and its unwritten social rules, that intersection can move greatly. In some societies, you can get away with a lot more ruthlessness.
Wow, this post is going longer than I thought… best to clip it here. じゃな！
Afer navigating the professional / business world over the last decade, I’ve come to realize that in general, people are nice.
I’ve made lots and lots of acquaintances, who have helped me in many ways. 99% of people want to do the right thing when given a choice. It doesn’t mean they’ll go out of their way and take personal losses to help you, but they’ll be polite and respectful even if they’re acting selfishly.
But I’ve also learned that quite a few people you’ll meet, including many in prominent, successful positions, are not nice. By which I mean, they’re downright horrible human beings that make you sick to your stomach. You’ll come across them once in a while, and you’ll want to stay clear of them.
Being a good human (or rather, not being a shitty human) is not a pre-requisite to being successful in our chosen endeavours in life.
What matters, is doing the work that’s required and giving people what they want. As long as we help other people get what they want, they’ll try to work with us.
I can recall many times in my life when I was overly nice to people because I felt like I had to be.
So if you’re a “nice guy/gal”, be so because you choose to, not because you feel an obligation to. And wear it with pride.
I’m extremely optimistic about humanity’s potential. Human ingenuity is amazing.
But humanity’s progress in science and tech is slower than it should be, and our efforts are laughably inefficient. Our challenge as a species is how to effectively utilize and deploy the sum total of our intellect and resources towards shared goals.
In many ways, we’re still a nascent civilization, and the vast majority of us are still subsisting like other animal species — on average, our daily activity is still oriented around survival (earning a living), reproducing and nurturing our progeny, and trifling pleasures.
Only a tiny few among us are contributing to the technological advancement and evolution of our species, which is, on a macro level, crucial to our long-term survival. And even those who do, face an incredible amount of friction and tough barriers that further slow down scientific progress.
The reason is that humans are extremely limited in their ability to utilize the ideas and experiences of other humans to accelerate their own discovery and problem-solving processes. Here’s why:
Knowledge barriers: Our ability to learn is limited. It’s hard to know enough about other disciplines to fluidly extract insights and reapply them. It’s also hard to start, when there is an overabundance of information.
Language barriers: Billions of people only speak their local language.
Resource & information sharing: Free movement of information and resources (funds, materials, equipment, etc) road blocked by geographical, economic, political, or cultural/social barriers.
These limitations are not due to physics but due to the biological limitations of the human brain.
However, we’ve arrived at a place where all of these problems can be solved, to a large extent, using technology. By building the right tools and infrastructure, we can make untold leaps in our species’ technological journey.
DenseLayers (and its parent company, SANPRAM Research Inc) was founded to work on exactly this mission.
DenseLayers exists to accelerate frontier science.
And we are already making progress, by building several patent-pending tools to address all the limitations mentioned above. As technology advances, our products and infrastructure will keep getting better, and humanity will be able to extract and deploy more and more of its unutilized intellectual power.
Reforming “Science”?
The crux of the issue is to reform the way humans participate in “scientific discourse.”
The format of discourse has evolved greatly throughout history, but a few things have stayed the same: it has always been in small pockets, with limited geographical scale, and the spread of scientific knowledge has been painfully slow.
Science or math would usually travel via trading routes, such as how the Arabs took the zero (0) from Southern India and brought it to Europe. Chinese alchemists invented gunpowder as a medicinal substance decades before they shot their first “fire arrow,” and a good century or two before it started traveling westward in large quantities on the backs of Mongol horsemen.
Overall, from ancient universities to “learned societies” (where affluent intellectuals would gather during the weekend to have fun talking science), sharing scientific findings with others has been an extremely informal and organic process.
Once the printing press had arrived, the first science “journals” were born in these very societies (such as The Royal Society of London), in the form of newsletters distributed to their members. Even Benjamin Franklin’s famous experiment, the “Electrical Kite” was first published as a letter to the Royal Society to be discussed by other members!
This was Science 1.0.
This changed in the mid-20th century, with the advent of large, commercial scientific publications and the structured “academic paper.” All thanks to a shrewd businessman named Robert Maxwell — he first decided to go and acquire every physical science publisher across the seven seas.
After capturing the whole market, he told universities that if they wanted to get published at all, they’d have to give him free labour — and then pay exorbitant sums of money each year to access the very publications they helped fill with their content. The process of distributing scientific findings and ideas also became quite formal and bureaucratic.
This is Science 2.0.
We know the rest of the story. Today, the very research papers that were meant to distribute science far and wide have become harder to read than ever before, even for the top scientists of their fields. They have also become prohibitively expensive to access, making inter-domain knowledge transfer even harder.
At DenseLayers, we are developing a new model for scientific discourse — a “learned society of global scale” — from the ground up.
It will be the first true global interconnected superhighway for science.
Our vision for the platform is that it will look like a collection of frontier research niches — from Deep Reinforcement Learning to Synthetic Biology — ever evolving and cross-pollinating.
It will be the hub, the go-to place where scholars from across the world, regardless of their language or knowledge background, come to publish, consume, and discuss cutting-edge science, with the same fun, informal environment that it was like for millennia.
This is Science 3.0.
Science 3.0 is about restoring the organic and free-flowing nature of the last 5,000 years of science, while also making it 10x more open and universally accessible.
It will be a tough journey, because this has never been accomplished before, but once it’s done, it will have a civilization-level impact on our future.
A 1,000 Year Vision: Reality or Insanity?
DenseLayers is being built to exist, in some shape or form, for the next millennium or longer. It is attainable. Here’s how.
What kind of human constructs typically last hundreds or thousands of years, intact and thriving?
One might think of the Pyramids. The Great Wall of China.
The Royal Society of London was founded 362 years ago. Its publications over the centuries were the precursor to modern-day academic journals.
But much better examples are social constructs — such as religions (Christianity?), societies and guilds (Freemasons), centers of learning (Cambridge, U.Bologna), and languages (Sanskrit, Armenian).
In a sense, they’re different forms of communities. Any community that continues to add new members over time, effectively replacing the ones who leave or die, can live forever.
Then, there are ideas and information (teachings of Pythagoras, Socrates or Laozi), etc. They too can get transmitted via person to person and far outlive their source.
By organically building a human community at scale, we see no reason why it can’t uphold itself for millennia, continuously evolving with technology. Even as we evolve past the current computer age, eventually transcending planetary boundaries and connecting astronaut-scientists exploring the galaxy.
This is Just the Beginning
I strongly believe that a universal “scientific network” for the human race is as fundamentally necessary as the internet overall, if not more.
It is the foundation. But it’s not the end-all be-all.
The process of “accelerating science” is in identifying every single source of friction in the scientific research process from A to Z, and building tools to address those problems. From idea / discovery to application, to commercialization, all the way to classrooms — our job isn’t truly done until the whole process is lightning fast and smooth as butter.
Our tools will evolve over time. It’s really a never-ending journey, and we will undoubtedly have to pass the baton to future generations.
At DenseLayers, we’re building the tools that the next Isaac Newtons, Aryabhattas, Marie Curies, and Ada Lovelaces will use to expand humanity’s role in the universe.
When I think of how I envision DenseLayers’ growth, the model that inspires and influences it the most is Quincy Larson’s FreeCodeCamp. I’ve been a fan of the project since I first heard about it, and it shows a path that I think we can follow as well.
FCC’s biggest advantage was the focus on community-building, and the insight that group-learning is so much better and more efficient than doing it alone. I independently reached the same conclusions about the practice of reading research papers, or for any deep knowledge-building activity in general.
You see the concept of “group study” across all human cultures, from Bible circles in college campuses in the USA (and even Africa), to housewives reading the Little Red Book together back in Mao’s China.
At DenseLayers, we want to enable group-study of and collaboration over breakthrough STEM research, on a species-wide scale.
I read back to how Quincy grew FCC:
He started with a tiny prototype (a list of good external resources with a checklist).
He also set up a HipChat/Slack group for members to hang out together.
On the content/marketing front, they grew by him tweeting a lot, live-coding, writing lots of articles and answering questions on Quora, and posting videos on YouTube with other members of the community.
His hiring approach was to simply pick active people from the FCC community itself. (I too have always intended that I’ll only hire people from the DenseLayers community — it’s a no-brainer.)
He also setup a publication to which other people could contribute content/tutorials.
The amazing thing is how capital-efficient they are. With only $350K or so in annual spending, they could deliver 2 billion hours of learning in that year.
Being self-employed + working remotely from home + having ADHD (not diagnosed, but I just know) has been a terrible combination for my productivity.
As of June 2023, I’ve found a series of workarounds that have made my present self the most productive (and hard-working) version of me that I’ve been in a long time.
I’m consistently able to squeeze out around 5 productive hours per day (which is the sweet spot for me), working out regularly, having a roughly consistent sleep schedule, and eating properly most days. (Yes, these are all things I’ve struggled with for many years).
Here are the changes I made:
I pay myself hourly.
Paying yourself hourly is like the ultimate hard work gamification hack. It doesn’t really work for employees or contractors (usually) — only yourself.
I’m talking real hours here, not just sitting at your desk. I use a time tracker to log my focused work, and I stop the timer when I’m taking a toilet break, getting food, talking to a friend, etc.
If you pay yourself monthly, the reward feels “certain” regardless of how much you work, and is also in a distant future. Not exactly motivating. But if you know that you only get paid if you put in the hours, it wakes up this “watchdog” inside your head that constantly tells you, “Hey! Did you work enough today?”
Now, don’t argue with me saying “I’d just let the timer running and cheat myself.” That’s because you’re probably not an entrepreneur. The above advice only applies to real entrepreneurs who have a big goal that they want to be faithful to.
I also get an immediate reward/punishment when I don’t work enough. I lose real money. And that hurts. I’ve set my hourly rate in a way that’s neither too rich nor too cheap. The former defeats the whole point, and the later sets you up for failure (i.e. no matter how hard you work, you never get rewarded enough).
I hired an “accountability assistant”.
This is still in the early experimental stages, but here’s how it works:
I found someone who will call me 3-4 times throughout the day (quick calls) just to make sure that I start my day off right, and keep up a consistent level of output. In each call, I have to state what I’ve been doing, and what I’ll exactly do over the next few hours (declaring intentions helps us stick to them). Talking things out with a companion really, really helps.
Each night, I have to send them my core priorities for the next day (these are often changing). But they also have my daily routine checklist, which doesn’t change as much (eg: things like my morning routine, evening routine, number of meals, workout, etc). So they hold me accountable for both my personal and professional goals day-to-day.
In total, the assistant only works ONE HOUR per day (usually less), and gets paid on an hourly basis — i.e. only 6 hours per week.
So far it has worked really well, but I don’t have long-term results yet. We’ll see.
Towards the end of February this year, I decided (or rather, a friend pushed me to decide) to bring DenseLayers back from the ashes and work on it full-time.
I was in a pretty bad place at the time — my first business had been unsuccessful. And not even in a spectacular fashion. It had been squirming in darkness for over a year, gradually losing blood, dying a slow, painful death, clinging on to “hope” till the very end. I didn’t lose any money on it, but I probably could have quit 2 years sooner. Two years of youth that I won’t get back.
(Note to reader: if you’re an entrepreneur, don’t let your business die that way. Go out with a bang if it comes to that.)
The decision to go all-in on DenseLayers was not easy, and I had to do a lot of explaining at home.
Since I had no money, and because my family wouldn’t tolerate me going through another unstable period of financial struggle, I decided to raise a small amount of funding. With all my insecurities, I still believed that DenseLayers was an investible idea — for the right kind of investor — and I also decided to use the fundraise itself as a “proof of concept”: that if I couldn’t raise the BARE MINIMUM of $15,000 within a couple months for my idea (low bar, I know), then I had no business building a startup right now. There was either a problem in my idea, or in my abilities as a founder, or something else.
In short, this pre-seed fundraise was trial by fire for the remainder of my life/career (and my self-confidence) as an “entrepreneur.”
Here are the challenges I faced in getting funding for a project like DenseLayers:
Idea/prototype stage; no traction to speak of (a grand total of 0 users)
The prototype looked terrible (didn’t even put “lipstick on the pig”)
Solo founder with no track record of building a tech startup, or even fundraising for it
Weak network (lots of people who could give “advice” but not write checks)
Not an attractive, juicy market (“research scholars” doesn’t really scream gimme-yo-money)
Completely new concept (high risk; too many assumptions that had to be right for it to work)
Unclear business model (I’m yet to figure out *exactly* how we’ll monetize the site, and whether it will work)
No certainty around the product vision (didn’t know what we’d be building in the future; it could go a few different ways)
Company wouldn’t scale quickly (scalable models already existed in some form, and had failed)
Unsure of my pitching strategy (I had no idea what I was even doing, and very confused)
“The market had dried up” (I was told there wasn’t much money around anymore)
Location (I was based in India, working from home, and pitching investors outside India – I was told that this would further impact my credibility)
No rich friends/family (I couldn’t ask friends/family to give me money, because I don’t mix my business and personal life)
To say that my prospects looked bleak to people around me would be an understatement.
But I was still optimistic.
With regards to fundraising, there’s a funny quote from Dan Peña: “There’s always someone out there who’s willing to fund your doofus deal.“ It’s very simple, but sage advice.
People invest in all kinds of crazy projects, for all kinds of reasons. They may actually think it’s a good investment, or have a personal interest in the problem you’re solving, or just want to support you, or have a passionate dislike for your competition / the industry you’re disrupting and help you say Fuck You to them, or they may just want to look cool because it would raise their status at a cocktail party.
A lot of very successful companies have been funded by the unlikeliest of people. Consider the first Starbucks — Howard was rejected over 200 times before he started getting his first external investments. One of those was $100k from a local doctor!
There’s always money available, somewhere on the face of this planet. You just have to look for it, long and far enough.
And I was confident that I would find it, because of the following factors that were IN my favour:
I was desperate (I felt like my whole life was on the line).
DenseLayers has a big vision — it’s one of those “moonshot” ideas which, if done right, would solve a huge problem that could have a history-defining impact on society. And some people prefer to fund moonshots. It’s also a “cool” idea, dealing with breakthrough A.I. research — not something anyone would feel embarrassed about funding.
DenseLayers may be a very new idea, but I had spent years refining and validating it. I knew my industry inside-out, and I had a logical solution.
I’m a solo founder, but I am an engineer — I could build the prototype myself, and didn’t desperately need a team to make progress. I also have experience working in Silicon Valley at some pretty cool companies, so I didn’t feel like my background would come under any question.
Lessons Learned
I will not disclose how much I ended up raising, and from whom exactly (too early to say), but it was far above my minimum of $15k. I can share my slide deck on request.
Here are some more takeaways and hard-earned wisdom:
WHO you’re pitching is as important as WHAT you’re pitching. I didn’t reach out to typical “finance” people or professional investors. I mainly pitched people who might get excited about the problem. They didn’t care about DenseLayers becoming a unicorn; they cared about the actual thing I was building.
If someone’s grilling you on the details too much (being devil’s advocate and pointing out holes in your idea), then they’re not a believer. They likely won’t invest in your project in a million years, and probably lack the money to do so anyway.
End the meeting asap (say “it sounds like this isn’t a compelling investment for you, would you agree?”), and don’t ever pitch them or talk to them about your idea again.
The best investments and outlier successes are often terrible, downright stupid-sounding investments. They’re no-brainers in hindsight, but not in foresight. Think about:
DisneyLand — sounds like a cocaine addict’s hallucination
Most original Hollywood movies are a gamble
Airbnb — “we let strangers open their homes to other strangers” yeah sure
SpaceX and Tesla — would you have invested in either of those at the idea/pre-seed stage?
Twitter — seriously, what the fuck? Also no business plan.
Facebook — MySpace had a 100M user lead; and FB had no business plan.
Google — Yahoo existed already, was a huge company + Google had no business plan.
Netflix — the founder literally wrote a book called “That Will Never Work”
Don’t ask people to give you advice on the NARRATIVE of your pitch — especially if they’re not an “ideal” investor / mentor for you.
I did several “practice pitches” to improve the delivery of my pitch. And I would happily incorporate people’s feedback into it, until it became unrecognizable.
Finally, a founder friend of mine (who’s building a moonshot aerospace company) told me this: “Every person you talk to will give you some advice, but it’s all a crapshoot. In the end, YOU have to do what you think is best.”
It’s like going around a restaurant with your noodle soup and asking people “how to improve it.” If you do everything they advise you to, you’ll end up with un-drinkable soup.
The only thing you should ask for feedback on is NOT “whether they believe what you’re saying” (it doesn’t matter), but only whether you’re communicating with CLARITY and CERTAINTY — that is, they understand what you’re saying and can repeat it back to you.
If they don’t like your pitch or don’t think the business will work out, don’t sweat it.
Next time some well-wishing friend tells you how bad your idea is, just think to yourself, “this person would not have invested in ANY of the biggest tech startup successes of the last 50 years.” Don’t hold it against them — they’re just trying to be helpful.
Look — 90% of new businesses fail anyway. Predicting that a business will fail makes you correct by default, 9 out of 10 times. Easiest prediction you’ll ever make. It doesn’t take a genius — on the contrary, when you look at it this way, naysayers sound kinda stupid. Find the person who thinks about how to make it work — that’s much more valuable.
The only time someone’s critique is worth listening to, is if they identify a fundamental, systemic weakness in your idea’s foundation. A plothole, if you will. Plotholes don’t sound like, “I don’t think there’s demand for it” or “I wouldn’t use it” or “that already exists” or “I don’t think it’s investible.” When someone really drops a plot hole on you, it will feel more like the carpet being pulled out from underneath.
Chris Sacca passed on Airbnb because “if someone gets murdered in an Airbnb, the blood will be on the company’s hands.” What would you say if you got that feedback from an investor?
How I went about it
Won’t go into endless detail; here’s the short version:
I exhausted my non-existent network of “investors” very quickly.
I couldn’t get many people to “intro me” to investors either. When your idea sounds bad, nobody wants to attach themselves to it. :)
I had to do it the old-fashioned way — cold emails.
Made a long wishlist of investors and investor types, and went about it.
I also hired an intern/freelancer — on a success basis (meaning, he/she would only get paid if we succeeded in raising a certain amount) — to help me handle the operational parts of the fundraise, such as data gathering, etc.
Truth be told, my fundraise was NOT a spectacular success. I ran out of motivation very often, and at times, my “intern” had to encourage me to keep believing in my own idea. I probably also made a lot of mistakes that Future Me will find funny or embarrassing down the line.
In the end, I raised enough to carry us to our next fundraise, but not enough to not have to worry about money at all for the next 2-3 years and build the “dream team” I wanted.
And that’s okay — all that matters to me (right now) is getting to live another day, build something I believe in, and keep fighting the good fight. This fundraise gave me that runway.
