Skip to main content
0

Codex Audentia

Codex: An ancient manuscript text in book form.
Audentia: Latin for “audacity”.

This is my codex — a working notebook with my notes, experiments, and rambles in their full glory. It is raw, unpolished and unfiltered.

This is not a blog.

You can subscribe to these posts here.

I’m building a 1,000 year company, and writing about the process.

Jun 22

(New) Systems That Help Me Work HARD AF

By Reflections No Comments

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:

  1. 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).
  2. 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.
Jun 22

The DenseLayers Story, Episode I: The Pre-Seed Fundraise from Hell

By DenseLayers, Reflections No Comments

Background

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:

  1. Idea/prototype stage; no traction to speak of (a grand total of 0 users)
  2. The prototype looked terrible (didn’t even put “lipstick on the pig”)
  3. Solo founder with no track record of building a tech startup, or even fundraising for it
  4. Weak network (lots of people who could give “advice” but not write checks)
  5. Not an attractive, juicy market (“research scholars” doesn’t really scream gimme-yo-money)
  6. Completely new concept (high risk; too many assumptions that had to be right for it to work)
  7. Unclear business model (I’m yet to figure out *exactly* how we’ll monetize the site, and whether it will work)
  8. No certainty around the product vision (didn’t know what we’d be building in the future; it could go a few different ways)
  9. Company wouldn’t scale quickly (scalable models already existed in some form, and had failed)
  10. Unsure of my pitching strategy (I had no idea what I was even doing, and very confused)
  11. “The market had dried up” (I was told there wasn’t much money around anymore)
  12. Location (I was based in India, working from home, and pitching investors outside India – I was told that this would further impact my credibility)
  13. 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:

  1. I was desperate (I felt like my whole life was on the line).
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

  3. 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”
  4. 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.

Now go out, start pitching, and get your money!

Jan 25

Ruthless Expectations: The Importance of Becoming Certain

By Reflections No Comments

I wonder if athletes who win Olympic Gold medals feel surprised about it.

“A Gold medal would be nice, I’ll try my best — but even if I get Bronze, it’s not a bad deal.” Can you win Gold with this mindset?

From what I’ve been told, most people who go on to accomplish anything in their lives, do so because they EXPECTED to. They envisioned it, prepared for it, and took the actions necessary to execute it.

Champions aren’t surprised when they win — they’re shocked when they don’t.

How do people develop this level of certainty with their goals?

Is there a process to it, an art, or a science to it?

That is the question I’ve been pondering on. Is it affirmations or visualization, is it planning, or is it simply taking action?

I feel like there must be a certain point when a person makes a decision that they are going to win the gold. They just unilaterally decide that the gold medal belongs to them. It’s theirs, not yours, not their competitor’s. And that they will do whatever it takes to claim it.

“That would be nice” = A death sentence

I’ve noticed that a lot of my “failures” so far (in business, and in life) have come from a “that would be nice” mindset.

And on the flip side, every accomplishment I’ve ever made came from a ruthless expectation of winning.

The question is: how do you cultivate this ruthless expectation with practical steps, such that it never wavers?

(Thanks to Dr. AnnMaria De Mars for igniting this idea in me.)

Nov 25

Success is closely linked with death.

By Reflections No Comments

An (incomplete) meditation on my definition of success.

I’m not even very old — but I recently noticed that I’ve already gone through several definitions of “success” in my life, as I was finding my way in this world.

Here are a few things I’ve learned (and I’ll probably keep revising this list forever):

1. Once I accepted my mortality — I’m not “death proof” and the reaper could indeed show up any day (even tomorrow) unannounced — a lot of things I thought of as being successful, were no longer important to me.

2. One huge aspect of success for me now is physical health and movement. We’ve been given a unique human body, and it would be a pity to not explore its full potential (both functional and aesthetic) before we kick the dust.

“Working out” for me is now like a meditation — a practice of exploring my own body, really noticing how my muscles react to different stresses and demands.

I feel like I genuinely learn something new about my body every time I work out, which is awesome. I regret not having done this sooner, but better late than never.

3. Another aspect of success for me now is being able to “live as many lives as I can.” I’m not attached to a single identity or “career” for myself. I would love to keep reinventing myself every few years to experience the full breadth (or at least as much as possible) of the human experience. This category also includes traveling, reading lots of books and history, and meeting lots of people.

4. (Somewhat contradictory to #3) While I love exploring diverse projects and reinventing myself, another big part of success for me is endeavors that demand total obsession.

A big endeavor is an adventure in itself. it shapes your character and helps you further explore who you are as a person. There’s also something really fulfilling and energizing about that obsessed, hyper-focused, high-performance state of living.

As Kobe Bryant used to say to his trainer: life is a series of SPRINTS. I do think now that life is too short for marathons (metaphorically).

Anyway, that’s all for my musings for the day. :)

Sep 09

Risk vs Uncertainty

By Reflections No Comments

I recently read The Dhandho Investor by Mohnish Pabrai. The biggest lesson I took away from his book was this:

There’s a difference between “risk” and “uncertainty.”

Risk refers to what you might lose. You are always risking “something” in exchange for the possibility of getting something else. How much does it cost you just to play the game?

Uncertainty refers to the number of possible outcomes. Some are more probable than others.

What I find fascinating is that you can detach the two and see them as completely separate factors while making a decision.

You can have high risk, but low uncertainty. Or low risk, high uncertainty, etc.

Low risk means that even if you don’t win, you don’t lose that much. So if you DO win, you hit it out of the park.

An example of this is being able to buy a business at an extremely discounted price. With that low of an investment to get in the game, you have tremendous upside, even if there’s higher uncertainty.

The second key takeaway from Mohnish (as well as other legendary investors I know of) is that they put a lot more emphasis on keeping their “risk” as low as possible. They look for heavily discounted, troubled assets that they think they can turn around quickly and cheaply.

“You make your money on the buy.” – Manny Khoshbin, real estate tycoon

This advice somewhat flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Humans are drawn towards certainty – whatever seems “sure.”

Conclusion

I see this as a very interesting way to grow wealth and choose which projects to take on.

Choose projects where I can reduce my downside to as low as possible, so that all that remains is a stratospheric upside.

A big part of this is finding other people to help finance your cost of getting into the game. But there’s also another facet of cost: opportunity cost.

Cost is not simply about what you put in, but also where else that time, money, and effort could have gone. THIS is why Warren Buffet often uses the analogy of a bingo card – imagine you can only ever make 20 investments. You would be much more disciplined in how you choose them, right?

This also goes back to what I believe about mortality. You may have only a year left to live, or you may have 70. How do you decide how to spend each year you have left?

Basically, first and foremost, do what floats your boat. If a project doesn’t make you feel alive, it’s simply bringing you closer to death.

Second, I want to do things that can grow geometrically, not linearly. That’s how time becomes your friend. That means domino/network effects and virality.

Sep 03

It’s not about the Eiffel Tower

By Reflections No Comments

My take on travel

I’ve traveled to a bunch of places — but interestingly, when I look back on them, I don’t remember all that much. I can’t recollect most of the “things” I saw – the beautiful nature, the wonderous creations of mankind – they’re all somewhat lost in my subconscious.

A great example of this is the Eiffel Tower. When I went to Paris, I was excited to see it. And then I saw it. Then the next day, I climbed up to the top. And then I kept seeing it from time to time as I traveled around the city. But the impression it had made on me at first sight was all I really needed. Afterward, it became boring. It might not have been there at all. When I think of my time in Paris, I don’t really think of the Tower.

I guess some things are meant to be experienced and appreciated for just a brief moment. After that, they dissolve. Ichi-go, ichi-e.

Yes they’re nice to look at, but traveling for “sights” is really overrated if you think about it. What I actually remember are the situations I was in, the people I met who left an imprint on me, and the moments I shared — and how they challenged and shaped me. You don’t cherish the places, but the faces. And the stories.

Or, as Proust said: the joy of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes, but in seeing with fresh eyes.

Perhaps all we really seek is a journey to know more about ourselves. The self is an ever-evolving ocean, that we can continue to explore over a lifetime and still have much to see. Travel, friends, lovers, art – they’re all simply a medium, a catalyst, a tool for self-discovery and self-expression.

Here’s another thing I learned about travel, and this was written by a Frenchman I do not remember.

Travel teaches you to hope again. How? Because each day that you wake up and plan your next move, your next destination, your next experience – you are practicing having faith that things will be different tomorrow. Maybe hope and faith, like everything else, are also matters of practice. Hope is a muscle.

Aug 25

Lessons from my failures (and successes)

By Reflections No Comments

I recently had a business failure.

Long story short, here’s the bullet list of lessons learned. If you’re not me, and you’re reading this, just know that I wrote this for myself. It may or may not apply to you.

  1. Focus
    If I had to distill everything into one word, it would be focus. Focus, focus, focus. FOCUS! Ignore the free ice cream van.
  2. Keep focusing
    This is not a joke. Stop strategizing or changing things. Just STOP! Once you make a decision, don’t switch directions until you’ve burned the fucking tires and they’re melting on the tarmac. Finish all your thinking before the decision, not after. Set 1-2 metrics/lead measures and chase them into the horizon like a mindless dog.
  3. Velocity
    Blaze through your day. If you have time for idle bullshit, or if you’re slowing down, close shop. Your venture is dying anyway. Sure, smell the flowers – but do it quickly. Get used to doing the work of three people.
  4. Only hire people who are better than you.
    Your team’s talent density/concentration should keep going UP over time. Each new hire should improve the average quality of your existing team members. It’s the only criterion that matters in the end. If you can’t hire someone truly remarkable, don’t hire. If a candidate likely keeps the average quality of your team constant, don’t hire. You don’t have the luxury of time spent coaching and training people to make them “better.” You’re an entrepreneur, not a manager. Stop fucking managing.
  5. The best time to fire someone is the first time it crosses your mind
    Harsh but true. The first time it crosses your mind, talk to the person to figure out what’s going on. If you don’t walk away with huge confidence that you should keep them, fire them immediately. But do it right by them – it was your mistake to hire them, so they deserve to be treated fairly.
  6. It’s okay to be tough
    Don’t strangle your inner toughness. Don’t make an “effort” to be nice. Nobody cares about “nice” people. Let people self-select themselves out of your life.
  7. (Bonus) Expect Success.
    You cannot be in doubt when fighting a monster. You have to have the conviction: when I drive my sword into its heart, the monster will die, and I will emerge victorious.

    You don’t need to be sure of how you will get your sword to reach the monster’s chest. You just need to have the conviction that it will happen, and all you have to do is get over the obstacles in the way.

    Without this conviction, you will prepare for failure instead of success – and your failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You will simply keep dodging the monster’s attacks, trying to stay alive, until you’re tired and dead.

    Expect to emerge victorious in the end. Expect to hold success in your hands. Visualize victory.
Aug 09

Why I never hired for “Experience”

By Reflections No Comments

I never understood the concept of hiring people based on an arbitrary number of how many years they’ve existed in an industry.

Experience is wonderful, but it’s only helpful in very specific types of jobs:

1/ When you need someone who has PRACTICED (to achieve a certain level of skill): some things just have to be polished by deep intentional training and repetition. There’s no way around it.

2/ You need them to have a huge pre-existing NETWORK (which takes time to build): whether you build those connections one by one, or at scale through a large audience or community.

Both of these compound over time, and there are no shortcuts to building them. But the focus should still be on the QUALITY of experience, not the “number of years.” I believe the quality of experience (what they did during that time) can only be seen in examples of their work, so my hiring process was always more focused on online exercises and take-home assignments.

All other reasons for hiring for “experience” are frivolous.

In my controversial opinion, someone looking for a job that they have already done a thousand times is often (though not always) a sign that they’re stagnant and not learning anything new.

The best pros want to challenge, reinvent, and stretch themselves into uncomfortable territory. If it’s not a little scary, it’s boring.

But then, I might be biased.

I challenged myself to get a black belt in Judo in 12 months, training at the Kodokan in Tokyo.

I challenged myself to achieve fluency in Japanese in 12 months. The result blew me away.

Designed by

best down free | web phu nu so | toc dep 2017