Slow

We are living in the era of AI, where everything is moving at an incredible pace. My customers and friends constantly tell me to ship faster. At times, I feel FOMO seeing young founders in their 20s claiming to have built in months what I’ve been working on for nearly a decade:Taghash, now 9 years and counting.

At its core, I believe the AI era has accelerated the pace of shipping. At the same time, it has introduced new layers of complexity. If we blindly let LLMs generate code without guardrails, we risk undoing years of hard work.

Throughout the history of civilization, many such waves have come and gone. What has endured is the determination to keep going, to not give up, and the ability to adapt like a stream of water, flowing through plains, mountains, and uneven terrain.

We are slow starters, but we are learning to swim with confidence so we don’t drown. We may be slow, but our eyes are open, and we have the ambition to go all in.

industrialised

Is automation killing authenticity? From pre-mixed gravy to cloud kitchen. We are becoming a mass market consumer. There is no real taste left. You order a gravy, and it will have a bucket load of cream or a sugary tomato blend taste. 

The same goes for any other drinks. Most restaurants sell packaged juice as “juice.” The recent encounter I had was with restaurants selling kombucha under the disguise of kokum syrup and water. 

We are entering into an era where our food taste will be industrialised in no time.

Winners

We live in a world where opinions are often seen as a cure for misery, and social media has amplified this trend even further. Any nameless account will post anything about anyone and anything. 

Building a successful startup requires a winner’s mindset. It starts with radical optimism and self-belief: a level of becoming obsessed and delusional. 

Every minute as a founder, you are engulfed in rejection, failures, and opinions from the world. If we see the history of all inventions, we will realise how everything was built: from aeroplanes, bulbs, AC motors, and many others. 

The journey as a founder is your alone. You have to live with a default positive, even when the world around you is crumbling in personal life. So hang in there and enjoy the ride. 

Bonus

We forget our roots. We leave the skin we were born with. With age, we transform. We are living in an uncertain era where we can go bust at any moment. There is no guarantee for anything. 

Some of us get worried and stressed about accepting this reality. This has happened in the past, and philosophers like Seneca have written extensively about it in books such as “On Shortness of Life”. 

The sooner we realise that we have a life in bonus: relationship and wealth, the more empathetic we will become towards the world. Everything around us is temporary, and we are here for a short period of time.  

Lowballing

The price of being nice in business is that people will take you for granted. This should not shake your core fundamentals. This is an arm-twisting technique that has existed for a long time and has been practiced by many in trade.

The sooner you realise that your niceness is seen as weakness, the sooner you will change your course of action. We live in an uncertain world with things changing rapidly across technology, work, and society: a world where everyone has an opinion. You have to stay very focused on what to take and what not to take.

People tell you that in business you have to be nice to everyone. I say otherwise. There will be people you will not like, and people who will not like you. You have to stay away from them. These are the people who will try to make you feel small. You don’t have to engage with such people or sell your soul.

Dilemma

We live in a world where underdogs live, thrive, and flourish silently. It acts as a double-edged sword on the path to progress. Our capitalist society often succumbs to the bazooka-like force of marketing. “Fake it till you make it” gets more limelight, and people form opinions just by the looks of things.

With technological advancements, we have entered into increasingly shallow relationships. Success is now measured by the number of likes, comments, and friends on social media. It is no longer about real connections.

And time goes on

I am currently in my hometown, a remote part of Bihar, and I feel a completely different kind of calmness here.

While the world seems to be on fire with the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence: billions of dollars in market value being erased overnight, life here moves at a different rhythm. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are redefining work, automating daily tasks, and reshaping industries. In the cities, every headline screams urgency: disruption, layoffs, valuations, crashes, breakthroughs.

But here, it feels like time has chosen not to participate in that race.

The world I inhabit in my day-to-day professional life and the world I am experiencing right now are 360 degrees apart.

Here, people are still living the way generations before them did. Their concerns are fundamental and deeply human: roti, kapda, makan. Educating their sons. Marrying their daughters. Protecting their land from encroachment. Ensuring the mango orchards and khet survive the season. Visiting the temple every month and performing their puja with quiet discipline. There is hope, resilience and faith.

In the developed cities of our country, we wake up to constant alarms, traffic chaos, infrastructure complaints, crime, political outrage, market volatility. The media amplifies every disruption. Urgency becomes the default emotional state.

But here, life is still anchored in continuity.

It makes me wonder:
Are we advancing faster than we are understanding what advancement truly means?
Are we slowly losing the simplicity that once defined human contentment?

There is something deeply grounding about being in a place where survival, family, faith, and land still define ambition. Perhaps progress does not always mean acceleration. Sometimes, it means remembering what was never broken.

against

As a founder, if you have an itch, a vision, and a quest to go against the norms, this journey is for you. It is also filled with pain. All the failures are on you; after all, you are leading this revolution.

Time and again, your desperation to win deals and retain employees can create a persona of scarcity and fear. Over the long run, it alters your mind and drains your energy. The only virtues that keep you going are optimism, self-belief, and fearlessness.

You are the horse: you have to run and win. So keep running with optimism. The world will be against you. Your loved ones may laugh at you. But you, my friend, must continue on your path with grit.

Innovation has always happened because of a few knuckleheads who went against the norms.

change

We are living in a different time. After the internet, AI seems to be the next big thing. It will impact each one of us, in good or bad ways.

As a startup founder, I see it as a blessing when it comes to shipping code. The dependency on humans to write code is going to decrease significantly.

At the same time, customers will become more demanding. We are already seeing OpenClaw-style stories circulating everywhere. Per-seat licensing will require much stronger justification.

This new wave will create competitors from anywhere. What will differentiate a great organization from one that gets disrupted is a sense of urgency and the ability to adapt to the new normal.

When writing code becomes commoditized, founders will have to think deeply about what more they can do for their customers—what truly keeps them hooked to the platform.

authentic

We live in a crowded, noisy world. The glamour and desire to be someone or to be like someone have become supreme. We change, sell our souls, or behave unintentionally. 

We have upgraded our lives with wealth, and real/reel life has merged. Our quest for material wealth and power is killing us from the inside. It is taking us away from the social fabric.  

We are wasting more money on our looks. We apply filters to our photos on social media. We spend no time on our souls or talking to ourselves.

Our forefathers must be laughing in pain from above: they never anticipated civilization losing its authenticity. We are decades away from the singularity, the ultimate death of our souls.