Creative Destruction

Creative Destruction is all around us. Our old industries are being replaced with efficient, cheap alternatives. In the case of technology, this happens more often. There has been a cycle, and the entire industry has been adapting itself—those that did not, disappeared or shrank in size.

Who would have thought Amazon e-commerce sellers would also displace the paradigm of infrastructure with cloud computing?

Who would have imagined running an entire organization without hosting any infrastructure, tech tools, or software developers in-house? The launch of Salesforce displaced the old notion of hosting clunky software and fighting with multiple vendors.

How many Gen Z even care about Nokia phones anymore? They did not adapt to the Android ecosystem and lost the race.

How many of us know that you could courier and get DVDs delivered, like Blockbuster? With the emergence of the Internet, some players changed their business models, while market leaders disappeared. We have numerous examples, like Kodak not adapting to digital photography, while competitors innovated and swept away their leadership.

The Artificial Intelligence era we are currently in is going to have similar repercussions. Software developers and organizations that do not adapt will cease to exist or lose significant market share to newer incumbents in no time.

This is not my AI anxiety speaking, but rather the realization brought on by the advancement and rapid pace at which it’s moving.

value system

Your value system plays a huge role in defining your vices and virtues. How you see the world, how you react to certain situations in life, your emotions — all of it is interwoven with your value system. Our value system starts with our parents, then comes society, books, and our friend circle.

As we grow older, we get closer to looking back at life. The scars, cheers, and jubilation of the past reside with us in our mental closet. So, the earlier we fix our value system, the more peacefully we die — having lived a virtuous life for ourselves and those around us.

change

I have been part of many hype cycles in the past. I would say I built my career during these periods and benefited from them. Technological shifts often begin with a blip, but the cascading effects take time to surface.

A notable example is Reliance Jio’s data plans, which triggered a surge in smartphone adoption in India. Another major enabler has been cloud computing, which allows a small team like ours to operate remotely with guaranteed uptime, without the burden of managing infrastructure.

The AI wave will reset civilization and fundamentally change how we live, work, and consume content. This transformation is inevitable, and the transfer of wealth will favor the winners.

Within my organization, I’m already witnessing changes in workflows. Content creation, code deployment, and the development of new features are all being accelerated with AI tools, automation, co-coders, and co-creators integrated into the process.

New job seekers will struggle to adapt to this paradigm shift, and those currently unwilling to embrace it will be left behind. The change is inevitable.

Attitude

Building a successful company requires a team with a great attitude. Sometimes, between a winner and a loser comes a sense of who will outlast the other in the market. In most scenarios, the battle is won by those who are assembled with the attitude to win.

If your team has people whose attitudes are not aligned with organizational virtues, the plague will not take long to hit and affect the entire organization.

As a leader, it is your role to focus more on the right attitude than on skill sets. Also, time and again, if needed, course-correct—even if it requires making tough decisions.

As a founder, you are responsible for failure. Success will have many leaders.

strength

A founder’s life is a joyride. It is no less than a movie script. It has everything—joy, failure, happiness, and sadness. Every moment of the journey is filled with excitement.

One thing, apart from luck, that defines a winning or quitting founder is their mental strength. Most startups die when founders give up. All auxiliary reasons—about the team, funding, and competitors—are immaterial.
If you have the quest and determination to build, you will find a way. Nobody can stop you. It requires a lot of determination, forgiveness, and not being discouraged by the naysayers.

I still remember pitching to our early customers when building Taghash. A lot of them said tools like ours were not needed at all in their workflow. A few told us about our competitors and how much funding they had raised.

curious

A young child is curious. He has many questions—sometimes so many that even we adults get agitated. A child is fearless, and their mind is not yet corrupted by society. All they care about is food, sleep, and affection from their parents.

We grew up and got onto the treadmill of life. What was right and what was not came from the invisible hand—our superiors, teachers, or the government. We aimed to be productive everywhere, so much so that we started counting calories in everything.

We killed our curiosity with a never-ending urge for productivity. As a result, we are running, panting, and restless—and every break starts to feel unfulfilling.

pace

As a founder, one additional task for me is keeping up with the rapid advancement of AI and what the future holds—both internally and externally. The pace of advancement is skyrocketing. This is unfolding even more rapidly than the open-source cloud wars, the PaaS wars, or the evolution of DevOps tools. I’m not sure who the ultimate winner will be or what standards will emerge, but it’s keeping all of us on our toes.

Early signs suggest that many automation and low-level coding tasks are being replaced. At the same time, areas like content, marketing, legal, and finance are experiencing a major upheaval.

I believe the way we use software is going to change dramatically. We’re already seeing people turn to ChatGPT and similar tools instead of Google or Bing for search.

Will we still need SaaS platforms, web apps, mobile apps, or Alexa-like interfaces? Or will everything consolidate into a unified LLM prompt? Does this mean we’ll no longer need to invest heavily in front-end development?

It seems like every piece of software might eventually evolve into an assistant, operating primarily through voice.

change

Over the past 18 years of my career, I have witnessed the technological landscape evolving. And if I add my encounter as a kid with the Internet, we have come a long way.

  1. No more PCOs and queues to make STD calls. We all have mobile phones now.
  2. No more cyber cafes—once a center for connecting and socializing. I know a few friends who got married after meeting strangers at a cyber cafe. <story for another blog>
  3. No more dial-up internet connections over BSNL.
  4. Death of CD/floppy drives with the arrival of pen drives.
  5. Cable TV to DTH.
  6. Internet via a cable service provider to fiber cable at home.
  7. TVs and journalism with advertisements shifting to the internet.
  8. Social gatherings happening over the internet rather than in person.
  9. Food delivery, clothes, ACs, and dating via an app.
  10. Shifting from compiling RPM/DEB packages to apt-get install with a click.
  11. Buying/burning Linux distributions from friends or labs to downloading the OS on a pen drive.
  12. Entire marriage celebrations are now captured on a tiny mobile phone, including post-processing.

A hundred others are missing from the list above. In short, our society has become more lazy and prosperous. The rapid change at which we have moved this far is beyond imagination.

In the last few months, I have been reading and witnessing a big wave of AI—or artificial intelligence—coming. It will not end up well. Most things will be automated, and generalists will have a tough time. If we go by stats, the number of entry-level jobs in IT, once considered the safest in any storm, is widely impacted. From content, marketing, media, and finance, the same is going on—people are being laid off, and hiring is at a freeze.

I am imagining a social shift with the advancement of AI, where minimalism will become mainstream and alternate careers will become the new norm. We will move back to our old roots. It is scary and painful at the same time.

I see metro cities drying up soon in India. The AI wave will result in it. No more formal jobs, no more need to be physically available. We will have multiple jobs—from being a barista to a coder to a farmer. Our future is going to be different.

Others

We have many friends around us or people in our vicinity who thrive on pleasing others. As a result, they end up wearing a different skin, lacking originality of their own. It can win them deals and make them rich.

Deep down, as they age and the crowd disappears, all that is left is old age calling them to act on themselves. A part of them is uncovered, making them realize who they truly are.

Time and again, driven by capitalist and materialistic desires, we end up becoming who we are not. The constant battle within can drive some of us mad. The quest to become someone is achieved, but the discovery of the true self gets lost along the journey.

narrative

I am not sure if the narrative we have built is from our past experiences. It is our internal checklist. How will it play out in multiple scenarios or longer run in life can be a life changer.

We are taught to be open-minded and welcoming about various thoughts and ideas. As a human, we are built to act against it. Our past keeps coming to haunt us. It defines what is good or bad.

Time and again we have lost love, life, and wealth by missing out on opportunities because our narratives were against it.