Sriram Krishnan

The Odyssey

2026-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

I was fortunate to be at the world premier of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey a few days ago. I was asked to hold reviews until the movie releases but allowed to post reactions so will try to tread that line.

The topline: this will be the movie of the year, will leave a deep impact on any viewer and will go down as one of the great epic movies made. If Nolan doesn’t win Best Director for this, we riot.

I’ve tried to build a habit in recent years of trying to resist reading online chatter going into any movie. There are many forces online that want to cast every movie into their pet topic and I find that deeply reduces the immersion and experience from watching a piece of cinema for the first time. In other words, ignore the chatter about this movie and just go to the closest IMAX theater and watch it and you will be moved.

Without spoiling, a few thoughts

a) Nolan’s adaptation is deft, modern and finds a way to honor the original (something my wife who is a true fan of the Odyssey deeply cared about) while also delivering a movie that feels epic and modern.

b) Expect multiple Oscar nominations and I would be shocked if Matt Damon and Robert Pattinson and Anne Hathaway don’t pick up nominations. However, the heart of the movie for me is Tom Holland. His portrayal of Telemachus and the father-son bond in absentia is the beating heart. In the hands of many other actors, this could have been an annoying teenager B-plot where we just wait to see Matt Damon deal with monsters but with Holland, it really comes alive.

c) I’m in awe of the craft and effort required to deliver something like this to the screen. The level of work required to shoot in these places or make this happen makes me both proud that we can still accomplish things of this nature and mildly jealous. I got to see the cast interviews during the premier and almost all had the view “This was something very special we got to be a part of”

d) Nolan’s powers are in full display here but if I had to point out two aspects it would be the use of sound interleaved with what you see visually. The very first sequence opens up to a very smart use of Ludwig Göransson’s work interleaved with editing. The other power of his is to use some very smart fast paced editing and sound to propel you during exposition.

Finally, when you watch any major movie, you interpret it through where you are in your life at that moment. For me, it is hard to see this movie and not see this as a journey of a father and also of someone dealing with a changing civilization (won’t spoil more here).

Go watch this movie opening weekend.

Back to writing

2026-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

I’m going to make a commitment to writing often here, perhaps as often as once a day.

There are a few contributing factors here.

First, I’m out of government and can speak more freely. Though at no time did anyone ever tell me to watch what I said, my default was to not opine on anything online.

Second, I was deeply impacted by the passing of two people I knew well - Om Malik and S. Somasegar. One of the many things that struck me about both was how much they enjoyed sharing what they loved with the world. In Om’s case, his body of writing online is a gift and it reminded me of something about the early days of blogging we all seem to have lost. I’ve always admired people like Tyler Cowen for their prolific online output.

Third, in an increasing world of online AI generated tokens and algorithms, it feels good to have a little corner of the internet with each character typed in by hand. I’ll be definitely using some Claude/Codex help to dust off the scaffolding here. I find what is most precious is to eliminate the friction necessary to write.

Currently the best way to keep up is by coming back to this site every once in a while. I will have to wire this up to some email subscription service over time.

Model capabilities and four minute mile

2026-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been discussing with some frontier lab researcher friends as to why frontier model capabilities are always so clustered together as opposed to any one model having an unassailable edge.

The best metaphor for this in my mind is the “four minute mile”: no one broke it till Bannister in 1954 and then very quickly five more runners did it in the next two years.

In the model world, this translates to:

a) Intense competitive pressure.

b) Often similar pool of ideas and research directions.

c) Roughly similar access to capitalization and compute infrastructure.

The oft quoted “fast follow” example is after the launch of o1 being quickly followed by reasoning models from multiple players, both closed and open weights.

This is not the case with many other technology driven industries where capability or advancements often tend to be longer held and a fast-follow model is harder.

Daniel Ellsberg, Kissinger and knowledge

2026-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

I have told this story about once a week for about a decade. This is from Daniel Ellsberg’s book “Secrets” recounting a conversation he had with Henry Kissinger and applicable to anyone who feels they are inside an ecosystem. I find this highly applicable to Silicon Valley companies. There are underlying lessons here on humility and the downsides of trying to make complex systems legible.

“Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret.

“I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.

“First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.

“You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t….and that all those other people are fools.

“Over a longer period of time — not too long, but a matter of two or three years — you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can. But that takes a while to learn.

“In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues….and with myself.

“You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.”

….Kissinger hadn’t interrupted this long warning. As I’ve said, he could be a good listener, and he listened soberly. He seemed to understand that it was heartfelt, and he didn’t take it as patronizing, as I’d feared. But I knew it was too soon for him to appreciate fully what I was saying. He didn’t have the clearances yet.

On Brandon Sanderson

2025-12-27T00:00:00+00:00

Every Christmas break for several years now, I’ve developed a ritual: getting lost in a world of Brandon Sanderson content. Without fail, each time I come away struck by how amazing a person Brandon seems to be.

Brandon is best known for his vast collection of Cosmere novels and numerous standalone titles. While fantasy isn’t my typical genre—I usually prefer sci-fi or thrillers—I discovered his writing through an indirect route. I stumbled onto the videos of his writing course at BYU when I was harboring hopes of writing fiction myself. I can’t recommend these enough. Not only do you hear Brandon deconstruct the craft of writing, his genuine passion for just story and helping people become writers shines through.

The more you read Brandon—both his books and everything around them—two things become clear.

the man is insanely productive. He’s taken a natural gift for writing - his craft of choice - and structured his entire life around it in a manner I’m jealous of.
there’s a genuine goodness about him. You see it in his work, in two decades of fan interactions, and in how he talks about family and faith.

In his own words: “I’m a guy who enjoys his job, loves his family, and is a little obsessive about his stories.”.

I realized that it is this generosity of spirit that pulls me back in every holiday season. I come away thinking the world would be better with more Brandon Sandersons.

P.S. If you’ve never read him, Mistborn is a great place to start.

Group chats rule the world

2024-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

Most of the interesting conversations in tech now happen in private group chats: Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal, small invite-only Discord groups. Being part of the right group chat can feel like having a peek at the kitchen of a restaurant but instead of food, messy ideas and gossip fly about in real time, get mixed, remixed, discarded, polished before they show up in a prepared fashion in public.

Salons and groups have always existed but why the recent shift to private discourse?

The great culture wars of 2020 meant people, especially in tech, weren’t comfortable sharing their views in public lest they get various online mobs after them.
COVID meant we all had to shelter indoors and turned online for community.
Many of the big internet trends of recent years – crypto, AI – all started or found homes around small online communities.

Time and time again I’ve seen group chat conversations act as the memetic upstream of mainstream opinion. Like a standup comic workshopping his set in a small club before a big Netflix special, people trial content and ideas, find bonds and you’ll often see narratives and ideas discussed make the jump to X/Twitter and then mainstream discourse.

Which leads to the question: what makes one of these work? I’ve been a part of several groups and have tried to stand up many myself and I find the same patterns repeating across all the good ones. The best ones are a “forever dinner party” – good friends and conversation happening in perpetuity. They often share the below.

Gardener, not carpenter

A strong and fair central leader who sets the tone and enforces the rules. The open source community uses the phrase “benevolent dictator” but I think this is more akin to a gardener who knows how to tend a garden – plant seeds, pluck weeds, water and always give the garden the love and care it deserves.

A good group chat gardener has to know when to bring in new members, when to bring in new ideas or shut down conversation and generally keep the dinner party going in a manner that is fun for everyone. At any given moment, this person has a certain intangible but very real instinct of the vibe of the group.

This person also lays down the law: a misbehaving member or someone breaking Chatham House rules (unspoken but accepted in most groups) will find themselves immediately kicked out.

Cooling rods and nuclear reactors

Cooling rods are used in nuclear reactors to control the rate of the reaction. When they pull back, the rate increases and when they go in, the reaction slows down.

Every group chat usually has one or two people that like to talk..a lot. They are critical: you need the provocateurs who inject new ideas consistently. However, almost all of them have a tendency to dominate these groups.

This is where the cooling rods come in. This is usually the BDFL or some trusted member who can judge the state of the group. Conversation slowing down? Get some of these spicy provocative takes going. Conversation getting heated/dominated? Take someone aside and calm them down. No different from a friend of mine who tries to get everyone’s glasses filled again and again if he feels the dinner getting boring.

The n-1 group

Every group I’ve been a part of has had multiple side chats. This is to either make fun of, discuss in private or just to avoid certain loud personalities. This is desired! I look for this to know if a certain community is “working”.

This leads to one of my favorite axioms: every group chat has a n-1 group containing everyone except that annoying member. And if you think your chat doesn’t have such a group, oh boy, do I have some bad news for you.

Dinner party alchemy

There is a touch of alchemy to picking the right people to come into a chat. A great dinner party doesn’t have the same kind of person – the best ones have a mix. You have someone who will be entertaining, perhaps someone famous, someone who is warm and keeps the conversation going and definitely someone who will be a great raconteur. A good group chat needs a mix of personalities. Some archetypes:

the very online person who is familiar with participating in chat at all times
The celebrity who everyone is surprised to see in a chat.
The deeply thoughtful people who don’t speak up often but when they do, have real depth to their opinions
The cheerful bon vivants who keep the group light/funny/fresh.

Gravitational pull of a few topics

It is common for group chats to suffer from audience capture and start circling the same topics incessantly. This happens in a few ways:

A certain topics gain outsized influence and the group can’t stop having the same debate ad-nauseaum
Two or three people in the group align themselves into various teams and feel locked into supporting or opposing the same causes or people every single time. In the chats I moderate, I always look out for two people arguing with each other incessantly.
The angriest/most provocative topic usually winds up sucking the most oxygen. I’ve seen many groups die because they couldn’t get past talking about the one issue they disagreed on.

This is where variety comes in. You need a constant injection of new ideas, themes, and members into the mix. Stagnation is death.

Size and Pruning

Every good group chat has an inverse relationship with size. It is impossible to add new members forever without decreasing quality. Over time, the group decays in quality and I often find groups with >100 members unsustainable. Far below Dunbar’s number, it breaks some human model of intimacy.

This is where pruning comes in. Good group chats make you earn your spot periodically. And if you haven’t participated in a meaningful way in a while, you should find yourself kicked out.

On the flip side, one of the best ways to add value to a group is to suggest a good new member who will fit in.

Shared rituals

The best group have shared rituals, jokes, routines. They range from the simple (post the same thing every week) to something deeper (organize a multi-day trip once a year). These rituals bring people together in deep ways and give meaning. After seeing several of these, you can easily see how religions and communities need these as a bonding experience.

So, what makes a great group chat work? I recently stumbled onto a 1930 Vogue essay on hosting great dinners by early 20th century columnist and socialite Elsa Maxwell. I’ll leave the final word to Ms. Maxwell writing nearly a century ago.

“What makes or breaks a party?. A new idea, plus a sense of humor, makes a party – and the bores break it.”

Clock speed

2024-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

The biggest determinant for success in a technology company is the speed at which it operates and learns – the “clock speed” to use a CPU analogy. The easiest external measure for this is how fast you ship product. However, I’ve come to realize that is often hard to measure or hard to accomplish. You can’t ship hardware every week or make research breakthroughs every day.

I have come to realize there is often a simpler cultural test that one can apply which is the following.

When someone says “Let’s have a follow up conversation”, what is the implicit unspoken understanding of when that should happen? What will be considered early, appropriate and late in a way that violates cultural norms?

In companies I’ve been at, that has ranged from a few hours to the next day to the next week to …perhaps never. This little test usually tells me a lot about how fast your organization/company works.

John le Carré and Bernard Pivot's necktie

2022-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

When Aarthi and I started doing the show and interviewing people, I read up on all the great interviewers - past and current - to learn the art of interviewing a person. Of all the things I read, the anecdote that stayed the most with me came from an unlikely source. In John le Carré autobiographical work The Pigeon Tunnel, he describes being interviewed on French TV by Bernard Pivot. These following lines have always stayed with me

Pivot has the most elusive quality of them all, the one that film producers and casting directors across the globe would give their eye-teeth for: a natural generosity of spirit, better known as heart. In a country famous for making an art form out of ridicule, Pivot lets his subject know from the moment he or she sits down that they’re going to be all right. And his audience feels that too. They’re his family

Here reproduced in full is “Bernard Pivot’s necktie”. The rest of the book is great, do buy it! Here’s a video of the actual appearance but do watch it after you’ve read the account below.

Few interviews are pleasurable. All are stressful, most are boring, and some are downright awful, particularly if your interviewer is a fellow countryman: the seasoned hack with a chip on his shoulder who hasn’t done his homework, hasn’t read the book, thinks he’s doing you a favour by making the journey and needs a drink; the aspiring novelist who thinks you’re second rate but wants you to read his unfinished typescript; the feminist who believes you’ve only made it big because you’re a plausible middle-class white male bastard, and you suspect she may be right.

Foreign journalists in my simple lexicon are by contrast sober, diligent, have read your book inside out and know your backlist better than you do - with the exception of the odd maverick such as the young Frenchman from L’Evénement du jeudi who, undeterred by my refusal to grant him an interview, ostentatiously staked out my Cornish house on foot, overflew it in a small low-flying aeroplane and reconnoitred it again from an inshore fishing boat before writing an article about his escapade that did full justice to his powers of invention.

Or there was the photographer - also French and young, but dispatched by some other magazine - who insisted that I inspect samples of his work before he took my portrait. Opening a greasy pocket album, he showed me photographs of such luminaries as Saul Bellow, Margaret Atwood and Philip Roth, and when I had dutifully admired each, fulsomely as is my way, he turned to his next exhibit which consisted of the rear view of an escaping cat with its tail raised.

‘You like cat’s arsehole?’ he demanded, keenly observing my reaction.

‘It’s a nice shot. Well lit. Fine,’ I replied, mustering whatever sangfroid I possessed.

His eyes narrowed and a smile of great cunning spread across his absurdly young face.

‘The cat’s arsehole is my test,’ he explained proudly. ‘If my subject is shocked, I know he is not sophisticated.’

‘And I am?’ I asked.

For his portrait he wanted a door. An outside door. Not of any particular character or colour, but a recessed door, with shadow. I should add that he was a very small man in stature, almost elfin, so much so that I was half inclined to offer to carry his large camera bag for him.

‘I don’t want to pose for a spy shot,’ I said with uncharacteristic firmness.

He dismissed my concerns. The door wasn’t about spies, it was about profundity. After some while we found one that met his strict criteria. I stood before it and looked straight into the lens as instructed. It was like no other I had ever seen: a half-globe, ten inches in diameter. He had dropped to one knee, with one eye glued to the eyepiece, when two very large men of Arab appearance drew to a halt behind him and addressed me over his back.

‘Excuse me, please,’ said one. ‘Can you tell us the way, please, to Hampstead Underground station?’

I was on the point of directing him up Flask Walk when my photographer, furious at having his concentration disturbed, swung round and, still on one knee, screamed a piercing ‘fuck off’ at them. Amazingly, they did.

Setting such incidents aside, my French interviewers over the years have, to repeat, displayed a sensitivity that their British counterparts would have done well to emulate: which is why, or how, on the island of Capri in 1987, I signed away my life to Bernard Pivot, the shining star of French cultural television, founder, creator and anchor-man of Apostrophes, a weekly literary talk show that for the last thirteen years had held la France entière in thrall at prime time every Friday evening.

I had come to Capri in order to collect a prize. So had Pivot. Mine was for writing, his for journalism. Now imagine Capri on a perfect autumn evening. Two hundred dinner guests, all beautiful, are gathered under a starlit sky. The food is divine, the wine nectar. At a high table for the honorands, Pivot and I exchange a few merry words. He is a man in his prime - early fifties, vivid, energetic, unspoiled. Noticing that he alone of all the men is wearing a tie, he makes a joke against himself, rolls it up and jams it in his pocket. The tie is significant.

As the evening progresses, he chides me for refusing his overtures to take part in his programme. I feign embarrassment, tell him I must have been going through one of my rejection periods - I was - and somehow manage to leave the matter unresolved.

At midday the next day we present ourselves at Capri’s town hall for the formal award ceremony. The lapsed diplomat in me cautions a suit and tie. Pivot dresses informally and discovers that, whereas last night he wore a tie and didn’t need to, today he wears no tie when all about him are wearing theirs. In his speech of acceptance he laments this lack of social graces, and points to me as the man who gets everything right but refuses to appear on his literary programme.

Carried away by this perfectly judged charm offensive, I spring to my feet, tear off my tie, hand it to him and, before a packed crowd of enthusiastic witnesses - for the sake of the drama if no other - tell him that it’s his, and that from now on he has only to show it to me and I will appear on his show. On the flight back to London next morning, I wonder whether promises made in Capri are legally binding. Within days I know they are.

I have committed myself to a live interview, in French, of seventy-five minutes’ duration, to be conducted by Bernard Pivot and three top-tier French journalists. There will be no prior discussion, no questions will be telegraphed in advance. But be prepared - thus my French publisher - for a wide-ranging debate covering all topics including politics, culture, literature, sex and whatever else comes into Bernard Pivot’s febrile mind.

And I have barely spoken a word of French since I last taught it at O-level thirty years earlier.

The Alliance Française occupies a pretty corner house in Dorset Square. I drew a breath and entered. At the reception desk sat a young woman with short hair and large brown eyes.

‘Hullo,’ I said. ‘I wondered whether I could arrange to brush up my French?’

She stared at me in stern bewilderment.

‘Quoi?’ she said, and we took it from there._

First, in whatever French remained to me, I spoke to Rita, then I spoke to Roland, and finally to Jacqueline, I think in that order. At the mention of Apostrophes they sprang into action. Rita and Jacqueline would take turns with me. It would be an immersion course. Rita - or was it Jacqueline? - would concentrate on my spoken French, help shape my responses to predicted questions. Jacqueline, in collaboration with Roland, would plan our military campaign. On the principle of ‘know your enemy’, they would make a study of Pivot’s psychology, document his tradecraft and preferred areas of discussion, and keep a tight hold on the influx of daily news. The producers of Apostrophes set store by the programme’s topicality.

To this end, Roland assembled an archive of old Apostrophes episodes. The rapidity and wit of the participants’ exchanges terrified me. Without telling my tutors, I furtively enquired whether I might after all insist on an interpreter. Pivot’s reply was instantaneous: on the strength of our conversations in Capri, he was convinced we could manage. My three other interrogators were to be Edward Behr, polyglot journalist and celebrated foreign correspondent, Philippe Labro, well-known author, journalist and film director, and Catherine David, respected literary journalist.

My distaste for interviews of any kind is not an affectation, even if now and then I give in to the temptation or bow to the pressure of my publishers. The celebrity game has nothing whatever to do with writing, and is played out in a quite different arena. I was always aware of that. A theatrical performance, yes. An exercise in self-projection, certainly. And from the publishers’ point of view, the best promotional free ticket in town. But it can destroy talent as fast as it promotes it. I’ve met one writer at least who, after a full year of promoting his work worldwide, feels permanently drained of creativity, and I fear he may be right.

In my own case, there were two elephants in my room from the day I started writing: my father’s lurid career which, if anyone had cared to make the connection, was a matter of public record; and my intelligence connections, which I was forbidden to discuss, both by law and by personal inclination. The feeling that interviews were as much about what to conceal as what to say was therefore rooted in me well before I embarked on a literary career.

All this in parentheses as I take my place on the platform of a packed studio in Paris and enter the land of serene unreality that lies just the other side of the fence from stage fright. Pivot produces my tie, and with gusto tells the story of how he came by it. The crowd loves it. We discuss the Berlin Wall and the Cold War. A clip from the movie of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold provides respite. So also do the lengthy contributions of my three interrogators, which tend to be more like mission statements than questions. We discuss Kim Philby, Oleg Penkovsky, the perestroika, glasnost. Did my team of advisers at Alliance Française cover these subjects during our operational briefings? Evidently it did, because by the look of me I’m reciting from memory. We admire Joseph Conrad, Maugham, Greene and Balzac. We ponder Margaret Thatcher. Was it Jacqueline who tutored me in the rhythm of the French rhetorical paragraph - state the thesis, turn it on itself, enlarge with your own summation? Whether it was Jacqueline, Rita or Roland, I protest my thanks to all three and the crowd again erupts.

Watching Pivot perform in real time before a live audience that is free-falling under his spell, it’s not hard to understand how he has achieved something no other television character on earth has come within shouting distance of imitating. This isn’t just charisma. This isn’t just energy, charm, deftness, erudition. Pivot has the most elusive quality of them all, the one that film producers and casting directors across the globe would give their eye-teeth for: a natural generosity of spirit, better known as heart. In a country famous for making an art form out of ridicule, Pivot lets his subject know from the moment he or she sits down that they’re going to be all right. And his audience feels that too. They’re his family. No other interviewer, no other journalist of the few I now recall, has left such a deep mark on me.

The show is over. I may leave the studio. Pivot must remain on stage while he reads out church notices for next week. Robert Laffont, my publisher, guides me quickly into the street, which is empty. Not one car, not one passer-by, not one policeman. On a perfect summer’s night, all Paris is wrapped in slumber.

‘Where is everybody?’ I ask Robert.

‘Still watching Pivot, of course,’ he replies contentedly.

Why do I tell this story? Maybe because I like to remind myself that, amid all the ballyhoo, this was a night of my life to remember. Of all the interviews I gave, and the many I regret, this is one I’ll never take back.

How to write a cold email

2020-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

I’m a big believer in cold emails. They’ve personally opened many doors for me and been the basis of many relationships.

Here are a few things I’ve learned about powerful/wealthy/interesting people.

They read their own email.
Moreover, they’re good at responding to email.
They’re very, very curious people.
They have very little time. Anything with friction gets sorted into a “later” bucket.

Which means a cold email, well crafted, is a great way to get attention. The magic is in writing it in a way (and having the body of work to back it up) that grabs attention.

The perfect cold email is

Short and grabs attention.

Self-explanatory. Anything over a couple of paras and it gets sorted into the “later” bucket. The receiver isn’t rude, they just don’t have time for it when checking their email on the way to work. And “later” may never happen.
Super clear on who you are.

Why are you worth paying attention to? There are two approaches to this. You could either demonstrate credibility through your past institutions/roles. If someone gets a cold email from an exec at a large company, they’ll immediately pay attention.

Or, you could show off a body of work. Link to your Twitter/a paper you wrote/a Github repo/your blog which is interesting and shows why you’re worth paying attention to.

I used to do the latter for years until I could start doing the former.
Value prop for the receiver.

What’s in it for them? Everyone wants to help with general advice but it’s hard to respond to everyone. Easy ways: ideas for their companies or a thoughtful response to something they wrote or said.
Has a specific ask.

What should the receiver do? A generic “help me with advice” is really hard unless you really stand out with #2. The same goes for “Would love your thoughts on my post/startup”. It gets filed into a “todo” bucket as most folks want to send a thoughtful reply…but then never get to it.

My suggestion is to have have a specific ask which is low friction. Examples - “follow me on Twitter” - “here’s a live demo account you can click into to see what I’ve built” - “a PDF of screenshots”.

The key is - it’s low work and can be done in seconds.

That’s it! Have fun with cold emails and always feel free to send me one at sriram@sriramk.com!

First 30 days

2019-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

You’ve just gotten that fancy job you’ve always wanted.VP of Eng/CRO/CPO/Head of Partnerships/whatever. Congratulations! But what do you actually do?

It often goes like this: it’s day one and you’re pumped. You have that fancy office/conf room! But as you go through meetings, your mood changes. You find that the organization is large and complex. Multiple teams and leads are vying for your attention and you can’t even keep their names straight. You’re are also detecting whiffs of trouble: projects in trouble and people who don’t like each other. A sister organization seems to be eyeing your turf. Your CEO checks in with you at the end of the day - “How are things? All good? Super excited you’re here.”. You nervously type out a “All good!” but you’re secretly worried whether you’ll survive your first three months.

First, relax! Every senior leader I’ve met has been through a similar experience when they’ve been promoted into a new role. These jobs are not easy and every single person struggles with impostor syndrome.

Second, meet everyone. Spend your first two weeks doing only 1:1 meetings and being a quiet observer in team meetings. In every meeting, cover these three topics and do as less talking as possible:

understand that person and how they fit into the org
three things they feel are going well and three that are not going well/need fixing
At the very end of the meeting, ask for a couple of names for people you should meet

When you walk out of the 1:1, write up what you heard and set up meetings with the people they suggested, even if they’re outside your org.

You’ll quickly build a mental map of common themes that emerge. Project X and Y which seem to be in trouble. Person Z who everyone thinks is awesome but is just some junior data scientist in title and should probably be promoted. Compensation issues. Space issues. Within two weeks you should have a list of three things the org needs to change and three things the org needs to double down on/accelerate.

You’re also laying the ground work for relationships and information flow across the org which will be critical later on where the same people may not be as open with you as they are with a new person.

Third, make obvious people changes quickly.

Within the first few weeks, it should be apparent which parts of your team are working and which aren’t. If you need to make an obvious change and ask someone to leave or change their role, it’s better to do it early and quickly. You’ll find people expect you to do this with your fresh slate than having to do it eight months later.

This can feel very hard. You have barely gotten started and you may not even know the other person well. However, you’ll always find that these situations are obvious and the org is almost expecting you to do it (and will judge your standards if you don’t).

Fourth, build key relationships.

There are three sets of key relationships you’ll need and in the first few weeks, spend time on all of these: Your direct reports, your peers and your manager. Your directs come first - they rely on you for their career progression and are your biggest responsibility. Take them to dinner, have coffee with them. Get to know them as people and not just in the confines of their role.

The most important however is your boss: the CEO or someone reporting to him/her usually. Check in with them at all times. Pass on your observations and get theirs in return. Calibrate whether this resonates with them and more importantly, get to alignment on what they think success in your job looks like. Ideally you’re chatting every few days. Most new exec failures are because there’s no early alignment.

Fifth, pick a crisis/early win

One of the most crucial things for new leaders is having an early “win” where the team sees you roll up your sleeves and in action. This could mean any number of things - close that sale yourself, handle that incoming press/PR kerfuffle, personally get involved in that site outage. Whatever it is, it is key that people get to see you engage - your style, how you actually do the work and add value.

Senior execs hope for a good crisis where they can help the team. The easiest thing to do is pick a quick/small project (not something that will take months) where you can have a visible win/outcome and justify your role as opposed to being just another layer of management.

Sixth, communicate.

Every single week, write out an update to your entire org on the people you’ve met and some high level observations. Write about yourself and your journey. People want to hear from their leaders and you’ll be surprised how little they know of what you actually do all day. Writing is by far the best way to get them to know you.

The key here is consistency. Send it to the same google group/alias at the same time of week with the same structure.

Finally, at the end of the month, write up a document on everything you observed from step two and send it to the org along with a few themes you want to focus on. This can feel uncomfortable - most execs aren’t used to being transparent so broadly. However, there’s real value here. The org gets to see how you work transparently but also have a mirror shined back on them from an unbiased source. I often find these docs are valuable years after the fact and good ones are the key to changing org behavior and culture.

These can sound trivial but you’ll be surprised at how repeatable and applicable this playbook is across job types and industries. Remember - these jobs are hard but you’ve earned it for a reason. Trust yourself, have fun.

Building something no one else can measure

2017-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

Any large system picks a metric to goal itself on. Entire books and way-too-long Medium posts have been written on the importance of said metric - it influences everything from people’s incentives to how quickly you can optimize your business. In an organizational equivalent of Schrödinger’s cat, picking the metric itself can cause weird cultural distortion (see Goodhart’s Law).

Since it is near impossible to perfectly measure human behavior, most large teams/products pick a proxy metric to measure underlying behavior. For example - ‘clicks’ are a proxy for “did I read this?” and “will I buy this product sometime in the future?”, ‘time spent’ is a proxy for “did I enjoy this content?” and NPS is often a substitute for “do I love this company?”. You convert a nebulous human emotion/behavior to a quantifiable metric you can align execution on and stick on a graph and measure teams on. Engineers and data scientists can’t do anything with “this makes people feel warm and fuzzy”. They can do a lot with “this feature improves metric X by 5% week-over-week”. Figuring out the connection between the two is often the art and science of product management.

This is where opportunities arise for startups and insurgents.

These metrics never really capture the underlying human emotion or behavior they are trying to measure. To make things more interesting, they almost always create secondary behavior which makes the metric go up but in a way the system designers didn’t anticipate or want.

For example, in terms of what designers wanted, what they built/measured and what they unintentionally caused:

Quality journalism → Measure Clicks → Creation of click-bait content
Whether an ad resonates with a human being → measure how long someone saw an ad → varied tactics to game people into seeing an ad.

If you take this outside tech, you could vaguely apply this framework to broader issues.

Hire and retain best teachers → Measure test performance → “Teaching the test”
Govt building long term infra for the people → Term limits → Every administration optimizes to get re-elected in 4-5 years.

At scale, you often have to settle for things you can measure/optimize or monetize. You also have to settle for metric that optimize for the short term - that’s what drives quarterly earnings or the competitive dynamics or product iteration loop at the moment. It’s just the best you can do and is often, good enough.

But you, as an outsider, you can do better. If you can figure out this this blind spot , you can build something that captures a space that the existing incumbent can’t go after easily. This is not easy and almost always needs some instinct or intuition on product/human beings/communities that is not broadly known and by its very nature, high beta.

Here are some crazy, impractical examples in this vein.

A social network that makes you spend less time on it and tries to get you to get outside/workout more instead to optimize for long term health.
A niche community/behavior that has no unified online presence (and hence can’t be measured/understood easily by an outsider).
A supermarket with a limited catalog that only sells healthy items.
Having only long form pieces that demands you spend a lot of time reading it. While on the surface these may sound just contrarian, what most of these do is to optimize for something long term/less measurable where the incumbents are constrained by time and what they can measure.

You might have noticed something else here - they’re almost all hard to monetize or build sustainable businesses as existing monetization/external systems all align with existing metrics too (a commerce company which tries to cap the amount of money a customer spends every year faces real challenges).

No one said this would be easy. But if you can thread a needle here and make it work, there is real value. In the frustrating words of all my childhood math textbooks, how to do that is left as an exercise to the reader.

Some fun further reading here, here, here, here , here and here.

Updated: Some more specific examples as opposed to theoretical ones.

Google optimized for sending people away from its site when prevailing wisdom at the time was to maximize time on-site
Zappos optimized to make the return-experience a delight and part of shopping when every other retailer was trying to drive down returns.

Not fundable

2012-12-16T00:00:00+00:00

Based on actual quotes and comments from VCs and folks in the industry. Hindsight is 20/20 but if you’re an entrepreneur getting a lot of nos, you’re in good company.

Dropbox

Storage is a low-margin, commodity business.
They'll get killed by Live Mesh/GDrive/the platform providers.
Users will leave them the moment the next startup offering more storage for less dollars comes along.
Which storage backup company has had a billion dollar exit?

Airbnb

No one wants to have a stranger ransack their home.
Not sure how big it is going to be (source).
Can't compete with Craigslist.

Instagram

Who has time for yet another social network? Facebook and Twitter dominate everyone's social network minutes.
Apple will build this into the camera with the next iOS update and crush them.
Their competitors are seasoned entrepreneurs who launched first on multiple platforms.

Palantir

Selling to the DoD and government is hard, if not impossible.
The incumbents have sales guys who have been in the business for three decades, know everyone in the chain of command and go out drinking and golfing with them. No one is going to trust classified information to a startup in Palo Alto.

Youtube

They'll get sued out of existence by the movie studios and the networks, just like Napster was.
Their bandwidth costs will crush them. This is video we are talking about. Do you know how much it costs us just to distribute operating system updates? (guess which company).
Flickr will add video and crush them.
Pirated content, home videos, sex tapes. What else is there?

Google

Why search when you can just bookmark the sites you go to everyday?
The home page has nothing on it. I didn't want to join a startup which had only a textbox. [from a friend who was offered a role when Google had 15 employees]
How will they make money when the minutes spent on site is so low? They send away everyone who hits the site.