Category Archives: Life Lessons

Digital Spring Cleaning Checklist!

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As our lives increasingly go digital, it is useful to periodically run a status check on our online assets and relationships. I recently did my annual online services (subscriptions) spring cleaning. It threw up multiple surprises & uncovered leakages.. sharing a quick checklist here

  • Unused Subs: Found 2 subscriptions I’m paying, but not using.. promptly killed!

  • Broken Subs: Found multiple sububscriptions that got broken by the RBI credit card issue took some time, but painstakingly resurrected each one!

  • Dual Billing Shocker: Turns out my Audible a/c was being billed both by Amazon India (in Rs) & Amazon USA (in $). So weird – emailed customer support, they acknowledged the problem & reversed the US dual billing. What a relief!

  • Android PlayStore Billing: Realized this has ballooned into a sizable, slippery list. Found one paid kids app I was unaware of. Seems like the handiwork of my 10yr old daughter… led to some family drama:)

  • Foreign news sites: Foreign news publication Economist, NYT, WSJ have HORRIBLE a/c settings. Confusing navigation, bad UX & findability. My WSJ account has no record of my invoices of 2yrs! Some of these services have been applauded for overcoming their print legacies and growing online subscriptions strongly… I’d guess that turnaround is largely confined to news consumption interfaces… they still have a long way to go on basic hygiene stuff.

  • Free Subs: But credit where its due – NYT has offered 8 months free subscription (Nov21-Jun22) due to RBI billing issue (in India). Thanks NYT. Guess every cloud has a silver lining… some good finally coming out of the RBI CC mess:)

  • Only Monthly Billing: Not sure why, but some services only have monthly billing (e.g YouTube premium). Hello.. its 2022, the Big G cant do quarterly or annual bills?

  • Unsubscribe Flow UX Dark Patterns: Came across UX dark patterns in unsubscribe flows of multiple services! Customer retention ninjas at work:)

  • Indian Subscriptions: Its heartening to see Indian startups catching up. I am paying for multiple Indian services now… this was zilch 2-3 years back!

Last but not least, replugging my old rant about the need for a meta news subscription service (instead of signing up individually with each). Hasn’t the world made any progress on this?

Recommend everyone does this spring cleaning once in a while… you’ll end up saving some $$, besides getting on top of things!

Startup #LifeLessons from the YCombinator Vinod Khosla interview – “How to Build the Future”

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I’ve always found Vinod Khosla’s commentary on technology and startups very compelling. He’s an outspoken tech visionary, has a knack for articulating his thoughts clearly & impactfully for others to learn. This interview with YCombinator is a true gem – I jotted down its key takeaways for reflecting internally… and then decided to share it on the blog for public reading. Here are some hardest hitting startup #lifelessons from the conversation –

Culture & People

  • “A company becomes the people it hires, not the plan it makes”
  • The best people you’ll hire will take significant time to join you, since they will always something great to walk away from
  • “If you are reasonable, you can’t do unreasonable things”
  • “Hiring the early team is like engineering the gene pool of a company”
  • Doers v/s Talkers: at a startup, surround yourself with doers who have “skin in the game”

Strategy

  • For a startup, the end goal is like Mount Everest, but they don’t climb it in a straight line. They first get to basecamp 1, then to basecamp 2 and so on
  • Startup business plans (or pitch decks) aren’t important for knowing what founders will do, but for knowing how they have thought through and analyzed the problem

Investors / Advisors

  • “90% investors add no value, 70% add negative value to startups”
  • “Single hardest decision for startups – whose advice to listen for which topic”
  • How founders should think of investors: “they are employees you can’t fire”

Equity

  • Be generous with equity; use it strategically to hire people who are magnets for other good people
  • “If you are maximizing the size of the pie, it doesn’t matter what % you own”

Overall I think the interview is very insightful. Its like what is said about classics (books) – “every time you read it, you learn something new”.