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Thinking of Your Career as a Startup

Broadly speaking, it’s useful to think of your career as a startup.

Your profit+growth percentage should be a minimum 40%

So say, you join a big company like Microsoft and your skills grow at 20% every year, while your pay only grows 10% - that's bad.

You need to grow your skills and outcomes faster.

The other extreme is also fine: You join a small startup which can make great use of entrepreneurial DNA plus specific skills.

Your pay jump is 30%, and your skills grow only 10% - that is fine too

Your pay is profit. Growth is demonstrable skills growth.

Think of each career move as a Merger and Acquisition: Write a detailed document with the best reasons for making the switch.

Make the best argument possible. And then, red team it. Shred it to pieces.

I've done years where I grew by ~50% because of 15% pay jump and ~30% skills jumps - but doing it consistently is what matters. I’ve never done a 2-year streak of 40%+ growth in my career.

Most college graduates that I know - earn double of their starting pay at 30 years old. Which is effectively the growth rate of a fixed deposit. Fixed deposits are among the worst asset classes to invest in India.

  • Their gains come from savings and investments and the magic of compounding, not higher income alone
  • Your starting income should be high, or restart your career in some way e.g. moving to a new country

Charge more. Grow more

Assigning a % or $ value to your skills

The most common criticism of this approach is this: “I don’t know how to measure my skill growth - it’s intangible”

Saying something is intangible is a way of saying it has large error margins, it still has a minimum, median and a maximum.

Figure out all three, you don't need precision - you need worst case scenarios.

Look at any company's balance sheet: They've a "brand value" intangible and they assign a $$ value to it.

Millions of people pay millions of dollars for the Nike, Apple, Sony brand every year - it's a not a miracle.

The $$ values don't have to be precise. People always get lost in details.

I just ask them for the minimum, maximum and median - and people are like --- ohh, yeah, that makes sense - we can guess these with some work.

Do the work. Charge more. Grow more.

Mummy ka Raja beta, Nirant

Originally appeared at my newsletter

Diwali 2019: Annual Letter

I wanted to drop by and wish you a very Happy Diwali!

This is an annual email that I write to say thanks to mentors, friends, allies - everyone who has chipped in sculpt a better me.

So that is what I'll begin with: Thanks a ton for being there for me!

Also, checkout the 2018 edition of the annual email in attachment if you're curious :)

Moving onto the least comfortable piece, talking about myself:

Health

This has been a year of regression. For instance:

  • My BMI has slipped from 30 to 33 (higher is worse), gained about 7 kgs
  • Have worked out less than 2000 minutes (was 5000 minutes last year)
  • Have made tremendous unmeasured progress in managing my long term asthma, now I can frequently run up 2 floors without noticing that I did

Wealth

  • I was trying to invest in things other than mutual funds. Well, I've lost 25% of whatever I’ve invested in stocks (via smallcase) since then
  • I hired a financial advisor, which was a net loss making deal due to the fees, but helped me form better habits. Financial advisor in that sense are like gym trainers, more than the exercise - their main value addition is in following up
  • I’ve reduced my Fixed Deposit and Recurring Deposit investments to 0% of my savings
  • I’m diversifying my folio to a mix of index and bond funds now - this is still work in progress

Learning and Reading

Last year, I wrote how I was trying to think and dream better. Well, that has been a bust. The intent was to form a mental model, a scaffold of habits and information on which I could add new information and refine the scaffold itself.

This has been slower than I’d have guessed.

Intentionally, I read less books this year. I did read a lot more modern essays (blogs?) ranging from Peter Drucker, Marc Andressen, Naval Ravikant, and surprisingly boring, a former Coal India Chairman. I also re-read a couple of books like Courage to Be Disliked and Effective Engineer.

I also spent an unhealthy time reading beginner content on seemingly irrelevant topics like Policy making and Human Capital. Here is my favourite cross-topic discovery so far: Talent vs Luck: The role of randomness in success and failure.

Work

Since last Diwali, I quit Soroco and moved to Verloop.io - a really small, pre-Product Market Fit, loss-making business. I strongly considered a very enticing data science role at an investment bank. I finally leaned away from it, making a financially very expensive gut call.

The role here is challenging in two very important ways:

  • Autonomy: There is a much higher degree of autonomy on how I prioritize tasks and that has been scarier than I’d thought
  • Leading: I also hired 3 Machine Learning engineers who now work with me

The thing that could unlock 10x value? Technical and Learning-to-Manage Mentorship: Something I could really use a lot of help on, is critically missing.

The other welcome change is in how anxious I am about work: I am not! I am almost always excited to go work.

Work Adjacent

  • Public Speaking: I was invited to speak at PyCon India 2019 - India’s top conference on the Python programming language
  • Open Source: I’ve continued to maintain Awesome-NLP for years now. It now has over 9 thousand stars and 80+ contributors now. It’s officially recommended by Stanford to their Deep Learning students now.

What's Next?

  1. Writing and Tact

I suspect more knowledge workers in 20s should invest in learning how to communicate via either public speaking or writing. My chosen medium will probably be writing. I intend to write about a select list of topics: technology and how it has shaped our choices.

Owing partly to how I grew up, my default communication style has been confrontational. I'll incorporate a lot more tact, grace and consideration in the years ahead. Be more Kabira.

  1. Chase external validation

My professional and personal framework so far been focused internally. I did not value traditional credentials like degrees, grades, that exclusive college club and so on very highly. In hindsight, this was a bad career decision.

External validation is what sets apart sustainable, long term careers from short one-trick wonders. This mindset shift will be hard. And will probably be a long 5-15 year journey, and I’ll keep you posted - unless you want me to stop. Just let me know 🙂

Till then, Happy Diwali and a Happy New Year!

Best, Nirant

Strong Beliefs, Loosely Held

On Death

  • Is usually better the sooner it happens. Just like it’s best to retire from your cricket career at your peak for your own sake, it’s best to die when you are at your peak. You just might become Father of the Nation.

  • No one wishes that they’d accomplished less on their death beds. You might hear that no one wishes that they’d worked more. That’s right too. And there in lies the great human stupidity. You can’t hope to accomplish without working more. You might accomplish less despite working more.

This is also my answer for what I think is true, but almost no one agrees with me (from Peter Thiel’s Zero to One)

  • No one (with as many safety nets as me) would wish that they’d take less risks in their 20s. Cool people (like cool companies) are polite, go against less empathetic institutions and take risks (h/t Jeff Bezos)

On Purpose of Life

  • There is no higher purpose. Why would a microscopic life from a floating blue speck in the dark cold space have a higher purpose? It’s arrogant to assume otherwise

  • Serve the man next to you, then the one next to him and so on

  • Follow the Paradoxical Commandments, not because they help, but follow them anyway.

On Philosophy of Life

  • Options, choices are net bad. Decisions are good. Defaults are better. Burn your bridges. All-you-can eat buffets are scams. Having good looks or being visibly rich is a dating disadvantage because it creates options.

  • When in doubt, look for answers from the dead: Sufis, Stoics, Mystics, and Buddhists.

  • Eastern philosophy is more tolerable than Western philosophy. Here is how they contrast

  • Simple systems that fail at edges beat complicated systems that can handle edge cases. As in engineering, so in life. Regret minimization framework (h/t Jeff Bezos) seems like the best candidate and I am testing it as I write this uncomfortably honest piece

On Money

  • Time value of money is underrated

  • Money is like sex. It’s good to have a lot of it when you are young. That still won’t fill the hole left in your heart by not having a philosophy

  • If you’ve money, invest in your learning by paying for coffees with smarter people. Books, blogs, and those Coursera courses are a slow learning curve

On Work-Life Balance

An older version of this lives on Medium