Self-awareness, imperfection, and substack

Why now, why not till now, and what could you expect from this substack

Why now:

Earlier this week, I was shadowing Hans (my boss and mentor) at the board meeting for a company we partnered with since 2019. As I was reflecting at the end of that board meeting, two pieces of old wisdom blared through my mind:

• “Most people don’t grow as fast as companies do” - Staple wisdom dished out at entrepreneurship and venture capital classes during my time at Stanford’s business school; The inference for me has been to never say no to partnering with leaders who learn and grow as fast as their companies do, and understanding whether/how leaders learn is a core part of our DD process

• “What got you here, won’t get you there” - Marshall Goldsmith, and often repeated by ex-boss and mentor Shashi Buluswar in our 1:1s.

I was particularly amazed at how much the founder grew in these two years (from an already high base back then). It was inspirational how he scaled from being a CEO who steered the company through the “1 to 10” journey, and how he’s stepping up to lead the company in the “10 to 100” journey. Coincidentally, this week I stumbled upon a bunch of in-depth stories related to Forrest Li and Tony Xu, two of my favorite leaders for their personal growth. Both of their companies have business models where the “playbook” had to evolve constantly and had more naysayers than promoters for the most part of their early journeys¹.

So, I took some time to reflect on what I need to “get there”, and audit my calendar to assess the inputs to outcomes relationship. Among other things, public writing came out as one of the things I should do. (In @David Perell’s words, writing publicly as it’s the highest leverage human activity).

It hit home when I assessed how I spend my time on portfolio support (2nd largest chunk of my time). Every quarter, our team reviews priorities across the companies we work with and iterates our portfolio support plan. I personally like to find one priority that is common across the companies I work with, and identify how I could corral resources across my firm and outside to help. e.g., how to set up effective user insights teams; org design and culture tweaks for more “0 to 1” projects to layer revenue, building an IPO ready finance org, etc., There is a fairly good amount of content that comes out through this process, but I haven’t documented it enough and it’s mostly disseminated through calls. Not documenting makes it repetitive every time I work with a new company, and it makes it harder to get feedback outside my bubble and to iterate.

Why not till now:

The biggest reason is the fear of being imperfect and incomplete, especially in a world with legendary startup writers such as Paul Graham and operators. The next big reason is the fear of “crossing the line” and inadvertently cause reputational damage to those I work with. Moreover, the immediate ROI of writing hasn’t always been obvious. So, it fell in the important but not urgent bucket.

What could you expect from this substack:

So, this is my attempt to changing it: Iterate in a time-bound manner and see whether it works. I am going to write for 3 months (once every two Saturdays) about things I am passionate about and have a unique vantage point. Especially as a first-gen college grad who navigated through multiple socioeconomic groups, lived across India, Africa, and the US; working in social impact, hardware products, and now internet tech; as a consultant, operator, founder, and VC. I am a big fan of derived ideas from another discipline, sector, or geography. e.g., applying positional and competitive advantage theory from business to personal career. parallels between Hollywood and the Silicon Valley, merits of Austin as a hub for the Indian startup ecosystem, etc., These derived ideas are often incomplete and imperfect and require multiple iterations and integrations to be valuable. Hence, I named this substack “Integrated derivates” and hope to write, refine, and learn through your input.

I want to be respectful of your time and mental bandwidth. I am a new writer. So, as you read these posts, I’d love to hear ideas to write about and feedback on what’s working and not working. If it’s easier, feel free to write one-liner feedback without all the bells and whistles.

Thank you and look forward!

1. Disclosure: I own both Sea Ltd and Doordash stocks as part of my personal portfolio.