Pathik Shah

Make Something People Want

2024-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Make Something People Want - Going Beyond

In the opening lecture “Challenge of the Future” of his Stanford class, Peter Thiel argues the fundamental challenge of a startup is to simultaneously answer three questions correctly:

For the startup, the answer to what is valuable? drives the market.
For the investor, size of the opportunity or the investment potential.
For the customer, the problem solved.

The answer to what is missing? drives the idea for the startup, product for the investor, and solution for the customer.

Finally, the answer to what can I do? or rather, what can we do? drives team, execution and satisfaction respectively:

Let’s enrich this framework.

Paul Graham claims the fundamental challenge in a technology startup is to Make Something People Want. This is a thoughtful, simple, intention-revealing and specific action statement. It tells founders to do something. It is also incomplete (likely for brevity), because it lacks uncertainty and tension that comes from constraints. The challenge for the typical startup is to make something people want with very little time and money.

Make Something is about the team executing on an idea to solve a problem by building a product:

The methods to make something are fairly well understood: deliver a simple solution early, iterate fast. I will write about the agile/lean topics later.

Part of what People Want is about a simple solution to an overlooked problem that actually needs to be solved.

Startup-worthy problem seems to be hard+schleppy+unsexy (therefore, overlooked) and frequent+urgent (therefore, needs to be solved).

The solution for the startup-worthy problem is demanded by the market:

“Focus on the problem” approach, however, seems less than exhaustive. People seem to want other things than solutions to problems (pinterest, instagram)

People Want » Make Something

Knowing what people want is harder than making something. Why? I can think of three reasons:

Understanding what people want is hard for the typical startup founder (harder if product targets enterprise). Customers don’t say what they want or don’t want directly. A twenty-something, somewhat introverted CS major guy did not yet acquire a wide enough range of human experience and emotional maturity to penetrate what isn’t being said.
Accepting what people don’t want is hard for the typical startup founder. Customers say what they don’t want. Founders ignore and rationalize the feedback. Founders confuse stubbornness with persistence, their ideas/product with their identity, or both.
Understanding what people want is hard.

The real reason is probably a combination of all three. I will explore the last one.

Let’s start with the people. They are customers. Customers form the startup’s market, and demand the product.

people ≠ persons
people = customers

A customer is defined by a pattern of demand, as an instance of customers. Therefore,

customer ≠ a person
customer = persona
customer = a demand pattern that reached critical mass

Now we can tie it back to market:

demand = public spread of a private want
market = a private want shared by a critical mass

Notice we are circling around the want. The central complexity is cracking the want.

want = lack of something desirable and/or essential
or want = a need component + a desire component

For needs, I will use Steven Reiss’ framework of 16 common needs deeply rooted in human nature:

Ordering and grouping reveals three clusters:

About Person

Eating
Physical Activity
Independence
Honor
Tranquility
Romance (includes beauty and aesthetics)

About Things

Curiosity
Saving (collecting/accumulating things of value)
Order (organizing, structuring things)

About Other People

Family
Social contact
Acceptance
Status
Power
Idealism
Vengeance

That’s the need component.
Now, let’s focus on the desire component. It seems to have three distinct parts:

A seeking drive that is neutral, independent of the object of desire (you desire something feverishly, then go on and desire something else the same way)
A learned, mimicked and virally spreading part (you want that? I want it too)
An addictive, self-reinforcing reward part tied to intrinsic feeling combinations (facebook: wonder + lust = voyeurism, vitality + self-importance + lust = narcissism)

Putting it together, and reordering:

want = need + desire
want = 16 needs + addictive reward + mimetic/viral desire + neutral seeking drive

The question what is valuable? is from customer’s viewpoint in relation to themselves.

The answer is a story: underlying psychological drivers, the needs, cause people to share a private want. This want defines the demand and drives the potential market for your startup, and the investment potential for your angel/VC. Sometimes customers are aware of an obstacle, manifested as a problem. If you want to make something they want, you better root for them. Therefore, their problem becomes your enemy, and defines your marketing personality.

The answer to what is missing? is defined from customer’ point in relation to what else is there. The other stuff drives what we learn to desire. The underlying psychological driver for the answer is the desire.

The underlying psychological challenge for the startup is to do ordinary things under extraordinary situations: courage.

Finally, let’s add the fourth dimension, the psyche, to the Peter Thiel + Paul Graham framework:

Enough theory. Let’s predict:

To make something people want notice hard+schleppy+unsexy+frequent+urgent problems, and publicly spreading private wants that are about to hit a critical mass.
For publicly spreading private wants, notice combinations of 16 core needs (status, power and curiosity) that a. yield an addictive reward (acceptance of + instant influence over masses, endless wonder) and b. became ok to borrow from each other (twitter)
The more of 16 needs your product covers, the more people want it (facebook)
The fewer of 16 needs your product covers, the more it needs to solve a hard+schleppy+unsexy+frequent+urgent problem (dropbox)
The fewer of the 7 social needs about people your product covers, the more need for building viral mechanisms into product (dropbox)
The 3 needs about things make the product addictive (pinterest)
The 7 social needs about people are over-served
Combining under-served needs opens big markets (airbnb: independence + idealism + curiosity)
Vengeance (e.g. shame wrongdoing judges) is under-served.

Note - This post is not my creation, it’s this dude’s. But it’s a brilliant way to think about and build products. The original post which I read almost 10 years ago doesn’t seem to be online anymore. Hence this repost.

The Next Big Tech Wave

2022-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

Finally - we may have some visibility into how the next big wave of technology will shape up.

In the last decade, 2000-2010 - the smartphone and mobile internet wave - was initiated. 2011-2020 has mostly been just about riding that to maturity.

The last decade also saw all prescient techies and VCs starting to clamour to find the next big tech wave - speculating, tinkering and betting on what will lead to the next explosion in value (and valuations).

Everything so far - has looked bleak. There were mainly 3 options, from a layman’s perspective (excuse if I miss some niche development that only experts in the field would know of) -

/1 AI / AGI -

AI always seemed overhyped. Chat Bots & AI Assistants took over in the middle of the last decade, and died down once the initial novelty wore off.
Bots started beating a lot of human players in structured games, and then unstructured, complicated games as well.
Beyond that - nada (for the layman consumer - a lot of things became more way more optimized in the background though).

/2 VR / Metaverse -

This was to be the next big computing platform. The company with the biggest consumer user base in the world changed its name to ride this too.
Everyone I know bought or played with an Oculus VR, and used it less than 10 times and it’s now gathering dust somewhere in their house. Note - if it didn’t pick up during the lockdowns, on its own merit, hard to make a case for it given the current experience.
Great novelty factor, but too inconvenient or expensive to become a daily use computing platform for the masses.

/3 Crypto / Web3 -

Highly speculative - meant to disrupt the current financial system and governments.
Ended up with having some people make a lot of money, a lot of people losing some money, and rediscovering and speedrunning every scam and bubble since the dawn of humankind.

You could actually argue that while speculators were attracted to Web3 to get rich quick, a lot of builders were also attracted to it because Web2 seemed so dystopian. BigTech has won everything and most startup funding dollars are going to BigTech too (cloud, performance marketing and inflated talent costs). Web3 still felt full of hope, the chance to build everything anew and from scratch.

None of them in isolation turned out to become the next big technology wave that everyone’s been waiting for.

This fact - combined with the end of the zero interest rate regime across the world - has led to doom and gloom and even FAANG techies (coddled over a decade, riding the beta of the last tech wave by being in the right place and the right time) are now seeing a dystopian future full of layoffs and the reality of free markets crashing down on them.

However - it feels like we’re on the cusp of something big.

/1 AI / AGI -

Generative AI is finally making its mark on multiple industries (could still be mostly hype, but doesn’t feel like it).
Almost all known games (both in the virtual and real world) - will soon be beaten by it, led by DeepMind et al.
Self Driving Cars and Robots may genuinely become viable in 2021-30, the coming decade.
The most ignored child is turning out to be the most capable.

/2 VR / Metaverse -

Headsets and user experience seem to be getting better. With FB’s new headset, and rumours of Apple launching something good by 2024 - if this doesn’t make it a mass computing platform - nothing else will.
There will be a gold rush for developers once this happens, similar to what we saw at the dawn of the App Store across the world and the dawn of super cheap mobile internet due to Jio in India which birthed most of the unicorns in India indirectly by significantly expanding access and the TAM.

/3 Crypto / Web3 -

The most controversial, overhyped and now the most criticised leg. Maybe it was just truly ahead of its time.
Decentralization - hard to make a case for it given the strong control of current governments and centralized computing platforms.
Scarcity - now this - will become more and more valuable - given the wave of digital abundance pushed forward by the Generative AI wave. Until now, it was speculative, now it may become a real need.
Proof of Ownership and Proof of Human Creation will become more valuable as we get flooded by midwit level digital content and entities post the Generative AI wave takes hold.

What if the next big wave is not any of these 3, but the confluence of all of these 3.

Metaverse/VR increasing the value of ‘Digital’ as opposed to ‘Real’ in everyone’s life.
Generative AI improving the ‘Digital’ experience thoroughly with Abundance and making the need for ‘Real’ world interactions minimal by automating all logistics (production, deliveries, rides) and need for human connection (via virtual companions/sex bots)
Crypto finally providing a way to control this ‘Digital’ ‘Abundance’ and ascribe value to the things that are truly ‘Original’ and ‘Real’.

They say it’s more opportunistic and higher ROI to be in the top 10% of 2-3 fields and intersect them as opposed to being in the top 1% of any new field.

They also say that one should be fearful when everyone is greedy, and greedy when everyone is fearful.

As a combo - we’re leaning more towards fear in Crypto, feeling neutral for the Metaverse, and just starting to get greedy in AI.

For anyone just starting out in Tech or trying to do something new in Tech, maybe now truly is the best time to build, before the speculators ruin everything again. For most people - not just in one of these (as all of them are extremely deep fields with real genius needing a decade to get to), but at the intersection of all of these.

The beginning of a long cold winter for speculators, and the beginning of a new wave opening up multiple opportunities for consumer facing disruption for builders.

PS: Maybe this post is just triggered by the early novelty of the breakthrough with ChatGPT and multiple other Generative AI projects, and will age badly. Only time will tell.

What’s your Bet on the Future?

2021-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

My latest existential crisis was triggered by this tweet. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the last few years, but this forced a lot of clarity in my mind.

There have been people working on crypto for a decade and consumer VR for as long. As those areas mature, these experts will lead the way. Much like how early in my career social media was the same kind of bet that has now grown significantly. What are people just starting now?

/0 - Few understand this.

All the known entities right now are people who made their mark via the Internet, Social and Mobile.
The Crypto/VR people will make their mark now. But that’s already a decade old. The intersection between the two sets of folks is fairly low.

/1 The early adopter phase - the Internet is already 25 years old now, Social is 15 years old. Crypto/VR is about 5 years old. The rate of change of new technology waves and inflection points coming in is rapidly reducing. It’s both scary and exciting.

/2 The winners in any market are usually decided during the early adopter phase. Platforms and networks get built then and then scale with the market growing. If you don’t stay on the cutting edge actively, you risk becoming completely irrelevant.

/3 Even the generation 10 years younger than us will think of us as dinosaurs. Just like we meme and make fun of the last generation business leaders who don’t get technology, I’m fairly aware of a lot of current ‘tech’ leaders in internet/mobile, who simply don’t get the next wave.

Food for thought:

Are you coasting on your knowledge of the past, or are you betting on and armed to build the future? Are you just exploiting or are you also exploring? Are you climbing the right hill for the future?

Heroes vs Villains

2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve always been plagued by this question - In any comic or movie, what would you rather be?

The hero or the villain?

Since a very young age, I’d discovered the answer isn’t that plain and simple. I’m often able to relate more to the complex villain and way more interested about their motivations, as opposed to rooting for the boring, overtly simplified hero.

The most interesting villains aren’t the stupidly evil kind. They’re actually anti-heroes. The world isn’t black and white. Lex Luthor is not completely wrong; he has some method to his madness. So does Thanos.

Loved this post, which expands on the same.

Heroes become super by virtue of their actions. They do great things. They perform heroic acts. And then, when the honor is bestowed upon them by some shared consciousness, they become superheroes. The super- prefix is one that is earned, not given. It is a trophy. No superhero has ever become a superhero by calling himself a superhero.

Villains, however, are different. Because people are assumed to be good by default, villains must consciously decide to deviate into villainy. No villain has ever accidentally become a villain. Villainous acts are performed with the full intention of achieving an end goal that satisfies ego, greed, lust, or the desire for power. Sometimes those goals align with universally positive outcomes, and, though they should always be seen through the lens of skepticism, villains are not bad without exception. Actions that appear evil can often be used to achieve noble end goals. In fact, in many situations, “evil” is a required ingredient for the manufacture of success. Villains are often misunderstood superheroes.

Responsibility vs. Power

The biggest benefit to villainy is that it provides far more potential for doing good than heroism. Unlike superheroes, villains are not beholden to the requirements of their position. Villains define their own situations, while superheroes work against very strict, and very public, rubrics for doing good. This difference gives villains the ability to achieve goals on their own terms. It gives them the freedom to be creative and to push boundaries. While superheroes have responsibility, villains have power. Superheroes are handcuffed by conformity. Villains are liberated by absolute power.

The downside to all of this is that villains play a fragile game. With power comes moral corruptibility, and with corruptibility comes unpopularity–maybe even hatred–from society. But as long as villains can hold themselves back from corruption, they can do great things.

High Agency

2021-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Who do you want to go to war with?

Over the last few years, I’ve been lucky enough to have hired, worked side by side with and interviewed lot of very smart people. I’ve also had the chance to interact with a lot of very smart folks online and offline and learn from them. After all of that, if there’s one thing I look for, before any other trait (especially the obvious ones), it’s something that’s called a “High Agency” mindset.

It’s a concept which is not very popular and has never really been spoken or written about cohesively in a single post – and hence I’m taking a shot at it. All credit to Eric Weinstein for articulating this, Ryan Holiday and George Mack for expanding on it.

PS: I also tend to be a bit lazy and whenever I’ve been asked for feedback, it tends to revolve around this one point only, so I’m writing this blog post also so that I can just redirect to this. PS: If you have issues with war mode analogies and startups, keep them to yourself. I really don’t care.

What is the High Agency mindset?

When you’re told that something is impossible, is that the end of the conversation, or does that start a second dialogue in your mind, how to get around whoever it is that’s just told you that you can’t do something?

High Agency is a sense that the story given to you by other people about what you can/cannot do is just that – a story. And that you have control over the story.

High Agency person looks to bend reality to their will. They either find a way, or they make a way. Low agency person accepts the story that is given to them. They never question it. They are passive. They outsource all of their decision making to other people.

People articulate High Agency behavior in different ways.

Paul Graham – Relentlessly Resourceful – says he can describe a good startup founder in two words – “relentlessly resourceful” (high agency) He says the opposite of this is “hapless” (low agency).

Jeff Bezos – Third World Prison – has a framework for identifying high agency friends/romantic partners. Answer this question: “If you was stuck in a third world prison and had to call one person to try and bust you out of there – who would you call?”

Keith Rabois – Barrels vs Ammunition – identifies high agency in employees through a mental model called “Barrels vs Ammunition”.

Peter Thiel – 10 Years in 6 Months – has a question to help bring out high agency thinking. “How can you achieve your 10 year goal in 6 months?”

Steve Jobs – Change Reality –“When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”

Life is too short to spend it with Low Agency people

When you’re working on extremely ambitious problems, you really want to be surrounded by people who’re high agency. They give you energy. They figure shit out. They bend reality. They win.

Raw intellectual horsepower, hard work and other things are hygiene. High agency behaviour is what the ultimate differentiator is. It will help you learn much faster, grow much faster and eventually make a huge impact, either in some job you’re doing, or even if you start your own company some day.

In a lot of instances, when I’m introspecting myself or when I’m giving feedback to my directs on why certain things can’t be done, I use one line a lot – “The world is unfair. Deal with it. The market doesn’t care. Figure it out.” The best people, those with a high agency mindset, inherently understand this. And those are the only kind of people that you’ll want to work with.

No?

Master & Slave Moralities

2021-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

Something from Nietzsche’s “The Genealogy of Morals” that hasn’t left my mind since I first read it. It explains a lot about the world we live in now, and the state of the human race. (#1, #2)

–

In any population, you are going to have a group of people who are more talented / gifted / intelligent than average. Let’s call them The Strong. You are also going to have a group of people who are less talented / gifted / intelligent than average. Let’s call them The Weak.

The Strong will naturally accrue the power in society for no other reason than they are more capable and talented than the others.

Because The Strong won their greater power and influence through outsmarting or outperforming others, they will come to adopt ethical beliefs that justify their position: that might makes right, that they are entitled to their privileged position, that they earned what is theirs. Nietzsche calls this “Master Morality.”

Because The Weak lost their power and influence by being outsmarted and outperformed, they will come to adopt ethical beliefs that justify their position: that people deserve aid and charity, that one should give away one’s possessions to the less fortunate, that you should live for others and not yourself. Nietzsche calls this “Slave Morality.”

Master/Slave Moralities have been in a kind of tension in every society for all of recorded history. Many political/social conflicts are side effects of the struggle between Master and Slave Moralities.

Nietzsche believed that the ideas of guilt, punishment and a “bad conscience” are all culturally constructed and used by The Weak to chip away at the dominance and power of The Strong. He also believed that Slave Morality is just as capable of corrupting and oppressing a society as Master Morality. He used Christianity as his primary example of this.

Nietzsche believed that Slave Morality stifled man’s greatest characteristics: creativity, innovation, ambition, and even happiness itself.

Patman - The Origin Story

2021-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

Patman - The Origin Story

Hi, I’m Pathik.

This is my new blog. I’ve blogged, tweeted and spread my gyaan all over the internet a lot in the past 15 years - but I’ve burnt it all down and doing a fresh new start here.

Work - 2011-2020

I lead DB Digital, a digital content products startup. We’re building multiple digital content products for the 500 million+ users coming online on mobile by 2020, starting with a mobile-first news product built for Bharat with high quality trusted content for multiple languages, engaging content formats and a seamless product experience optimized for India. Something that India really deserves, but certainly lacks right now. We’re backed by India’s biggest newspaper group (The Dainik Bhaskar Group) which reaches tens of millions of consumers across India on a daily basis, in multiple languages including Hindi, Gujarati and Marathi.

Before that, I led Product, Growth & M&A at Hike Messenger. We built some really cool shit and grew to more than 100 million users in India, raised more than $250M to become one of the fastest unicorns in India. We were building India’s first super-app and leading the Product and Growth teams, we built everything from messaging to social to content to gaming to payments and even commerce within a single app. We also acquired 3 companies and invested in one.

Other Shit

Other than that – I spend most of my free time evaluating, mentoring and investing in promising consumer tech startups solving real problems for the Indian market. I’m an avid learner and reader of business, finance, technology and I love good sci-fi. I’m also trying to dabble with exercise, sleep optimization and basic biohacking to achieve peak human performance and would love to spend more time learning and mastering that.

Ancient History - Pre 2010

Before all of this, I tried to create my own business empire in the dark unexplored areas of the internet while in college (but dropped it when I realized my ideas won’t scale), barely scraped my way through an engineering degree, tried to become a professional gamer (CS & DoTA – quit when I realized probably only 10 people in India would make good money doing it), joined an investment bank in the technology team (to eventually become a cool investment banker, and left when I realized that wasn’t the path to it), dabbled with an MBA to drop out on the first day, completed 2 levels of CFA (and then dropped out as both weren’t worth the time), joined and eventually led the India Ops of a US based tech enabled equity research startup.

Connect

Just ping me on Twitter – @pathik or LinkedIn - @pathiks