The Wisdom Wall

“the docile, yes, subservient people never turn out to be good. The arrogant pricks are the ones who do better.”

“I feel like hard work has very little impact on the outcome of a certain thing. Hard work is generally something that we use to appease our own ego when our ego comes calling as an explanation to why we failed or validation to why we succeeded. Hard work as a byproduct of the success, I don't think has very big…”

“So if you believe in the use case of capitalism, you have to believe in trickle down economics.”

“if these large model companies are going to cannibalize the end product, if you build on top of them, I think for a young entrepreneur, it's important not to be short-sighted and kind of like diversify and hedge what they build on top of, uh, not, it's not a, it's not the right analogy, but not end up in a world where…”

“I feel like AI and the ability to code with things like cursor and a bunch of other changes have democratized the ability to build A lot of these American products which might have costed X at a fraction of X.”

“When you look at the West and you account for real estate to cost of cups sold, you're able to serve up a lot more cups because the culture is of people buying a coffee and then walking with it. India somehow has out, sidestepped that altogether. Nobody's buying a coffee or a slushy or a matcha and walking the streets.…”

“The category of people in India, which can afford to pay a premium, uh, is still very low. Very, very low. I think we are very, very price conscious. It's almost like annoyingly price conscious. If you're selling something at 50 rupees and you're not in the craft space, you're in the mass market. If he sells it at 45,…”

“If your outcome is money, you will statistically do better at the industry where there are least amount of passionate people. The more boring your business, the likelihood of you making money is higher.”

“Society misrepresents insecurity to be a bad thing. Insecurity, in my opinion, leading to inaction is a bad thing. Insecurity leading to action is generally conducive to a world governed by capitalism for sure.”

“There are fifty million people in India that you're truly building a product for. If you're going down the premiumization route and the more premium you go, the higher the rate of growth seems to be.”

“Your ability to evolve is probably highest In isolation. Mimetic theory. If you're around people, you're going to be biased by virtue of your surroundings. If you want to truly evolve, you need objectivity.”

“Brings you slightly more insecurity. And the semblance of power, which is so intoxicating that you start to value things you should not value in a certain way in life more importantly than you should.”

“If I were to divide all the money on the planet equally amongst everybody tomorrow, one will work harder than another day after tomorrow, one will be more skilled at a certain thing. And we will come back to where we are today, maybe not in five, 10 years, but in 50 years or a hundred years, because that is the very…”

“Today, GSEC is considered as cash. I think that's a systemic risk. They're using it as a tradable instrument. Yeah, they're treating it as cash, and I think it's a long-term systemic risk in the system which has to be changed. Anything, any financial instrument which has a mark-to-mark component carries duration risk.”

“It's probably smart for the beneficiaries of capitalism to also fiend altruism because that allows for them to remain capitalist for longer.”

“This pathway comes further down the journey than that pathway, because I think you have to win at capitalism before you can win at morality.”

“People with most risk capital will have the best models by virtue of how much money they pump into those models.”

“I feel like society has wrongly coined hypocrisy as a bad word. Hypocrisy and change are synonymous in a way. I feel like it shouldn't be looked bad upon. Like, if you believe in something today, and you believe in a completely different thing tomorrow, you should change and not give a f*** about who is going to say…”

“I think societies are happy when the trend of relative change is upward. It doesn't matter if you have a lot more than me, as long as next year I have more than I have today.”

“I feel like all people are born the same and we all attempt different things. If I was five years old and I played cricket and I played cricket better than the 20 classmates of mine, I would organically become passionate at cricket, because I'm doing it better than the 20 kids around me.”

“In the capitalistic society, the projection of being selfless is a value add.”

“When we subscribe to a media house that I read from a certain journalist, I'm actually subscribing to the bias of that journalist. If you withdraw that bias from that journal, then I might as well read those 20 lines of text. So bias will never go away, I feel like.”

“Like when my dad was sick, I got him a nurse. So then he didn't have to do anything. He didn't have to move. Somebody was doing everything for him. That's the worst thing you can do for your parent. Uh, it's very counterintuitive, but I think just that community, the having to play with someone, having some competition…”

“The more I think about passion and talent, Neil, in my life it's starting to sound to me more as an output than as an input. I believe I'm passionate or talented at something when I do something and I'm a little bit better at it than my peer group. Uh, I was having this conversation with someone. If I believed that I…”

“I think personally that passion and talent are two forms of the same word. We often think passion or talent are inputs. Like if you're passionate about coffee, you get into coffee and then you realize you're talented and you have a good outcome. I feel like passion and talent are more outputs than input. When you're…”

“Uh, and I've said this before, but I find that a lot of very successful people today are building on top of some kind of confrontation, Avoiding confrontation, vicariously viewing confrontation or, uh, something shameful that happened.”

“I feel like in a, in a family, you can be communist almost, if it's your family. With a group of friends, you can be socialist. But as the group becomes wider, I don't think socialism works because trust factor falls very quickly. We don't trust people inherently that we do not know.”

“I feel like in that hierarchy, Every manager does lesser than the people he manages. And every manager's manager does lesser. It's actually like inversely proportional to the reward they get for the work.”

“We fiend benevolence a lot, because it is cool to be benevolent and not malevolent. We often are nice to people because we like the projection of ourself of being nice to people.”

“Companies do well over the long term who are able to bear the brunt of a down cycle. And most companies I see today will find it hard to survive a down cycle.”

“If you start a shirt and sell it at 15,000 rupees, you might find it hard to sell it. But if you price a shirt at one lakh rupees, Indian made, weave a story around it, it will sell itself to a certain extent.”

“In my experience, I find like something either works from the very beginning, or it never works at all.”

“I don't think movies should be where society derives their sense of morality.”

“I feel like I have changed as a person every year in the last 10 years. What I thought I wanted today has been totally different from what I wanted the next year. And I would hate to commit the present version of myself to another person when I know I'm going to change so much.”

“Eventually, uh, I feel like in society, everybody is chasing status. Which is differentiation from your fellow people.”

“I feel like Indian celebrities shy away from being vocal about who they are as people. They show the very media trained facet of them. And I feel like that worked five years ago. I don't know if it works today because you can't fall In love with a face or the manner in which a person acts or the proper image that they…”

“I feel like if the real version of you with the flaws, the vulnerabilities, the strength, all of that is depicted in a manner which is truly organic to you, I would assume like there will be some people who will troll you and dislike you and all of that. But net net, if you then sell sneakers, I think more will sell.”

“Consciously people are nicer to you before they get funded, not after.”

“Imposter complex is good. A lot of us seem to have it. Insecurity is good. As long as neither of these lead to inaction, but they lead to action.”

“Avoidant attachment type. Good for startups. Bad for relationships overall, but good for starting a company.”

“it has become so important, even for people like me, uh, an entrepreneur to build distribution because paying for distribution takes away so much of the Delta you might have, uh, that a district that a person with distribution brings organically.”

“Arrogance as a sales strategy is working. If people go to a brand and ask for something and they say, no, you can't have it. People want it more.”

“firstly, I don't believe charity is altruistic. I feel like everything has subtext in context, which I might not be able to speak about in a manner which will be comprehensible by many, many people, including myself in most cases, but I think charity is done. From a place in your heart where your morality is being…”

“No, the differentiation is, once you've built a business, and you've been successful once, you don't start all over again. Yes. As an actor, you start all over again. People only remember your last movie.”

“I feel like being indifferent, and having low expectations, like really low expectations, is the key to happiness and content.”

“The rate of UBI not necessarily being the same, but the thinking of the world has to go in this direction together, because if country A remains Overtly capitalistic and competitive, where company, country B goes to the UBI way, it'll cross discrepancies in the world.”

“Energy does not seem to be the problem as much as it is the fungibility, the movability, and the storage of energy today.”

“If I want the youth of India to change one thing, just one thing, is they need to stop Thinking that changing their mind is some kind of hypocrisy.”

“I would in a way in the new world, define creativity by contrarian behavior more so than yesterday, because a lot of these models are trained on data, which always projects a certain path.”

“Think of the world as a game of monopoly. You need to have chips to play, and the more chips you have, the more fun it is to play. People say it's not important, but it is.”

“See, in the short run, novelty sells. In the long time, I think specificity like that sells.”

“Reason in itself is not organic. I feel like the world tells us what is right or wrong. Uh, and we conform more often than not because not conforming is a lot more work than conforming.”

“authenticity itself is transient. My authentic self today is going to be different from my authentic self tomorrow.”

“Stay away from anything that is cool today. Stay away from the flavor of the season. These tend to be hard, expensive spaces to enter. And pick a sector first, then focus on what company you want to build in, because you want tailwinds in whatever you're trying to build.”

“When I met them in person and they became my friends and I had access to them like I have today. Uh, you start seeing that they're a bit like yourself as well. And you realize, okay, I saw this facet, which was exaggerated through that lens, but he has his own flaws, weaknesses, positives, advantages like me. Uh, so…”

“Like, the life of an investor barred trader is the life where you fail 49 times out of a hundred.”

“I feel like it's tough to compete with businesses where people are doing it for passion. I believe the same in restaurants. Very hard to make money.”

“how good your partner is? How you, how supportive, The man or woman you choose to, uh, cohabitate with or marry or have children with. Is a game changer.”

“So fundamentally, you have to build something which is against convention. If it is convention, the incumbent will likely do it better by virtue of experience and time.”

“This is again something which is common to a lot of successful entrepreneurs. Rebel, often without a cause.”

“But you know what I feel is a bigger challenge than going from zero to one. Is finding the gumption in you to reinvent yourself after the ecosystem around you has built up your ego into a bubble to come to terms with the fact that you've become complacent faster than the market tells you.”

“I think organically people do right by people over the long term. I'm not talking about the rich versus the poor, the gifted versus the ungifted, whatever, but society, humanity has lasted till this point, and it has thrived because organically we kind of do right by each other.”

“the difference between the West and India is in the West, people are going into a coffee shop to actually drink coffee. The culture of buying a coffee and walking, especially in New York, is such a big thing that the financials work out for them. Here, if you sell a coffee at 203 hundred rupees, and people have to sit…”

“Uh, if people were allowed To change their minds more often without judgment is something I think will help humans evolve faster. If I believed in something five years ago, and I changed my mind about it drastically today, the term society would give it is hypocrisy. The real term that should be attached to it, I think…”

“I think the way diamonds and cigarettes got sold by Hollywood is testament to how soft power is in the movies.”