📚Credit on UPI, Trust proxies, Ancient scrolls, Presenting to your CEO
📚Credit on UPI, Trust proxies, Ancient scrolls, Presenting to your CEO
Business of incense sticks + more interesting ideas from across the internet
Hi and welcome to the post #141.
I hit the send button for this post in Mysore. I’ve passed through this city many times, but never stayed and explored it. This time we decided to base ourselves here and explore the city. There is an old world charm to Mysore and it is fairly evident, in spite of a lot of new development. I am amazed by the wide roads, well placed parking on most roads, and a lot of green coverage everywhere. I hope to discover it more in the coming years, maybe as part of some planned exploration trip with like minded folks. Let’s see.
For now, let’s get to today’s post. It’s a little longer than usual, there were too many good things and I found it difficult to leave any of these out. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.
Let’s jump right in.
💸 UPI now, pay later
Continuing on the themes of innovative offerings under DPI in India & new fintech products with this blog “UPI Now, Pay Later” by Piyush Kharbanda.
That one can expand credit over the UPI rails is a use case that can transform the consumer credit business in India. This post expands on challenges with credit cards, MDRs, how BNPL and Neo banks failed to make a mark and finally why credit on UPI can make a dent in this world. He highlights the key lessons that we have to gather from these past failures and work towards using them in credit on UPI models.
It’s a new area and can mean a lot of new product & distribution innovation in the world of consumer credit. Worth reading!
🪃 Trust Proxies and The Swirl
John Cutler’s short essay “Rebuilding trust and breaking free from trust proxies and the swirl” is brilliant as it describes a complex situation very well. Here’s the relevant snapshot:
When teams don't trust each other, and they don't want to have the hard conversations to rebuild that trust ("really work it out"), they tend to look for proxies:
They debate surface-level things (like methodologies, practices, etc.)
They look to processes or systems as a quick fix for the lack of trust.
They make hollow concessions meant primarily to "put out the fire."
They single out individuals to blame for the situation.
The proxying gets worse when people who distrust each other ALSO lack details about what's happening (or when the people who work for them lack trust or when things happen that routinely cause flare-ups and disagreements they have to deal with).
If you can relate to the problem stated above, then John has listed some suggestions on how to overcome them. Worth a try.
💡 Tiny changes to transform your life
100 tiny changes to transform your life is a quick list to go through. These are suggestions from different folks from all walks of life. I like this one as it also hints at things that people bother about.
Some of them contradict each other, but that’s ok. We don’t need to be in one size fits all world! You’re bound to pick up a couple of them for your use.
(via readwise)
📜 Nat Friedman on Dwarkesh’s podcast
Reading Ancient Scrolls, Open Source, & AI - those are the themes of Nat Friedman’s conversation with Dwarkesh. It’s phenomenal that in just a span of 1.5 hours, you will get to hear & learn about history, really advanced technology in image processing, open source, ai data sets, building trust, taking big bold bets and a lot more.
Here’s one snippet that I find worth sharing.
And then my first day as CEO after we got the deal closed, at 9 AM the first day, I was in this room and we got on zoom and all the heads of engineering and product. I think maybe they were expecting some kind of longer-term strategy or something but I came in and I said – GitHub had no official feedback mechanism that was publicly available but there were several GitHub repos that the community members had started. Isaac from NPM had started one where he'd just been allowing people to give GitHub feedback. And people had been voting on this stuff for years. And I kind of shared my screen and put that up sorted by votes and said – We're going to pick one thing from this list and fix it by the end of the day and ship that, just one thing. And I think they were like – This is the new CEO strategy? And they were like – I don’t know, you need to do database migrations and can't do that in a day. Then someone's like maybe we can do this. We actually have a half implementation of this. And we eventually found something that we could fix by the end of the day. And what I hope I said was – what we need to show the world is that GitHub cares about developers. Not that it cares about Microsoft. Like if the first thing we did after the acquisition was to add Skype integration, developers would have said – Oh, we're not your priority. You have new priorities now. The idea was just to find ways to make it better for the people who use it and have them see that we cared about that immediately. And so I said, we're going to do this today and then we're going to do it every day for the next 100 days.
Dwarkesh’s questions are brilliant as usual. They make the conversation a lot more engaging.
If you like the history theme, you can check out this episode from Mukesh Bansal’s podcast covering this conversation with Manu Pillai. There is more in this series, and I am looking forward to that.
📽️ Presenting to your CEO
Wes Kao enlists tips on how to present to your CEO (or any senior leader). She is brilliant at spotting and stating the hard-to-describe challenges that we face. I had multiple deja vu moments as I read this post. And that compelled me to go pay full attention to what she suggests. This one piece stands out for me:
🗽 Missing Monuments of Silicon Valley
Most of us know Kevin Kelly for his “1000 true fans” maxim. Tech nerd junta may know him from his Wired magazine. He writes about his current interests & observations in his blog “The Technium.” One of the recent pieces talked about the missing monuments of Silicon Valley. This topic may not be high on your list of things to explore, but give it a quick read. It shares an interesting perspective on culture & civilizations.
My favorite bit:
The second assumption is that cultures need to build infrastructure. In some ways this is one of the definitions of civilization: the accumulation of infrastructure. There are civilizations in our deep past, like the ones that native American peoples built, whose infrastructure was not made in stone, and so their contributions have been erased, as those people were erased. But on average, remaking the environment to increase options is what civilizations do, and that means they tend to build, and often build big.
🕯️ Business of Incense making & Cycle Agarbatti
Arjun Ranga talks to Pritish & Sarthak on the business of incense making. They cover the history of incense, origin of Cycle Agarbatti, lessons of brand building from a time where the word ‘brand’ may not have been spoken of, importance of product thinking & quality culture as a lever in commodity market, and some good customer & distribution insight from the world’s largest incense manufacturer.
All lessons are deep rooted in fundamentals, devoid of any jargon. The humility in which they are served makes this one stand out from many other founder interviews you hear from more recent entrepreneurs.
Two key takeaways (copied as is from the Pritish’s summary)
Scent retention holds significant importance in the incense industry, especially during prayers that can last extended periods. Beyond the initial 20 minutes of the prayer, a residual fragrance should continue to evoke a sense of divinity and spirituality in the surroundings. The industry also demands the art of offering consumers the specific fragrance they'll resonate with the most.
Premium-ness in the agarbatti industry isn't necessarily associated with wealth but with uniqueness and commitment to spirituality. Even in the low-income segment, individuals deeply committed to prayer and spirituality choose to buy premium products as offerings to God. This unique consumer behaviour challenges the conventional notion of premium products being exclusively for affluent households.
🍶 Water Bottles & Lessons in Viral Growth
If you’re into your Instagram and viral marketing news, you must know about the Stanley water bottle. I was not aware of it, till that viral post surfaced on my feed and anyone & everyone reposted it.
If you’re still feeling clueless, don’t worry. This post by Rex Woodbury - “Water bottles & lessons in viral growth” tells us a lot more about Stanley water bottles. It’s a very interesting story involving a good product, a boring brand, a chance insight by a smart hustler, entering new categories, co-creating with your fans, building for the new generation and a dream business turnaround.
That ex-CMO of Crocs Terence Reilly was also involved in this turnaround in recent years gives a good confidence that product & brand reinventing themselves in changing time is a real possibility.
Here’s a sneak preview covering the key lessons:
The post further lists out 5 lessons in distribution from modern businesses. Worth a read.
✨ Everything else
Amit Trivedi's Sound of the Nation performance. He has given us the best new music in our time (the generation after Rahnam, of course) and this performance goes on to show how. From artists to the language - his mix is fantastic. Each artist is enjoying it and Amit Trivedi is like the magician who is bringing us one trick after another. A banger of a performance, I wish I could see this live!
Infrastructure can be beautiful too. Amazing thread from The Cultural Tutor covering the world's strangest and most wonderful bridges… check out for beauties from Switzerland to Iran and Colombia to Korea. Just brilliant.
Winners of the closeup photo of the year awards. (via Kottke)
That's all for this week, folks!
I hope I've earned the privilege of your time.
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