📚 Finternet Technology, 50 Things, Case against Daily Routine, Asian Paint Story
Third Place, Telephone Design and more
Hi, this is post #164.
Federer magic continued this week. I loved “Federer: Twelve Final Days”. It’s a fantastic watch. The premise has an inherent appeal. And with Federer at the center of it, the experience is super emotional. It was so touching to see the bonding between the legends of the game. This is a real tearjerker, I must warn you.
Here’re what I found super interesting and worth sharing this week:
It’s a long list, let’s get to it right away…
💸 Finternet Technology
“Finternet technology vision and architecture” by Nandan Nilekani, Pramod Varma, Siddharth Shetty is a fantastic read if you want to understand (or revisit) the fundamentals of fintech & internet technologies.
I am amazed with the simplicity with which this document explains the core concepts and also lays down the foundation of what’s to come.
I’m not much into reading white papers & draft proposals, but this one excited me from the word go (maybe because of the authors) and kept me glued as I read it. I highly recommend it as an investment into your learning of the topic and to experience a beautifully written long form.
Here is a snippet explaining tokenization.
Traditional digitisation Tokenization represents a significant evolutionary step beyond digitisation in the way we interact with financial and real assets. Here’s how it builds on these concepts:
Digitization refers to the process of converting physical information or processes into digital formats, primarily for internal use. For instance, turning paper records into electronic documents serves as a foundational step, focusing on creating digital replicas of existing physical entities. This process is essential for streamlining internal operations and enhancing accessibility within organizations. However, transactability across different enterprises often presents challenges.
Dematerialisation takes digitisation a step further by eliminating the need for the physical form. This is often seen in the financial sector where physical stocks or bond certificates are replaced with electronic records. This means that the asset doesn't need a physical counterpart to exist; its existence and ownership are recognized purely through digital records. Dematerialisation also grants legal sanctity to the digital record.
Tokenization builds on these concepts by making digital representations of assets not only exact but also programmatically rich and operationally flexible, thus making them transactable, accessible, and affordable to all. Unlike mere digital copies, tokenized assets become embedded with enhanced capabilities for transactions and management. This approach scales transactions exponentially, thanks to the inherent reach and efficiency of the internet. Each tokenized asset can contain embedded transaction capabilities, making each unit independently operable within an open, digital-first system. This integration allows for direct control and manipulation of assets' features and behaviors through programmed instructions, without relying on external systems or platforms. By making assets programmable, tokenization unlocks a new layer of functionality, enabling a wide range of transactions and interactions that are secure, immediate, and highly efficient. This not only increases the liquidity of assets but also broadens access to them, potentially transforming various sectors by enabling new models of ownership and exchange.
📒 50 Things by Sasha Chapin
When art critics get together they talk about content, style, trend and meaning. But when painters get together, they talk about where you can get the best turpentine.
When I read any ‘n things’ list, I find myself going back to this quote by Picasso. Most such lists are filled with superficial concepts & observations. After all, it’s hard to find so many core truths.
Once in a while, I come across lists that are able to bring out a few ideas close to the core truths. Ideas that connect at a deeper level and make you think more. Sasha Chapin’s 50 things I know is one such list for me.
Below are a couple of noteworthy bits that hit hard:
It’s strange, but I know that it’s common to resist positive emotions, as well as negative ones. Ask yourself, next time you’re doing something enjoyable: are you really surrendering to the full enjoyment available here? The answer will often be no. Perhaps this has something to do with how displays of rapturous delight are often discouraged in adolescence.
I know that people really and truly cannot read your mind. It’s easy to think that people are ignoring your wants or emotions because they don’t care about you. But it’s likely that they have no idea what those are. If you’ve told them, they’ve likely forgotten, and may need a reminder — they have their own whole crowded bubble of consciousness going on!
I know that if you tell someone “we should keep in touch,” you will not keep in touch. Instead say, “I’m going to schedule a phone call with you in two months to catch up, I’ll send you the invite — if we need to adjust when we get closer to the date, that’s fine.”
(via Recomendo)
🕙 Case Against Daily Routines
Andrew Chen’s essay makes a case against morning yoga, daily routines, and endless meetings. He says:
This is the anti-routine essay, in which I refute the paradigm of fitter, happier, more productive routines as the secret to success. Our careers are defined by the highest moments of its biggest upside swings. The question is how to create the most opportunities at achieving that, not how to execute perfect little habits. That is: Reject the core loop, the checklists, and all the email. Embrace serendipity!
The post’s title caught my attention (it’s unlike what Andrew Chen talks about on most occasions).
The post, itself, did not disappoint. Here’s his core idea.
Breaking routine
The problem with 10x work is that it’s often unclear it’s happening until it happens. You often don’t know that a moment is important until you connect the lines after the fact, because it might be a chance idea that spawns a new project that then reinvents the company. It’s why we often read about accidental inventions, or huge technology waves that start as hobbies. However, I’m convinced that you can create an environment where 10x work is more likely to come up. That’s because at its core, 10x work thrives on agency, serendipity, and new information:
He goes on to share observations & suggestions to make a 10x impact possible! He has shared some good inputs here, read them even if you don’t agree with his views on ‘routines’.
🤖 Building AI products
Continuing my exploration of AI products and possibilities.
Benedict Evans’s essay “Building AI products” talks about how do we build mass-market products that change the world around a technology that gets things ‘wrong’? What does wrong mean, and how is that useful?
He is referring to current accuracy and smartness of AI solutions as well as the problems of hallucination that we’ve seen in abundance already. But his argument is that the technology is not at complete fault here. How we’re using them currently has a role to play as well.
Rather, a useful way to think about generative AI models is that they are extremely good at telling you what a good answer to a question like that would probably look like. There are some use-cases where ‘looks like a good answer’ is exactly what you want, and there are some where ‘roughly right’ is ‘precisely wrong’.
He explains further:
Looking at this on another axis: with any new technology, we begin by trying to make it fit the problems we already have, while the incumbents try to make it a feature (hence Google and Microsoft spraying LLMs all over their products in the last year). Then startups use it to unbundle the incumbents (to unbundle search, Oracle or Email), but meanwhile, other startups try to work out what we could build that would be truly native to the new technology. That comes in stages. First, Flickr had an iPhone app, but then Instagram used the smartphone camera, and used local computing to add filters, and further on again, Snap and TikTok used the touch screen, video and location to make something truly native to the platform. So, what native experiences do we build with this, that aren’t the chatbot itself, or where the ‘error rate’ doesn’t matter, but abstracts this new capability in some way?
A short read, worth your time. It may lead to some good discussion, in case you’re up to it.
🏡 Asian Paints Story
Asian Paints has given public investors the highest compounded returns in the history of the Indian stock market, with a Compounded Annual Growth Rate of 28% over the 42 years since it went public in 1982
Lores of Asian Paint as a training ground for the best breed of sales & distribution folks in India was told & retold to every batch of MBA grads in our days. It was the dream job for the folks interested in that field.
If you’re not intrigued about the Asian Paints story yet, let me throw one more card: Anupam Gupta (b50) recently published a book covering their history and Tigerfeathers interviewed them to talk about this book and behind the scenes.
“Three Mangoes, Two Horns, and a Garage” summarizes this conversation and brings you the best of the book, Anupam Gupta’s experience and Tigerfeathers’ witty writing.
Here’s a sample from the post:
I thoroughly enjoyed this one and am excited to read this book.
💗 Third Place
Allie Volpe tells us in her Vox piece that If you want to belong, find a third place.
What’s this ‘third place’? Here’s a quick definition from the person who coined it:
First defined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place, third places are settings a person frequents beyond their home (the first place) and work (the second place). Third places can include more traditional settings like places of worship, community and recreation centers, parks, and social clubs, but also encompass bars, gyms, malls, makeshift clubhouses in neighborhoods, and even virtual settings like Nextdoor.
There are many benefits, one of them being their roles as trust & relationship building.
As a result, third places are trust and relationship builders: You encounter a person frequently enough that you naturally graduate from a polite smile to small talk to perhaps deeper conversation. “You start to get the feeling that maybe I can trust that person if they say hello to me,” Giuffre says.
Vox’s piece does a fair job expanding on this theme, and suggesting how we can reimagine third spaces around us. I’m intrigued about this topic and want to explore it more. If you’re interested to join me in this quest, let’s connect.
☎️ Telephone Design
Kelly Smith writes the story of touch tone keypads to suggest what telephones can tell you about good design. Here’s the premise for this post:
What follows is a bit of trivia and some useful lessons in product design and user research. A good read for those interested in UX, product design areas.
(via Sidebar)
✨ Everything else
A mesmerizing aerial time-lapse captures the undulating patterns of Sheep Herding (via Colossal)
Benjamin Shine creates sculptures made from tulle/fabric that have a smoke-like appearance. His work feels magical, 9 out of 10 folks will fail to believe that it’s not a graphic/painting.
How to poop: Sheel Mohnot’s presentation in Learning Man 2024. Don’t miss it!
⏰ In case you missed last week’s post, you can find it here.
That's all for this week, folks!
I hope I've earned the privilege of your time.
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