Weekly Finds

[Podcast] The Big Pivot - Masters of Scale: In this episode of Masters of Scale, Reid Hoffman interviews ‘Stewart Butterfield’ (founder of Flickr and Slack). Stewart’s story is very fascinating as both of his famous startups were a result of a big pivot in his ongoing startups at that time.

In 2002 he was working on a multiplayer game ‘Game Neverending’ which had cool in game photo annotating and sharing capabilities. When this game idea failed to launch, the company pivoted and built a new product (Flickr) around this image sharing tool they had built.

In 2009, he again started a new multiplayer game startup called ‘Glitch’ which failed because it couldn’t attract a large audience. But the team working on the game had developed an internal chat tool for themselves as the chat tools available at that time weren’t good enough. This led Stewart to again do a big pivot and he built a product just around this team chat tool, which we know as ‘Slack’ now.

The episode goes into much more details of both the pivots, what went inside the head of Stewart etc.

[Podcast] 13 Businesses Making $1M+ per year with 0 employees: ‘My First Million’ is slowly turning into one of my favourite podcasts. In this episode Sam and Shaan takes us through their list of quasi-single person run businesses that are making more than a million dollars revenue per year.

They go over the businesses like StreamYard, TinyWow, Photopea, Marketing Examples, BuiltWith, GymStreak etc. My favorite one amongst these was GymStreak, how a boy from Zimbabwe goes to london and studies web development on the sides and builds this super awesome app. I might deep dive into his story in the next edition of this blog.

[Video] Do all plus sized people think the same: I was very confused: should I include this video in this blog or not. But at the end, I decided to let it be here.

In this video, a set of plus-sized people were invited and they were asked a bunch of questions to see whether they all think the same or not. Ignoring the questions and the people invited, the thing that fascinated me the most was the insane levels of denial these people were in.

My personal view is that barring some people who have genuine health issues, it is possible to defeat obesity if you put in the work and manage your diet. But in this video, it seemed like most of the plus-sized people don’t even want to accept the situation and put in the work to improve.

[Video] Cred Curious with Rahul Dravid: Oh man! who doesn’t love Rahul Dravid’s interviews. This is again one such interview that you shouldn’t miss. It’s almost funny how similar management roles are, whether they are in a deep tech company or in an international sports team.

I particularly liked how Kunal didn’t ask cricket questions to Rahul but he focused on the coach of Indian team and how he goes about managing a bunch of talented and hard working youngsters. In the interview you’ll get to listen to Rahul’s views on things like - inborn talent vs hard work, importance of consistency & discipline, earn people’s trusts and managing expectations etc.