Don’t line up to pay for the coffee at the @CollisionHQ today! Instead come to @BankOnTruly booth at the Ontario Pavilion, get some hot Nespresso coffee and meet two hot baristas - yours truly & @sandeeptodi Oh we also talk about APIs for global banking & payments 😉

When we were starting Rupa, we hired a girl just out of college to do operations work for us. Shortly after we hired her, her dad messaged me on LinkedIn saying how excited his daughter was about Rupa. Very few teammates dads did this so it stood out. 😂 Over the years he would message me telling me how grateful he was that his daughter had found Rupa and how much she loved it. This girl was a rockstar and grew into a lead on our operations team. Every now and then I would text her dad telling him how amazing she was and how lucky we were to have her. The other day I got a message saying he was going to be in SF and wanted to finally meet the person who made such an impact on his daughter. It felt obvious to say yes and make it work. Anyway, we got coffee the other day and it was one of the best, unexpectedly inspiring, mornings I’ve had. He (a German immigrant) was in town to show his 81 year old mentor and friend (the person who gave him his first job as a kid in Germany) Yosemite. It was one of his mentor’s lifelong goals to see it. They stopped in sf to grab coffee with me before exploring Yosemite on their own. Legends. Turns out, he wasn’t just “my teammate’s dad from Michigan”. He had actually risked it all on his own startup, bootstrapping a data center and cloud services company in the 2000s and having a very successful run for 20+ years (still going today though he exited it). He and his 81 year old mentor (who turns out is a business legend in Germany) spent 2 hours giving me life advice on work and family and risk taking. An unexpectedly wonderful morning. Anyway, I stand by the fact that one of the best gifts of startups are the people you get to meet along the way. Including your teammate’s dads and their mentors.

There's so much advice out there, maybe here's my best advice of all: 🙏Never Leave on Bad Terms🫂 Somehow, this became common in the 2021 era, and never went away. Most folks, from the CRO + CMO level to the IC + SDR level: - Just disappear and leave with no notice, just a Slack note or DM and then gone that day - Write snarky things on LinkedIn / X - In general, burn bridges on the way out, often without even realizing it I get it. Layoffs are now omnipresent. Pressure is higher. The world has changed. Maybe "loyalty" is a thing of a bygone era. Maybe it never existed at all. Maybe companies don't do what it takes to earn any loyalty anymore. Probably they don't But my advice is this: imagine your goodbye lunch. Remember those? When everyone would take folks out when they gave their notice? Joke about the good times, and the less good times? How everyone would thank them, including their manager. Imagine that. Leave that way. Not because you need to, or own them anything. You don't owe them anything. But because you'll see them again. Not next week. But down the road. Most of us go from startup to startup, leader to leader. Reference checks aren't what they once were, it's not that. It's that someday, you'll see them again. And you may wish ... you'd left on better terms.

Looking for early stage entrepreneurs to join @ku1deep and me for an epic one-day trek. We'll walk amongst the lushest greenest hills of the Western Ghats (mumbai vicinity) with waterfalls and rivulets, and we'll chat about the scaling startups, selling in India, and siezing the AI opportunity. Sign up now, spots limited. Thanks for organizing this @mumbai_tech_ #Mumbai #trek #hike #entrepreneurship

A thought experiment. Imagine if: Within the next 89 days, the US, Europe, and Japan agree to go zero/zero on tariffs and remove all trade barriers. Then Europe and Japan join the US in raising tariffs on China to 145%. Then the US, Europe and Japan as a united front negotiate with China to remove tariffs and trade barriers, and put in place strong structural protections for IP.

The martyrdom playbook is manic. An engine of depression, anxiety, metabolic dysfunction, and disease. It breeds impaired judgment, immune system collapse, and emotional chaos. People crave status, respect, and visibility so deeply that they will contort themselves into whatever shape culture demands. Even if it takes them to the edge of insanity, wrecks their bodies, and drives them to the brink of collapse. People feel trapped and tortured in the current social obligation to maintain 100+ hr/wk and be terminally online, all while pretending as if all is well. Everyone else seems to be ok? No, they're not. This mania is no different from a 19th-century surgeon boasting about high patient volume. Piling bodies onto an assembly line while dismissing hygiene and sterilization as a waste of time. The discovery of germ theory, leading to simple interventions like handwashing and sterilization, nearly doubled life expectancy and supercharged human productivity. It turns out that hand washing isn't a waste of time but on par with history's greats. The irony here is the martyrdom archetype is meticulously designing ultra efficient technology, paying down technical debt, eliminating bugs and upgrading constantly, yet ignore their own biological systems of intelligence. They snub sleep, exercise, and nutrition which downgrades their intelligence, judgment, emotional stability, and the body's basic processes to fight sickness, and repair and build itself. We perfect technology as we destroy ourselves. The martyrdom archetype is not just in the world of technology but has infected every corner of culture. The weird thing, who even wants this? When I talk to others and they let their guard down to be honest, they want it to stop. It's unsustainable. They feel miserable. They rejoice in even minutes of reprieve. A few days without it and they see the complete insanity of it all. You can be ambitious AF and also prioritize health. These two things are not mutually exclusive. In fact, your greatest competitive advantage may be prioritizing your own biological and cognitive function because it allows for clear headedness and endurance. This era will soon be seen as primitive and absurd. A time when we foolishly and recklessly spent down the most precious gift of all: our conscious existence. We are building superintelligence. We'd be wise to build our own individual and collective intelligence with equal vigor. Honoring our existence with the solemnity it deserves.

double yikes 🤣