A topic that has been something I’ve been talking a lot to the rest of the company. These are the builders who don’t just write code—they design experiences, solve problems, and ultimately solve customer’s end to end problem. The role of a product engineer extends beyond traditional software development. They bridge the gap between technical capability and user-focused design. Unlike …
One of the values we’ve recently added at HackerRank is something close to my heart. Like our other values, this one had taken on different forms in the past, but the current version resonates with me far more: we call it “Truly, Madly, Deeply Care.” In the past, we used the phrase “Customer Delight” Amazon has their version: “customer obsession.” …
Building a team or a company gives one a chance to make a lot of decisions at various stages. If you are lucky, some of them will be two-way doors, but most of them are one-way doors. Here are a few I can think of that I had to decide or think about at some point in the past (10+ …
We had our leadership offsite in the US this week and one of the lines mentioned in the culture session is still on top of my mind. Companies only have strong or weak cultures. You can’t classify them as good vs bad culture. For example, you can have a culture where you treat everyone as a family. Salesforce is a …
Even after fully going remote more than 3+ years ago, I still have a lot to learn about being productive in meetings. Zoom fatigue is real and sometimes jumping meeting after meetings makes it harder to focus on the right thing. Before the meeting Installing Meetingbar. Probably the single most productive step I’ve done to make it easier for me …
Probably the right title for this blog post should be “Regionalist”, but somehow the word ‘state-ist’ was the word I created and have been using for a long time. When I was assigned my room in the college hostel (back in 2004), each room was supposed to have 5 students. The 5 students in my room were assigned like this. …
When we started our company (>10 years ago), we decided to visit Bangalore to meet a few startup mentors for advice. I’ve already worked from Bangalore for a year, but visiting the startup folks was a new exciting experience. One of them we got a chance to meet in person was Swaroop CH. He wrote a book called Byte of …
From wikipedia, this is the actual definition of fire and forget – “Fire-and-forget is a type of missile guidance which does not require further external intervention after launch such as illumination of the target or wire guidance, and can hit its target without the launcher being in line-of-sight of the target.” Working with different kinds of people, there are some …
I’ve come to realise that one of the most underrated skills for anyone to grown well to a senior position in a company – “Growing with chaos”. By growing with chaos, I mean the ability to understand the state of chaos, being ok with increasing chaos in the systems, managing the chaos at the right time and ability to imagine …
Yak Shaving Yak shaving refers to a task, that leads you to perform another related task and so on, and so on — all distracting you from your original goal. This is sometimes called “going down the rabbit hole.” Seth Godin has an interesting post about yak shaving – https://seths.blog/2005/03/dont_shave_that/ and even AMEX has an interesting post about the same …
Building early-stage products require a big leap of faith on the ideas/products which don’t exist. In fact, I think there is some level of “stupidity” needed to build products at a very early stage. Of course, building products at any stage comes with its own challenges. It isn’t like the early stage is the hardest and life is super easy …
Three management principles I read while browsing the internet (of course over the past few years). I had this WOW reaction when I read about these for the first time. While it totally makes sense, I’ve been doing some of these mistakes earlier (probably even now). These are three principles I try to remember while making decisions, especially in meetings. …
I’m a huge fan of planes, learning about accidents of planes (both Air Crash Investigation and National Geographic Investigation are my favorite). Among all the aircraft crisis, of the best is the landing of the US Airways 1549 into the Hudson River. In fact, the movie Sully is based on this incident. And this is an interesting dialogue from this …
Startups are all about doing things that don’t scale. In fact, there is an interesting and famous article by Paul Graham on the same topic. http://paulgraham.com/ds.html. If you are an entrepreneur or planning to start something soon, this is a great read. We’ve done our fair share of things which never would’ve scaled. Looking back, we never actually planned to …
Meaning of Life This is something I (and I’m sure many others) have been pondering for many years. We all already know the answer to the question for “The answer to life, meaning, and everything”. It is 42. But what I’ve been pondering is the answer to MY life, meaning and everything. And to make things worse, I find myself …
All good companies (including ours) focus on growth and make sure they allocate a budget for their growth. Without a clear focus on growth, it is impossible to run a successful business. The term “growth team” and “growth hacking” are all normal in the current business world. I strongly believe the same logic should apply for us individuals too. We …
The main reason for me to write about this movie is a talk I’ve watched by Max Levchin. I’ve uploaded the 3-minute video where he talks about picking the right co-founder. The entire talk is an amazing lesson for startup founders and you can watch the full video at https://guides.co/g/y-combinator-startup-school/8943 Of course, running a startup with another founder for years, …
Startups are crazy! Things look so positive one minute and everything goes to negative next minute. Same way, things look so fucked up one minute, and then there is the ray of hope. In a startup, things seem great one moment and hopeless the next. And by next, I mean a couple hours later. The emotional ups and downs were …
The following is an excerpt from one of the documents we follow in our hiring process. It’s obvious we want to hire great people. No sane person will advise otherwise. There are different definitions of great, but let’s ask the question, why? The simple answer is time. Time is everything in a startup. A startup is designed in a way …
Founders are core to the company they create. They are supposed to smart, great in problem-solving, and at some level should be able to visualize the future. I recently had some one talk to me about how much he admires other founders and why founders are so great. While I was happy to take the credits, I wish I could …
I’ve always enjoyed the commencement speech made by Steve Jobs at Stanford. It is everyone out there should listen at least once. You can read/view the entire speech here at https://news.stanford.edu/2005/06/14/jobs-061505/. The best part about the speech is about he finished the speech. When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of …
One of the downsides of running a company is that you get caught up with so many problems to solve ‘at this moment,’ that you miss the focus to think long term. Especially one of the things I miss the most is reading books and reflecting on the learnings. It is easier to take your time off to read books …
9 years since I’ve decided to start on my own. Looking back, not a bad decision after all. Looking ahead, excited only about two things. People I’m working with and the problem I’m solving. More and more interesting people to work with. The scope of the problem to be solved is getting bigger and bigger. #excited! Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash
There are a lot of ways to define a startup. Paul Graham defines a startup as growth. This is how I would define it. A startup is an interesting & brutal game. The reason why it is both interesting & brutal is that the rules of the game keep on changing. Every 2 or 3 years, almost the entire rule set …
The answer for the above question was always “Vivek & Hari”, but not anymore. To give an idea on from when to when we built things and now who is “actually” building the company. From June 2009 – December 2011 From Jan 2012 – Today. There were many other smart programmers we hired, fired/quit. They did help us grow …