Shaant Minhas

GTM | Tech | Bizz

[Shaant Minhas @ShaantMinhas]

"Misbehavior is very strongly correlated with and responsible for creative thought."

- via The Power of Ignorance by @davetrott

[TBPN @tbpn]

"I do not think a chatbot is the right interface for travel or e-commerce." - @bchesky

"I think the future is not apps. The future is agents, but I don't think they're going to be text-forward. I think they're going to be really rich user interfaces."

"Imagine using iMessage to do everything, when in fact every other app has a unique interface."

"With e-commerce, you want a very rich user interface. It would be agentic. You can have a conversation with it, but the point is that it has to be more visual."

[redJ @sudoredj]

this guy took 6 years to graduate, started college intending to do poetry, realized junior year that he liked math, then went to america and won the fields medal.

[Shaant Minhas @ShaantMinhas]

@Abhishe50703871 @Myprotein Did you verify the authenticity with the QR code from the back? Mine came out authentic, taste is alright too.

[Shaant Minhas @ShaantMinhas]

@Myprotein_CS Can't send you a private message.

But Yes, my order number is 666496604. It's impact whey protein.

I have received a damaged product whose packaging is completely torn apart.

I believe it's tampered with, and so I want a complete refund of this order.

[DAN KOE @thedankoe]

hours worked is not a useful metric for value created

[Shaant Minhas @ShaantMinhas]

@SchopenhauerNow @AskPerplexity tell me why I should read Schopenhauer?

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Naval Ravikant on why founders shouldn’t chase trends

“Trend chasing is a lot like macro chasing. It’s often too late.”

In the clip below, he cites AI as an example. You will usually get drowned in a sea of copycats or you will get crushed by the company that established the industry (e.g. OpenAI).

“The thing that is always the best to do is something that you know really well and have conviction about. Usually it’s that you’ve worked on a product because you want it to exist for yourself or it’s an industry that you know really well or there’s some technology that other people don’t get but you’re intellectually obsessed with.”

Naval’s favorite companies are the ones that are doing something technologically challenging and difficult that the founder is passionate about but it’s not in an easy-to-define field or trend.

“Wealth is a byproduct of knowledge… What you should be doing when you are creating a startup is not asking what space is hot. Instead, ask ‘what knowledge do I have?’”

He recalls Peter Thiel’s famous question: what important truth do very few people agree with you on?

In his book Zero to One, Thiel writes:

“The best entrepreneurs know this: Every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.”

Naval adds:

“You’re only going to [have a secret] if you have an intellectual obsession—if you are obsessed with a space for some time for whatever reason… and you figured something out. And because you figured something out, you can bet on that with deep conviction.”

Video source: @AngelList (2023)

[Shaant Minhas @ShaantMinhas]

@iamjasonlevin @denk_tweets @beehiiv You can just do things. Go!

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

"The enemy of most dreams and intuitions, and one of the most dangerous and stifling concepts ever invented by humans, is the career."

- Steve Jobs

[Arthur MacWaters @ArthurMacwaters]

Great ideas are everywhere. Great products are few.

The pain, iteration, arguments, failures, grind, and craft that is required to make great products is what makes them rare.

People who can embrace that process are rare

[Atlas @DentesLeo]

Nothing surpasses obsession.

Discipline is simply the act of channeling obsession into a process.

[Shaant Minhas @ShaantMinhas]

@DentesLeo "Everybody lies"

- House MD

[DAN KOE @thedankoe]

If you can't solve a problem with hard work, you can probably solve it by going on a walk.

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Reed Hastings on the role of the CEO at a startup

“In the first couple of years, you do everything—you’re doing dishes at night, you’re coding, you’re writing marketing materials, you’re dealing with customers and investors. And you have so many disadvantages as an irrelevant little nothing of a company that you have to make up for it with talent, hard work, and brute force. And so if you’re lucky, that’s only a couple of years as opposed to 10 years, where you’re just on call constantly in a very intense way.”

But once you get to 50-100 people, you have to evolve your management style entirely and adapt to be more strategic. You no longer know everyone at the company, and are no longer involved in every little detail.

At Netflix’s scale, Reed’s responsibilities are almost entirely company strategy and vision. He’ll decide which markets Netflix should be in, but he’s not picking countries or shows. He’ll decide that the marketing budget should be 5-10% of revenue, rather than 50%, but he’s not deciding what the campaign is. And lastly he’ll set the vision in terms of culture:

“What are the rules of the road of how the firm operates? What’s our character so that it’s a healthy place?”

But at Netflix’s scale, the CEO can’t do much of the work:

“It’s just too big. And if you try to, you’ll (A) burn yourself out, and (B) get everyone else upset.”

This is actually what happened at Reed’s first company Pure Software:

“I was 33, the company had grown to about 50 people, and I was still trying to code at night and trying to be CEO during the day and sleeping at work, and I wasn’t careful enough about taking showers… It was just gross… And when there was bugs in my code, it was hard to get me to fix it because I was off doing other things… I was trying to hold on too long to the dual roles.”

Video source: @GreylockVC (2015)

[Philosophy Quotes @philosophors]

“You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.”

— Carl Jung

[Atlas @DentesLeo]

Everything will start to click the moment you detach from obsessing over engagement.

True engagement - The one you truly want - is invisible.

That's hard for traditional marketers to grasp.

I get the importance of being data-driven.

But the thing is, your real impact is a lot harder to quantify.

It’s in the honesty of the responses you get in comments, in the number of DMs that aren’t cold pitches, in how often people quote you or repeat your teachings, in how often you’re copied.

These things are difficult to measure, but that’s exactly what a real personal brand does—it moves people.

If I had to sum up the goal of a personal brand, it would be to build a tribe, a movement of people deeply connected to you as a person and to you as an idea.

[Shaant Minhas @ShaantMinhas]

So that's what the world's come to. Oh, well, good for us, I guess.

[Yoni Appelbaum @YAppelbaum]

4. "A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records—something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic of an earlier time," @rosehorowitch reports: https://t.co/uGdkhrCa2J