Asvin Ramesh

Alliances, Ecosystems win not companies, Be Different, ❤️Connecting dots, Stay connected by speaking 5 languages, views personal, Go Niners!

[Ryan Holiday @RyanHoliday]

https://t.co/8eTvnrKpbi

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

Everyone needs to hear this…

The Empty Boat Mindset

(a visual thread)

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc driving the Ferrari Luce should have been the entirety of the launch campaign. Am totally convinced now. This $640k EV is gonna sell like hot cakes.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

This is a story about my father, parenting, and my rule for the strongest relationships in life…

When I was 12 years old, I tried out for a baseball all-star team in our area.

I really wanted to make this team. The tryouts were my first adventure beyond the confines of my small town. An opportunity to see how I stacked up against kids from all around the state.

When the results came out, the coaches called my house.

They were taking 16 players for the team...and I was the 17th on the list.

I was devastated.

It was my first real experience with failure. Something I wanted, worked towards, and came up short. I went into my room, sat on my bed, and cried.

A few minutes later, my dad walked in. He sat down on the bed next to me. After a few minutes of silence, he offered a few words:

“I know you’re upset. I understand. It sucks. But here are the three things the coaches said you needed to work on. Let’s go out every day this summer and work on them. Together.”

And we did.

I’d patiently wait for him to get home from work, holding our gloves, a bucket of balls, and a bat. He took me to the local field damn near every single day that summer. I’m sure there were days when he didn’t want to. When he was exhausted from work or travel, but it never showed.

And I came back the next year a completely different player. Years later, when I got a scholarship to play baseball at Stanford, I still thought back to that one summer as the turning point.

But it was more than the practice that was the real turning point.

It was what my dad said in those moments as we sat on my bed, with tears streaming down my face—and how he followed through on it every day that followed.

He had two options when he walked into my room and sat next to me.

Option 1: Tell me the coaches were idiots. I was the best player. They had made a mistake. They didn’t know what they were doing.

Option 2: Acknowledge the pain. Tell the truth about the opportunity in the failure. And be there to support the work to meet that opportunity.

Honestly, in that moment, I probably wanted Option 1. It would have made me feel better. It would have told me that the world was the problem. That an external thing was to blame. That I was great.

Option 2 was the tough pill to swallow. But also the right one.

I believe that the strongest relationships in life stand on two pillars:

The first is high expectations.

The belief that the other person is capable of excellence. That their potential is only limited by their own views. The willingness to tell the truth about that opportunity and the work required to meet it.

The second is high support.

The ability and willingness to provide the love, support, and engagement to help the other person meet those high expectations.

A lot of relationships fall short of this standard. They hit one pillar, but miss the other.

Low expectations and high support will provide comfort, but no growth. High expectations and low support may spark short-term growth, but breed long-term resentment.

Sir Isaac Newton famously said:

“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

It’s a beautiful line, but I think it leaves out the part that matters most.

The giants had to bend down. They had to choose to provide energy to lift him.

That’s exactly what my dad did the night I didn’t make that all-star team. He didn’t lower his shoulders to the level of my disappointment. He didn’t tell me the high heights didn’t matter.

He told me that I was capable of the climb—and then he gifted me with his attention and energy to help complete it.

I think about this constantly now.

This, to me, is the highest calling in our relationships:

To create an environment of high expectations with those we love and show up to support them to meet (and exceed) those expectations we’ve set.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot as a father. I hope it resonated with you.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

Everyone should read this story...

Imagine someone is struck by a poisoned arrow.

A doctor is called to remove the arrow, but the man stops him.

"Not so fast! Before you remove it, I want to know who shot me. What town or village does he come from? What kind of wood was his bow made from? Was it a crossbow or a longbow?"

While he asks the questions, the poison takes hold and he dies.

Like the man in the story, we occasionally get shot with the poisoned arrows of life.

But ruminating too much on the nature of those arrows is unlikely to help.

This is a trap we all fall into:

We think we need more information to solve our problems, when all we really need is more action.

The trap is becoming more challenging to avoid in a modern era where information is abundant.

We've become conditioned to get our dopamine from information gathering.

But you see, dopamine from information gathering is a dangerous drug. It convinces you that information alone is enough. That it's sufficient. That it's all you need.

But information alone is never enough. Information is nothing without action.

The information meant to push you forward can quickly start to hold you back.

Struck with the poison arrow, you feel a surge of satisfaction from learning that your attacker was from a nearby village, that his bow was made from oak, and that it was a longbow.

And then, you're dead, because the information you wanted had become a distraction from the action you needed.

This is what I call the Poison Arrow Principle:

Never allow information-gathering to get in the way of action-taking.

The next time you're in an overthinking loop, ask yourself:

Do I really need more information, or do I simply need to act on the information I already have?

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

Your entire life will change the day you realize real confidence is less about knowing you’ll win and more about knowing you’ll bounce back even if you don’t. Real confidence is resilience. Adaptability. Tolerance for uncertainty. Fear loses when you know failure is never final.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

A mentor once told me this: Life will test you with the same challenge until you learn the lesson. The same fight in every relationship. The same burnout in every job. The same regret in every missed chance. Until you do the inner work, the outer world won’t change.

[Jamin Ball @jaminball]

https://t.co/h6CM2sCtXR

[Daily Dad @DailyDadEmail]

https://t.co/znNLekhoI9

[Arnold Schwarzenegger @Schwarzenegger]

My best advice is to stop using motivation as your only fuel. I know it feels great when you’re fired up, but it’s a short-term fuel source. That’s why the vast majority of people who start anything - diet, fitness, new projects - don’t finish. They run out of gas.

The only lasting fuel is routine. And you only get a routine by dragging yourself on the days when you have no motivation. Over and over.

I know that’s not the answer anyone wants. I wish I had a magic pill for you. But the only thing that works long term is showing up for yourself even when you don’t want to. Brute force.

I’m slightly crazy and don’t have any investors or consultants to listen to, so I’m giving people 50 dollars of their 100 dollar annual subscription back when they show up for themselves and complete a full program in my app. If that motivates you to start, it’s designed to build your routine to keep you going like it has for thousands of other people, so join us: https://t.co/7hmVrdc2Gp

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Levie just made the best case for AI abundance I’ve seen…

and he’s still underselling the real bottleneck.

His Jevons Paradox frame is right.

When you make something cheaper, demand expands to absorb the efficiency. Coal, compute, cloud software.

The pattern holds.

And yes, AI agents will drop the cost of non-deterministic work the way SaaS dropped the cost of deterministic work.

But here’s what the data actually shows: 74% of companies struggle to achieve and scale value from AI, according to BCG’s 2024 adoption study. That’s not a cost problem. Task costs already dropped.

It’s a human oversight problem.

The bottleneck is that someone still has to specify what the AI should do, evaluate whether it did it correctly, integrate the output into a workflow, and make the final call. AI makes the execution cheap. But specification, evaluation, and integration remain human-bound.

Deloitte’s enterprise research found that resistance to AI adoption stemmed from unfamiliarity, skill gaps, and lack of change management. Only a third of companies prioritized training. And the 2025 data is even more telling: fewer than 5% of firms reported net workforce reductions from AI. Instead, 37% reported task redistribution, with workers shifting toward oversight, integration, and decision-making roles.

This means the Jevons Paradox for knowledge work has a different shape than Levie describes.

Demand for AI task execution will absolutely explode. But demand for human judgment, context-setting, and quality verification will explode faster. The 10-person services firm can now build a prototype in days. But someone at that firm still has to know what to build, whether the prototype works, and how to deploy it. Those skills are scarcer than the tasks they enable.

The real trade is that the companies who solve the oversight bottleneck, who build organizational capacity to specify, evaluate, and integrate at scale, will capture most of the value from cheap AI execution.

The constraint moved from “can we afford to do this task?” to “do we have anyone who can tell if this task was done correctly?”

Jevons works. But the coal equivalent here is the human attention required to make that output useful.

[Vala Afshar @ValaAfshar]

The first gift is life. The second gift is good health.

The third gift is to love and be loved. The fourth gift is peace of mind.

There are no other gifts that matter as much.

The fifth gift is having the wisdom to know what to appreciate most.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Everyone's missing what this divergence actually means.

The S&P exploded while job openings collapsed because tech companies made a choice: buy GPUs, not hire people. Meta, Amazon, Microsoft are cutting headcount to fund compute infrastructure. Every percentage point of workforce reduction finances another H100 cluster.

But here's what makes this wild. Job openings peaked at 12 million in 2022 and dropped to under 8 million by late 2023. That's 4 million fewer open positions. During the same window, the S&P rallied 30% because the market decided AI infrastructure spending matters more than labor costs.

This tells you everything about how capital is repricing productivity. The market believes buying compute capacity today generates more value than hiring workers. Companies with the cash to make that trade are getting rewarded. Companies without it are getting left behind.

The interesting part? We're watching real-time resource reallocation from labor to infrastructure before we have proof the infrastructure actually delivers ROI. The entire market is betting that AI compute becomes more valuable than human headcount.

And that gap is only getting wider.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

An 18-year-old reached out to me asking for the life advice I’d give my 18-year-old self.

Here was my reply:

[Wonder of Science @wonderofscience]

The scale of the Universe.

[Nick Maggiulli @dollarsanddata]

Your real emergency fund isn't just your cash.

It’s your skill set, your network, and your ability to deal with hardship when things get real.

If I had to choose between an extra month of cash and a friend I could rely on, I'd take the friend every time.

[Daily Stoic @dailystoic]

“Be satisfied with even the smallest progress," Marcus Aurelius said.

[Aravind Srinivas @AravSrinivas]

Perplexity is a great way to ingest the knowledge in the Gita

[Asvin Ramesh @asvinr]

@SahilBloom More nuanced is to think about leading and lagging indicators. Leading indicators are more important for habit building but in the end all that matters is results which are lagging indicators.

[Deedy @deedydas]

— 608 US unicorn founders got their degree abroad
— 44% of unicorn founders are not US born.
— Google, SpaceX, Zoom, Moderna, Whatsapp were founded by immigrants.

They contribute trillions to the economy and employ millions of Americans.

Immigration is America's superpower.