Vedant khamesra

Building@AtoB, ex-PM@Revolut | ex-Uber | IITK | Early stage operator and angel investor on the side.

[Rajdeep Sardesai @sardesairajdeep]

I first met @AshutoshRanka two months ago, when the NEET paper leak controversy had just erupted, well before the CJP was formed. He had painstakingly compiled data on every major paper leak in India over the last two decades and sent it to me on WhatsApp. The research was meticulous and deeply impressive.

Little did I imagine that this same young engineering graduate would soon be sitting across the table from two Union ministers, negotiating on behalf of student protesters.

As he told me, he had never even been to Jantar Mantar before this. Ashutosh isn’t a professional agitator. He’s an idealistic young Indian who chose to act.

I interviewed him last night after the CJP-government talks. He looked exhausted, seemed unwell, but spoke with remarkable clarity and conviction.

If there’s one lesson from the last few weeks, it’s this: never underestimate the power of informed, idealistic youth. You don’t have to agree with everything Ashutosh says but cannot but admire his spirit. Watch: https://t.co/81PxIP0Izo

[Vedant khamesra @khamesrav]

@deedydas @grok is this true?

[Vedant khamesra @khamesrav]

@historigins @grok which song is this?

[Vedant khamesra @khamesrav]

@BoziTatarevic Hi Bozi, we are trying to build a glassdoor like tool for truckers to know how much they are earning compared to others and improve https://t.co/u9xqT0wjjv , let us know if its relevant for truckers

[Blake Burge @blakeaburge]

We're all plagued by the same disease.

Short-term thinking is a virus of the mind that holds us back from achieving our true potential.

If we can't do it today – or at least in the very near future – we tend to doubt our ability to do it at all.

According to Jeff Bezos, we've got it all wrong.

In 2017, while being interviewed by his brother, Jeff was asked about his perspective on short vs. long-term thinking.

Here's what he said:

"Long-term thinking is a lever. It lets you do things that you could not do or couldn't even conceive of doing if you were thinking short-term."

To illustrate, he goes on to give an example:

"If I collaborated with somebody here in this audience and I said, 'Look I want you to solve world hunger and I want you to do it in five years' you would properly reject the opportunity.

You would say 'Look it's not possible it's not practical.'

But if I said look, I want you to solve world hunger in a hundred years, that's a job you'd take. Because it's a much more addressable problem."

Two Takeaways:

1. Give yourself the right time horizon

We place higher expectations on ourselves than anyone else. We expect to do more, with fewer resources, in less time.

Ambitious? Sure.

Realistic? Not always.

Make sure your timeline is reasonable for the goal you're trying to achieve.

2. Breathing Room

Bezos says: "If everything has to work in two to three years, then that limits what you can do. If you give yourself the breathing room to say, okay... I'm okay if this takes 7 years, all of a sudden you have way more opportunities."

When we box ourselves into an unreasonable timeframe we make rash decisions, cut corners, and –as a byproduct of being rushed – don't do our best work.

Give yourself permission to breathe.

A little pressure is good, but apply too much, and anything (or anyone) will eventually break.

Never let the thirst for short-term gratification distract you from achieving your long-term goal.

If you enjoyed this, follow me @blakeaburge for more.

[Marc Randolph @marcrandolph]

No matter what you’re working on, don’t overthink it. 

Bang it out, hit publish, and move on to the next. 

You’ll be amazed how much more you accomplish.

[Tejeshwi Sharma 🇮🇳 @tejeshwi_sharma]

The moment one understands that success is about being maniacal about input metrics and leaving the outcome to probability, life becomes a bit easier.

Understanding probability alleviates anxiety and allows the mindshare to play the long game.

[Caleb @caleb_friesen]

25/25 There’s so much more to the Blue Tokai story that I don’t have space to share in this thread, but here’s a sneak peak from my podcast with Matt Chitharanjan where we went even deeper. You can find a link to the full conversation in my bio, it's worth a listen.

[The Cultural Tutor @culturaltutor]

We're so used to seeing and hearing about the pyramids that it's easy to forget how strange and extraordinary they really are.

So, just to remind you:

When woolly mammoths went extinct the Pyramids of Giza were already more than 500 years old.

Cleopatra and Julius Caesar are closer in time to the present day — to the Burj Khalifa — than to the construction of the Pyramids of Giza.

Where are they and who built them?

There are three pyramids on the Giza Plateau, which is on the west bank of the River Nile, in northern Egypt. They aren't far from Memphis, which was the capital of Ancient Egypt when they were constructed.

The largest and oldest was built in less than thirty years around 2570 BC for the Pharaoh Khufu. The second was built for Khufu's son, Khafre, and is only a few metres shorter. The third and smallest was then built for Menkaure, Khafre's son. Three monumental tombs for three generations of the same family.

Nearby are many more tombs for various members of the royal court, the Sphinx, several more temples, and the remains of a sort of workers' town including houses, workshops, bakeries, kitchens, breweries, a hospital, and a necropolis.

Khufu's Pyramid, known as the Great Pyramid, was the tallest building in the world for over 3,800 years — that is, until the spire of Lincoln Cathedral in England was constructed in 1311.

And at more than 6 million tonnes it was the heaviest manmade structure ever built, and is still third behind only the Great Wall of China and the Three Gorges Dam.

The mortar used in constructing the Great Pyramid alone weighs over half a million tons, which is more than the total weight of the Burj Khalifa.

See, the Great Pyramid is almost entirely solid — there are only a few narrow shafts and three small chambers inside. It was largely built from huge blocks of local Giza limestone, although its exterior was once covered in polished white limestone transported there from nearby Tura, and its interior includes blocks of granite weighing up to 80 tonnes transported from Aswan, over 500 miles away.

The *precision* of the pyramids is also remarkable. On a technical level their masonry is astonishingly accurate, but even more amazing is that the four sides of the Great Pyramid are all almost exactly the same length — they have a variation of no more than 60 millimetres.

Not to forget that all three pyramids are aligned according to the points of the compass — within one tenth of a degree of perfect geographical accuracy.

And if these facts weren't impressive enough, the actual construction of the pyramids — the specifics of how the blocks were quarried, transported, and lifted into place — remains a marvel we have yet to fully understand.

But those are merely the facts of the Pyramids of Giza; perhaps more interesting is what they really mean.

After all, you can learn a lot about any society from its architecture. What we say about ourselves can rarely be trusted — but what we do and what we leave behind is always truthful. In other words, that which we build expresses our priorities, how our society works, and who has the most power.

Think of it this way: what are the biggest buildings in the modern world?

By volume it is factories (the Boeing Everett Factory is number one right now) and distribution centres.

By total floor space it is airports and malls.

By height it is mixed-used skyscrapers, though they are usually dominated by offices, especially relating to finance. The Pentagon was the world's largest office building until this year; it has been overtaken by the Surat Diamond Bourse in India.

By capacity? Well, there are sports stadiums, the biggest of which is the Narendra Modi Stadium in India, with an official capacity of 132,000. That being said, no single complex can hold a greater number of people than the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, which has a capacity of 4 million.

So the largest buildings in the 21st century are almost all related to industry, finance, retail, transport, and leisure — with religious worship something of an outlier. This is a technologically advanced, industrial, highly consumerist society in which businesses hold a great deal of power, and in which the wants and demands of the public are very important.

For comparison, during the Middle Ages nothing came remotely close to cathedrals in size or complexity, though castles and fortresses were also far bigger than everything else. We can draw the basic conclusion that religion was of immense and central importance, that the church as an institution was very wealthy, and that power was actually spread out among the hereditary nobility rather than being entirely concentrated in the monarch alone, not to mention the political and spiritual power also held by the church.

So, what about the Pyramids?

The Ancient Greek historian Herodotus remarked that the Pyramids of Giza were proof of how tyrannical a ruler Khufu — or Cheops, as the Greeks called him — must have been. In his native Greece the largest buildings were temples for public worship; the Great Pyramid was a monument to but one man alone, and this shocked Herodotus.

The biggest buildings of the 21st century are all useful. They have a clear and immediate purpose, and usually one which benefits — in some sense — lots of people. A factory produces things we all use, a distribution centre organises our online shopping, an office is a place of work, and a stadium is where we go for entertainment. Our largest buildings are intimately and inseparably related to employment and consumption.

What about the Pyramids? They were tombs for the Pharaohs and they were supposed to last forever. In other words, they had no immediate use or purpose, at least for the living. They served only one person: the Pharaoh — plus his family and closest supporters, though they were buried nearby rather than inside — in his journey through the Afterlife.

So this is not the same as a large and lavish royal or presidential palace; such buildings are designed to be used as a seat of power and administration — by several succeeding generations or leaders.

Meanwhile, all the resources and labour that went into building the Pyramids, which were literally manmade mountains, were for the benefit of one Pharaoh alone, after his life had ended — and, to a lesser extent, those lucky enough to have been buried nearby at the time.

Does that mean Khufu and his descendants were tyrants? In some sense, yes. But there is evidence that those who built the Pyramids were not, as Herodotus thought, slaves, and were instead closer to conscripted workers and freely employed craftsmen who were fairly remunerated for their labour.

See, it wasn't just that Khufu held total political power; he was also the spiritual leader of his subjects, such that their work was fundamentally religious in nature — it might have even helped them achieve a better afterlife.

There was nobody who could refuse Khufu's desire to build the largest tomb in human history, because he was a divinely appointed intermediary between gods and humans; no regulation to stop him, because his will was the law; no limits to his expenditure, because he collected the taxes and owned all the land in the kingdom.

However powerful the world's richest and most influential people might now seem, none of it compares to the power wielded by Pharaohs like Khufu; a power that was political, financial, legal, military, and spiritual — absolute.

And so the Pyramids are a glimpse into a society fundamentally and almost irreconcilably different from that in which we now live, to the earliest epochs of human civilisation, long before democracy and the rule of law, when one man could rule as a god and have mountains built to serve as his personal, eternal monument on earth.

[Vedant khamesra @khamesrav]

@deepakabbot Its also because Rocket boys is more fiction than facts

[Broken Cricket Dreams Cricket Blog @cricket_broken]

The Legend of R Ashwin grows 🔥

- Made Non-Strikers Run Out Cool Again
- Pioneered the Retired Out
- 2 Reviews in the Same Ball 👀
- Bowls Off Spin
- Bowls the Carrom Ball
- Bowls Leg Spin
- Pauses action during run-up and plays mind games
- Opens the Batting
- Bats at #3 in T20s
- Finishes Clutch Games
- Puts Body on Line to Save Tests

I'm glad to have watched @ashwinravi99's career unfold.

A true genius and thinker of the game 😍🤩🔥🔥

#CricketTwitter

[BCCI @BCCI]

A guard of honour and a warm welcome for @cheteshwar1 on his 1⃣0⃣0⃣th Test 😃👌

#TeamIndia | #INDvAUS | @mastercardindia

[Elad Gil @eladgil]

If it doesn’t ship, it doesn’t exist

[Roshan Patel @roshanpateI]

Startups pay staggering salaries to C-Suite, VPs, and Engineers, etc but in every company there is some 26 year old Operations Associate and that's the person who is holding the entire company together.

[neha @neharedy]

i will never understand why boys and grown men alike just go about with their day and suddenly break into a bowling action

[Deirdre Bosa @dee_bosa]

About Friday at Twitter HQ - I didn’t do enough to confirm and I regret the mistake

[Dan Siroker @dsiroker]

Today we are launching Rewind: the search engine for your life https://t.co/05G3jkDnco

It’s a macOS app that enables you to find anything you’ve seen, said, or heard.

We’re also announcing that we’ve raised $10m at a $75m valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz.

(1/23)

[Sam Altman @sama]

one of the best things about elon is a reminder of just how much one person can do

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

This must be what a professional player lives for – to be a cricketer’s cricketer! And yes, for a brief moment, the T20s captured the drama of Test cricket! https://t.co/ZVcz23jLPI

[Virat Kohli @imVkohli]

Another strong result. 🇮🇳💪