Sripad Panyam

Building Dezerv | previously Urban Company | Girl Dad

[Sripad Panyam @psripad]

@jspujji GA

[Sripad Panyam @psripad]

@calcsam Book

[Sripad Panyam @psripad]

@Vanshi_agr Tried @urbancompany_UC ??

[Romit Mehta @romitme]

One stat in Urban Company’s DRHP jumped out at me:

The top 5% of service professionals earn INR 50,000 / month - coincidentally, the income at which you would be classified as top 5% by income in India. All this while working 40 hours/week on average.

The average service professional earns ~INR 27,000/month while working 22 hours/week, outearning in absolute terms the freshers who join the likes of TCS and Infosys.

If this is not dignity while changing lives, then what is?

[Sripad Panyam @psripad]

@shreyas Bob Moesta has a course on how to run JTBD interviews - worth every penny. Here's the link - https://t.co/4y4mKqCq8t

[Scott Stevenson @scottastevenson]

A big trap in your 20's and early 30's is "vanity knowledge". Learning things that you think will impress people or get you to the next tier of status in your career. This is rampant in tech/software. A lot of the things "experts on the stage" talk about are fairly irrelevant to actually creating results.

This is something that completely blindsided me early in my career. Don't think I've ever really read a good clear blog post about this, but I think most people intuitively learn it by 30-35, without quite being able to put their finger on what it is.

[Tim Ferriss @tferriss]

If someone asked me to give investing advice to a 30-year-old today who had just made their first million, I would first point them somewhere else. I’m not a financial advisor and don’t think I’m qualified to give anyone financial advice. The particulars matter too much. But if they insisted, I might say:

(1) If you want to play in early-stage tech investing (or anything high-risk, high-reward), ensure you have a plan for developing an ENORMOUS informational advantage. Aim to develop new skills and relationships through portfolio companies so that you can win over time, even if you “fail” with many bets going to zero. Only bet what you are comfortable losing and what you can recoup in other ways. Though my angel investing snowballed, I began with $10K checks and advising for sweat equity. Think of this as tuition for a real-world MBA. Are you willing to move to the hub of activity to ensure the best possible information and deal flow, as I did when I moved to SF lifetimes ago? Or make commensurate commitments or sacrifices to ensure you are in a position to win? If not, I’d suggest choosing a different game. Other people will take the initiatives that you won’t, and they will beat you. Much of early-stage investing is cooperative, but let’s not kid ourselves, a lot of it is competitive, and not everyone will podium finish.

(2) For the rest—which could be everything—follow Buffett’s advice. Keep it simple.

One cautionary example of doing the opposite: I spotted the COVID curve ball early, and I made a lot of very “sophisticated” (complicated) decisions related to investing, and the associated research, diligence, phone calls, and so on chewed up an unbelievable amount of time and energy. Eighteen to twenty-four months later, I’d done very well but decided to look at how passive S&P 500 returns would’ve added up over the same period, and… they were roughly the same. Of course, you can’t always bank on this outcome, but beware of seeking complexity if you’ve been rewarded for problem-solving throughout your life. Looking back over the last 15+ years, the handful of investment decisions that made all the difference have been simple and were somewhat obvious to me, no major gear-grinding required.

(3) Knowing when to buy isn’t enough. Have policies and rules for when you will sell, or the universe will punish you with very bad and very expensive decisions.

(4) Don’t discount luck, including lucky timing. I started angel investing seriously in 2008 and hit a golden window of converging trends, cheap valuations (by today’s standards), and an uncrowded playing field. The financial crisis had culled the herd of a ton of investors and fair-weather founders. It was a target-rich environment, even for someone with very little to invest. Micro-VCs were just cracking out of their shells, and the big players hadn’t started assailing the seed stage stuff. In retrospect, it was a wildly rare combo of things. I don’t believe I could replicate what I did in 2008–2012 now.

(5) Personally, I’ve largely stepped back from angel investing to double down on writing and the podcast (The Tim Ferriss Show, soon to hit 1B downloads). This comes from a desire for more predictability and less stress. I love the excitement of startups, and I’ve had some lucky wins, but I don’t find it nearly as interesting as developing creative muscles that bring in forecastable revenue year after year. For me, that has compounded more reliably than the all-or-nothing bets. Massive ups and downs in sectors like crypto also take a toll that reduces my creative batteries. In this chapter of my life, I think simplicity is the name of the game (e.g., finding one decision that removes 100 decisions).

(6) Over-optimizing is just as bad, if not worse, than under-optimizing. Past a certain point, buying extra Skittles just doesn’t fucking matter. So, a note to self: stop fiddling around with your goddamn spreadsheets and get more interesting hobbies on the calendar. What hobbies? Exactly.

(7) If we assume the point of investing is ultimately to improve your quality of life and the quality of life of those you most care about, investments that consistently add stress over long periods of time probably don’t make sense. Money is traded for things or experiences that catalyze certain feelings. If your investments are generating the opposite spectrum of feelings, it might be time to reassess.

It’s easy to miss the forest for the trees. Money is a means, not an end.

And in the end, most things matter very, very little. Do what helps you sleep at night and wake up with a low heart rate. To me, those are the hallmarks of a world-class investor who gets the big picture.

https://t.co/CVXVWAKuGM

[Sandeep Jethwani @sandeepjethwani]

@iRadhikaGupta One place to start is how the current portfolio is doing and how to optimise it. We’re attempting that with our Wealth Checkup (https://t.co/FodzGUDSir)

And at @DezervHQ we ensure that we don’t index on past performance to select funds.

[Abhiraj Singh Bhal @abhirajbhal]

We are glad that @urbancompany_UC has topped this year's @TowardsFairWork survey for India. We are committed towards empowering our service partners to live respectful middle class lives, constantly improving their earnings & well being, and enabling them to delight our customers

[Superman @Le_samosa]

@CRED_club I invested in @dezervHQ portfolio and i Hardly check what's going on as they are soo good at it,i Dont have too

[anshul gupta @anshgupta64]

High Borrowing

Despite claims of robust economic growth, the government has been taking many loans in recent years. Bangladesh borrowed >$1.7 billion from multilateral agencies and>$3 billion from development partners as budget support to combat the pandemic.

[Sandeep Jethwani @sandeepjethwani]

@ayushjaiswal is an unusual founder. Young, on a mission and wise beyond his years.

Fresh episode of Insider Investing: the @PestoTech story, struggles as an entrepreneur, what the tech crash means for developers & future of work.

@dezervHQ

https://t.co/PU0AHxwusd

[Springworks @springroleinc]

In this episode, Suhail shares how organizational learning program barriers can be broken & more 🎧

[Tapa @tapa_app]

Netflix wrote its dynamic image processing service in Java. When the demand spikes, they face slow start-up times for the initiation of instances. They are evaluating Golang to solve this problem.

Which language do you think is better to address this? #Java or #Golang and why?

[Urban Company @urbancompany_UC]

In the last couple of days, there have been some concerns regarding the earnings and well-being of our service partners. We hear you, and through this article, would like to highlight some important facts and data-points. 1/n
https://t.co/6BC7nUxGgv

[Amit Das @Godgeez]

.@psripad and I talked a bit today about asking questions. Some running thoughts logged 👇