Dharmesh Ba

Ben Thompson on writing!

You gotta stay hungry and stay foolish to make it big!

A curious problem develops in companies once they grow past a certain size: the same customer gets surveyed by six different teams, none of whom know about the other five. The marketing pod wants to know why people aren't converting. The onboarding pod wants to know why people drop off. The retention pod wants NPS. The product pod wants feature feedback. The CS pod wants satisfaction scores. Each of these is, in isolation, a reasonable thing to ask. Taken together, it becomes indistinguishable from harassment. Every pod has a metric. Every metric needs data. So every team runs its own research, not because they want to, but because the alternative is trusting another team's interpretation of the same user. No pod has ever willingly done that. The customer, who does not know about pods, simply concludes that your company is unbearable. This is why the companies with the best user understanding almost invariably centralise their research. The pod structure was invented to increase focus. It works. It also, as a quiet side-effect, makes the customer feel overwhelmed as they keep being asked to clock in. The solution is not more pods. It's one adult in the room who can say: we already know the answer to that. Stop asking.

@zaidmukaddam @harshilmathur Cleartax was the first YC startup from India built for India. Hacker Rank was the first YC startup from India for the world.

.@harshilmathur is in the house @ YC SUS! Razorpay is the first YC startup from India and it's extremely inspiring to know this.

@siddharth17 Very true

@dharmeshba Most of the decisions humans make are emotional often followed by rational justifications to make them sound sane. Products that address this underlying emotion end up working

I keep thinking about Monica’s secret closet from FRIENDS. Monica, the OCD-driven perfectionist, had a closet in her home that was a mess, and she never wanted anyone to see it. When Chandler discovers it, she feels shame and guilt. Shame because she hasn’t worked on it. Guilt because she preached to others before fixing it herself. We all have these tiny shame-and-guilt corners of ourselves that we are either too lazy to fix or too busy to pay attention to. OTT subscriptions we never watch. Gym memberships we never use. Idle money in the bank we never invest. iPads we never draw on. We let these things sit until they become shame, because letting go requires becoming, for one brief moment, the kind of person who has admitted defeat. This is why personal finance products almost always fail at the most human part of the job. They are designed for the ideal version of you. The one who tracks expenses, reads the fine print, and reviews insurance annually. This person does not exist. They have never existed. When it comes to finance, we make emotional decisions rather than rational ones. The subscriptions stay because your future self - the one who will definitely start using Duolingo again next month - needs them. Cancel too early and you've given up on them. Misplaced, expensive optimism, but optimism nonetheless. Here's what we get backwards: people don't need a product that helps them be better with money. They need one that quietly forgives them for being human - and fixes the mess anyway. That’s the wedge. Your tiny wedge to win micro-trust is to help them get rid of shame and guilt, and you will have their attention.

You all kept asking for better model….hence

@abhicantdraw Reminds me of the Vadivelu comedy where all his subordinates attend a phone call but never inform Vadivelu ‘Yaar raja phone attend panninga…’😅

@dharmeshba Everyone thinks someone else will do it and no one does. Same behavior in larger teams vs smaller teams in companies.

Why do 10 waiters serve worse than 3? I was at a restobar today. There were hardly five customers but more than ten staff members. I'd been here on weekends when the place was packed- every waiter would sprint from dining to the kitchen, and I used to get my orders on time. But today there were more waiters than customers, and yet the service was lousy. A rational economist would predict the opposite: more capacity equals better outcomes. People do not work that way. I kept thinking about what could explain this behavior. When one person is responsible for a table, they own it. When ten people could be responsible, nobody is. Each person looks around, assumes someone else will handle it, and goes back to their phone. It's like a version of the bystander effect. There's also something about pressure that sharpens focus. When the room is slammed, every staff member's brain is fully engaged - no room for distraction; urgency is obvious. In a near-empty room, there's no signal telling anyone to move. The brain drifts. Then there are incentives. Peak hours mean more tables, more tips, and more reason to perform. Off-peak is, implicitly, recovery time. That's not laziness; it's rational behavior in a system that rewards effort unevenly. Abundance of capacity is not the same thing as abundance of care.

@isenditbacc Only if you experience in the right intervals.

@dharmeshba Pressure brings out the best in us 😁

We have techno-optimists who, every few years, declares that a whole profession is about to be automated. They are usually right about the tasks and wrong about the profession. User research is having its turn in this cycle. Transcription, theme extraction, sentiment analysis, clustering, recommendation generation - all of these are now produced in minutes by tools that, two years ago, didn't exist. Reports that used to take four weeks arrive in four minutes. The panic it has induced in the research industry is understandable. It is also misdirected. The part of research that was ever actually valuable was never the transcription. It was the judgment. The decision, when presented with a hundred possible themes, about which three matter to this company, this quarter, given what this team is equipped to ship. That judgment requires context: the CPO’s temperament, the CFO's mood, the designer's current project, the engineering team's patience for qualitative anything, the founder's personal preferences, the lingering shame of the last failed feature. AI can surface a hundred options. It cannot pick one and defend it under pressure. More importantly, it will not hold its position. Ask it twice whether it's sure, and it will reverse itself. Its architecture is, by design, accommodating. This is a feature for most use cases and a catastrophe for decision-making. The human in the loop is not there to do the work. The human is there to stand behind an answer when a senior executive pushes back - and not flinch. Automation will absorb the craft. It will never absorb the conviction. Every business ultimately amounts to a series of decisions and making those decisions requires human judgement.

Hiring, GTM Manager #1. Retweet for good karma, beer and coffee, dear X!

Give a man an LLM and he'll know everything. Give a man 2 LLMs and he won't be sure of anything.

Hi All, As many of you know, while @praan_inc is a deep-tech company at its core, we are equally obsessed with design. So far, I’ve been serving as the Creative Director/Art Director. But as we scale, it’s time for someone far more talented than me to take this forward. We’re hiring a full-time Creative Director based out of our Mumbai HQ. This role will span everything - hardware, software, AI, brand, films, spaces, and storytelling. At Praan, design isn’t surface-level - it defines how humanity will experience air for the next 100 years. Looking for someone with a key eye for detail, loves thinking abundantly and your work reflects it! If you (or someone you know) are this person, would love to look at your work and chat!

I have become mildly viral on insta because some guy decided to use my picture as the founder of Where is My Train 🚂 I’m flooded with internship requests and angel investments. 🫩

I keep thinking that Singapore became what it is because they decided that talent was super important in the absence of oil, land and minerals. I think we, as a country, are also at a point where we have to really leverage what we have at our disposal. And our talent and demographic are something we have never managed to utilise well. And I believe that getting our talented people to also build in India is going to be the best long-term strategy. We first need to do a few things. 1. Make Incorporation & compliance trivially easy 2. Build institutions that create talent density Let us try to fund 3–4 world-class applied AI/deep tech research institutes with genuine autonomy (not government-run, but government-seeded). Partner with IITs, but give them real industry connections. 3. Fix infra like air quality, housing, schools, healthcare, and public spaces. Through @Rainmatterin we are doing our bit by supporting entrepreneurs, instuitutions, and the community. But I think we need more capital and effort torwards making a change. If there is anything we can do to share our learnings, our setup and our structures and how we are able to do the things we do, happy to share that.

@gssudharsan What’s the use case? Want to use it as a business or as a distributor onboarding clients?

Is anyone successful in getting WhatsApp Business API from India? What did you do to get it right? @dharmeshba

Jayaraj and Bennix case during lockdown was the first time an incident gave me sleepless nights. Very close to home kinda incident. I remember calling my dad that day and asked him not to open the shop and was terrified when I read the details of the case. A closure to this case gives me a tiny hope in democracy. This case was not for weak hearted.

Hostar has introduced vertical dramas on the mobile app.