Archit Varshney

You have no experience. You’ve never started a company. You’ve never had a full time job. Nike is going to kill you. You’re a kid. You don’t have technical skills. You shouldn’t build hardware. Apple is going to kill you. You can’t build hardware. You can’t measure heart rate non-invasively. Athletes don’t care about recovery. Under Armour is going to kill you. It won’t be accurate. You don’t listen. You’re an ineffective leader. You can’t recruit great talent. You’re going to have to pay every athlete. You can’t measure sleep non-invasively. It’s too expensive to research. Athletes are a small market. The product costs too much to make. The product costs too much to sell. Your valuation is too high. Consumers aren’t going to want it. Hardware is too hard. You should measure steps. Fitbit is going to kill you. You can’t build a marketing engine. You can’t raise enough money. You need a real CEO. Google is going to kill you. You can’t be a subscription. You can’t build a brand. You can’t do consumer in Boston. Your valuation is too high. You shouldn’t make accessories. You shouldn’t make apparel. Lululemon is going to kill you. You can’t predict Covid. Stay in your niche. You are going to run out of money. You can’t build a health platform. Amazon is going to kill you. You can’t measure blood pressure. You can’t get medical approvals. The market is too small. You don’t understand AI. The market is too competitive. It won’t work internationally. The supply chain is too complicated. You can’t build an AI. You can’t raise enough money. It’s too competitive. Healthcare isn’t going to want it. … Just keep going ✌️

On Scott Adams. A man finds, to his astonishment, that he exists. After the elation of childhood wears off, he asks, who am I, why am I here, how does this work? These are hard questions, so after a brief struggle, he selects a readymade answer and goes about the motions of life. Scott Adams was not such a man. He was a live player, ever curious, intent on figuring out this simulation that he found himself in. From first principles, Scott unraveled, understood, and ultimately controlled his own reality. He hacked himself with affirmations, others with persuasion, the world with simultaneous sips. He explained people as moist robots, two movies happening on one screen, his world as Gods’ debris. He carved a personal mission to “be useful,” and made us all better writers, public speakers, and persuaders. He preached the footwear theory of motivation, the Adams Law of slow-moving disasters, the skill stack, systems over goals, and of course, the Dilbert Principle. Besides cartooning, philosophizing, and teaching, Scott rose to the occasion and displayed, “the one virtue that cannot be faked” - courage. Scott had the courage to speak honestly as he saw it - about Trump, about his nation, and about his time, even though it cost him friends, audience, money, and his ticket to polite society. Scott had true courage, the kind that makes you unpopular, the kind that is always and everywhere in short supply, At the end, as any hacker of reality, Scott covered all of his bases - he left as a Buddhist, a Christian, and a player in the Simulation. Scott, we didn’t get enough time with you, but you were a mentor and a marvel. You were useful and you were courageous. You were incompressible and indivisible. One of a kind, and generous with your drawing, writing, and speaking. Unlike your squealing critics in the chattering class, you will be read generations from now. On this earth there are many long-lived hells but no lasting heaven. Each heaven must be created and nurtured, ex-nihilo, from mind and from mud. Scott, you created a small heaven for us all, and to a larger heaven you go. A man finds, to his astonishment, that he no longer exists. He asks why, what it was for, and how will the new reality work? When the rest of us get there, we’ll find Scott, ever useful, ready to explain, having figured it all out. Notes: • First line paraphrasing Schopenhauer. • Courage quote via Taleb.

Need more engineers in life

@danifesto Memory

I’ll share a small part of pickle.com Back in med school, I became obsessed with augmenting memory and dreamed of a Notion or Obsidian that completes itself. Today, we’ve built something close. My self-awareness is sharper and everything feels connected. I genuinely believe AI does not replace humans. It amplifies us. Huge respect to our engineers and designers who made this crazy thing real. Bubbles are the episodic units of my life that the system interprets from my raw data. Clouds are the system’s questions, its hypotheses about who I am. When I answer a cloud, it becomes a bubble again. There is so much personal data that I cannot fully demo it. Wish I could. This system understands me more deeply than anyone. Want to try it? Retweet and comment “memory.” I’ll DM you an access code to skip the waitlist.

When Shohei Ohtani was a high school freshman, he created a detailed "dream sheet" with one central goal: to be the #1 draft pick for 8 NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball) teams. It was a 64-cell roadmap based on a framework called the Harada Method. Here's exactly what Shohei did 👇 1. First, some history.... The Harada Method was created by Takashi Harada, a Japanese junior high track coach. He took a team ranked last out of 380 schools and, using his system, turned them into the #1 team in the region within 3 years. They held that top spot for the next 6 years. 2. You start by placing your main goal in the center of an 8x8 grid. For Ohtani, this was "be the #1 draft pick." 3. Next, you identify 8 critical supporting pillars needed to achieve that goal. These surround the main goal. Ohtani's 8 pillars were: • Body • Control • Sharpness • Speed • Pitch Variance • Personality • Karma/Luck • Mental Toughness 4. You then break down each of those 8 pillars into 8 smaller, actionable tasks or daily routines. This fills out the entire 64-cell grid, turning a massive dream into a concrete, daily action plan. To improve his karma, he listed tangible actions like: • Showing Respect to Umpires • Picking up trash • Being positive • Being someone people want to support 5. The method goes far deeper than just technical skills. It forces you to analyze your weaknesses and build confidence. It also has a highlight on service to others, emphasizing that humility and contributing to your community are essential for personal success. 6. The key to the system is daily execution and accountability. Once the 64-cell chart is complete, you turn the tasks and habits into a daily diary and a "Routine Check Sheet." It’s designed to transform abstract intentions into a measurable, daily practice.

Here is an update - All three satellite-tagged Amur Falcons Apapang (male), Alang (young female) and Ahu (female) are now undertaking their daring Arabian Sea crossing. Apapang has already flown nonstop for 76 hours, covering 3100 km at an average of 1000 km per day, aided by strong easterly tailwinds. From here, the journey becomes even more extraordinary as they head towards Somalia on their epic 3000 km oceanic flight @sureshwii @wii_india #Amurfalcons

@piyush_s_mishra 😂😂

AGI is here

there are essays, and then there are "violently shift your entire perception of reality" essays

What many don't seem to realise is that we have entered the age of the showman entrepreneur. The beginnings of every industrial revolution is marked by these showmen. They are necessary because it is not the quiet tinkerer who first pulls the future into the world, but the one who can make a crowd hold its breath. They've always been there, we just forget about them because these revolutions used to come every 50-60 years, and now maybe every 20-30yrs. On New Year’s Eve, 1897, Thomas Edison lit a single lane in Menlo Park with his "impossible bulbs". Hundreds, maybe thousands, came to watch. So many, they had to hook up extra wagons to the trains. They came not to buy anything. No one had yet pulled up an electric pole to their door, no wires laid at their altars, no sockets waiting like open mouths punched into their walls. They didn't need a bulb. Not yet. They all came to see an incandescent beast caught in glass. To stand in the dark and watch the world tilt toward the electric. We are entering that age again. There will be entrepreneurs who will build in the shade, and they should. And then there will be those who build at the center of the theatre obscura, the theatre fantastica. These founders will pull ahead and win the crowd as long as the story is sound, the act is authentic. The world will pay attention to these founders... through success and miserable failures, but the world will pay attention.

We must repudiate the idea that "speech can be violence" once and for all. @glukianoff and I wrote about the dangers of promoting this idea on college campuses back in 2017, in @TheAtlantic: theatlantic.com/education/arch…

It was only last week, I discovered Charlie Kirk while reading about the Reform UK’s Sep 13th protest. He’d made some interesting parallels between the USA and the UK’s cultural shifts. Spent Wednesday night watching his Oxford Union debate and Turning Point USA 1-1 conversations with average Americans. Woke up Thursday morning to a YT push video that showed life leaving his body from 6 different angles, as he held a mic, in front of hundreds of people - because someone probably disagreed with him. Now it’s Friday as I sit here thinking about millions in a generation who saw that too. And who will probably live out a lifetime believing silence and ignorance was just objectively better than even debating to discover your values, let alone acting on them. Because apparently you are just not safe. Anywhere.

Tech X is so wild it’s sometimes hard to tell between parody and a serious idea. And perhaps that’s the genius

To all the Apple boys, do the right thing

Yes new iPhones at the Keynote and all but wait till you’ve seen what this kid just made

@Shetty_nhl Value first always, love it!

That’s a really good point, and I completely get where you’re coming from. I started my career on the trading desk, and honestly, there’s no work culture tougher in terms of unrealistic expectations: the markets run 22 hours a day, and while the upside is limitless, the grind is relentless as there's absolutely no limit! When my friends and I were talking, the context was around switching careers or standing out in a field we truly care about and want to grow in. The idea was: create value first, get into the system, and only then can you really demand what you think you deserve. If you don’t feel valued and you feel exploited, the best time to quit is always yesterday.

One of my friends dropped some truth bombs over the weekend, when we asked him how he was able to navigate through some of his low points in his career. Quit his lucrative CS job out of NITK Surathkal to start something on his own and has had multiple pivots — crypto, blockchain, no code development tools, AI agents for full stack development. This is what he left me with: Make yourself indispensable. Overdeliver on every promise. Add more value than your manager can imagine. Let’s see how you remain unemployed or if stagnation can still catch you. Truly got admire where he’s already reached and this is still the beginning!

Don’t know who needs to hear this, but if you see yourself not winning a game where the rules keep changing - it’s likely time to change the game

For the first time in the 11 years that India has battled the ‘anti-India forces’ paranoia, I am a believer of it. Not because i read it somewhere or because Nepal is protesting. But it just makes sense 1. The world’s eye is on India and Modi for standing up to DJT and White House. 2. Clearly, prima facie, India’s stance is victorious. The photo ops from the SCO have spooked White House. 3. India is the freeweight in the Allies vs DragonBear polarity of the new world. Wherever India goes, weight will shift. 4. Modi has shown he is hard to break. But, that opens up space for an opposition that will collude and that will make the deal. Its just how democracies work. The incentive is personal victory, and the hope is that personal victory and national victory will align in the long run. Any reasonable opposition or alternative would be interested in outing modi, and any foreign power would be interested in helping them. 5. Peace (or the symptoms of it) have come in too cheap and too easy. It took only (one sided) verbal jousting over a few weeks. That means gears have shifted, and not necessarily for the best. 6. The entire subcontinent and neighbours have been disrupted over the last 5 years- Mayanmar, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka… The reason for this is to declaw china and re empower allies. India is the last bastion. Tricky times ahead for India for sure. Dont be so sure of peace. Be grateful for the stability we live in.