Deepanker
3.8K posts
@_deepanker
https://t.co/3kt5HKlIf6 | Here to learn | 1.01^365=37.8
Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.
Long post but the TLDR is choose your reference points carefully. I grew up comfortable in Kansas with a father who owned a small business pulling $40k a year. I felt rich until I went to Brown. Then I felt like the poor. There were students that had BMWs parked on different parts of campus so they wouldn't have to walk far to get access to a car. I needed to make money to pay back my parents for college so I went to Wall Street. After Morgan Stanley, I worked for a single manager hedge fund managing $1.5Bn (alot of money back in the day) in SF that had just received an anchor investment from Yale University. My boss was making more money than ever and was spending it. He would vacation with Lance Armstrong and Cindy Crawford. He became close with Wes Edens at Fortress. We made investments in Fortress portfolio companies. My boss took board seats on some of these investments. My boss spent alot of time frustrated he was not on the same level as Edens. My boss was also close with Charles Schwab and we also invested in SCHW. Charles would let my boss and the firm stay at Stock Farm in Montana to host events for our LPs and management of some of our portfolio companies. It was the first time I ever flew private. I met Don Valentine of Sequoia who was an LP in our fund. We ran into Huey Lewis in the men's locker room before playing some golf. It was a world I never knew really existed growing up in Kansas. We were also investors in Herbalife and would complain to the CEO at the time Michael Johnson (ex Disney) that he was massively overpaid and that the compensation structure of the company needed better alignment for shareholders (based on hitting key KPIs, etc). He would say he impressions mattered in his industry and living in LA was expensive. When 2008-9 happened, our fund got decimated as we basically were a long only. Heavy exposure to Fortress names with massive leverage was no bueno. My boss had board seats which meant we were restricted. Yale pulled their entire investment. While the world was burning down, my boss in his fancy office in the Transamerica building told me that I was lucky "to not have any money to lose" while the world was burning down lol. I get what he was saying now as we saw clients that had amassed generational wealth in tech or owning boring businesses in Louisiana lose half of their net worth in 12 months. People were scared. I would move back to NYC and end up working for 3 billionaires at different points during my career as a journeyman buysider. I did well enough at points to have direct contact with some of them. I saw the same dynamic - always someone doing better. Always frustrated. Not that happy. I stayed in this world just trying to stay alive with some good years and years I got paid nothing when performance was poor. I was fine staying on this never ending hamster wheel until 1) I got married 2) we had a daughter 3) my dad's cancer diagnosis got more grim and I did more self reflection on what game of life I was playing. Ultimately I left to buy a small business which has been hard. I still have friends on the buyside and in tech that struggle with comparison. But the reference points I was around constantly in my W2 are no longer loud. I wake up early and turn on machines. Most of my team members never graduated high school. My customers are mostly salt of the earth sales people working for small distributors sprinkled with some big publicly traded companies. $4 gas is a huge problem to everybody I interact with during my day - my customers complain daily about it in their daily lives. I sometimes lend money to my team members when they need help. I have to fix problems every day as the business isn't big enough to support hiring a general manager right now. But I'm home for dinner every night. This works better for me and my family. My life is simple now => bring in business to make sure the 10 team members can feed their families. Last year when tariffs and a big customer shutting down hurt business badly for 3 months, my accountant told me to start firing employees as my competitors were either shutting down or firing 25-33% of their entire staffs. Entire shifts were shut down. I fired no one. It didn't feel right. I just stopped paying myself. This year things have turned around. Team members are making 25-33% more due to overtime. I have more purpose now as my life is simplified as I'm just focused on making sure my team can eat, we make good product for our customers and the business can continue to pay down debt. This is a hard path. I wouldn't recommend it for many, but it works better for me at this point in my life. My mental health has never been better. My wife reminds me how big of an asshole I used to be in finance as I was always stressed about my exposure / frustrated I wasn't doing better. What changed? My reference points changed. I no longer live in NYC. I live in this myopic world where I spend my weeks talking to team members, customers and vendors. 4am until 4pm is spent living in this world. 4pm-8pm is spent with my family before I go to bed ahead of a 330am wake up. I have no doubt if I stayed in finance and was living in the Upper West Side in NYC, I'd still be playing my own version of "why aren't I doing better." It took having a child and thinking more about my Dad's mortality (he passed this October from cancer) to re-evaluate things. I wish I had been brave/smart enough to consider a pivot earlier in life. x.com/deedydas/statu…
This happened to me twice. Coworkers who joined the same companies 6-12 months ahead of me are chilling today while I am still working. I have made my peace with it, as I still made enough to live a nice life and raise a family in the Bay Area. Meanwhile my coworkers today who only worked at mature tech companies or never saw an exit think that I am a lottery winner. Perspective matters and keeps you grounded.
We just wrapped our annual performance review at Sahi. Nobody got promoted. And we love it. @Sahi_HQ is 2.5 years old, and we've consciously avoided internal job levels and fancy designations. Every engineer is a "Software Engineer." Every PM is a "Product Manager." That holds across the company. Having built and led 1000+ people organizations at @amazon and @Swiggy , I carry painful memories of what traditional org structures — levels, titles, ladders — actually do to a company. I've been guilty of it myself. At Swiggy, we created titles and new levels because we had to, as tools to attract and retain talent. It's a slippery slope. Once you anchor people to levels and titles, they start to optimize for them. I call this the "resume-driven development" phase: careers are built around what it takes to get promoted, not what the company actually needs. The machinery around promotions — peer feedback, promo templates, calibration cycles — only deepens it. Employees and managers spend weeks "aligning feedback providers" and "gathering data points." Before long, the promotion process becomes the single most important conversation between a manager and their report. All of this to climb a ladder that was invented to give people a sense of personal growth. After 20+ years of watching it up close, I can say it plainly: promotion culture is broken. It's the opposite of what great companies need to win. Great companies hire missionary talent, trust them with the freedom and opportunity to do meaningful work, and share the rewards through wealth creation. At Sahi, we're holding on to this. Every team conversation is about impact and outcomes, with zero time lost to promotion politics and the Day 2 culture rot it leaves behind. In the age of the AI-native company, the old hierarchies are dead. **Performance Culture >> Promotion Culture**
For unix nerds... how about we think this way. web1: r-- web2: rw- web3: rwx
Why good management is still rare is because inherently their work is to set process goals for a large organisation so that the organisation can hit outcome goals. One of the hardest things to do as human nature is wired to the opposite.
