I'm Arjun. This is my digital garden.

I learned a very important lesson as a founder this week — a lesson in optimal stopping, but generally about the psychological temperament I needed to have. People will always want to take you for a ride. You can't escape it by being too defensive. You can't either be too naive all the time and let others take advantage of your good. You need to look at every opportunity in terms of its cost to you and the trade offs that you're willing to make to take that opportunity cost. You need to learn to evaluate at which point this opportunity cost becomes sunk cost. And when that happens, you need to stop playing the game. Empathy is very important. But don't let your empathy be a reason for people to treat you as a doormat. And they will do that. Don't blame them for it, its only natural. You can see other people's biases, but you can't see yours. You will always judge yourself by your intentions while judging others by their actions. If you're woke at this le

I’m very happy for Baba Ka Dhaba and that its proprietor was able to get his small business back on track because of the power of social media virality.   I’m also thinking about how much his business would have increased due to the viral effects, both in short and long term. I’m afraid, not very much. We saw a huge queue of enthusiastic foodies at his shop, but most of them had to return because they ran out of food pretty quickly. Why was that? Because there probably weren’t sufficient cash flows to acquire raw material, there wasn’t enough labour to meet the demand and there probably wasn’t a credit line either.  Now people are trying to make other such dhabas viral, but those efforts likely won’t reach that critical mass. That’s the curse of virality. It becomes a victim of its own halo effect. Even if these effects do become viral, it will again lead back to a similar situation like Baba ka dhaba where there will be unmet consumer surplus.  Social impact entrepreneurs must think

There’s a lot of talk about how JioMeets has blatantly copied Zoom’s UI. Well, imitation is the best form of flattery, isn’t it? But I’m wagering that there’s a smarter move behind it. It’s called switching costs. I argue that Jio has not copied the UI, but the UX of zoom. Why? For the simple reason that it wants current zoom users to seamlessly be able to move to their platform. Earlier, Zoom had dropped the requirement of users being ‘signed in’ to zoom in order to join a meeting. What that meant was that zoom removed the network effects (possibly to reduce switching costs of MS Teams and Google Meets users). Well, Jio just one-upped them at their own game.  Jio’s strength has been its distribution. When you combine the power of distribution with low switching costs for users, after raising 10 rounds of funds, with one sided support from the government, against a chinese company, in a country of the next billion users having a generally negative Chinese sentiment at peak, you’ve figu