There are two ways an entrepreneur can fail: a) launch a product that nobody desires; b) launch a product that people desire but with no significant advantage over established competitors (hence give no strong reason for a customer to switch away). These two failure modes have their analogous success modes: a) culture-led startup success where… Read More| Inverted Passion
It’s important to clearly distinguish between what people desire and how they fulfill them. Our desires usually remain the same, but methods of fulfillment keep changing. For example, the desire to have good oral hygiene can be fulfilled in multiple ways: toothbrushes, mouth wash, or even crunchy foods like carrots that help clean mouth as… Read More| Inverted Passion
Hi, I’m Paras Chopra, founder of Lossfunk and Wingify, a SaaS company known for its market-leading A/B testing product VWO. An updated version of the book below is available on Amazon by the title: “The Book of Clarity: Building Your Dream Start-Up Using First Principles Thinking“. Most chapters in the new book are the same… Read More| Inverted Passion
Most markets are like the car market. Some people like bigger cars, others like efficient cars and then there are some who like premium cars. That is, markets aren’t homogeneous. They consist of different sets of people who value different aspects in a solution. Because different segments value different aspects, an improvement in one aspect… Read More| Inverted Passion
There’s always a temptation to launch a fully built product with more features and capabilities than existing competitors. It’s exciting to build the next Google, the next iPhone or the next SpaceX, isn’t it? This temptation is dangerous because even the most successful products in a market had simple beginnings. No product arrives in the… Read More| Inverted Passion
All of us chase after success. For majority of us, success means achieving more in life. A better car, a bigger house, a promotion at job or a fancy watch. This particular definition of success pertains to what I call as professional success. Most of the stars, sports people, top shot CEOs and other celebrities… Read More| Inverted Passion
I’m Paras Chopra and this is my digital home. These days, I’m building an AI lab called Lossfunk. Explore 👉 Start here to get an overview 🌱 My knowledge garden containing notes and thoughts 🧠 Mental models for entrepreneurs (my book) 🎙️ The podcast I host: Bold Conjectures 🧵 (250+) Twitter threads I’ve written Recent… Read More| Inverted Passion
Brace yourself for some wild speculations! Been thinking if nothing is even possible. I think it’s impossible for nothing to exist. When we’re sleeping, it’s not as if we’re feeling nothing. There’s actually no feeling then. It’s as if such moments don’t even exist, and that’s a hint.. So the more I think, the harder… Read More| Inverted Passion
The following is the essay I had submitted as part of the one week summer course I took at the Oxford University, where we read Plato’s Republic. The essay includes a few references to structure and specific content from the book, so if something doesn’t make sense, it’s probably because it refers to an “insider”… Read More| Inverted Passion
It’s always hard to define life. Everyone has their favorite definition – some describe it as a struggle against entropy, while others describe it as an emergent property of chemicals. Countless books have been written on the topic, yet we’re far from a consensus. Against the backdrop of the second law of thermodynamics, life seems… Read More| Inverted Passion
People have busy lives and they usually don’t think much about the products and services they use in their lives. It’s a myth that people are on a constant lookout to (marginally) improve their lives. The reality is that unless the value delivered by a new product or service is substantially higher, most people will… Read More| Inverted Passion
The most beautiful aspect of a SaaS business is that your monthly revenue is more or less stable. Unlike buying a soap, an automatic monthly or a yearly subscription means that customers aren’t frequently re-evaluating their decision for what to purchase. However, when times are hard, people do think deeply about where their money is… Read More| Inverted Passion
I thought I knew! But the more I introspected, the hazy my understanding got. Is GDP amount of stuff produced or consumed? Does it include imports or exports? What does it have to do with well being? Why does it keep increasing? So, I fired up Claude and started understanding what GDP really is. This… Read More| Inverted Passion
The Internet is full of people winning all the time. Someone is traveling to exotic locations, someone else is raising funds, and another person is winning awards. Essentially, everyone around you is succeeding while you do spend your days as the nature intended – sleeping, eating, smiling, chatting with friends, and spending time with your… Read More| Inverted Passion
This year’s review is going to be shorter than 2023 (and previous years) because I’m in Goa right now for a holiday and I don’t feel like being in front of a screen for long. I mean, just look at this view and tell me that you’d rather be in front of a screen writing… Read More| Inverted Passion
I recently finished a very short book with an intriguing title: Why Greatness Cannot be Planned. It’s an unconventional self-help book disguised as a computer science research exposition (that’s why the publisher is Springer). I strongly recommend reading it. Here is a taste of the book’s main ideas. Objectives only work when your goal is… Read More| Inverted Passion
A musing on how intelligence comes to be. The bedrock of intelligence is abstractions – the thing we do when we throw away a lot of information and just emphasise on a subset of it (e.g. calling that thing an apple instead of describing all its atoms and their x, y, z positions). But where… Read More The post What bootstraps intelligence? appeared first on Inverted Passion.| Inverted Passion
The first book I ever read was The Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. I liked it so much that I re-read it 8 times. As a young boy, the book had made a lasting impression on me, making me fall in love with ideas such as the arrow of time, black holes, entropy,… Read More| Inverted Passion
I used to wonder why questions in philosophy never get resolved. For example, take the question of whether we have free will or not. From Socrates to Kant and to modern day philosophers (such as Daniel Dennett), everyone seems to have an opinion on free will. Free will is also a favorite topic of many… Read More| Inverted Passion
Are LLMs intelligent? Debates on this question often, but not always, devolve into debates on what LLMs can or cannot do. To a limited extent, the original question is useful because it creates an opening for people to go into specifics. But, beyond that initial use, the question quickly empties itself because (obviously) the answer… Read More| Inverted Passion
1/ I recently made notes on the book “Hooked” but wasn’t satisfied by the depth of explanation in it. 2/ I wanted to get down into neuroscience of habit-forming products and that inevitably lead me to the (in)famous neurotransmitter dopamine. 3/ Before we dive into what dopamine does, let’s first make one thing clear: dopamine… Read More| Inverted Passion
Time is strange – 2023 simultaneously felt too long and too short. It was short because I remember recently writing my 2022 review, and it was long because I ended up packing a lot of stuff into it. ✅ Train 5 days a week (including Mixed Martial Arts) I did manage to train 5 days… Read More| Inverted Passion
I re-read the book Hooked by Nir Eyal and these are my notes. 1/ The key question that the book answers is: how to make habit-forming products. And its answer is a model that involves four stages: a) trigger; b) action; c) variable reward; d) investment 2/ Why should products be habit-forming? It’s because only… Read More| Inverted Passion
Most likely, you’re going to read this sentence and hit the back button. Still here? Good, then you’re likely to scan through a few paragraphs in this article and then give up. (Unless, you’re a long-time reader and trust that my writing is worthy of your time. More on this later) Why are humans so… Read More| Inverted Passion
Good definitions are powerful. Lately, while reading The Art of Game Design, it became clear to me that the author’s definition of games makes a lot of sense. He defines games as problems that people pay to solve with either their time or money. Unlike movies or books, games are not passive: they require an… Read More| Inverted Passion
After a barrage of recommendations on my twitter, I finally ended up reading Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks. The central premise of the book is simple: everyone has got about four thousand weeks to live, and spending that limited time chasing efficiency is wrongheaded. The message seems old. The entire self-help industry revolves around saying… Read More| Inverted Passion
This year was intense. Perhaps the most intense one in quite a while. I’ve been gradually developing the habit of reflecting as months and years pass by. In my 20s, I used to think that celebrating birthdays or New Year is pointless. After all, what’s so special about Earth completing one revolution around its star?… Read More| Inverted Passion
