Reflecting on my reading on the internet
I've shifted my focus from ideas to people, finding inspiration in personal blogs and weekly notes.
People over ideas for the time being
At the time of writing this line, I have 200 tabs on my phone’s browser comprising of blog posts that I opened in the past 2 weeks.
I have been exploring and finding people’s personal blogs in recent months. This issue is my reflections on reading people’s blogs. I have curated feed of blogs that I follow through the rss but lately I haven’t read many of the posts from the feed.
While writing down this post I just realised why I am unable to direct focus towards them. If you have read my information stack post , you would know how serious I am about curating this feed. Most of it comprises of blogs from newsletter writers, economists and operators talking on domains like logistics and agriculture , general software and startup-tech and lastly businesses and market. But having worked on different aspects of product building for a couple of years now, reading these topics only add incremental value now. There is far higher learning curve while doing my work than reading a blog post on it.
The change that occurred is that I switched to being a people person.
I have this core framing I use to categorize people: people persons and idea people. What I’m asking is whether a person is primarily motivated by an interest in people or ideas. Do they do what they do out of a fundamental desire to serve and love humans, or are they more driven by an appetite for new and novel ideas? Effective founders come in both forms, especially if they manage to attract lots of talented people of a similar motivation style.
Maybe it’s a phase before I turn back to being an idea person. Or I am done with ideas and now find people to support their cause.
At the same time, I was listening to a podcast of two founders from my previous domain, agriculture. The topic was about future of agri-systems. The founders sounded smart and insightful but I just couldn’t connect with their message. AI was referenced and how it is a new paradigm that will change everything. I am living through that paradigm shift in a parallel domain of logistics, I don’t think people understand how hard it is to bridge the interface between physical and digital worlds. Many startups work in helping bridge this gap. The bridge is constructed of newer technologies at disposal. The technology helps translate the physical world with the digital and increase the efficiency. AI is a new tool that does it differently in comparison to all previous technologies.
This is a tangent but bear with me for a moment. For example, there is an agent that gives bespoke advisory to every farmer in India. Farmers start following this advice and start generating better yields. This entails that as a startup you are bridging the farm of the farmer into a data model and then generate relevant advisory in an accessible manner. AI solves the lack of structure part of data but you will still need to get farmers to accurately describe their field and their activities on the farm. I will be optimistic over here and say the startup figured it out. Can we say for certain that then farms become economical? What will be the future of supply chains with agents? Would labour needs reduce? Would costs subside for a farmer? Would they get better income?
In the conversation they touched about benefiting farmers through AI and there being no moats for agri-business in the AI age. But that has been the case since the beginning . There are no moats in legacy domains like agriculture, it was always power.
The idea of fragmented lands hindering the economic viability of farmers in India is know and written about since 1918. The idea is there for anyone’s taking but there are no companies with sufficient power to make it happen today in India.
I think this is a big motivation why I tapped out and stopped drinking the cool-aid of business folks especially entrepreneurs spewing hyperboles. Instead, I started looking to people doing interesting things and sharing on their sites.
I realise how ironical it sounds since I was also a founder who started writing this newsletter when spearheading a startup. But if you go back and read the early posts, they always have been my own take on things. And we were in a business with zero moat ourselves.
Many of the blogs I started to follow are adopting the format of weekly notes. It documents different facets of one’s life that happened in the past week.
I shared my interest in writing my own version of weekly notes in the previous issue. I am yet to commit due to two reasons.
I barely keep up with my weekly notes at work. So the discipline of writing and introspecting weekly is hard for me. Second, the intimate nature of these updates when work doesn’t feature. Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino articulated this point in her People’s and blog interview.
My friends started doing weeknotes but I always had a problem with the intimacy of the format. I was never a Livejournal kind of girl and don’t really like writing about my personal life outside of the end of year reviews Molly Steenson started me on.
Giles formulated this phenomena and formalised the concept which is now adopted by the blogging world I inhabit.
The initial purpose of the weeknotes were specific to workplace and the core benefit of writing them in the words of Giles.
They act as a broadcast mechanism. They give teams and individuals a voice, and a platform for communicating with almost anyone, about the things that matter to both parties - weeknote writer and weeknote reader.
Weeknotes are well suited to teams that want to communicate about their work to colleagues or management. But they’re useful in other circumstances, too, such as individuals communicating to the teams they’re part of, or leaders communicating to the people they lead.
Basing on Doing Week notes I incorporated them at my work. Being an IC, my work ends up across different streams among different teams. There was no single source of truth either for me or the team to track progress. I have now written more than 25 of these at work and will continue as they provide a coherent narrative on progress made and broadcast updates to the team.
I will write a full breakdown of my approach to week notes and why it is a powerful tool in execution as a standalone post. (This is adding to the queue of many more posts I alluded into the previous issues)
For now though I like to focus on the blogging world and their adoption of the week notes. Thej who I follow has been posting week notes which I found interesting to read. Since he is a technologist, he covers different projects and events that happened in the week. He also developed a webring on his website .
There are many others who do a similar thing of recommending fellow blog writers that they read on the internet. I am going through the webring that Thej shared and discovering diverse folks. So far I have practitioners across different skillsets in US, England and India. This act is refreshingly fresh and the writing is original.
These weeknotes cover their work but also provide their reflection on their work. And they have been joy to read. Far more engaging and interesting than the usual stuff.
The other source where I am finding interesting personal writing is from the clear writing community that is run bt Amit Varma. Folks from all walks of life share their own personal writing. Many of them are Substacks and reading them makes me slightly envious. I feel like ditching the writing on topics I shared in the mind-node and write on personal stuff.
Round up
Manuel Moreal’s People and Blogs interview series has been a wonderful source of finding newer blog writers.
He has done more than 80 of them. And I have found few people with whom I really vibed and started reading their archive.
Jatan Mehta
He is an independent space exploration writer. I found his personal writing equally fascinating.
A recommendation from Thej’s webring surfaced Divya. Her notes have been a revelation. I enjoy reading them very much. Funny, earnest and wholesome.
Beta Brain- Divya Shivaram
She is currently building her own startup and writes weekly notes. I am clearly rooting for her to succeed.
Simon Wilson
The last one in the round up comes from Simon Wilson who i have been following since the start of the GenAI phase if tech. He works through them and writes an accurate picture of what is going with all the latest models.
Links that resonated
Skipping any links because I have just introduced you to many sources which you can subscribe and enter rabbit holes following people who are referenced in the posts.
Sign off
I am not picking one side over the other. I just moved over to the people side because of the environment I currently exist.
Implementation of an idea involves people. Working in large organisation and a growing product, I realised that implementation is completely people driven. Understanding people and supporting them towards their success is something that I enjoy. This is counter to sticking to an idea and aligning everyone towards it.
I was confused about this behaviour of mine until I started writing about blogs I am currently reading. The people I follow either live or do interesting work. There are earnest and like to share about the progress they made. Most of it without any expectation in return. Focus on contributions and not on recognition. I am looking to emulate this nature in my own writing.
Signing off till next time,
Vivek, busy closing 200 tabs on my browser