September 25, 2022

The change in my writing

The writer’s journey up until now

I have been reflecting the change in my public writing. This newsletter is my 4th attempt at writing publicly. The bug of writing seeped young and early for me. 2012 was the year when the world of startups, venture capital and analyst writing opened up to me as I completed one year in my undergraduate degree.

Yourstory and Nextbigwhat were the only two blogs covering the niche startup space duriing that point of time in India. Just to put things in perspective, Facebook was cool back then.

While journalism space about startups was just starting in India. The world of Techcrunch and Techmeme was a vast resource to dive deep into knowing about the developments of Silicon Valley and US startups. By my second year of undergraduate degree, I spent more time reading about the startup world over my course curriculum. One good outcome of this meandering led me to successfully run a workshop on entrepreneurship in 2014 with my friends.

Growing with Startup School

In 2014, with our batch starting to talk about career prospects, I was in a situation with no option to pursue relevant to the coursework. Fortunately, the Indian startup space was exploding with flipkart, ola and snapdeal gaining steam.

During this time, I had a small startup with my close friend called Cegians.com(our college name+people). It was a forum to discuss topics built on top of vbulletin forum software. It ran for a brief duration of 6 months before the backlogs of exams took precedent in our lives.

During that time, Sam Altman did a Stanford course on Startups where prominent operators of Silicon valley took classes and these were shared on Youtube. The videos fundamentally exposed me to different ways you could think about building a startup. Having consumed enough content over the years, I was inclined to write on my own.

First Rodeo

With the heavy consumption of content ensued around startups. I dabled into the space of writing myself. Stratechery was a huge inspiration to help me get started but I wrote from a voice of commentary.

There is something about being young and naive, it gives one the confidence to proclaim things that they have no idea about. It was how my writing started on Medium with cartooning, first.

An another one about food ordering apps.

This stint ended with me writing about the overarching development in the Startup community I was witnessing. Again, authoritative, ignorant and confident. Here is the post and snippet from it.

Being a entrepreneur is a shitty job, you shouldn’t do it unless you have clear cut vision for yourself but in our country it is portrayed as cool thing rather than a highly passion driven thing. Portraying them as rockstars when one succeeds or terming them frauds when they hit a setback is certainly no way of treating the founders, instead we should aim for a balanced viewpoint.

If I were to begin again, I don’t think I could have done it differently.

Second Stint

As college was coming to an end. I left career prospects to the wee end which forced me to decide a domain where I started as an intern. So, all my reading was around skilling myself into a becoming product designer. It took more than a year but I gotten good at it by the end of the year.

During that time, I shifted to being a general news media junkie. Subscribing to more than 50 news sites and being up to date about most things in the world.

Hence, began a newsletter called “The greaterfool” on substack. I wrote posts on curated links, long narratives on the society and some book reviews. It started because I was angry around the political developments taking shape and being unable to do anything about them.

I wouldn’t want to link anything from that time because of the alt nature of running that newsletter. I wrote it psuedonymously. Yet, I believe some of the original writing I did was back in those posts. Each post took a gigantic effort to produce but having them out there was the greatest reward for my effort. No one read them, ofcourse.

Progressing to stage 3

My most succesful outing as a writer was when I was a co-writer with my childhood bud Bheemeshwar. It all started with a note pitching the idea between the two of us. I was at that stage where I was working as an independent product designer after failing at my first serious startup attempt. Thus began Duologue.

It is currently in dormant state for over an year and half but for 2 years we wrote across a wide variety of topics. Both of us approached it from an analytical standpoint, writing about tropical developments unpacking their context, strategy or logical reasoning. It was as close as I could get writing like Ben on Stratechery. Bheem was just helping his friend out and penning some great insights.

By the time it turned dormant, both of us got busy with our lives. I was in the middle of running Subjimandi.app and Pipehaul whereas Bheem was working on getting certified as a climate risk analyst(qualified recently). Now, I sometimes coax him to write about this new domain of expertise but he scoffs me off.

A special mention to the series “Making Sense” where I tried my hand at interviewing folks who were curious about interesting topics. This interview with Karan and Sathish turned out really well. I will look to use this form of writing in the future as well.

On the side

The current live and kicking version of my public writing happens to be this very newsletter you are reading. The major shift I see in my writings is the approach. I now write from a lens of an operator. I believe when you practice something and write about it, the chances to it being helpful to the reader are higher because it is scores high in believability.

Writing provides clarity of thought. I have been a beneficiary of this in my career. Now, as I navigate my career as an operator. This newsletter helps me to think deeply on certain topics I am currently engaging with across personal and proffessional life.

I am no more as confident as I was when I first started. Experience is humbling. This endeavour is to build a career moat around the intemixing of topics that peak my curiosity and keep me enthralled.

I have subscribed to the challenge of penning 100 of these by following the advice of Visakanv

The fun of Do 100 Thing – and also the profound thing about it (if you can see it and receive it without grasping too tightly)- is that it allows you to experiment playing in an expectation-free, failure-friendly environment. It’s worth doing this in a domain you don’t care about.

So, going by the name “on the side” allows me to focus without being focused on a specific topic. My first goal is to hit that 100 mark.

Signing off till next time

Vivek , thinking about the next post