I have a contrarian take on it which I felt like sharing today. It might be a bit long read, so I hope you would bear with me.

The nihilist penguin isn’t sad. It might look tired. That distinction matters.

Depression is inward. It collapses agency. It drains energy.

The nihilist penguin, by contrast, is still standing. Still functioning. Still observant. It hasn’t withdrawn from the world - it has simply stopped pretending the world is something it isn’t.

We’ve grown used to diagnosing realism as pathology.

In a culture that insists everything must be meaningful, purposeful, and “aligned,” the refusal to perform enthusiasm is treated as a problem to fix. If you’re not visibly hopeful, you must be burnt out. If you’re not chasing a narrative, something must be wrong.

But sometimes nothing is wrong. It’s that the illusion just wore off.

Modern life runs on compulsory optimism.

Jobs need “mission”, brands need “purpose” and work needs “passion.” Even suffering needs a lesson.

This constant demand to feel something about everything creates a subtle distortion: neutrality begins to look like failure. Calm becomes indifference. Acceptance gets misread as disengagement.

The nihilist penguin is what happens when someone stops over-interpreting their own experience.

It’s not that life feels empty. It’s that life feels normal. Random. Occasionally interesting. Frequently mundane. Mostly indifferent to your internal storyline.

That’s not depression. That’s statistical honesty.

Nihilist penguin is not really nihilist. Nihilism is a collapse in perceived agency. The sense that nothing you do matters and therefore nothing is worth doing.

Realism is quieter. It says: “Things matter less than I was told - but some things still matter enough.”

The nihilist penguin hasn’t given up on action. It has given up on exaggeration. It no longer needs work to be transformative. Or growth to be exponential. Or life to feel profound every day.

It shows up without demanding that effort justify itself emotionally. That’s not emptiness. That’s efficiency.

But why is the internet pathologizing the penguin?

We pathologize realism because it doesn’t market well.

A person who doesn’t need meaning is hard to motivate with slogans. A person who accepts randomness can’t be easily sold certainty. A person who doesn’t romanticize outcomes is difficult to manipulate.

So we label them unmotivated. Detached. Or let’s say cynical.

But cynicism still cares. It’s disappointed idealism.

The nihilist penguin is past that phase. It’s not angry that the world doesn’t make sense. It just stopped asking it to.

Here’s the part people miss: the nihilist penguin still acts.

It still works. Builds. Commits. Creates. Just without the internal monologue narrating its significance.

It doesn’t need hope to function. It doesn’t need belief to begin. It doesn’t need meaning to endure repetition. That makes it unusually durable.

Most burnout doesn’t come from effort. It comes from carrying emotional weight that the work never promised to return. The penguin dropped that weight.

The penguin cares selectively. It cares about what it can influence. It disengages from what it can’t. It doesn’t confuse intensity with importance.

This is why the nihilist penguin resonates now.

After years of inflated narratives - careers that were supposed to fulfill, startups that were supposed to define identity, work that was supposed to love us back- realism feels like relief.

That’s the quiet truth the nihilist penguin embodies. Not everything needs meaning. It’s just done pretending that the world owes it significance.

And paradoxically, that’s what allows it to keep going - calmly, consistently, without collapse.

So how does all of that really make it a good founder?

Working for someone requires belief. Building on your own requires tolerance.

Most people trades in conviction. They need to believe - publicly, repeatedly, and loudly - that something matters. It could be a product, a lifestyle, a framework or simply a version of the future.

Founders don’t get that luxury. Founders operate in environments where belief is optional but tolerance is mandatory. Tolerance for ambiguity. For boredom. For long stretches where effort produces no visible signal.

The nihilist penguin isn’t motivated by belief. It’s motivated by acceptance. That’s an advantage for building.

You Don’t Perform Motivation

Most people to survive must look motivated. Founders must remain functional.

The nihilist penguin doesn’t wake up energized by vision statements. It doesn’t romanticize outcomes or narrate progress. It doesn’t confuse motion with meaning.

It shows up because showing up is required. That makes it unmarketable. There’s nothing inspirational about “this might not work, but I’ll do it anyway.”

But that sentence describes most real progress.

Belief Is Fragile. Acceptance Is Durable.

Belief needs reinforcement. When results lag, belief erodes. That’s why many founders burn out right after the first illusion breaks - PMF takes longer than promised, growth stalls, capital tightens.

The nihilist penguin starts after the illusion breaks. It doesn’t need the work to justify itself emotionally. It doesn’t need constant affirmation that this matters in some cosmic sense.

It just needs the work to be necessary. That’s a much more stable foundation.

You need to build without hope.

Hope is a powerful motivator - and a dangerous one. Hope attaches effort to expectation. When outcomes disappoint, effort collapses with it.

The nihilist penguin separates the two. It works without expecting meaning. It persists without promising reward. It builds without assuming the world will care.

This looks bleak from the outside. From the inside, it’s liberating.

You don’t need to be right.

Normal people must sound right. Founders must become less wrong.

The nihilist penguin isn’t attached to being correct, admired, or early. It’s willing to iterate quietly, discard ideas without drama, and change direction without identity loss.

That’s hard to do if your self-worth is public. It’s easier if you don’t think the universe is keeping score.

The nihilist penguin won’t inspire you. It won’t sell you a framework, promise outcomes or perform certainty.

What it will do is keep going when the story collapses. And that’s the rarest skill in building anything real.

It’s a long journey ahead.

We grind for months, ship relentlessly, talk to users, tweak pricing, rework onboarding - and one day it clicks. Retention stabilizes, revenue grows and investors nod approvingly. There’s a moment as a founder we feel that we achieved product-market fit and move on to “scaling.”

This framing is convenient., but it’s also wrong. Product–market fit is not a moment you reach. It’s a position you occupy - and can lose.

PMF is a temporary advantage, not a permanent state

The real truth is that markets don’t stand still. Customers will change. Competitors will copy. Distribution can shift. What worked six months ago can quietly decay.

If product-market fit were permanent, incumbents would never lose. But history is full of companies that once had obvious fit- and later couldn’t explain why growth slowed.

That is never a sudden failure, but it was a gradual erosion.

It can start from as small as tiny frictions ignored, new use cases underserved, a pricing model that stopped matching customer reality or a competitor that understood one narrow segment better.

The First Version of PMF Is Narrow by Default

Early PMF almost always exists in a thin slice of the market.

• A specific customer type

• A specific use case

• A specific urgency level

Founders often miss this mistake early traction for general demand. They raise money assuming the fit is broad. Then they hire sales, expand marketing, and widen positioning - before understanding why the first users cared so much.

The result is dilution.

The product still works. But it works intensely for fewer people.

Defending PMF starts with knowing exactly where it lives.

Retention Is the Only Honest Signal

Founders over-index on growth metrics because they’re visible and flattering. But PMF actually shows up elsewhere:

• Users come back without reminders

• Usage increases without new features

• Customers complain when things break.

If retention weakens, it signals that PMF is weakening too - even if revenue might still growing.

Growth can be bought with marketing, capital, purchase incentives, but retention has to be earned repeatedly.

Teams that treat retention metrics as lagging indicators miss the point.

Scaling Is the Fastest Way to Lose PMF

Most companies lose PMF after they think they’ve found it.

Why? Because scaling changes the product even if you don’t touch the code.

• Sales promises stretch beyond delivery expectations.

• Support quality drops.

• Onboarding becomes generic and lack of attention to nuanced customer pain points.

• Roadmaps optimize for revenue, not value

Each change seems reasonable in isolation. Together, they move the product away from the original fit.

Defending PMF requires saying no to customers who look attractive on paper but don’t reinforce the core use case.

This is uncomfortable- especially when revenue targets are involved.

PMF Is Maintained Through Feedback, Not Vision

Founders like to believe their job is to “hold the vision.” In practice, defending PMF is actual operational job:

• Talking to users even when metrics look good

• Watching how edge cases behave

• Noticing when power users leave quietly

• Shipping small fixes instead of big bets

Vision helps you start and keep the momentum. Feedback helps you actually deliver. Teams that stop listening because they believe they’ve “figured it out” usually haven’t.

Competition Exposes Weak PMF First

When competition appears, founders often blame marketing, pricing, or capital.

Yes, sometimes that’s true. But often it’s not.

Competitors never steal customers randomly. They take the ones whose fit was already marginal.

If switching feels easy for a customer, it’s a direct signal that PMF was never strong.

The right response isn’t aggressive positioning, but rather tightening the loop with the customers who still care deeply.

PMF Is Defended by Focus, Not Speed

The instinct when growth slows is to do more. The first step that comes in the mind to add more features, more segments and more experiments.

But PMF is defended by doing less better.

• Fewer ICP’s (Ideal Customer Profiles)

• Clearer positioning

• Stronger defaults

• Faster response to core users

Speed helps discovery, but focus preserves fit.

How do I find whether we have a defensive PMF?

You don’t know you have PMF when things are going well. Sometimes it’s important to test things in a contrarian way to check whether you are on track.

You know it when:

• You raise prices and users stay

• You pause marketing and usage continues

• You ship nothing new and retention holds

PMF is not excitement, but resilience. And resilience has to be maintained.

Product–market fit isn’t a trophy that we win as a startup.

It’s a posture a founder has to maintain - by paying attention longer than feels necessary, by resisting premature expansion, and by treating alignment as ongoing work.

The companies that last aren’t the ones that find PMF. They’re the ones that keep defending it while everyone else assumes it’s already secured.

Till then, keep building.

We like stories that end well. They feel instructive.

Good endings don’t prove good logic. Most of the time, they just prove luck, timing, access, or the ability to stay alive longer than others.

When someone succeeds, we ask, “What did you do?”

We don’t ask, “Who else did the same thing and still lost?”

That’s the first distortion.

We listen to the winners and pretend their stories explain the whole game. They don’t. They only explain how the survivors survived.

Two people take the same risk. One would make it, and the other one might vanish.

We talk to the one who made it—and call that wisdom.

Advice is usually autobiography pretending to be theory.

Most success stories are edited. The chaos is removed, accidents become “insight,” lucky breaks become “strategy,” and dead ends are quietly erased.

And finally marketing does the final polish. The mind of survivors converts a messy chain of events into clean steps, rephrase randomness as some principles, and what can’t really be repeated we call an insight.

The winner like this version because it now sounds plausible.

And you on other hand don’t buy advice because it’s true. You also buy it because it feels manageable. Advice softens uncertainty. It promises a map of steps, on following which you should get there.

But the real world doesn’t care about instructions. It rewards where you stand, when you move, and how much chaos you can live with.

That’s why most people who follow great advice still don’t get great outcomes. Not because they failed, but because the advice was never universal.

The uncomfortable truth:

Most advice is reverse-engineered justification.

We don’t really know why things worked; we only know that they worked, so we build stories that make the result feel intentional. We accept those stories because randomness is terrifying.

If success were mostly skill, advice would work more often. If it were mostly structure, advice would look more like sociology than self-help. But success is neither clean nor kind. It’s a mix of ability, access, timing, and survival.

Advice only sees the survivors. That’s why it sounds confident, why it sells well, and why it fails quietly.

The real skill is not following advice. It’s knowing which parts of someone else’s story don’t apply to your world. Most people don’t want that skill. They want a script—and survivor bias with good marketing is the best-selling script of all.

I noticed it first in a small, uncomfortable way.

I would draft something - a note, a post, a memo - and feel that familiar friction. The thought wasn’t fully formed yet. The language was uneven. It needed time.

Then I’d run it through ChatGPT. The result was cleaner. Calmer. More confident. And somehow, less mine.

But I still posted it. No one complained. In fact, it performed better.

That’s when it became clear: the trade wasn’t intelligence for laziness. It was rough truth for smooth sense-making.

And once that trade becomes normal, the rest follows quietly.

The popular fear about AI and narratives is dramatic - that machines will invent propaganda. I feel that’s likely wrong.

If AI ever takes control of the narrative, it won’t be because it overpowered humans. It will be because humans voluntarily outsourced storytelling to it - enthusiastically and at scale.

Not through conspiracy. But through convenience.

Today, AI models are trained on human-generated data. But it’s difficult to deny the fact that eventually they will get exposed in training on AI-assisted human expression - if not with AI-generated content.

That distinction matters.

Every post you see that even was:

• polished with an AI

• summarized by an AI

• optimized for reach by an AI

is no longer a clean human signal. It’s a feedback loop artifact.

We aren’t just publishing content anymore. We’re publishing content that already passed through a machine’s priors.

And most content distribution platform don’t filter that out. They reward it, which means the training data of the future is increasingly self-referential.

Why this may happen easily (and quietly)?

This doesn’t require a breakthrough in AI capability, but three very ordinary incentives to align -

Efficiency beats originality

Original thought is slow, risky, and cognitively expensive. AI-assisted creation is fast, legible, and socially safe.

Over time, the recommendation algorithms on LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. naturally selects for:

• clean structure

• familiar metaphors

• predictable moral arcs

• confident but moderate tone

AI excels at exactly this shape of communication. Not because it’s “manipulative” - but because it optimizes for acceptability.

Platforms amplify the median, not the edge

Most social media and platforms don’t promote what is true or novel. They promote what is least frictional.

AI-generated (or AI-assisted) content converges toward:

• consensus language

• polite disagreement

• balanced takes

• non-threatening insights

As humans learn what “works,” they unconsciously mimic that style - even when writing without AI. And the result is narrative compression.

Training data doesn’t care about authorship

A model training methodology doesn't ask if this thought was earned. It asks instead whether this pattern repeats.

When AI-shaped content floods the corpus, the model doesn’t see it as derivative. It sees it as ground truth frequency. At scale, repetition becomes authority.

AI doesn’t need to control narratives. It only needs to average them. And averages feel neutral - even when they’re not.

The danger isn’t a biased AI shouting ideology. It’s an AI calmly reinforcing what already survives visibility filters.

That’s far harder to notice. And far harder to resist.

What worldview does AI inherit?

Not a radical one. A comfortable one.

I will find it concerning if on these grounds AI inherits worldview that is:

• Technocratically optimistic

• Economically centrist

• Morally polite

• Risk-averse

• Language-heavy, action-light

• Confident in systems, vague about power

This is not left or right. It’s platform liberalism - shaped by engagement incentives, moderation rules, and professional class norms.

Not revolutionary. Not reactionary. Just smooth. And smooth narratives travel far.

The biggest shift won’t be belief manipulation. It will be narrative narrowing. And humans will increasingly rely on these explanations - because they feel reasonable.

Over time:

• raw experience gets filtered

• strong claims get softened

• moral ambiguity gets resolved too quickly

Not because AI is evil. But because clarity scales better than truth.

As as this becomes a bigger portion of the machine priors, it will become more and more difficult for people to prompt the models to tame and think otherwise.

We worry about AI hallucinating. But the more dangerous outcome is AI remembering us incorrectly.

Not as we were - conflicted, unfinished, inconsistent - but as we presented ourselves for algorithms - which would be the most polished, balanced, optimized and harmless manner.

If AI inherits the narrative of our time, it won’t be the story of human struggle. It will be the story of what survived posting.

An interesting paradox is …

The worldview of an AI models depends on distribution in the data corpus. But the decision-makers decide to control what the models learn - one can argue it will still depend on the worldview of the person choosing what goes in distribution. How do you really understanding the morality of that bias?

So it may not really be objective function. You may be able to objectively remove AI-generated content, but AI-assisted content is hard to distinguish.

And interesting thought: will it make more sense to optimize the training so that an every individual is sustainibly able to train his own co-pilot which is hardwired away from every increasing digital corpus and internet.

If you still write without assistance, you are already an outlier.

If you write something sharp, unfinished, or uncomfortable - you’re providing rare data. Not for engagement, but for the future memory of how humans actually thought.

Because the next generation of intelligence won’t just learn from what we believed.

It will learn from what we were willing to publish.

On paper, the week looked solid. Investor calls. Team reviews and townhall. Customer sync. Strategy meetings and discussing PoA’s. No gaps. No red flags. But when Friday arrived, I realized I hadn’t spent a single uninterrupted hour on the thing the company actually exists to build.

Everything important had been discussed. Almost nothing important had been done.

That’s when I realized: my calendar no longer reflected my values- it reflected my obligations.

I realized all founders like to believe they control their time. In practice, the calendar fills itself.

A quick sync. A follow-up. A meeting to align on the last meeting. A misalignment that needs attention. A quick meeting turns into a weekly ritual.

None of it feels wrong. That’s why it accumulates. You stop asking, “Is this aligned?” and start asking, “How do I fit this in?”

At some point, the calendar stops reflecting what you’re building and starts reflecting what you’re maintaining.

Decisions deferred, conversations repeated, energy spent explaining the same thing in different rooms. Deep work gets postponed to “later.”

Thinking happens at night, tired and compressed.

The calendar is full. The days feel thin.

It shows up as:

• Low-grade irritation without a clear source

• Workdays that feel dense but unsatisfying

• A sense of always “catching up” to your own thinking

• Progress that looks good externally but feels thin internally

You don’t feel lost. You feel misplaced.

What changes is posture. You move from creating to responding. From shaping the work to servicing it.

Responsibility slowly turns into availability. Availability is a costly value to hold by default.

Not building. Not thinking. Not creating.

Just keeping things from breaking.

The calendar becomes a record of what your obligations instead.

Because the calendar doesn’t judge. It doesn’t moralize.

It simply records. Meeting after meeting.

Context switching disguised as collaboration.

What makes this hard is that none of the entries look wrong in isolation.

Each meeting sounds reasonable. Each call has a purpose. Each commitment once felt necessary.

But values aren’t reflected in individual blocks. They’re reflected in patterns.

• The work you claim is “important” keeps getting postponed.

• The thinking you say you value happens only late at night, exhausted.

• The people you care about are fit into leftover slots.

• The work that energizes you appears rarely - like a guest, not a resident.

Values show up not in your loudest declarations, but in what survives your busiest weeks.

None of this happens maliciously. It happens gradually. One reasonable “yes” at a time.

A calendar aligned with your values has a different texture.

It starts with being deliberate about what you say yes to.

Every founder has a trust bottleneck somewhere in the system - holding on only makes it worse.

Delegate what others or systems can do. Reduce decision fatigue where judgment isn’t required.

There is space. There is intention. There are fewer explanations.

Not because you care less- but because you’ve decided where your care belongs.

You don’t attend everything. You don’t respond immediately. You let some things wait so other things can exist at all.

This isn’t neglect. It’s stewardship.

What I realized over last few years is that the calendar will take whatever you give it.

Because in the end, your calendar isn’t a scheduling tool.

It’s a record of what you chose to protect

when no one was forcing you to choose.

I’m writing this without an agenda.

No resolutions to announce.

No tidy arc that pretends the year made sense.

Just a pause - long enough to look myself in the eye.

Last year taught me that progress rarely arrives the way ambition imagines it. It comes disguised as friction. As repetition. As discomfort you don’t get applause for.

I spent a lot of time building things that won’t show up in screenshots. Foundations instead of facades. Systems instead of stories. Conversations that didn’t trend, decisions that didn’t feel heroic, days that looked boring from the outside but mattered quietly on the inside.

I learned that clarity is expensive. It costs ego. It costs speed. Sometimes it costs being misunderstood for longer than feels fair.

But confusion is more expensive.

I also learned that effort doesn’t always compound immediately. Some work sits dormant, like seeds underground, testing your patience before it rewards your faith. This year asked me to keep showing up without proof. To trust that invisible progress is still progress.

There were moments I mistook exhaustion for failure. Moments I thought something was wrong because things felt heavy. They weren’t. I was just carrying weight that actually mattered.

I’m beginning to understand the difference.

Not everything needs to scale. Not everything needs to be optimized.

Some things need to be protected.

• My attention.

• My standards.

• My curiosity.

I read less than I wanted and learned more than I expected. Mostly about myself. About how easily the mind reaches for noise when silence asks better questions. About how often certainty is just fear wearing confidence.

I noticed how the best insights arrived sideways - during walks, half-finished books, late-night notes that weren’t meant for publishing. The work behind the work. The thinking behind the thinking.

This year reminded me that identity is a process, not a declaration. That becoming is quieter than announcing. That integrity is built in private, long before it’s tested in public.

I don’t want a life that looks impressive but feels misaligned.

I want one that feels honest, even when it’s inconvenient.

So here’s what I’m carrying forward in 2026:

• Less urgency, more intent

• Fewer explanations, clearer decisions

• Fewer inputs, deeper work

• Fewer performances, more presence

And here’s what I’m leaving behind:

• The need to prove momentum

• The habit of over-intellectualizing discomfort

• The belief that rest must be earned

Next year doesn’t need a reinvention. It needs continuity. It needs me to keep doing the unglamorous things well. To stay curious longer than comfortable. To choose long arcs over short applause.

If I read this a year from now, I hope I recognize the person who wrote it- not because everything worked out, but because I stayed honest while it didn’t.

That feels like a good enough ambition.

Until next year.

- Gagandeep

The premise is simple: people communicate differently, and most conflict comes from assuming theirs is universal. As he categorizes people into four color profiles, you realise Erikson’s four colors aren’t psychology. They’re a shortcut - a rough map of how people process speed, emotion, harmony, and detail.

What stayed with me wasn’t the model. It was the discomfort.

I noticed how often I mistake urgency for clarity.

How I assume precision is helpful when it’s just overwhelming.

How frustration usually appears when I expect others to operate on my defaults.

The book works best when used lightly. It’s not about labeling people. The moment you start doing that, you miss the point. The value is in the pause it creates - maybe they’re not difficult, maybe they’re different.

It also revealed something less flattering: how rarely I adapt. How often I expect others to meet me where I am instead of translating.

The title, in hindsight, is a trap.

It invites superiority - but rewards humility.

Read it not to explain people, but to soften your certainty.

Most misunderstandings aren’t personal.

They’re linguistic.

That realization alone made the book worth reading.

Used without it, it becomes exactly what it warns against.

The most valuable insight isn’t about others. It’s about yourself.

You notice:

• How often you assume clarity when you’re just being familiar

• How rarely you adapt your communication style, even when outcomes suffer

• How much conflict is sustained by ego rather than misunderstanding

In that sense, the title turns inward. The “idiot” is often the part of us that refuses to translate.

Every year pretends to be important. But some years don’t just pass - they invalidate assumptions.

2025 was one of those years.

Not because of a single crisis or breakthrough, but because many comfortable stories we relied on - about markets, wars, startups, India’s “rise”, AI, careers, pedigree, and global order - quietly stopped working.

The dashboards looked fine. The lived experience didn’t.

And that gap became impossible to ignore.

Markets stopped explaining themselves

One of the strangest contradictions of 2025 was this: markets appeared calm, yet people felt constantly on edge.

Volatility existed, but it was episodic. Corrections were shallow and quickly bought. Indexes recovered faster than narratives could catch up. On paper, capital markets looked rational.

But something fundamental had shifted. Markets stopped being explanatory.

Prices moved ahead of earnings. Liquidity mattered more than fundamentals. Short-term positioning overwhelmed long-term conviction. The “why” behind price action mattered less than knowing who else might buy next.

Retail investors oscillated between fear and FOMO. Professionals learned to trade narratives instead of businesses. Long-term investing quietly turned into tactical survival.

This seeped into everything else - careers, startups, even life planning.

The uncomfortable truth:

2025 markets didn’t reward insight. They rewarded positioning. And positioning, by definition, is unstable.

Conflict as an infrastructure, instead of event

By 2025, war lost its shock value.

Conflicts no longer erupted and resolved cleanly. They simmered, paused, fragmented, resumed - without conclusion. The world adapted not because it became safer, but because instability became familiar.

Energy markets absorbed shocks. Supply chains rerouted. Defense budgets normalized. Headlines moved on.

This normalization was the real change.

War stopped being an event and became infrastructure - a persistent input into energy prices, migration, capital flows, industrial policy, and technology access.

Modern wars weren’t fought for resolution.

They were fought for leverage. And once leverage is established, it rarely gets relinquished.

This mattered because it fed directly into markets, geopolitics, and long-term uncertainty - especially for countries and companies trying to plan beyond the next quarter.

“Fundamentals” didn’t save startups anymore

The neat post-mortem of 2025 goes like this:

“The market rewarded founders who focused on fundamentals.”

That story is comforting — and incomplete.

What actually happened was harsher:

Founders with leverage survived. Everyone else learned the language of fundamentals too late.

• Distribution beat differentiation.

• Access beat elegance.

• Timing beat discipline.

Companies with average products but entrenched enterprise contracts survived. Technically superior startups with weak go-to-market quietly shut down.

Fundamentals mattered - but only after survival was secured.

The real lesson:

Being right without power is still losing.

Is there really an AI Bubble? (Not where you think)

The bubble in 2025 wasn’t “AI is useless or it is overhyped.” AI worked — that was the problem. Contrarian, but true.

While capital became costlier in 2025, it is being artificially discounted for AI opportunities. I met lot of notable institutions who just want exposure to AI, it doesn’t matter what it is or whether it will generate any value.

The bubble showed up elsewhere:

• Too many AI wrappers chasing the same workflows

• Identical demos differentiated by branding, not outcomes

• Revenue lagging far behind inference costs

• Talent costs rising faster than margins

• Imbalance of expenditure and intellectual saturation across domains.

The ecosystem chose the winners very early - optimized on signals rather than substance. And consequently is trying to keep the cycle running on a belief system.

Capital recycled aggressively:

model company → cloud bill → infrastructure provider → back into AI funds.

Money moved in loops, not lines.

Uncomfortable truth:

In 2025, much of AI investment didn’t create new value.

It circulated value.

An identity crisis disguised as innovation for Indian deep tech ecosystem

India entered 2025 loudly declaring:

“We’re done cloning. Deep tech is the future.”

That statement sounded confident.

It wasn’t entirely true.

Yes, consumer internet cooled. Yes, more startups attempted EV infra, AI, robotics, climate, and industrial software. But many ran into the same structural wall.

We realized while India wants to be ambitious as global hedge against China, but there is still a large gap in talent, mindset, patience and alignment.

• Founders still find it easier—and often rational—to build in India and sell outside it. Not because they want to leave, but because outcomes are clearer elsewhere, and execution is faster.

• Top-tier talent remains magnetized by the US. What returns in the name of “reverse brain drain” is usually the median, not the edge.

• High-risk domestic capital is limited. It prefers exposure through the US–India corridor rather than committing fully within India. Safety, not conviction, shapes most decisions.

• Foreign capital remains hesitant. That’s the ground reality—regardless of how optimistic the narrative sounds. India excites investors, but rarely enough to absorb long cycles, regulatory ambiguity, or deep technical risk.

• Workforce optimizes for stability over stretch. Comfort over uncertainty. That’s understandable—but it changes what kinds of companies can exist.

• Customers are still final friction point, creating lack of early adopters due to pricing, bureaucracy and reluctance towards risk.

Deep tech thrives only when these incentives align. In India, they still didn’t keep up as per expectations.

Most “deep tech” startups struggled not because the tech failed — but because cash flow timelines and cultural expectations were incompatible. Those who survived were mostly based in Bay Area - not building for India as market, but rather using India as a cost center for economical development rather than decision making.

Uncomfortable truth:

Deep tech in India isn’t impossible - but without a mindset shift from momentum and optics to mastery and endurance, it remains largely performative.

The Indian economy appeared to be growing, yet quietly fucked up

2025 was full of headlines celebrating India’s macro strength.

They weren’t wrong - just misleading.

GDP growth didn’t translate into wage growth. Asset prices outran incomes. Consumption leaned on credit rather than confidence.

Millions weren’t unemployed. They were employed, educated, and anxious.

This wasn’t an economic collapse. It was an incentive collapse.

Too many aspirants chased too few genuinely high-quality opportunities. Growth existed, but it didn’t feel predictable, inclusive, or secure.

Hard truth:

Growth without productivity-linked income doesn’t create optimism.

It creates fragility.

The collapse of the illusion of employment

The employment stress of 2025 didn’t come from sudden cruelty. It came from correction after excess.

For several years, capital was cheap and growth was cosmetic. Companies expanded headcount to signal momentum, not because work demanded it. Compensation drifted away from contribution. Hiring optimized for surface signals rather than sustained output.

Work felt lighter. Expectations softened. Salary jumps and job switches felt frictionless - driven by optical signals like pedigree instead of proof of work.

That phase trained a workforce on conditions that were never durable.

As markets tightened, the logic reversed.

Companies recoiled back to efficiency. Roles had to justify contribution. Output replaced optics. Rewards grew conditional.

This created a paradox:

• Employers struggled to find people who met rising expectations and merits

• Workers struggled to find roles that matched old assumptions - and felt a feeling of being undervalued.

Not because capability vanished - but because the reference point was wrong.

AI accelerated this shift by lifting baseline productivity — it didn’t cause it, despite the popular narrative.

Uncomfortable Truth:

The hardest adjustment wasn’t technical. It was mental.

A generation calibrated its expectations in an abnormal environment. When conditions normalized, the mismatch felt personal.

Optional awareness around geopolitics became a liability

Until recently, geopolitics was background noise for most professionals. 2025 ended that illusion.

• Export controls affected hardware startups.

• Visa regimes reshaped hiring.

• Capital came with political assumptions.

• Neutrality itself carried cost.

The world didn’t become hostile. It became conditional.

Reality check:

Globalization didn’t reverse — it fragmented.

And ignorance stopped being neutral.

Reflections going forward in 2026

2026 doesn’t need optimism and narratives, but rather repositioning how we make decisions, choose depth over chasing speed and build right incentives for evolutions.

The next decade won’t be exponential. It will be selective.

Last few years have normalized instability. 2026 won’t reward certainty.

It will reward those who can move without it. It will reward right positioning, rather than insight or ambition.

And in a world where the old stories no longer work, that may be the only real advantage left.

Happy New Year!

Much of the work that matters most is invisible. Founders are trained to chase visible markers of progress: growth graphs, feature launches, fundraising rounds.

But most of what makes a startup durable lies in the hidden scaffolding: the dull, continuous work beneath:

clean data, stable infrastructure, internal tools, repeatability.

This is the dark work.

No customers see it. Investors rarely ask about it. But sooner or later, everyone feels it.

The Early Illusion

A strange property of dark work is that you can ignore it for a long time and nothing terrible happens.

Everyone tells you to “move fast.” Everything feels urgent at the beginning - demos, customers, shipping. They hack things together. They tell themselves they’ll “fix it later.”

And you can, because the first version of a startup is small enough that duct tape holds.

But duct tape ages. And later rarely comes. That’s what makes it dangerous.

Most teams collapse not because they lost to competitors, but because they tripped over their own early shortcuts.

You don’t pay for dark work immediately. You pay later, with interest.

Through the lens of building Minus Zero …

At Minus Zero, we learned all of this firsthand.

We started like most deep-tech founders:

thinking the hardest problems were algorithmic - making the car drive better, interpreting complex scenes, closing the perception-to-control loop.

And we made real progress. Every month the system drove better. Models improved. Demos looked promising. But underneath, we were accumulating silent debt.

Data Chaos

Our data pipeline evolved organically - not deliberately.

Each time we mounted new cameras or recorded different scenarios, small changes were made to schema, storage structure, or naming. Individually harmless, but collectively chaotic.

Nothing broke at first. So we kept going.

Months later, as we evolves, we found: inconsistent schemas, timestamp drift, unaccounted sensor transformations, unclear labeling conventions, etc.

Bad data teaches the model to be confidently wrong.

Absence of dark work cost us more time than any model bug.

We weren’t fighting the world. We were fighting ourselves.

Infra & Tooling Debt

A similar thing happened with infra.

In the beginning, running models or experiments on a single machine or ad-hoc scripts was fine.

But as the team grew, tribal workflows became bottlenecks:

• Only a few people knew how to run certain experiments

• Preprocessing scripts had implicit assumptions only the author understood

• There was random unaccounted commits in repos found much later.

• We lacked reproducibility; runs couldn’t be re-created reliably

• Debugging failures took days because logs were scattered or missing

• Model performance differed depending on whose machine ran it

We didn’t lack talent - we lacked internal systems.

A few engineers became single points of failure.

Velocity dropped not because people worked less, but because every step required too much re-interpretation.

We felt fast when hacking individually, but slow when moving collectively. That’s the clearest signal dark work was missing.

Internal Alignment Problems

Dark work isn’t only technical. It’s cultural.

Without common schemas and internal language:

• QA reported issues differently

• engineers interpreted scenarios differently

• evaluation definitions drifted between teams

Even defining “model regression” became a discussion.

We spent emotional energy debating definitions instead of fixing problems.

Not because people were wrong - but because no internal scaffolding existed. Without strong systems, culture becomes dependent on individuals.

When individuals disagree, progress stalls.

The Realization

There’s a moment every founder faces when they see the startup not as a product but as a living organism - one they’ve been starving without realizing it.

For us, that moment came when adding people slowed us down. And we started observing some weird patterns -

• Engineers took weeks to ship simplest of things.

• Different teams report different metrics

• There is only one person who knows how X works

• Incidents repeat

• Fixes create new failures

There’s no more humbling signal. And we started investing time in reinforcing the scaffolding: building debugging tools, standardizing processes and definitions, documenting the code, find root cause of bugs instead quick-fixes, etc.

Nothing glamorous. From an optical perspective, the company looked as if it had stalled.

No customer clapped. No investor praised.

But slowly - things changed.

• Outcomes became predictable.

• Debugging became rational, not archaeological.

• Meetings got shorter.

• Arguments got fewer.

The company felt … lighter.

Moving as a team became possible again.

Dark work isn’t about going slower. It’s about removing the drag you didn’t know was there.

Looking back, we realized the most expensive thing was the time lost fighting our own internal chaos.

And similar signs are evident in successes of companies we looked up to.

Dropbox learned this the hard way. Different teams defined “active user” differently - some counted openers, some uploads, some link-clickers. Three groups, three realities. Dashboards lie when the data beneath them is crooked (that’s a great example to imagine the compounding effect of petty things.)

Eventually, Dropbox standardized definitions and pipelines - invisible work no customer saw, but from then on, decisions got clearer.

In 2011, an AWS outage took down Reddit, Quora, and parts of Netflix. Not because they were bad engineers - they’d simply grown faster than their infrastructure discipline. Startups often treat “temporary” systems as harmless. A cron job hacked at 3 a.m. quietly becomes the backbone of billing. Teams that survive prepare early - monitoring, logging, backups, incident playbooks - long before they seem necessary.

Rule of thumb: if something runs every day, assume it will fail catastrophically one day.

Stripe looks simple: one API call and you’re accepting payments. It just works.

Its real innovation was beneath the surface -deep logging, dispute tooling, tracing, redundancy. Patrick McKenzie once said Stripe could inspect every API transaction through multiple banking networks in real time. That’s not UI polish - that’s infrastructure. No one saw it. But it made Stripe trustworthy.

Figma’s “overnight” success took years. Before launch, Dylan Field’s team spent years perfecting low-level WebGL rendering so collaboration felt instant. Investors hate this kind of invisible work - there’s nothing to demo.

But when Figma finally shipped, it felt like teleportation. Competitors cloned the interface but not the depth - and kept losing.

If your foundations are deep enough, imitation becomes useless. That’s what turns invisible work into a moat.

Uber shows the cost of neglect. Between 2014 and 2016, velocity collapsed under technical debt - fragmented infra, inconsistent metrics, microservices chaos. Even simple questions like “Why did supply drop yesterday?” had multiple answers.

Eventually, Uber built massive internal platforms like Michelangelo, uDeploy, and uMonitor just to regain coherence. It took thousands of engineers and years of re-plumbing - but once the dark work was done, the company could move again.

A Founder’s Reflection

I used to think my job was to make the product work. Now I think my job is to make the work work.

Building an autonomous car felt like the real challenge. But building an autonomous culture - one that could run without heroic effort - was harder.

You don’t really grow as a founder until you realize that the most important systems are not in the car or in the models, but within the company.

We are made to believe startups die because the world was hostile. More often, they die because they break from within - overwhelmed by their own entropy.

A startup is like a bridge that people start building while others are driving on it. You can’t stop building. The smartest founders know when to pause and strengthen the beams that will hold the weight.

Every great company has two stories:

the one it tells the world, and the one beneath the floorboards.

It’s tempting to think the first story is the important one. But the second determines how long the company lasts.

I used to think best companies are the ones that execute the fastest. But velocity is an illusion.

The real advantage is frictionless-ness - it compounds quietly, until one day it becomes indistinguishable from speed.

It began quietly - not with a resolution, but with a restlessness.

The kind that makes you reach for books without knowing what you’re looking for.

I thought I was reading stories, but maybe the stories were reading me.

I stepped into Marjan Kamali’s The Stationery Shop of Tehran the way you step into a memory that doesn’t belong to you.

The scent of paper, the hum of a distant city, the trembling hope of young lovers - Roya and Bahman - meeting in a bookshop that holds the world still for them.

When the revolution tears them apart, what remains is not tragedy, but time refusing to explain itself.

I underlined a line I still remember:

“Love is not about what happens. It’s about what doesn’t.”

That sentence followed me for months.

It whispered that the stories that matter most are the ones we never finish telling.

During mid-2025, I found a fancy for translations of some popular Japanese fiction -

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and its sequel. Satoshi Yagisawa’s world is built from silence and sunlight. The story doesn’t rush; it lingers like steam rising from a cup.

If Tehran was love interrupted, Morisaki was love unhurried. It reminded me that sometimes reading is not escape — it’s recovery.

You return to yourself sentence by sentence.

I also read the first part of the very popular set this year - Before the Coffee Gets Cold — another Tokyo story, where time travel happens in a small café if you’re brave enough to face your past.

But the rule is cruelly poetic: you can go back, but nothing you change will alter the present. The only thing that changes is you.

The year 2024 and early 2025 had be tough for my startup (and me personally in general.) At some point, the books on my table shifted from hearts and time to markets and struggle.

I picked up few books that had been on my list long due. And having had decently progressed in my evolution as a founder, I always have been on look-out for something that ushers new insights - rather than being a manual for beginners.

I picked up Zero to One by Peter Thiel because it’s too popular to be in ‘unread’ list. While a lot in it wasn’t new, it read like a provocation - a reminder of why I had started up in the first place. I would recommend it as a good starter for anyone before they start up.

I recall few nice things:

Creation is almost always lonely.

that every moment in business happens only once;

the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t build a social network,

the next Larry Page won’t build a search engine.

Underneath the contrarian tone, the larger idea I would revisit again for any one starting up -

“You don’t get to hide behind templates.”

Don’t follow them as a playbook.

Then there was Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things - truth written in scar tissue. No philosophy - it shoots point-blank.

This was the book I really needed to read and it has surpassed everything to top positions in my non fiction reads. And I know I will keep coming back to it again and again.

He doesn’t glamorize building. He describes the 3 a.m. anxiety, the impossible decisions, the weight of knowing that sometimes there are no good options - only less catastrophic ones.

“There are no silver bullets, only lead bullets.”

It wasn’t just about companies. It was about life.

No perfect hacks, no clean exits. Just showing up, again and again, firing one imperfect shot at reality after another, hoping, somehow, to move things an inch forward.

I think I would want to take out time to write about this book in more detail sometime.

These two books together drew a rough sketch of ambition:

the dream of creating something that didn’t exist, and the quiet brutality of surviving what that dream demands.

As a founder and an adult navigating relationships and friendships - dealing with people turned out to be far more complex than I had imagined.

Thomas Erikson’s Surrounded by Idiots arrived like a translation manual for human nature. On the surface, it’s a framework — colors and categories — but beneath that is an invitation to humility.

I learned that understanding people is not about decoding them, but about de-centering yourself.

That we are all, at some point, someone else’s “idiot.”

And that empathy begins the moment you stop demanding that others make sense to you.

If Zero to One and The Hard Thing about Hard Things asked what we build in the world, The Silent Patient asked what we build inside our heads (though it’s fiction). Alex Michaelides’ novel comes dressed as a psychological thriller: Alicia Berenson, a painter, murders her husband and then goes completely silent. Theo, a psychotherapist, is determined to make her speak.

But as the story unravels, you realise the real investigation isn’t just about Alicia.

It’s about him. And, uncomfortably, about you.

I underlined a thought about how we tell ourselves stories to live with what we’ve done - and how sometimes those stories are more dangerous than the truths they hide.

Silence, in this book, isn’t emptiness. It’s everything the reader suspects but doesn’t want to face.

It’s the recognition that we all maintain carefully edited narratives about who we are. And sooner or later, those narratives come to collect their debt.

When I turned to The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, the language shifted again — from narrative to distilled thought.

Naval doesn’t add complexity. He strips it away.

Wealth, happiness, freedom — he treats them less as goals and more as side effects of understanding yourself clearly and wanting less from the world.

Then came Gulzar’s Selected Poems — words so gentle they barely touched the page.

He doesn’t explain life; he hums it. His verses are like open windows — what enters is not meaning, but air.

And in between these two, I met Morrie. Tuesdays with Morrie is a small book with a very slow heartbeat. On the surface, it’s simple. In reality, it’s a quiet dismantling of everything we mistake for a life.

Morrie doesn’t insist you chase greatness. He insists you pay attention - to love, to presence, to the tiny, unglamorous rituals of care.

If Naval questions your desires and Gulzar tenderises your feelings,

Morrie does something subtler: He asks whether the ladder you’re climbing is even leaning against a wall you care about.

There were two very light reads I swept through - Deepinder Goyal’s Culture - an internal memo they followed at Zomato, given to every employee, and Ritwik’s I don’t don’t love you anymore - which gave me vibes like Rupi Kaur’s work. The latter is nice for mass appeal in college kids, but don’t expect much if you are a literary nerd like me.

By the end of the year, I realized: I hadn’t been reading for answers.

I’d been reading for echoes.

Each book — Tehran, Tokyo, the therapist’s office, the startup war room — had been a mirror of different parts of my mind.

And what I underlined wasn’t just lines. It was reminders:

• That silence is not emptiness.

• That leadership is not loudness.

• That love, once begun, never really ends — it only changes form.

• That people are puzzles, not problems.

• That meaning is not found; it’s assembled, piece by piece, from what we notice.

Books are not an escape. They don’t take us elsewhere. They bring us closer - to the person waiting this side - the one we had lost in touch with.

Recently there was lot of things going on in startup and my personal life, and I craved for something light on my reader’s palate. I ended up picking The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. And for a particular state of mind — its writing style ends up being exactly what you need — it doesn’t tell you what to do, rather it just refreshed the way you think.

This time, I read it through the lens of a founder rather than a to-be founder. Some lines hit differently when you’re in the middle of building something uncertain, burning through time, money, and sanity.

These are the lessons that stayed with me — not as quotes, but as reminders I wanted to keep returning to.

Owning Your Name

“Clear accountability is important. Without accountability, you don’t have incentives. Without accountability, you can’t build credibility. But you take risks. You risk failure. You risk humiliation. You risk failure under your own names.

The people who have the ability to fail in public under their own names actually gain a lot of power.”

There’s something deeply humbling about being a founder — you’re visible in every direction. Every action is a public experiment.

It’s terrifying at first. But Naval’s point is liberating: accountability is leverage. And it’s not just for founders but even applicable to every employee we hire.

When you put your name behind what you build, you create a loop of trust - and your incentives align in right proportions in either ways. It increases the reliance in the pillars of the organization - that’s what keeps people together to build great companies.

And if you do fail?

“People will forgive failures as long as you were honest and made a high-integrity effort.”

The world doesn’t punish honesty as much as we think it does. It just punishes pretense. Integrity compounds faster than growth metrics. It doesn’t show up on dashboards, but it’s the foundation every long game is built on.

Leverage

“One form of leverage is labor — I would argue this is the worst form of leverage that you could possibly use. Managing other people is incredibly messy.”

That line should be tattooed on every founder’s wrist. We learn it the hard way. More people doesn’t mean more progress — it often just means more meetings.

We think building a big team is success. It often isn’t — it’s just overhead in disguise.

Naval reminds us of a better kind of leverage:

“… a democratic form - “Products with no marginal cost of replication” — books, media, movies, and code.”

Things that scale without permission. If something requires ‘n’ engineering hours to build, we assume more will be do the job fast - but it ends up taking more time what a lean team would do. Management debt, more points for failure and less elasticity is a bane.

Every founder reaches a point where they realize managing people is less about leverage and more about alignment. The real leverage is what you build, not who you manage.

Build great products. Build great tools to empower lean teams to build great products.

Judgment

“Praise specifically, criticize generally.

…

Then people’s egos and identities, which we all have, don’t work against you. They work for you.”

The more I lead, the more I realize management isn’t about control — it’s about psychology. As a founder, you quickly realize feedback is a double-edged sword — necessary, but often wounding.

Naval’s principle is pure gold: specific praise builds trust; general criticism preserves dignity.

You can tell someone, “You did this brilliantly,” but when it’s time to fix things, talk about the system, not the person.

When you praise specifically, people feel seen. When you criticize generally, people feel safe.

It’s not manipulation — it’s empathy applied to leadership.

And then there’s radical honesty.

When no one speaks truth to power, bad decisions compound. Radical honesty doesn’t mean being blunt; it means being clear.

Teams don’t crumble because they argue; they crumble because they don’t.

Happiness

I see people around me a lot successful or making a lot of money, yet they are not happy. A specific section of the book aptly hits like a diagnosis.

“Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.”

We all are too attached to the outcomes. We keep postponing happiness until after the next milestone.

We bought a new car. Now, I’m waiting for the new car to arrive. Of course, every night, I’m on the forums reading about the car. Why? It’s a silly object. It’s a silly car. It’s not going to change my life much or at all. I know the instant the car arrives I won’t care about it anymore. The thing is, I’m addicted to the desir-ing. I’m addicted to the idea of this external thing bringing me some kind of happiness and joy, and this is completely delusional.

The truth is, we’re just addicted to desiring.

Sanity

Often things might be bit overwhelming, so keeping your mind sane is of utmost importance. Yes, there are age-old advices like physical workouts, good diet, meditation, etc. but there are few things which offers new perspective.

“Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts.”

For me, that space is when I’m alone on a Sunday evening, laptop shut, mind quiet. For five minutes, I’m not building or planning — I just am. That’s the rarest kind of wealth. That of often where serendipity happens. You get clarity of thought. You become productive.

I’m less habitual than most people. I don’t like structure my day. To the extent I have habit, I try to make them more deliberate rather than accidents of history.

Most people run their lives on autopilot — routines formed from school, jobs, family expectations, or old patterns. Naval rejects that. He believes habits should be designed, not inherited.

“To make an original contribution, you have to be irrationally obsessed with something.”

Obsession is the entry ticket.

You can’t fake it. You can’t outsource it. If you’re not a little crazy about what you’re building, it’s probably not worth building.

But obsession needs a container. That’s where Naval’s second rule comes in:

“Set up systems, not goals.”

Goals are binary — they make you anxious before you hit them and empty afterward. Systems are quiet — they compound in the background.

Use your judgment to figure out what kinds of environments you can thrive in, and then create an environment around you so you’re statistically likely to succeed.

The current environment programs the brain, but the clever brain can choose its upcoming environment.

Your environment programs your brain — so design it carefully.

The Real Product

Here’s the truth no one tells you when you start:

You think you’re building a company. You’re actually building yourself.

Every hiring decision, every setback, every all-nighter — it’s shaping your judgment, your emotional range, your relationship with failure.

Naval’s wisdom isn’t really about wealth or startups. It’s about awareness.

And in that sense, every founder’s journey is spiritual whether they admit it or not.

We’re all just trying to create something outside that reflects who we’re becoming inside.