On Writing Well by William Zinsser

 If you are a company that publishes open source tools, the question to ask yourself is, do you want to make money from your product (rent) or from services around it. Rent is exactly how proprietary products make money. You can’t compete with your own free offering. There are billions of dollars flowing into proprietary platforms that should be the target. 

A monologue I was having when someone asked, "how do I learn coding?”

I don't think coding can be learnt. It is about having a problem to solve and then solving it using a mix of tools. If we are able to solve it using any tool whatsoever, then it is coding.

There are over 100,000 (actually 800k+) computer engineers trained every year in India. Yet, the creators are handful. Most of these creators don't have a background in coding.

Learning coding

A beautiful essay on the idea of friendship. How many friends do we have with whom we can "hang-out" with?

The average adult has roughly 16 people they would classify as friends. Of these, about three are “friends for life,” and five are people they really like. The other eight are not people they would hang out with one-on-one.

These other 8 are "deal-friends". Friends with whom we have kind of professional relationship.

You don’t need to have dozens of friends to be happy, and, in fact, people tend to get more selective about their friends as …

(Thanks to @Sbikh for sharing the pic.)

To have a unicorn or to be a cockroach?

As a founder, I think, it is much more important to be a cockroach. To survive. To keep innovating. To stay relevant.

Unicorn is just a number. A number not given by our customers but by our peers.

To have a unicorn requires raising a million dollars at a billion dollar valuation.

To be a cockroach requires creating something. Everyday! For years!!

As @Sbikh says, “business is an effort of lifetime.”

Isn't that more …

 All maps are lies. Useful lies, but lies all the same. They don’t tell you everything about the territory. If they did, they’d be totally useless and impossible to read. Maps show you a highly simplified model of the territory—an incomplete version of the truth based on your goals, context, zoom level, location, etc. They’re helpful because they leave stuff out.