Entrepreneurial Thoughts & Erratic Ramblings

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by Anish Godha

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Why the Fed Can Look Hawkish. The Pieces of Financial Repression Are Quietly Falling Into Place.
Aug 4, 2026 · original
America owes almost $40 trillion. To put that in context, America spends more in defense than the next 6 countries combined . Just the interest to service America’s debt eclipsed the massive defense budget in 2024. Roughly a fifth of every tax dollar you send to Washington goes straight back out the door as interest. What’s making this worse is that most of the debt was issued in 0% years, whereas the short term interest rates now are at 3.75%, which means the interest bill is further set to rise, aggressively. Every government that has ever owed this much money relative to its economy has faced the same menu. There are three doors. The Three Doors Door one: Cut Spending. The math is brutal. Interest, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense consume nearly the whole budget. No politician can propose meaningful cuts to any of those programs and still expect to have a promising car
Guide to Angel Investing
Jun 15, 2018 · original
I’ve been dabbling in startup investing for a few years now. Nothing extraordinary, and I’ve definitely not made it a career, but I have developed a guide of sorts that I follow when making the final decision of whether or not to invest. This is written from the viewpoint of a single angel investor. Here it is: Risk : Understand the high risk in angel investing. Mentally, assume you’ll write off all investments as soon as you make them. Invest only what you can afford to lose. Avoid life-support investing : If a company comes for funding, where the founder says/implies something to the extent of: “fund us or we’re going out of business” – usually gravitate to not investing. Life support investing is a bad idea (not to mention stressful!). Lean towards companies that will survive regardless of whether or not you invest in them. Three companies come in for funding : A – Entrepreneur has th
“I could have built that in 2 weeks!”
Apr 26, 2016 · original
Yes but did you? That’s the point. You’ll often hear an over zealous programmer or engineer exclaim that they could have built [insert hot startup] in no time so what was the fuss about? The key that they’re missing out on is that it’s simple to clone , but extremely difficult to innovate . It’s a decision tree. Every node represents a set of decisions available to you with all the possible permutations as below. What is visible to everyone is the path travelled, not the paths forgone . Once you know your destination, tracing the tree back to the root is relatively simple. However, starting from the root without knowledge of your destination is where true innovation happens. That is a process filled with trial, error, failure, and course-correction over and over again till you reach your final destination. Conceptually speaking there are several startups that are in the same space – most
Solving a user problem vs a technical problem: the difference between creating value and wasting your time
Sep 11, 2014 · original
What is the kind of problem you are working tirelessly to solve? Are you actually working to create value or simply wasting your time? The difference is in the end goal of what solving the problem accomplishes. Some very big user problems have fairly simple technical solutions. They are easy to use, solve an actual need and fairly simple to interact with. On the other hand, some very big technical problems really don’t end up doing much for the end user. The former gives you something that people want, while the latter gives you an extremely beautiful piece of crap. Engineers are particularly susceptible to this. It is natural to fall into the trap of believing that just because something is challenging from a technical perspective, it must be a valuable problem to solve. From a user’s perspective, all that’s important is that the product does what it is meant to. “How” really doesn’t ma
Overthrowing the 600lb Gorilla: Create a Platform Shift
Jul 14, 2013 · original
As the little guy, albeit with some pretty large aspirations, how do you exactly go about taking on the 600 lb gorilla that has billions of dollars in resources and tens of thousands of employees? The gorilla has been in the industry for ever, knows all the other chimps in the space and is the undisputed leader. So, how do you, with limited resources, almost no name and a tiny team expect to, well, overthrow this big guy? You did have large aspirations, remember? Assume the incumbent is in the industry of creating horse-carts. He knows everything there is to know about horse carts – which breed works best for what purpose, what food the horses should eat, how comfortable the cart needs to be and so on. You can’t compete with this guy on horse-carts. He has tens of thousands of horses for every imaginable type of cart and he is killing it. So, how do you beat him at his own game? Well, yo
For the US to remain competitive, it needs to outsource *more* jobs to China & India
Feb 26, 2013 · original
Globalization has made the world a smaller place. A consequence has been the shift of jobs, especially in manufacturing, to China and India. Contrary to popular belief, the fall of US manufacturing is to the benefit of the US by making the industry more competitive than before. Lets take a bottoms-up approach. With respect to American manufacturing, the way it works is: I am a US corporation. My costs are ridiculously high and profits are very low. I discover I can reduce my costs by 40-70% if I move manufacturing to China. So, I do that (lets hold the fact that I need to layoff a bunch of people in US for now and come back to that). As a company, that increases my profits which enables me to re-invest it and grow. Being a US corporation, US government sees more cash by taxing my higher profits, which it can use to build society, healthcare, infrastructure etc. and do other public good.
The reality behind “We got 70k users in 2 days of launch”
Feb 1, 2013 · original
For any startup, gaining traction depends on two things: 1) How many people are you bringing and 2) How many users getting engaged. The first one has a lot to do with marketing, while the second one has everything to do with the product. How many people are you bringing? Companies launch not over one day, but over a process that can last almost an entire month or maybe more. Phrases like “We got 70k users in 2 days of launch” often have a back-story behind them. 1) Instagram – For instagram, they had Jack Dorsey (founder of Twitter and about 2m followers) back them. So, when they launched, it was fairly easy for them to get their initial users since they needed to get people like Dorsey reach out to their network and the press picked it up pretty quickly. 2) LinkedIn – I was speaking to one of the co-founders of LinkedIn, who was VP of Marketing. He said that initially most of their user
Unreasonable Obsession for the Startup Grind
Nov 17, 2012 · original
When getting a co-founder, employee, investor or any other stakeholder for your startup, one of the most important metrics you want to scan for is belief in the startup over and above any monetary compensation. Simon Sinek says it beautifully – “ If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears. ” In any startup – things will go wrong, stuff will break, investors will pass, your product will suck, employees will quit, hiring will be a problem, deadlines will be pushed, users will not be engaged, partners will bail – but you and your team still need to keep pushing through. You will face rejection over and over and over again – from investors, users, and pretty much everyone you talk to. You will hear people give several reasons why the startup will not w
What Makes Silicon Valley Work?
Oct 31, 2012 · original
Silicon Valley or the Bay Area has a completely different “vibe” for entrepreneurship. It is the epicenter of the world’s technology innovation, where 40% of all US venture capital is invested and where 90% of the highest venture returns occur . Why? Why Silicon Valley and not New York which is filled with Ivy alumni; or Boston, home of Harvard & MIT; or even somewhere in UK or Europe or Asia? All of them have amazing engineering and business schools filled with very smart people, so why is the Bay Area the epicenter of innovation? It comes down to the culture. The culture in Silicon Valley is completely different – where it encourages entrepreneurship to another level. So, what is so unique about Silicon Valley culture? 1) It is OK to Fail – Yeah, you read that right. Embodying the culture, at Stanford, all our entrepreneurship professors have continually drilled into our heads – It is
Early Valuations are Bets on People
Oct 15, 2012 · original
Early stage valuations of start-ups are just bets on people – the underlying assumption being that a good team can figure out a product-market fit more easily. In the early days, when the product is not concrete, the initial idea can pivot, morph or get completely overhauled within a span of as little as 3-4 months. The initial team is the most crucial element of this, since the composition of the initial team will determine what direction the product takes. Swap the initial founder out with someone else and you will have a completely different product. When it comes to markets – they should be large/have the potential to be large or you are not in the right space. If they are large, expect them to be crowded with people still trying to “crack it.” Within this large market, your product needs to “fit” into a specific area. An example is how Twitter and Facebook “fit” into the market. Fac

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