Back to Blog
startups product management entrepreneurship

Learning 👩🏽‍🎓 from Kunal Shah.

Kunal Shah on winning in India, second-order thinking, the philosophy of startups, and more.

Thu Mar 28 2024

Source: Lenny’s Podcast

Standout Thoughts

Company founders/CEOs take on different Indian mythology God modes base on the need of the business and phase of the company. Brahma the creator, Vishnu the grower/maintainer and Shiva the destroyer.

The perception of time in India 🇮🇳.

Inefficiency is the greatest employer.

High-trust and low-trust markets. India is a low-trust market that believes in big brands and products from those brands like Tata or Apple. It’s a developing country without key institutions strong enough to care of things. USA or Europe is a high-trust market where institutions are strong enough to care of many things.

Envy is hyper-local for Indians and onlooking Indians actively discourage smart upcoming entrepreneurs in India.

Curiosity is growth.

Curiosity is that demonstration to adapt and learn, and you only create more information asymmetry. To me, wealth is nothing but information asymmetry. All the best companies in the world have unfair information asymmetry. And that comes from curiosity because you’re constantly collecting dots, connecting dots, collecting dots, connecting dots, and end up creating this unique edge for yourself and information asymmetry for yourself.

Look to animal kingdom for those animals that have survived the test of time.

🦈 🐊 Sharks, crocodiles and horseshoe crabs.

  • Low-metabolism mode can be turned on.
  • Adapt to crazy environmental changes comes from curiosity.
  • Very high conversion rate, which means high judgment and the deadliest bite. So they’ll not chase many options, but if they chase something, they will have the biggest bite on it and they’ll convert it

Wealth is nothing but storage of energy.

Motivation is evolution, connecting the dots, solving harder problems than I have solved before.

Life is ultimately a game; you wanna feel like your levels have changed; your skills have changed. Gather lots of challenging, different and interesting experiences. So when you are old, you will have lots to talk about.

Back to Blog