Tech-Thoughts

Elon Musk has three citizenships - South Africa, Canada, and the USA. Peter Thiel acquired New Zealand citizenship in 2011 and now has two citizenships - USA and NZ. He is pursuing EU citizenship via Malta . Google’s ex-CEO Eric Schmidt purchased Cyprus citizenship in 2020 and now has two citizenships - the USA and Cyprus. Snap’s Evan Spiegel acquired French citizenship in 2018. And has two citizenships now - the USA and the French. Google co-founder Larry Page is working on his New Zealand citizenship. The other Google co-founder Sergey Brin has set up a family office in Singapore. Early Google billionaire Urs is working on his New Zealand citizenship. He is a Swiss citizen and probably a US citizen as well. Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum is a citizen of Russia by birth, Canada by naturalization, and was granted citizenship of Montenegro. Sam Altman, the founder of Open AI, has been granted an Indonesian golden visa . Kevin O’Leary, of Shark Tank fame, is a citizen of Canada and Ireland. He was recently awarded UAE citizenship. Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, was awarded Serbian citizenship.

Recently, after doing some Google mandated updates of my MusicSync , music player Android application, I received a weird error in Android Studio during the build process. Bash 1 AAPT2 aapt2-8.8.0-12006047-osx Daemon #1: Daemon startup failed I tried to search for the error on Google, and got zero results . ...

Start with podcasting or video blogging (YouTube/TikTok) It is hard to build an audience when you don’t have one Start with interviewing other podcasters/creators to bring yourself to the front of their audience Alternatively, build an audience via engaging (tweet replies) high-value customers or by catching the trending topics Build a one-way connection with your audience via newsletter on email/WhatsApp The goal is to connect directly with your followers and not be dependent on social media algorithms for too long Build a community via Facebook/Slack/Telegram/Circle groups Once you have a critical number of connections, invite them to a community In the initial phase, maintaining and running a community requires work Eventually, the community becomes self-sustaining Monetize Selling branded merchandise Large-ticket affiliates like insurance Paid consultation calls Fan funding (Patreon) for exclusive content access Organizing a Conference

GitHub Actions (or GitLab CI) is great for Continuous Integration (CI). However, using it for Continuous Delivery (CD) for docker images isn’t necessary. And there is a better approach.

Here’s a simple project success heuristic. All projects have some element of uncertainty but over time the questions should become more refined. If that’s not happening, then the project is almost certainly failing. The company might still succeed via a pivot but the project is unlikely to. Consider the progression of questions for a consumer (B2C) product. Would anyone use this? Would a million people use this? What’s the total addressable market? Would people pay for this? Is 10$/month too high or can I increase the price further? Notice how questions keep becoming nuanced. ...

American government goes everywhere exporting its brand of democracy. The Chinese government wants to do business and make money [with these autocracies] in Asia, Africa, and South America - Lee Kuan Yew In many ways, American companies take the same approach. They build one product, localize it a bit for the target countries, and try to win big there. However, Chinese companies seem to take a different approach. China utilizes lower labor costs than its American counterparts and builds targeted products for markets. And Temu is the perfect example of that. Temu’s parent company’s flagship product is Pinduoduo. Pinduoduo is designed for the Chinese market. A completely unrelated E-commerce product, Temu is designed for the American market. ...

Javascript isn’t a language. It is just a specification. Well, that’s true for many other languages like Python and Java. However, most languages have just one de facto implementation. For example, CPython for Python. Java has two major ones - Oracle’s JDK and Google’s Android Java. That’s not true for Javascript though.

There are two major ways to make money on consumer Internet - subscription or ads. Also, unlike enterprise-world, usage-based subscription is hard and confusing for consumers. So, we end up with 10$ a month all-you-can-consume buffet or we end up with ads. Now, like it or not, not all users are created equal. Some are more valuable than others. And these valuable users indirectly pay more than the users with less spending power. In other words, these users subsidize the product for the less fortunate fellows. In fact, in some ways, ads are a transfer of wealth from rich to poor users of the same service. So, next time wonder when people complain about ads, they will always be rich and powerful. These rich users would prefer a minuscule 10-a-month price instead of being worth thousands, if not millions, for the advertisers. And if the product has network effects, like social media, then it is unavoidable for these richer folks. ...

Bengaluru-based Postman , a API management product, has raised a total of $433 million valuing it at ~$5.6B. Its revenue was $171M in 2023. As a comparison, Rubrik with ~ $850M ARR is valued at $6B or about 7 times its revenue. The same metric would put Postman’s valuation at $1.2B. I would argue further that Postman has much lower stickiness and will face higher churn and hence, the revenue multiple would be lower for Postman. ...

For more than 10 years, this website has been running on WordPress. Over time I come to dislike it for multiple reasons.