Viraj Tayshete

Kunal Shah’s talk with the Gojek CEO

3 min read

Kunal shah is truly exceptional. I am always awestruck whenever I read or listen to him. I do have a huge respect for him. Here is the summary of everything I learned from the podcast

  1. The word "problem" has a problem in it ironically. Instead look at the world in terms of "is this efficient or not". In that case everything right now is inefficient. There is always a better way to make it more efficient. True wealth is created in that sense.

Kunal built all his company in such a way where there wasn't really a big problems. He himself never used post paid recharge yet he still built a company. But he just showed people a more efficient way of doing recharge. The same is with CRED.

If you are able to make something more efficient than how it is right now then you are able to make more wealth.

For eg If I am able to make a pill where once if you take it all your mental health problems or something that will instantly cure your eye sight. Then you create massive wealth in it.

  1. one interesting thing that I learned is that impact doesn't correlate to hours put in. YOU CAN work for 12 hrs still make a low impact choice.

impact per hour is what truly matters. Now the question is of how do you increase your impact/ hour. This is something tricky and I don't have much information yet. But this is all what I know. I might be super wrong about this.

One of the way you can increase your impact/ hour is by not just focusing about your work and work and trying to do all the work. Those useless meetings, standups etc.

Instead its'a about getting access to asymmetrical information.

why?

I mean think about this: When you are so busy with just doing work and work you become good at solving that particular problem. But lets say if now you have to solve a new problem. Then how do you solve it?

  1. You work on it. through first principles and solve it.
  2. you experiment about it and solve it. Do AB testing
  3. you do some random stuff to solve it

But all of them might be solving it temporarily. Its very hard to now think about the second or third order thinking about those actions.

Also how do you avoid future circumstances? Or Take decisions that will change trajectory. How do you do that. Do you think? do you work more. you just have 24 hrs a day. So here getting access to asymmetrical information or knowledge will help you to take better decisions and increase impact/ hr. because your impact is determined by the decisions you take and how do you take better decisions? -- you acquire more knowledge and for that you have to talk to different people, read more information. understand & travel.

If you are just busy with work. How will you do this?

if you are busy founder then maybe you are not learning and compounding

  1. Take feedback and segregate them into cohorts. I think what this means is that. Not all feedbacks are something that you should take seriously. you should make them into cohorts and see which one is coming from where.

your org will try to mimic the way you function. That is very true. Your behaviour will be reflected in the way your organisation functions.

short summaries

  1. Often good founders are those who are able to convert pain into fuel.
  2. being a founder is that worst thing you can do to your life.