In the first half of this 2010s decade, I built two startups. During this, I shipped almost a dozen web and mobile apps. They were mostly consumer internet products, with the exception of a couple which were enterprise. All in the hope of creating a product loved by 1 million or more monthly active users. However, nothing seemed to ever stick, and despite lots and lots of trying, I failed to hit that milestone.

In 2017, I decided to take a sabbatical in England to study and reflect on my previous years. Frankly, I didn’t have strong intentions of graduating with any sort of degree — I just wanted to take a break, make new friends and learn in a low-stress environment. But, time flew by fast. Next thing I knew it was already 2019, and I had been awarded a degree. 👨🏽‍🎓

I decided to spend the following month in France 🇫🇷 looking for inspiration on what to do next. Due to my prior failed attempts at entrepreneurship, I felt inclined to do something I could be easily successful at, so I decided instead to get a job. I spent months looking for the right role in the right company doing things I wanted to do, but nothing that felt like a “perfect fit” came up.

I took that as a sign from the universe reminding me about my big unfulfilled dream. The title of a song from Hans Zimmer’s score for the movie The Dark Knight Rises 🦇 is “Fear Will Find You”. Another song on the same album is called “Why Do We Fall”. I kept listening to these songs over and over again, and realized I was running away from my dreams.

I want to build a product loved by millions of people — this has been my dream since I was a young teenager. Owing to the endless stream of motivation from public personalities like Gary Vaynerchuk, blog posts and book chapters about failure, and sports legends emphasizing the importance of failure, I’ve decided to embrace my fears and follow my dreams once again.

And so, I introduce you to Blankslate Labs. We’re on a mission to bring a modern social maps experience to your smartphones. You can read more about my new company and the motivation behind it here: Blankslate’s mission.

Quoting Thomas Wayne (Batman’s father) from the Batman movies, we fall so that we can learn to pick ourselves up. I might fail again — 9 out of 10 startups fail. But it won’t stop me from trying. As the 2010s near an end and the 2020s are about to rise, I’m turning the page over to begin a fresh, new chapter of my life. 📖

Old dreams, new attempts. ✨🚀

A few months ago, I covered my favorite picks from Y Combinator’s Winter 2019 batch. I got some good feedback on that post, so I decided to do it again for the latest batch. Y Combinator is arguably the world’s most esteemed startup incubator. I’ve always admired their penchant for ideas in spaces that aren’t always “hot”. What’s also respectable is that in recent years, they’ve accepted more and more founding teams from outside the US, especially from India and Latin America. India’s startup ecosystem is particularly one that I care a lot about, and there is a strong consumer focus in the products of the India-based YC startups in this batch.

I decided to check out every single one of the 166 startups that TechCrunch covered in their analysis of the two demo days earlier this week. Out of that, I picked a handful that appealed to me the most. Here are my favorites, in no particular order, with my brief takes on them:

• Kern Systems: This is one of those “whoa” ideas. 🤭 Instead of storing stuff in hard drives, Kern Systems wants people to store data in DNA 🧬. According to their site, they are “*leveraging the power of enzymes and software to create the world’s most scalable DNA data storage infrastructure” — *ok, that’s pretty cool. The founders seem to know a lot about DNA, evident from their deep backgrounds in synthetic biology from Harvard and MIT.

• Pengram: Pengram is an AR product that lets you create indoor waypoints. For the last few years, it has been forecasted that AR will become a $100bn+ industry by early 2020s. AR is such a transformational technology. I predict that market size will get a lot bigger near the end of this decade. However, the reality is that there isn’t a single AR app on my homescreen. The Pokémon** **GO fad is undeniably over. Pengram is the kind of AR app that seems easy to set up and useful for common tasks. For e.g. think about entering an Airbnb for the first time — with a set of waypoints the host set up, a guest could easily get a tour of a space as part of the check-in process, showing where the basic necessities are and any other important notes such as “feed the fish in this fishtank”.

• Midtype: Midtype helps you build products without having to code a backend yourself. Having built lots of apps over the years, writing backends for specific use cases can be pretty time-consuming and complex. There’s a million things to worry about — what programming language is best, what database to use, how to handle payments and user accounts, building an API etc. Midtype handles all of that so that you can focus on the crux of the experience of any product — the frontend. It reminds me of Parse, that Facebook acquired and unfortunately shuttered a few years ago. I built a handful of apps on Parse and found the backend-as-a-service a big catalyst in shipping apps quickly. ⚡️📲

• Prenda: As a kid, I would often fall behind academically because I always had better things to do like building websites or starting companies 🙄. I often felt lost in the classroom. This is why the idea of “microschools” championed by Prenda resonates with me. Smaller class sizes lead to more individual attention that every kid can benefit from. Some of the most esteemed schools in the world have very small class sizes. However, it’s not practical in every district due to lack of resources. Microschools could really change education at the grassroots level 🤓. What’s unclear is how Prenda ensures that all kids get a safe environment with a capable teacher, and whether Prenda makes the core of the experience consistent across all its microschools (if that’s even a good thing?). Pretty interesting idea, nonetheless.

• PredictLeads: PredictLeads right off the bat seemed to me a Palantir-type product for company intelligence 📈. The value proposition is high for venture capitalists, market researchers or C-level executives. I’m intrigued by one of their products, DealGraph, that lets you explore your business networks using AI in a way Salesforce or LinkedIn might not. I’d love to take this product for a test drive.

• Well Principled: Well Principled applies AI 🤖 to the field of management consulting 🧳. I’ve always felt that AI startups have a better chance of succeeding if they focus on one or two specific verticals. Well Principled does exactly that by focusing on CPG and Retail, a vertical where management consulting heavily permeates. TechCrunch reported in their demo day coverage that this company is advised and funded by Palantir leaders. Officially backed by Founder’s Fund, Well Principled is a company to watch as AI proliferates across every industry.

• Earth AI: Earth AI wants to disrupt mining through AI. And we’re talking about real drilling holes kind of mining ⛏💎, not the cryptocurrency kind. Mineral exploration is capital-intensive yet critical for the sustenance of future generations of humankind. It’s an industry that really is in need of innovation to improve efficiency — Earth AI promises just that.

• Project Wren: Project Wren helps people calculate their carbon footprint and fund projects that can offset that footprint. Climate change is a critical issue that is brewing up an oncoming catastrophe for this planet. Year after year, we’ve been seeing the mayhem unleashed on living beings in the form of devastating floods, hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters 🌪. Yet, most of us choose to do nothing about it. As it ought to be, it’s a key issue in the US 2020 Presidential race but so far, we haven’t seen any solid strategies proposed by the candidates leading the polls. Project Wren tackles the problem at the grassroots level by making people aware of their carbon footprint — my carbon footprint is apparently just below the Canadian average. You then sign up to fund a wide variety of climate-saving projects 🌴 which promise to potentially offset your footprint, while getting detailed updates on the project every 2 weeks.

• Tandem: Tandem brings remote teams closer 🌏. It lets you collaborate on different apps that your team already uses through stuff like shared cursors. The idea of Rooms with transparency on “who’s in what app right now” is pretty cool. All this can be done while video or audio chatting with multiple team members. With over 40 integrations, including Sign-in with Slack, this product looks incredibly appealing. Remote work is here to stay. And we need more products that reimagine work in the remote context from the ground up.

• Taskade: Taskade is an example of the unbundling-bundling trend we’re seeing in the space of “future of work” apps. This one takes a bunch of focused work tools and creates a unique productivity tool by combining them. It’s a competitive space with an ever-increasing set of products, including some from the last YC batch I covered. I’m impressed by the pace at which Taskade has created a template marketplace with useful-looking templates for all kinds of tasks that you can start using right away. The app also feels blazing fast ⚡️. And looks like Aaron Levie, Founder & CEO of Box, tweeted about this app — never hurts to get some validation from one of the hotshots of the enterprise software world. 🔥

• Compound: Figuring out equity compensation 💰 is a complicated task. I’ve heard my friends rant about it. Often, when you join a startup, it’s not clear what it will mean for you financially down the line. Compound provides a bunch of guides that shed some light on the different concepts. Since I didn’t find any demos for the forecasting tools, the lifetime value add for a user is unclear to me, but I know for sure that they’ve found a problem that exists.

• Carry: Carry wants to make corporate travel ✈️ booking easier by letting people do it via Slack. Travel chat apps are emerging and offer the value add of speed, personalization and generally good deals. Carry brings that right to Slack, SMS and e-mail, acting as a personal travel assistant, especially built for corporate teams. I’m sold 😶.

• Simmer: Simmer is something that should’ve always existed. The restaurant and food delivery world lacks transparency into which dishes are actually loved most by people. You either have to sift through a million reviews, or ask a friend / the restaurant staff. That’s a lot of effort! Simmer focuses the experience on dishes instead of restaurants. They’re starting off with the food delivery use case. While a great idea, it seems like existing ordering services could easily catch on and incorporate this into their apps. Nevertheless, next time I’m in NYC or SF, I’m going to give this app a shot.

• Matagora: Matagora is an idea worth trying. It’s been on my mind every now and then. Let’s face it — retail space has become very unaffordable for small and new brands, around the world and especially in major cities. It’s the age of pop-up shops 🛍. Even in 2019, despite Instagram and Shopify, only a small percentage of global retail happens online. Brick-and-mortar is still king. However, brands who are looking to open physical stores don’t do so because it‘s traditionally been very capital-intensive. Matagora lets brands find pop-up spaces in showrooms + other commercial retail spaces and makes the process of tapping into an offline traffic seamless. If the platform can manage the whole process end-to-end, I think lots of retailers would be sold on the idea. Currently, it seems active in Montreal and SF.

• GreenTiger: This is a made for India 🇮🇳 product that lets you trade stocks on NASDAQ and NYSE. Similar to the hugely successful app in the West called Robinhood, GreenTiger charges zero commission. Whether that’s an early user acquisition strategy or not, GreenTiger still provides significant value-add as a simple and not shady-looking trading platform for Indians. Trading is something lots of young Indians want to do as a side hustle, and there’s a dearth of good, cost-effective platforms for Indians to do so. That said, I’d love to know the different ways GreenTiger plans to make money.

• Binks: Made-to-fit clothing has been part of Indian culture for generations. It’s cheap, easily done and loved by women in every part of the country. Binks modernizes the process by bringing it online. One step ahead of an idea like Stitch Fix, Binks promises to alter or completely remake a piece free-of-charge if a customer isn’t satisfied with it. I simply love the value proposition: “hassle free tailor-made clothing for the modern Indian woman”. As an Indian, I’ll be rooting for the success of this startup.

• Curtsy: Thanks to Instagram and apps like depop, people are recycling fashion a lot more these days 👗. The idea is that you splurge on a great outfit, wear it a few times, and sell it while it’s still in pristine condition. This is definitely a trend. Curtsy tries to ride this reselling wave. They claim that most items sell in a few days, which is not surprising as I’ve heard similar things about vintage clothing accounts on Instagram for womenswear. Curtsy has all the makings of the massively successful depop.

• The Custom Movement: In a world exploding with sneaker collabs 👟, this kind of idea has mass appeal. The Custom Movement is like an Etsy for sneakers. Artists mod iconic sneakers with their creative expression and voila — you’ve got custom-made sneakers. Artists seem to sell a range of “creations” at a markup through this online shop. Owing to my affinity for sneakers, this idea resonates with me a lot. Retro Apple Nike Cortez sneakers, anyone?

• Cloosiv: One main reason why I keep going back to Starbucks is the rewards program. Who doesn’t love free coffee ☕️? However, in the last few years, independent coffee shops have taken over many cities. Some of my favourite places to “coffee and work” in Toronto are independent coffee shops. Cloosiv takes the good concepts of the Starbucks app, such as order ahead and rewards, and rolls it out to indie coffee shops. So far, it seems they’re taking a launch everywhere at once kind of approach, instead of focusing on launching widely in one or two cities (I only found 2 places in NYC that are using this app). Whether or not Cloosiv works, I feel that this kind of idea is here to stay.

• Digi-Prex: Digi-Prex is another Indian startup, looking to disrupt the massive prescription drugs market in India. Getting medication from the neighborhood pharmacy can be chaotic and time-consuming. Some pharmacies even sell fake products. People on regular medication, especially the elderly, all over India find it a massive chore to do this on a weekly or monthly basis. Digi-Prex offers to deliver medication to doorsteps for cheaper. The smartest thing about Digi-Prex seems its WhatsApp-based ordering. WhatsApp is a core commodity in India and Digi-Prix seems to have the right strategy for speeding up adoption.

• Mighty: Having several browser tabs open is a common sight in the daily workflows of most. The more tabs you’ve got open, the slower your browser will be. My laptop often heats up if I have too many tabs open ♨️. Mighty wants to make that problem obsolete. Instead of running a browser locally, it wants to stream the browser itself. It claims to make browsing faster while using 10x less memory. Currently, it’s focused on Google Chrome as a proof-of-concept, and soon enough, I foresee it working for Safari and other browsers. Every now and then, some existing behavior becomes streamable, whether it’s watching movies, listening to music, playing games, or working with files. It seems inevitable that one of these things will be the browser some day. Mighty might just kickstart that.

• Dex: In a chaotic world where your phone is buzzing with notifications every two minutes, it’s not easy to maintain relationships with people you know. Yet, research shows that stronger relationships lead to more happiness and satisfaction from life. Dex is like a CRM or Rolodex for your personal life. While it sounds super nerdy 🤓 and lots of people will find the idea of using a CRM for your personal life ridiculous, it might find acceptance in the Tinder generation. The downside is that it seems like a lot of effort, which is why I feel these kind of apps have never taken off. And I kind of wish it was an iPhone app built on top of Contacts instead of a Chrome extension.

• Stoic: Emotion tracking isn’t a new app idea. But, none of them have really ever taken off. Stoic seems simple. I’m a fan of the monochrome design (Costar has it too). Tools to improve our mental fitness is something many of us could benefit from. The biggest challenge in keeping a journal ✍ of any kind is consistency. Stoic seems worth a try.

For more startups and TechCrunch’s brief analysis on each YC startup from the latest batch, check out their coverage from day 1 and day 2.

I think a lot about the history of the consumer internet industry. The big structural shift of 1990s was the internet. The trick to finding startup ideas and getting funded in this era was to think of something you do on a daily or weekly basis, then prefix it by “online”, and voila, you’ve got a startup idea! What were some consumer ideas that emerged on the internet in the 90s, and the defining companies that leveraged them?

• Web browser. Netscape.

• Personalized “PUSH” of media. PointCast.

• Money transfer. PayPal.

• Free email. Hotmail.

• Directories/yellow pages. Yahoo!, WhoWere.

• Radio. Broadcast.com.

• Mailing lists. eGroups.com.

• Instant messaging. ICQ/AOL.

• Personal websites. Geocities.

• Shopping. eBay.

• Search. Google, Altavista.

• Maps. Mapquest.

• Classifieds. Craigslist.

• Online Dating. Match.com.

• Q&A. AskJeeves.

• Books. Amazon.

2000s

Now, fast-forward past Y2K and the dot-com bust. The 2000s. The structural shifts of the early 2000s were slightly more nuanced. These shifts were leveraged into startup ideas through a new set of prefixes, such as social, micro, free, unlimited, personalized, cloud, and sometimes, even Ajax. The trick to come up with decent startup ideas in this era was to add one of those prefixes to something people did. Here are some ideas from that era, along with the defining companies that rode the wave (and, occasionally, even created the wave):

• Blogging. Blogger & LiveJournal.

• Social bookmarking. del.icio.us.

• VoIP. Skype.

• Personalized internet radio. Pandora.

• Social resume. LinkedIn.

• Cloud storage. Dropbox.

• Photo sharing. Flickr.

• Maps. Google Maps.

• Location-based social networking. Dodgeball, Gowalla.

• Unlimited, free e-mail. GMail.

• Social events. upcoming.org.

• Social networking. Facebook.

• Social yellow pages. Yelp.

• Video streaming. YouTube.

• Social blogging. Twitter.

• Mobile messaging. BlackBerry Messenger.

• Social Q&A. Quora.

• Forums. Reddit.

• Movies. Netflix.

• Recommendations. Hunch.

• Web roulette. StumbleUpon.

• RSS. Feedburner.

• Social gaming. Zynga.

• Smart home. Nest.

• Social commerce. Wish.com.

• Social coupons. Groupon.

• Social city exploration. Foursquare.

• Handmade: Etsy.

2010s

After a scintillating launch of the revolutionary iPhone in 2007 and its App Store in 2008, mobile became the big structural shift of the following era. Convert anything from online to mobile, and you’ve got suitors for your seed round. What was even more interesting in 2010s was that the combination of prefixes led to even more startup ideas. Some popular ones other than mobile: social+photo, social+video, curated, share, on-demand, live, ephemeral, and voice-enabled. Some big ideas from the 2010s and the defining companies:

• Sharing rooms. Airbnb.

• Social photo bookmarking. Pinterest.

• Photo sharing. Instagram.

• Taxi. Uber.

• Photo messaging. Snapchat.

• Live videos. Periscope.

• Dating. Tinder.

• Groceries. Instacart.

• Micro-videos. Vine.

• Classifieds. Letgo, Offerup.

• On-demand delivery. Postmates.

• Group video chat. Houseparty.

• Fiction. Wattpad, Hooked.

• Astrology. Co-star.

• Cross-platform messaging. WhatsApp.

• Music. Spotify.

• Language learning. Duolingo.

Why even do this?

Certainly, lessons can be learned from the successes and failures of dot-com companies of the late 90s and 2000s. But, can industry trends be predicted and secrets be unlocked by looking at companies of the past? Can these insights then help in making sense of the present and predict the future? The bottom line is that no one can predict the future, but one can certainly make calculated guesses, instead of just plain speculating. I’m starting to believe that fundamental human needs change very occasionally. But every decade or so, new ways emerge to fulfill that need. That small period where it is the right time to fulfill a need is the most ripe for incubating companies.

Despite best efforts (Webvan), you couldn’t make online grocery delivery work in late 90s but you could in 2013 (Instacart). You couldn’t make a social networking website work in 1996 or 2000 but you could in 2003 (Facebook). Airbnb wouldn’t work in 2005 but it did in 2010. “PUSH” didn’t work in 1999 but maybe it is coming together now. Generally, the only good time really to start a valuable company around a wave is that small period. In that small period, you need to act fast and get the execution right. You can make mistakes but you have to make them really fast to get to the right answer. The exciting thing is that in fast-growing economies, you’re more or less always living in that “small period” of a wave that is ripe for the birth of some company or set of companies.

The right time for an idea

The key thing for any entrepreneur who’s still at square one (either starting for the first time or after one or more failures) is to figure out which idea’s small period is happening right now or about to happen in a matter of months. I believe one way to do that is to identify: current trends in consumer behaviour, unmet needs, failing companies, and also, have a basic understanding of all the recent progress going on in a relevant technology. Looking at the past decades of the industry could give you hints.

If you already have an idea, then determining whether you’ve got the right idea or not while you’re in or approaching a wave is tricky. Benedict Evans suggests to think in terms of roadmaps for evaluating whether a technology can become universally accessible and ubiquitous:

In generational shifts, you force the new tool to fit the old workflow, and then the new tool creates a new workflow. … Word replaced typewriters and email replaced Word. … What matters is seeing the value of the capability, not predicting particular applications. … “Everything looks like a toy”, “That is a toy.”, “no one will want that” and “no one wanted want phones either” are both completely true and “not even wrong”. They have no predictive power. … Ask whether there is a technology roadmap or whether this is a superpower — this will give you a roadmap to understanding what might happen.

Yet, you have to remember certain realities, such as the one Walt Mossberg’s final column touched upon:

The big software revolutions, like cloud computing, search engines and social networks are also still growing and improving but have become largely established.

Another observation that M.G. Siegler described well in the context of social networking products was around the concept of “niche networks”. I feel it could apply generally to more categories of ideas, within consumer or enterprise internet. It goes like this: you start by fulfilling a particular niche — for e.g. it could be a website/app that lists gyms around New York and lets them advertise pay-per-click/call. Then, you build a website that lists flower shops. Then, leather jacket stores. You scale this to all kinds of independent but linked websites. $100mn ARR. Then, you build a product that caters to the entire gamut of advertisers on the combined network. $1bn. IPO.

Build something specific

Almost always, successful products first cater to small markets and barely look like products. They just scale rapidly and possibly reinvent their business on the way. All things said, the stupidest thing you could do is “be a visionary” and sit and try to think of an all-encompassing product that could become a billion dollar company. It just doesn’t work like that. The correct way to do it is to build/hack something specific, see if there’s any demand, build a business model, then scale out fast. Not all hacks have lucrative paths out, but that’s where the “vision” thing comes in to play.

Recently, TechCrunch covered Y Combinator’s (YC) Winter 2019 Demo Day, giving the world a glimpse into the companies launching from the world’s top incubator for startups. It’s the largest batch of startups ever launching at this Mountain View-based incubator started in 2005. YC-incubated companies include Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, Reddit and Instacart, with a combined valuation of all YC companies hovering over $100B. On reading TechCrunch’s analysis of the most recent batch, I found a vast array of interesting startups around spaces such as healthcare, enterprise SaaS, logistics, developer tools, Africa and Latin America-focused solutions, college hiring in India and cryptocurrency trading.

Out of the 173+ startups from the YC’s latest batch, these are my favorite picks, in no particular order:

• Jetpack Aviation: Jetpack Aviation is building a flying motorcycle called the Speeder. It almost seemed like an April Fool’s joke, but it’s real. Think transporting paramedics or injured citizens, extracting personnel, or time-sensitive cargo. Or Batman. Speeder can be piloted 👨🏽‍✈️ or flown autonomously 🤖. The Speeder is set to come in two versions — recreational and military.

• Glide: Glide can create a mobile app from a Google Sheet. There are countless spreadsheets waiting to be turned into apps — think expenses, travel budgeting or interview shortlists. But building apps isn’t that easy. Glide turns a spreadsheet into an app in 5 mins, that you can then publish to the App Store or Play Store. Pretty cool.

• Supernova: Along the lines of Glide, Supernova turns design assets from an app like Sketch into production-ready native code. While this isn’t a new idea, Supernova looks like a best of the breed solution. Designers seamlessly publishing apps seems like an inevitable and much needed future, and products like Supernova could usher us all into that era fast.

• Shef: Shef delivers healthy home-cooked meals for cheap 👩🏻‍🍳. As someone who orders a lot of restaurant food, I find Shef an appealing idea. You can create meal plans for 4 meals/week at $30, which is pretty economical, considering one or two restaurant takeouts can easily run over $30. More ordering in and less guilt? Seems like a win-win.

• Sunsama: Let’s face it —we‘ve all got todos at work. However, they’re often scattered across several different apps. There have been many attempts at unified todo lists in the last decade, but Sunsama looks promising with integrations like Slack, Asana, Trello, Github, and Jira. It also syncs tasks with your Google Calendar 📆.

• Cherry: Job perks are a big deal for most people. I’ve heard stories of people accepting or rejecting job offers simply on the basis of perks. Cherry lets employees customize their job perks, so they could choose between a Spotify or Netflix membership, Postmates or Instacart credits, Lyft or Uber perks, Headspace or Calm subscription, and so on. Teams can add the Cherry bot to a Slack channel and it all seems pretty seamless from there.

• Termius: Termius is an SSH client that works on desktop and mobile. This is a godsend for devs. I’m sure there are other services like this, but their iOS and Android apps look pretty good. Termius claims that over 24,000 engineers from teams like NASA, DuckDuckGo and Valve use the product. Even Woz, the developer of all developers, approves of it.

• BensenAI: Bensen lets you order food from restaurants over voice via Alexa or Google Assistant 🗣. Wait a second, I couldn’t do that already? 🤔 Well, maybe, idk? But for a restaurant owner, Bensen’s setup process looks simple. All you do is upload your menu and Bensen takes care of the rest. This seems like something a restaurant owner could spend thousands on for a custom solution, but Bensen makes the whole experience plug-and-play, promising 2.5x more orders. Bensen suggests that voice commerce sales will hit $40B by 2022, and frankly, takeout ordering seems like a good beachhead into capturing that market.

• Docucharm: Docucharm converts documents into structured data through machine learning. OCR for converting complex documents kind of sucks, while there are a gazillion documents waiting to be “understood” by AI. A product like this can make that process easier. Docucharm promises instant doc processing at “near-perfect accuracy”, eliminating manual data entry. This is a big problem worth solving.

• AskData: AskData abstracts away interaction with databases for non-technical people into natural language via a chatbot. Databases sit at the bottom of pretty much every app, and a person or company that owns an app probably needs to interact with a database on a frequent basis. AskData turns that interaction into a convenient chat interface, which can lead to significant time and cost savings.

• Trestle: Trestle is an intranet product to connect people at an organization. It aims to make a company more transparent and collaborative. Employees get their own profiles, and teams get their own pages, letting people quickly find what’s going on at their company. It’s sort of like LinkedIn, but just for your company. I covered a similar startup, Names & Faces, (another YC company I believe) in my last post. I’m really interested in this space, and I’m curious how these two products will play out.

• Pershop: Pershop lets you choose your favorite brands and creates a personal clothing store for you 🛍. This is something I wanted but never thought of as a product, and now that I know it exists, I’m definitely curious. Although, a fun part of the shopping experience is discovering brands that you didn’t know about, most of the time I only order from brands I love. If the iOS app can add more value over time, for e.g. alert me of sales or use AI to suggest clothes I might like, I can see its sustained utility.

• CouturMe: CouturMe makes custom dresses for women 👰🏼. Personalized apparel is a future we might definitely be headed towards, and starting with wedding dresses and formal wear to suit the unique curvature of every woman seems like a good idea.

• CityFurnish: As our lives become more mobile, we’re often moving between cities. Dealing with disposing off your existing furniture becomes a huge hassle. CityFurnish lets you rent furniture in Indian cities at economical prices. They even have packages with essentials like bed frame, mattress and wardrobe. Now only if there were more choices based on our individual tastes, I’d be hooked to the idea of renting instead of buying furniture 🛏.

• Allure Systems: Allure uses advanced computer vision to let online merchants customize models to wear a particular item of clothing 👗. Shoppers can benefit from more diverse and inclusive models while they shop — it might even increase sales. Imagine a day where you’re shopping online and the brand adapts its models for every item of clothing based altering attributes like skin color or size most relevant to you.

• YSplit: YSplit lets you split payments among people more easily 💸. When I was an undergrad, my roommates and I had a shared debit card to pay for expenses like rent or groceries. YSplit addresses that need by creating virtual debit cards to simplify your shared recurring payments 💳. There are dozens of “split the bill” products out there today, but YSplit takes a novel approach that basically feels like a modern version of what my roommates did as undergrads.

• Travelchime: If you’re into travelling, especially with friends, you have most definitely worked with a shared Google Doc to plan stuff out. Travelchime takes this particular use case and turns it into a product, letting you collaboratively plan travel on a doc 📝alongside a map powered by GMaps 🗺. This is an exciting idea and makes you think about other use cases in GDocs today that could be unbundled into their own products. I might give Travelchime a try for my next trip. 🏖

• PadPiper: Besides the name having striking similarity to the infamous Pied Piper of HBO’s Silicon Valley 😂, PadPiper makes it easy for travelling professionals to find rentals. Let’s face it.. finding homes in new cities is still pretty arduous. PadPiper lets you find pads that are fully furnished from trusted landlords while facilitating rent payments, deposits and even housemate finding all through a dashboard. Currently only in SF, Mountain View and Toronto, but if they execute this well, this could be a game-changer for 1-month+ rentals around the world.

For general coverage of all the startups from YC’s latest batch, you can read TechCrunch’s analysis from Day 1 and Day 2.

All that said, Y Combinator has definitely gotten much bigger and probably more competitive. In fact, recently they announced that for the summer batch of 2019, they will hold interviews in Bangalore for founders based in India. This indicates just how much inbound volume YC must be getting from India. While I’m in New Delhi for the next few weeks, I hope to publish my thoughts on the Indian startup ecosystem in a post, so stay tuned.

For the meantime, with all the startup pitch craziness, it’s only fair that I leave you with a gem from HBO’s Silicon Valley.

Every week, I stumble upon startups or products with intriguing missions in the areas of my personal interest. Here are 16 of them from the first quarter of 2019.

1. Names & Faces: “Fast, visual employee directories”

2. Side: “Best freelancers and independent contractors for your company within hours”

3. Superhuman: “The fastest email experience ever made”

4. Movable Ink: “Reinventing Personalization for a Visual World”

5. Smartify: “Scan the art, uncover the story”

6. Meural: “The smart art frame that brings every brushstroke to life”

7. Brainhi: “Talk to your patients 24/7 automatically”

8. Cleo: “Your AI pal that looks after your money. Budget, save and track your spending”

9. Spero: “Dairy & eggs reinvented from plants”

10. Impossible: “World’s most delicious, nutritious, affordable and sustainable meat, fish and dairy foods directly from plants”

11. Beyond Meat: “The Future of Protein® — delicious plant-based burgers, sausage, crumbles, and more — made directly from simple plant-based ingredients”

12. Tea Forte: “The Ultimate Tea Experience”

13. Chem 101: “Chemistry from the lecture hall, to the dorm room, and everywhere in between”

14. Civil: “Community-owned platform for independent journalism”

15. Sapien: “Web 3.0 social news platform that gives users control of their data, rewards content creators, and fights fake news”

16. Knotel: “Tailored spaces designed in your brand, for how your people work best, all on flexible terms”

The world wide web turns 30 today.

It has come a long way. The majority of things you and me take for granted today are possible because of the web, whether it’s writing or reading blogs, sharing a video on Snapchat, reading the news from around the world, trading stocks or buying cryptocurrency, tweeting, looking up restaurant reviews, ordering that Uber, or IM-ing your friend. We owe a lot of the convenience we enjoy today to the invention of the web. Thanks, @timberners_lee.

My tryst with the web goes back to the late ’90s when I got access to the internet for the first time, as a kid growing up in India. Since that day, I have been fascinated with the web. The web helped me think about the future and enabled me to get ideas for products and companies. I give credit to the web for giving me an entrepreneurial bent. While I wasn’t born early enough to be an “OG of the web” when things like IRC and websites were just beginning to take off, I feel like I was lucky enough to be born just in time to see companies like Google and Facebook form.

I started building things for the web at a young age. One of the earliest websites I built was a video games review website called GoWirz.com — archive.org captured a screenshot of this from February 2005. At that time, the Web 2.0 movement was in full swing. I was still in school but I wanted to create a website my friends and I could use to express our passion for video games at the time and deliver high-quality editorial content, similar to gamespot.com or eurogamer.net, while generating revenue through advertising or paid plans. It is perhaps my earliest entrepreneurial venture and it taught me a lot.

With 30 years of the web behind us, it’s important to consider where it is headed.

With the advent of smartphones, perhaps the web has not gone in a direction that many of us wanted it to take. Today, if you want to create a useful digital product and put it in the hands of millions, you’re probably going to consider making a smartphone app instead of a website. This is somewhat unfortunate as smartphone app stores are walled gardens that only run apps created for that platform, unlike websites that can essentially run and look the same on any platform with a browser. It’s much easier to learn how to create websites than apps. We still don’t know how this will play out over the long run.

With technologies like blockchain and AI emerging rapidly, how will the everyday-use web change for the normal consumer? What will the next generation of the world wide web look like? What will we be able to do that we can’t do today? These are all pressing questions on my mind that I’d like to devote more time thinking about. However, what’s certain is that these are still the early days of the web and there is much that remains to be done.

As I write this, at this very instant, across the universe, galaxies move, stars are born and stars cease to exist, supernova explosions occur, more than a thousand suns burn, meteorites accelerate, satellites zoom by, all while the universe itself moves.. an immense amount of cosmic activity just happened since you started reading this post.

Here on this planet, at this very instant, somewhere, multi-million dollar deals are being made and broken, hundreds of billions of dollars move through the financial system, lives enter and exit, giant waves rise and crash, thunder and lightning roar, new ideas and companies hatch, relationships blossom and break, planes land and take off.. this planet with all its natural and human-driven activity is a microcosm of the ever-changing, never-static universe.

We live in a cauldron of endless activity. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, pause and take a moment to think about this. Stay still and observe. Every time I do this, in the midst of a bustling day or a quiet night, a buzzing stream of energy percolates through my skin. It makes me feel alive.

Then, to get some perspective, I let Carl Sagan remind me about the Pale Blue Dot.

Pain, but I won’t let it turn into hate No, I won’t let it change me

— Youth, by Shawn Mendes ft. Khalid

Most, if not all, humans carry pain of some kind. One of the dangerous things about pain is that it is prone to turning into hate. If the feelings of pain over time are not kept in check, they can stealthily transform into hate. Hate is the most negative sort of energy you can possess or give off. Carrying feelings of hate puts you at risk of making bad decisions that can be damaging to yourself and the world.

While the ideal way to live would be to let go of pain, it can be a difficult thing to do. If you carry pain and simply cannot seem to let go of it, either try harder or perhaps, accept it. Accepting means being okay with the emotion of pain and moving on with your life. If you accept pain, it may fade away over time, healing you eventually. However, if you let it go unchecked and nurture it into toxic feelings of hate, a downward spiral leading nowhere but to an abyss will await you.

Humans wreak havoc on themselves and the world when they foster hate within themselves. Hate is a virus. It has the power to spread fast and wide. People carrying pain or a narrow-minded outlook on life are less immune to hate. The only antidotes to hate are love and forgiveness. If you practice love and forgiveness or read about it or fill your daily life with things or people that evoke these two godsend emotions, you’re effectively immunizing yourself against hate.

Most of us have been guilty of feeling the emotion of hate at some point in our lives, even if for a fleeting moment. When you experience that emotion, observe it and then, let go of it instantly, for your own sake. Better yet, try to understand what made you feel that way, and if it was pain, which will most certainly be the case, try to see if you can let go of that as well. Hate can never conquer hate - this is the universal truth. As long as humans keep making the mistake of not accepting this universal truth, there will be a great many obstacles to achieving world peace.

I’ve been wanting to write this one out for a while, and sitting at LaGuardia Airport in New York City waiting for my delayed flight, I felt an urge to finally put it into words and share it.

Over the last few years, I have often thought about the idea of a “Complete Man”. No, not the classic Raymond TV ad I grew up watching in India, but the idea of a man being complete, in light of his abilities. Completeness simply for the sake of it.

It’s important to note that I say “man” because I can only speak from the perspective of this gender and I don’t want to make presumptions about perspectives that I can’t credibly vouch for.

A few years ago, a good friend of mine sent me a fascinating essay written by the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1841 on self-reliance. This line from the essay struck out to me:

Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost.

That idea was encouraging and I let it simmer in the back of my mind. Fast-forward a few years, I wondered what a sense of completeness might mean, in a self-reliant sort of way. Sometime in 2018, I defined my own set of elements for what being complete meant to me, if interpersonal relationships were taken out of the picture. I kept coming back to that thought, tweaking it, if by way of action or simply realization, a different perspective developed. I came up with 5 axioms that would constitute a “Complete Man”.

Owing to echoes of a distant voice in my head, I realized during the summer of last year that my axioms were overly materialistic. Inspiration can be picked up in a million ways — in a coffee table book in someone’s office, a word written on a poster along the airport escalator, a dream, a conversation with a stranger or a good friend, or a mysterious little thing called intuition. Inspiration came and I set out to rewrite my ideas about this topic.

What transpired from that felt more whole and right. I’ve held on to this new set of elements for the last 6 months and they’ve been unchanged. Today I’m ready to share it.

Hereby, I propose a set of elements that constitute a “Complete Man”, with a focus on being equipped to do things for the greater good of the universe:

1️⃣ The man is aware of the “force” and its dual manifestation: light and dark. He should be in constant pursuit of being one with the light side and fighting the pull of the dark side.

Fear and greed are some of the dark manifestations of the force, whereas courage and kindness are some of the light manifestations of the force. I know, very Star Wars-esque, but the philosophy of Star Wars certainly has some depth to it.

2️⃣ The man should be forever in pursuit of perfecting his craft, once found. If he has not found his craft yet, he should be tenaciously looking for it.

Basically, get good at whatever it is that you do or want to do — management, sales, marketing, entrepreneurship, engineering, coding, medicine, photography, painting, writing or basically anything else that requires work to get good at. In the ideal scenario, this craft is how you earn your living.

3️⃣ The man should train as much as his body permits him to get better at a physical sport.

This one’s pretty self-explanatory and most people who can don’t. Picking up a sport looks harder than it actually is. Once you’ve picked up a sport, getting better at it can be fun and rewarding for your well-being.

4️⃣ The man should be in pursuit of in-depth knowledge of one art.

Whether it is architecture, politics, classical music, economics, spirituality, meditation, self-development, cooking Italian cuisine, kiteboarding (whatever that is), or any art among the vast number of arts in the world.

5️⃣ The man should be part of something that serves the greater good of the universe. Not just humanity, but the universe and all its beings.

The first 4 are pretty self-serving in nature. This last one is altruistic in nature and allows you to help the world progress in some way. The way it is worded also encourages you to think beyond humans, as we’re often guilty of ignoring the well-being of animals and plants. Too extra? I don’t think so.

Once proficiency has been achieved in #2, #3 and #4, which can take a long time, it’s not easy to lose that proficiency. On the other hand, proficiency in #1 and #5 is tricker to obtain and can be lost instantly.

The best way to look at this set of elements is not as a milestone to achieve, but a state to maintain. It requires consistent work throughout your lifetime as long as one is physically and mentally able.

Early-stage investing is complex. Usually, you’re making bets on companies on sheer gut feel. It’s slightly easier to invest in companies generating revenue from day 1 on a trajectory of growth. But considering investing in companies with just a product or idea, maybe some users and no revenue is incredibly difficult.

I believe early-stage investing is more of an art than a science. Even if you have a whole lot of data and access to sophisticated algorithms for making investment decisions, it comes down to a bunch of fundamental questions.

Since my involvement with the world of venture capital has been limited to early stage technology companies, I’m sharing my personal strategy on how I evaluate such investments.

When entrepreneurs pitch me their startup ideas, I look for answers to 5 fundamental questions. Consider each question to be worth 1 point each. If I get a convincing answer, I give the founder+idea 1 point.

1. Do the first 30 seconds of the idea sound interesting? (Good ideas should be easy to describe in 30 seconds) 1 point
2. What’s new about the idea, aka how is it different than what’s already out there? 1 point
3. What does the market demand look like, or what’s BIG about the idea? 1 point
4. How will the idea become a business? (aka the core biz model) 1 point
5. Why is this founder(s) suitable to work on the idea? 1 point

I need a 3/5 to even consider investing, of which at least 1 point needs to come from Question #1 or #2. If the founder can make it to 3 points, I’ll take a follow up meeting.

Following that, I ask myself 7 questions to evaluate whether I am a good fit to be an investor in this startup. For each YES answer to the following, I give the potential investment 1 point.

1. Do I like the founders? Particularly, do I like the CEO?
2. Do they seem authentic?
3. Will I enjoy helping them making this idea succeed?
4. Does this thing have the potential to become a $1bn+ (in revenue, not valuation) business?
5. Are these people basic level smart enough? i.e. can they be trained to become great?
6. Do I have the resources to give them what they are asking for in order to get to the next round of funding?
7. Will I be able to offer them enough overall value?

I need a 7/7 for this section to be willing to invest, no exceptions. Usually, a company that scores 10/12 can be a pretty decent early-stage investment, while anything over it is an opportunity hard to come by.