Sunday, April 2, 2023

Writing well - properties of content


Today, let's embark on a journey to explore the transformative power of content. Whether you're a seasoned writer, a budding blogger, or anyone in between, understanding the key properties of content and their effects on the audience is essential for crafting compelling and impactful material.

When we sit down to create content, our ultimate goal is often to inspire change, to spark a shift in perspective, or to encourage personal growth. We want our audience not just to consume our words but to be transformed by them—to emerge on the other side with newfound insights, knowledge, or motivation.

Now, let's delve into the art of crafting content that has the power to transform.


  • Novel + Useful = Enlighten Me:

Begin by brainstorming ideas that are fresh, innovative, and original—something your audience hasn't seen before. However, novelty alone is not enough; your content must also provide practical value, offering insights, solutions, or guidance that your audience can apply to their lives or work. Whether it's sharing personal anecdotes, presenting groundbreaking research, or offering actionable tips, strive to enlighten your audience with content that is both novel and useful.

Example: Share a unique perspective on a familiar topic, backed by research or personal experience, to shed new light on the subject and provide actionable takeaways for your audience.

  • Novel + Memorable = Engage Me:

To truly captivate your audience, your content must be memorable—it should linger in their minds long after they've finished reading or watching. Incorporate storytelling techniques, vivid imagery, or striking visuals to make your content stand out. Combine novelty with memorability to create an immersive experience that sparks curiosity and leaves a lasting impression.

Example: Craft a compelling narrative that transports your audience into a different world, evoking emotions and sparking their imagination. Use vivid descriptions and sensory details to create a memorable experience that resonates with your readers.

  • Useful + Memorable = Empower Me:

Content that empowers your audience is not only informative but also empowering—it equips them with the tools, knowledge, or inspiration they need to take action and make a difference. Combine practical advice with memorable storytelling to create content that empowers your audience to overcome challenges, achieve their goals, or enact positive change in their lives.

Example: Provide actionable steps, real-life examples, or success stories that inspire and empower your audience to take control of their lives, pursue their passions, or overcome obstacles.

  • Useful + Memorable + Novel = Transform Me:

Finally, aim to create content that encompasses all three key properties—novelty, usefulness, and memorability—to achieve the ultimate goal of transformation. By delivering content that is fresh, practical, and unforgettable, you have the power to transform your audience's thoughts, beliefs, or actions, leaving a lasting impact that extends far beyond the page.

Example: Present groundbreaking ideas or insights in a format that is accessible, actionable, and memorable. Use storytelling, visual elements, and interactive features to engage your audience on a deeper level and facilitate meaningful transformation.


Conclusion:

As content creators, we have the opportunity to shape hearts, minds, and lives through the power of our words. By understanding the key properties of content and their effects on the audience, we can craft content that not only informs and entertains but also inspires and transforms. So, let's embrace the challenge of creating content that empowers, enlightens, and engages—content that has the power to change the world, one reader at a time.






Monday, February 20, 2023

Microsoft vs Google : Strategy wars

With the launch of ChatGPT and open declaration of war on Google from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, we are living in one of the most exciting duels in most recent tech history. Lets analyze relative positioning and odds of who will come out on top in this epic Satya vs Sundar. Behind this lies a fascinating tale of the careers of these 2 Indian American executives who rose up the ranks to head these behemoths in Mountainview and Redmond.

Declaration of war

Microsoft has been making steady progress in the Deep Learning space through its investment in Open AI and the release of Dalle-2 and ChatGPT. While that is regular part of innovation and other companies like META has also been making steady progress in this field, Microsoft went a step ahead with product integration with Bing and open declaration of war. Here is what Satya said : 

Google is the 800 pound Gorilla in the room. This new Bing will make Google come out and want to show they can dance, and I want people to know that we made them dance

With that let us revisit how things go to here.

Google and its search monopoly

While Google is often credited for its technology, Google is able to retain its market share and monopoly in search due to its product strategy. The average user doesn't have much incentive to go and change the default search engine from settings. Google has successfully gated the entry points to search via Android OS for mobile, Chrome browser on desktops and by paying $20B to Apple for staying as the default search option on MacOS. No wonder Sundar Pichai (and not some engineer) became the CEO of Google because he was the Product Lead(read gatekeeper) of two of this products(read gates) : Chrome and Android. This virtually sealed Google's monopoly status on search. 

Monopoly and culture

What happened after Google became the monopoly it is today is exactly what a monopoly would need to do to stay a monopoly : lower profits so that they are not perceived as a monopoly. What better way to do it while stiffling competition by raising costs for competition by hiring developers at premium prices thus increasing cost and reducing supply of engineers. While the strategy was sound and paid off in the last decade, the recent ad recession of 2022-23 has exposed the flaws. Overhiring engineers, paying exhorbitant RSUs, lack of any need to deliver anything at all, delusions of exceptionalism, leads to a level of entitlement and lack of self awareness in engineers unseen in a while in Silicon valley. There are 2 high level problems with this

  • [Financial Mismanagement]As pointed out by investors/hedge funds TCI and Altimeter
    • Rapid headcount growth has led to reckless empire building. Managers reporting to Managers reporting to Managers..... Bloated org structures, title inflation, redundant levels - basically investors in Wall Street paying for the Sushi bar in Mountainview
    • The median compensation at Alphabet was 67% higher than Microsoft and 153% higher than the 20 largest technology companies and there is no justification behind this enormous disparity
  • [Cultural Trainwreck] Google engineers lost the ability to ship because for the last 10 years they didnt really need to. As pointed out in Mice in a Maze Google has 4 cultural problems

The way I see it, Google has four core cultural problems. They are all the natural consequences of having a money-printing machine called “Ads” that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins.

(1) no mission, (2) no urgency, (3) delusions of exceptionalism, (4) mismanagement.


Challenge from Microsoft - surprise ?  

In the meantime Satya Nadella has been playing 4D chess. Nadella was the boss of Bing before he got elevated to CEO in Redmond. So Bing vs Google is close to his heart. While Sundar has been enjoying his Sushi in Mountainview financed by monopoly taxes, Nadella has been plotting Bing revival one step at a time. Key milestones being investing in Open AI, Integrating it to Azure and then Launching Bing+Edge+ChatGPT in a bid to reinvest search. 


Microsoft CEO not only did the product announcements in Redmond, but also openly launched war on Google Search with its ChatGPT + Bing integration : 

Microsoft says for every point of share gain in the search advertising market, it’s a $2 billion revenue opportunity. 

There are several upsides of this strategic play from Microsoft. 

Microsoft Strategic Upsides

  • Asymmetric battle : This is all for Google to defend and any incremental market share win for Microsoft has a huge revenue upside as Amy Hood (Microsoft CFO pointed out)
  • Microsoft doesn't need to gain any market share at all to make Google lose. If it can change customer behavior to expect Search results from 10 link clicks(legacy search) to some mix of legacy search and some mix of conversational AI through ChatGPT(10-20% of the queries), it will be a big win. Conversational AI queries wont be monetized and the change in the mix of the search queries means, Google would also have to serve the unmonetized queries through Bard in order to stay competitive. Even if Google maintains its market share, it will put further margin pressure on Google and thus exacerbate the financial mismanagement and the cultural trainwreck issues highlighted above. This point is very important. It is not a matter of which AI is better, what matters is how will the user behavior and expectation change with the new form of search. Any deviation will hurt Google.
  • Here is rough math to prove the point
    • Google search queries : 300k queries per second
    • Revenue : 160B in 2022, 1.6cents per query
    • Cost : Apple 20B, 24% services margin, roughly 1.06cents per query
    • So Google has 50 cents margin per query which can go to inference costs of an LLM
    • Deploying current ChatGPT into every search done by Google would require 512,820.51 A100 HGX servers with a total of 4,102,568 A100 GPUs. The total cost of these servers and networking exceeds $100 billion of Capex alone

    • Essentially 30B $GOOGL profit could evaporate overnight

    • Looks like Microsoft knows how to flip a monopoly if not beat it
  • Flipping Search monopoly is beneficial for Microsoft because it reduces competition for Azure as Google cannot funnel its monopoly riches to money losing Google Cloud investments any more. 
  • What Google is facing is classic innovators dilemna

how large incumbent companies lose market share by listening to their customers and providing what appears to be the highest-value products, but new companies that serve low-value customers with poorly developed technology can improve that technology incrementally until it is good enough to quickly take market share from established business.

  • ChatGPT is doing free marketing for Azure AI Services which hosts ChatGPT thus increasing cloud adoption
  • Satya Nadella looks like a mastermind wartime CEO who looks like a peacetime CEO

Google Strategic Upside

  • Yes you read that right, Google has an upside here too. While Google bungled its latest Bard announcement and the picture looks bleak right now, the biggest upside is that it could get support that it is not a monopoly in its latest department of justice lawsuit due to this competition from Microsoft. 
  • Google has investments in Cloud hardware and TPUs could get more investments in the future to compete with Nvidia GPUs. So essentially the battle of search could be won or lost on the hardware front which could lead to significant value capture and also change the winners and losers of search

The next 1 year will be an interesting battleground for these two companies in Tech and how the personal lives, successes, failures and tales of two Indian American CEOs influence how they carve out the tech future for their companies. 

Sunday, January 1, 2023

Market Outlook 2023


As we step into the new year, it's essential to gain insights into the market outlook for 2023. Understanding the forecasts and predictions from reputable financial institutions can provide valuable guidance for investors, businesses, and individuals navigating the ever-changing landscape of the global economy.

Feel free to refer to this table for easy access to the market outlooks provided by these leading financial institutions.


Financial Institution

Market Outlook for 2023

Goldman Sachs

Link

J.P. Morgan

Link

Morgan Stanley

Link

Bank of America

Link

BlackRock

Link

HSBC

Link

Barclays

Link

NatWest

Link

Citi

Link

UBS

Link

Credit Suisse

Link

BNP Paribas

Link

Deutsche Bank

Link

ING

Link

Apollo Global Management, Inc.

Link

Wells Fargo

Link

BNY Mellon

Link

Fidelity International

Link

Lazard

Link

Tuesday, November 8, 2022

Demystifying layoffs

With layoffs being more frequent in the tech industry, here's a post demystifying layoffs. This is based on my experience working in various companies and hearing stories from friends and colleagues. This post doesn't talk about any particular company/scenario specifically. 

1. The way most layoffs go is like this:

Scenario 1 : Startup with reduction in revenue growth rates needs to cut costs to preserve runway

Scenario 2 : Big company with reduction in revenue growth rates is seeing margin pressure as costs(OPEX + CAPEX) are now a higher percentage of the revenue leading to loss in investor confidence and stock price decline

CEO: “how much do we need to pay off?”


CFO: “we need to cut our burn by 20%. To be safe, we should reduce headcount expenses by 20%. We can do 18% but that’s risky and means we need to save harder on OPEX.”


CEO: “Ok, 20% it is.”


2. CEO tells all C-levels to send him a list with names to layoff that reduce  headcount expenses by 20%. Deadline: a week.


C-levels look through their orgs and pass down mandates to VPs to reduce HC expense by X%: so it all adds up to the target 20%. 


  • Contractors, food expenses, etc are cut first so that layoffs is a measure of last resort. 
  • Key orgs can see less cuts. Orgs that are part of core revenue generating products, core infrastructure will get less targets as cutting them will disrupt core business. Experimental bets get chopped first. Companies internally close their venture capital and startup arms and consolidate key aspects of the business.
  • VPs in different functions get different targets. Recruiters, sales & marketing in b2c companies, QA, TPMs, Solutions engineers, PMs, Engineers - is the order of priority for layoffs. Engineering is touched last as engineers build. A product company doing massive engineering cut is a red flag as the company will be building less in the future. 


3. VPs usually involve directors, but NOT below. Senior managers, managers usually not in the loop.


Ok, so now the list needs to be built. Now, at this point there’s usually still a $ target, not a headcount target. So how is this list built?


4. Directors don’t reach out to managers but identify people to fired based on:

  • Poor performance reviews recently
  • People working on strategic priorities vs ones that dont align
  • Platforms easy to hire vs harder to hire 
  • Highest costs in redundant roles / ones less needed
  • People working in cost centers / long-term-bets


5. This is where a good director can do better for the team than random selection. Lot of directors who are checked out and dont have good level of understanding of their orgs current performance standing, will have a spray gun approach. A good director will know nuances of who is well respected, who has more spillover impact, etc.


6. HR will take a look at diversity, maternity, paternity leaves - legal challenges and prune the list accordingly. 


7. The selection will really depend on what the directors and VPs prioritise and it *will* feel random. The director has incomplete information, and need to have a list by a deadline. 


8. In some scenarios managers/snr managers are asked for the list by the director. Junior manager who may botch the layoff by leaking are skipped. After getting the list the director makes the call on whether to include the name of the manager in the list or not. Same goes with the director where the VP makes the call and goes up recursively to the CEO. 


9. This is the overall high level way this process works. Offcourse reality is a lot more messier, there are horse trading games directors and managers have to play to protect their teams. There are several contentious meetings where things can get very heated where some of these decisions are made. 

Friday, July 29, 2022

Fremont vs Los Gatos vs Palo Alto high schools




Fremont vs San Jose public high schools

  • Irvington and Mission - Fremont's top 2 seem to be in a different league compared to San Jose public high schools - averaging almost 50 kids to Berkeley every year
    • Mission San Jose's dominance is clear as it got similar kids accepted to Berkeley as Evergreen and Leland combined did
    • Irvington's dominance is clear as it got similar kids accepted to Berkeley as Evergreen, Leigh and Branham combined did

  • Evergreen(26.2) and Leland(29) are top 2 in San Jose and average close to American High(27.6) in Fremont
  • Washington(Fremont) and Milpitas High are the up and coming schools closing on the 20 mark
  • Other public schools in San Jose are around the 10 mark. This includes Leigh high, Piedmont and Santa Teressa high which have 7+ great schools rating and median home prices above 1.5m. This shows that a lot of the new buyers in those neighborhoords will probably send kids to private schools or will move to better high schools in the future. 
  • Kennedy (Fremont), Silver Creek, Willow Glen, Branham are all below the 10 mark








Fremont vs Los Altos schools


 

Fremont vs Cupertino high schools to Berkeley



Fremont public vs private bay area high schools

  • Harker and Basis cross the 15% mark when it comes to admission rates to Berkeley
  • Fremont's top 2 public high schools(Mission San Jose and Irvington) have higher 5 year average admission rates to Berkeley compared to all the other private schools listed in this study except Harker and Basis Independent
  • Mission San Jose and Irvington high cross the coveted ~50 kids per year to Berkeley mark
  • Based on percentage of class size, the top 5 are Basis Independent, Harker, Mission San Jose, Irvington and Nueva. This is the right metric as it normalizes by class size as the public schools have much larger batch size compared to Harker and Basis
  • Harker tuition fees is 50k per year while the Fremont public schools are free. The percentage admissions show that private schools dont have lot of additional delta edge compared to the top public schools
  • Bellarmine, Mitty and Valley Christian severely underperform in college admissions compared to their other top public and private peers


Thursday, July 21, 2022

Irvington high school 2017-2021 College admissions

IHS Berkeley Admissions




Books I am reading