Startup Bharat: @naval & @balajis

The full Clubhouse session in text

Thread Continued

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Naval: The Boston ecosystem has always regretting that they've sort of lost these companies.

India has to make sure it doesn't lose as entrepreneurs. And the way to do that is to give them the freedom to innovate. Everyone should be an entrepreneur.
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Everyone has a phone should be able to get a job through the phone. There's one level beyond that, that comes after that, which is everyone has a phone, should be a creator for the phone. And that's what platforms are enabling.
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There's the old, famous New Yorker cartoon with a dog on the internet, on the computer and it says on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. Well, yeah, on the internet, nobody knows who you are or where you are or what you are. All they care about is your output
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And that is incredibly liberating for a country that's so large and has such a good English speaking population, India can win, it just has to remove shackles.
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There's nothing to add. There are things to take away that are in the way of people who want to create excellent celebrity creators.
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Question by Vishesh: Right now, SaaS startups are big in India, like KhataBook and PagarBook, but do you think we need technology startups in India, like Open AI or crypto and VR also, how do we come up with new technologies?
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KhataBook and PagarBook are like payroll management and personal ledgers
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Naval's Answer: Elon Musk got started with Zip2. There's absolutely no shame whatsoever, and in fact, there's good things in doing the blocking and tackling SaaS company if that's your passion, or if that's what you're good at, you should go after that
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You don't have to try to, like push the frontier of AI. In fact, if you get a win under your belt and you've got some capital, then it makes it easier to take a bigger swing with the next one.
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Sam Altman before he did Open AI, he was at Whitefield as president of YC before that, but his company before there was Looped, which was the local locality social network.

Elon Musk, before he did Tesla and SpaceX, he did Zip2, which was like an online yellow pages.
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So it's, it's a natural progression for entrepreneurs. And I would argue, even for investors, sort of seeing myself. Is, we all start out doing the quote unquote easy stuff, the financial stuff, the SaaS, the consumer plate, etc.
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But eventually we get bored that we all want to do something bigger with our lives. And so that's when we start going into rocketry and aircraft and crypto and VR and AI and so on.
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This is a natural progression. It's got to work their way up the chain, uh, do all the SaaS stuff to your heart's content, make a lot of money, gain a lot of expertise and then go looking for a meeting, and then you'll create the next level of things.
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Balaji: I think that's right. And I think, in particular there's just zero shame in doing basic India clones. That's fine. Go and do that. Knock yourself out, execute on that.
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If we're good at execution and then the next step will be obvious once you've got that first one. And that first one, it's actually pretty hard to get.
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I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x
॥ॐ॥
अस्य श्री गायत्री ध्यान श्लोक:
(gAyatri dhyAna shlOka)
• This shloka to meditate personified form of वेदमाता गायत्री was given by Bhagwaan Brahma to Sage yAgnavalkya (याज्ञवल्क्य).

• 14th shloka of गायत्री कवचम् which is taken from वशिष्ठ संहिता, goes as follows..


• मुक्ता-विद्रुम-हेम-नील धवलच्छायैर्मुखस्त्रीक्षणै:।
muktA vidruma hEma nIla dhavalachhAyaiH mukhaistrlkShaNaiH.

• युक्तामिन्दुकला-निबद्धमुकुटां तत्वार्थवर्णात्मिकाम्॥
yuktAmindukalA nibaddha makutAm tatvArtha varNAtmikam.

• गायत्रीं वरदाभयाङ्कुश कशां शुभ्रं कपालं गदाम्।
gAyatrIm vardAbhayANkusha kashAm shubhram kapAlam gadAm.

• शंखं चक्रमथारविन्दयुगलं हस्तैर्वहन्ती भजै॥
shankham chakramathArvinda yugalam hastairvahantIm bhajE.

This shloka describes the form of वेदमाता गायत्री.

• It says, "She has five faces which shine with the colours of a Pearl 'मुक्ता', Coral 'विद्रुम', Gold 'हेम्', Sapphire 'नील्', & a Diamond 'धवलम्'.

• These five faces are symbolic of the five primordial elements called पञ्चमहाभूत:' which makes up the entire existence.

• These are the elements of SPACE, FIRE, WIND, EARTH & WATER.

• All these five faces shine with three eyes 'त्रिक्षणै:'.