Aishwarya Goel

I aspire to this and I'm proud of this. If people think of me as boring and low profile, this is actually kind of what I want. I've just seen cases with a number of people I've worked with, where attaching your incentives very strongly to the approval or cheering of a crowd can destroy your mind, and in some cases, it can destroy your soul.

I've... See more

When we fall in love with someone’s mind, it has far less to do with what they create and more to do with what they direct their attention toward. A relationship with Claude could satisfy me for a time on the level of output––I type, Claude types. When we are not speaking, I don’t know what Claude is paying attention to. Claude doesn’t either. I... See more

Squads will be as important as companies in the years to come. And as the micro-structure of our social and economic fabric changes, strong vibes and sustainability will become the new metric of success. Squads don't need to scale. They can just spread the big squad energy.

You never called Eight Sleep a mattress company. Instead, you pioneered a new category of ‘sleep fitness’ by positioning it as a ‘sleep fitness brand.’ Tell me about the decision-making and strategy behind this.

ZATARAIN: We were not intentional about our positioning for the first five years of the company because we didn't even know what brand... See more

The first shtick gets you noticed. It’s usually a job, a core skill, something that makes you credible, competent, and useful. Alone, though, it’s one-dimensional.

The second shtick is the one that keeps you interesting. It’s the twist, the unexpected dimension that makes you versatile, memorable, harder to pin down.

Together, they balance you:... See more

The impact of an essay is how much it changes readers' thinking multiplied by the importance of the topic. But it's hard to do well at both. It's hard to have big new ideas about important topics. So in practice there's a tradeoff: you can change readers' thinking a lot about moderately important things, or change it a little about very important... See more