Ajinkya Wadhwa

Live in the future, then build what's missing.If you look at the way successful founders have had their ideas, it's generally the result of some external stimulus hitting a prepared mind.

A wedding is probably the only event where all three of those big questions can be simultaneously answered in a way that you truly feel it. The answers won’t hit you like a tidal wave, but instead you’ll receive them piece-by-piece as the day progresses. And the more concrete the “Yes”es are, the more empowering the wedding becomes as a long-standi... See more

We can opt out of the stories of religion or politics, but we cannot opt out of the story of money. It is so interwoven into the fabric of society that even our physical health depends upon how abstract numbers on a screen can be converted into tangible meals.

So if we want to find a happy marriage, we need to think small—we need to look at marriage up close and see that it’s built not out of anything poetic, but out of 20,000 mundane Wednesdays.

And this linear movement of time is nature’s way of testing what we have labeled as meaningful. Only time can reveal whether a certain pursuit is driven by fleeting novelty, or if it is motivated by a strong sense of enduring purpose.

When startups consume incumbents, they usually start by serving some small but important market that the big players ignore. 

Of course, inexperience is not the only reason people are too harsh on early versions of ambitious projects. They also do it to seem clever. And in a field where the new ideas are risky, like startups, those who dismiss them are in fact more likely to be right. Just not when their predictions are weighted by outcome.

And these are the lucky procrastinators—there are some who don’t even respond to the Panic Monster, and in the most desperate moments they end up running up the tree with the monkey, entering a state of self-annihilating shutdown.

What founders have a hard time grasping (and Steve himself might have had a hard time grasping) is what insanely great morphs into as you roll the time slider back to the first couple months of a startup's life. It's not the product that should be insanely great, but the experience of being your user. The product is just one component of that. For ... See more