Essays
Long-form thinking on operations, building in India, AI in practice, trade, and living.
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The Man With Fourteen Cars
We thought we had hired a driver. He turned out to be salaried by a man with fourteen cars, and the 2x rate I had been so pleased with was a vendor margin I had not priced. On the labour-contractor layer that has been holding Indian urban work together for 140 years.
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The license that didn’t expire
Eight months into running a small bakery in Bangalore, the regulatory regime around us has been rewritten three times. A note on pace, predictability, and what Malmö doesn’t see.
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The Operating System Is Not the Moat
You can build a perfectly systemized AI-run business and still be unsellable. PE buyers treat channel concentration identically to customer concentration. One WhatsApp pipeline is one customer to a diligence team.
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Vibe Coding Is the Wrong Frame. What You’re Actually Doing Is Specification.
Karpathy coined vibe coding. Willison countered with vibe engineering. Both miss the real shift: the scarce skill is knowing your own operations clearly enough to describe them to a machine.
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Parking Garages, Service Elevators, and the Last Meter
The supply chain for a ₹195 cinnamon bun across a Bangalore apartment complex is, per unit of distance, significantly more complex than anything I managed at Tetra Pak.
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The Complexity Trap
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. The pattern is always the same, and I have watched it play out for fifteen years.
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Beautiful Sandcastles and the Case for Running Lean
Taiichi Ohno described boom-time organizations as beautiful sandcastles. The tide always comes in. The question is whether your foundation is rock or sand.
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Black Swans, Black Elephants, and the Tenth Man
Most supply chain disruptions are not Black Swans. They are Black Elephants: known risks that were simply more convenient to ignore than to address.