For purpose of this writing success is narrowly defined as the pursuit of wealth and influence over capital, labour, technology or ideology - the drivers of modern day capitalism.

In this narrow scope of success, I have found few fundamentals to hold true and few things which enable the pursuit of aforementioned success.

Those two words sum up a lot about human nature and opportunities. We are either fighting for survival or defending it, or we are reaching a little higher to rise up in whatever endeavor one might be perusing. We seldom can do both simultaneously.

When you are rock climbing, you clip the quickdraws to bolt before going any higher. You ensure survival and then you go higher.

Decision Making is like sex, everybody engages in it but most people don’t take the time to read about it or learn it methodically. This results in sloppy decision making.

We make decisions everyday, but every-time we have a critical decision - a job prospect, a life partner prospect, a decision to move countries or cities - we start from the ground up, we think about what we truly want, make pros and cons and discuss with our trusted and loved ones. This is an extremely sub-optimal way of decision making

Andy Rachleff in his famous class at Stanford “Aligning Start-ups with their market” teaches that a common misconception is that technology disrupts markets or companies, but it is not technology, but business models that disrupt markets and companies. Technology is merely an enabler of this new business, a new method to create and capture value.

We all have to make this choice. We have to make it few times in our life. This is my attempt to synthesis broad frameworks I have learnt from Andy Rachleff (Benchmark, Wealthfront) and Eric Schmidt (Google). This has helped me, and I hope the same for you.

Many start-ups are building artificial intelligence products for businesses to use. There are hundreds of machine learning, computer vision or deep learning businesses propping every week.

Everyone has a boss. Someone said this, and is true.

You are likely to manage people and be managed by someone. If you are a freelancer, it could be your clients. If you are an entrepreneur, it could be your board. Since we will all share this fate, we must try to understand the kind of managers that you might encounter and more importantly, understand the type of manager you want to be.