Question Everything | Co-Founder @_ignosis 🇮🇳 Always blabbering irl about tech, AI, spirituality, mythology, psychology, evolution, games, chess, piano
Ahmedabad
Joined December 2015
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🚀 Thrilled to announce that we've raised $4M Pre Series-A round led by Peak XV Partners with particpation from Razorpay Ventures, Kunal Shah and existing investors to build the next-gen financial data intelligence platform for India 🇮🇳
Are you a conviction person or a consensus person?
While this often comes up in VC investment thesis, I was mapping our internal decision frameworks and this single thing came out on top everywhere!
What do I mean by the two?
Conviction - A single person (or a minority), often with extreme value alignment has a strong belief, takes a bet, owns it to the end and team ralies behind them with full support.
Consensus - Majority usually tries to all align on a negotiated single direction, and then as a group works towards it with shared ownership.
(i'm sure there are better dictionary definitions, but this is what i think it as in my head)
How do we build products? - Conviction - Regardless of your experience, if you're culturally an ignosite truly, then whatever you think helps the mission will be built and you'll be supported no questions asked.
There are initiatives and products that have stemmed and led by founders, product teams, business, support, security, infra, tech, across seniors to interns.
How do we hire? - Conviction - As often quoted, we hire for clear proof of strengths, not for lack of weaknesses. Most of our hires have been one or two people having hell yes conviction, and becoming owners of making sure the hire succeeds. We choose a 10,7,7,7 over 8,8,8,8 any day.
Who do we hire - Conviction first people - As the entire organisation works on fast moving, truth seeking, bet taking, conviction first decision framework, if you would wait for consensus to form, the ship would have sailed long before that happens. But on the other end, people who thrive in chaos, seek freedom, and owns successes and failures equally grow exponentially in the organisation due to sheer size of impact they can achieve without any restraints.
I have always remembered one of the core value from a company I had interviewed at (and got rejected) for long back - "every decision taken at point in time with the limited information available at that point in time - is ALWAYS correct". Biggest killer of conviction culture is blaming individuals based on hindsight, based on outcomes which were impossible to predict at that time of making the decision, this often just induces decision paralysis and nothing ever happens once this is the norm.
Conviction builds momentum, and momentum builds movement.
While I'm sure both conviction and consensus are important and both work for different folks. It's not a right or wrong thing, it's about joining the right place, depending on what kind of person you are.
Today, we are looking for conviction first folks and if you are one of them, we'd love to talk to you!
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Zomato debate - over the weekend, nuance died a million deaths. Not trying to add yet another post of taking sides to your feed, this is quite the opposite.
Moral dilemmas are tough for our monkey brains and we love to take a simplistic argument, stick to a side, assume we are victorious and move forward. But the world has never been black and white, good and evil, it always has been something in between, the uncomfortable in-between of pull and push.
India as a civilisation has always advocated for this. All our upanishads, mahagathas, religion, mythology and stories have tried to make sure we internalise the grey, we debate the push and pull and we make progress, but not live in a delusion of binary world. Anyone you pick from our cultural stories, has never been depicted in a single color, why do we expect the today's world to be clean then?
I've always believed in just two directionally guiding principles
The world can be always be a better place
And YOU need to do something about it
-- Are a lot of people getting a way to make money through gig economy for their own good? Yes - it's an amazing ramp for people to start which requires almost nothing
-- Are we the consumers benefited with all the startups? Of course yes
-- Could the gig workers get better welfare and predictability? We can always strive for improvement
We need to accept the uncomfortable truth that inequality will always exist, maybe we can all chip in to alleviate in whatever small ways we can. Maybe help them get a better job if we have a reference, maybe create new jobs that we think should exist, maybe help their kids study so they can do better, maybe tip more, maybe support platforms that pay better.
There can never be a single right side in my view. We as individuals can pay with our wallets towards what we think is right. Activism or blind following either side might make us feel better in the head but unlikely to solve any real world problems.
Fin
Last one on this topic, and I have been holding this in myself for a while.
For centuries, class divides kept the labor of the poor invisible to the rich. Factory workers toiled behind walls, farmers in distant fields, domestic help in backrooms. The wealthy consumed the fruits of that labor without ever seeing the faces or the fatigue behind it. No direct encounter, no personal guilt.
The gig economy shattered that invisibility, at unprecedented scale.
Suddenly, the poor aren't hidden away. They're at your doorstep: the delivery partner handing over your ₹1000+ biryani, late-night groceries, or quick-commerce essentials. You see them in the rain, heat, traffic, often on borrowed bikes, working 8–10 hours for earnings that give them sustenance. You see their exhaustion, their polite smile masking frustration with life in general.
This is the first time in history at this scale that the working class and consuming class interact face-to-face, transaction after transaction. And that discomfort with our own selves is why we are uncomfortable about the gig economy. We want these people to look our part, so that the guilt we feel while taking orders from them feels less.
We aren't just debating economics. We are confronting guilt. That ₹800 order might equal their entire day's earnings after fuel, bike rent, and app cuts. We tip awkwardly, or avoid eye contact, because the inequality is no longer abstract. It's personal.
Pre-gig era, the rich could enjoy luxury without moral discomfort. Labor was out of sight. Now, every doorbell ring is a reminder of systemic inequality. That's why debates explode. It's not just policy. It's emotional reckoning. Some defend the system (“they choose it”), others demand change (“this isn't progress, its exploitation”).
And here’s the uncomfortable twist: the unsaid ask of clumsy ‘solutions’ isn’t dignity. It is about returning to invisibility.
Ban gig work and you don’t solve inequality. You remove livelihoods. These jobs don’t magically reappear as formal, protected employment the next day. They disappear, or they get pushed back into the informal economy where there are even fewer protections and even less accountability. Over-regulate it until the model breaks, and you achieve the same outcome through paperwork instead of slogans: the work evaporates, prices rise, demand collapses, and the people we claim to protect are the first to lose income.
And then what happens?
The rich get their old comfort back. Convenience returns without faces. Guilt dissolves. We go back to clean abstractions and moral posturing from a distance. The poor don’t become safer, they become invisible again: back in cash economies, back in backrooms, back in shadows where regulation rarely reaches and dignity isn’t even debated.
The gig economy just exposed the reality of inequality to the people who previously had the luxury of not seeing it. The doorbell is not the problem. The question is what we do after opening the door.
Visibility is the price of progress. We can either use this discomfort to build something better (which we keep doing continuously as delivery partners are our backbone), or we can ban and over-regulate our way back into ignorance. One of those choices improves lives. The other simply helps the consuming class feel virtuous in the dark.
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Early specialisation leads to one trick ponies, world-class excellence seems to emerge from multi disciplinary exploration. What does it mean for the academic factories of the country?
This paper seems to be getting a lot of eyes recently in my circles, to my engineering mind the first thought that came to me is, this is exactly what we do in machine learning. We love our slow ramps, quick learning usually plateaus with low bias and high variance.
Nerd talk aside, I've first hand witnessed this over numerous people I've mentored or have been a mentee of.
Top 0.1%iles of any field are more often than not, top 10%iles of many other things, commonly even unrelated things.
Musicians are rarely good at single instrument.
Most sports person are often good at many sports.
Hell, I'm yet to find a single top tier gamer who is not good at engineering.
Be it chess, maths, snooker or athletics, it all seems the same.
And I think everyone also intuitively understands the why behind it, activity of striving to be the best at something (anything) likely is the secret sauce, once generalised and abstracted, honing into one single mission often leads to world class outcomes.
Not trying to say that we should replace 'engineered specialisation' with 'engineered generalisation', but giving space to the young and encouraging excellence seems to be a scientific way to make sure we generate top class talent.
A massive new study on peak performance included 34,000 international top performers: Nobel laureates, renowned classical music composers, Olympic champs, and the world’s best chess players. It shows early specialization is a trap, and the road to greatness is long and varied.
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While I had my knees hurting after standing in my AC GFF booth, here's my dad - author, self publisher, one man show - setting up his first ever independent booth at International Book Fair (Ahmedabad), kicking at 65!
What I thought would finally become a gentle retirement hobby after 4 decades across music production, recording, teaching, and dozen other ventures... simply refused to stay a hobby.
Because making something from nothing, iterating it, and offering it to the world - is one of the most primitive human joys. For people wired this way, it's a lifeline, keeps the drive of life alive, burning and young.
Glory to the creators! Glory to the builders!
If you do happen to be from Ahmedabad, come say Hi at stall 28. He'll love all the support.
#AIBF2025
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Question isn't 'can we?' any more, it's only about making very tough 'should we?' choices.
Happy Diwali, everyone!
The coming year will be pivotal in deciding where India will stand in the world a decade from today
There is technology available now that can help us achieve our dreams—not by 2047, but by 2037. What matters is how we choose to use it
Policymakers will need to embrace this massive technological shift and enable entrepreneurship at scale—with enough checks to ensure we can course-correct quickly, even if we make a few mistakes early on
Entrepreneurs will need to ensure this technology becomes a tool that solves our current big problems of poverty and productivity, and not a weapon that further exacerbates them
Citizens must act proactively in what will be the largest upskilling exercise in our history
For a more resilient world, India needs to provide its 1 billion citizens a level playing field ASAP
It's time to build. It's time to get back to work!
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An introvert's nightmare? 🧵
If you had told me 3 years back that one day I'll be amidst 80k+ folks, networking with 100s of top founders, bankers and industry leaders, I'd have just laughed it off as an impossible reality in a parallel universe.
Boy I was wrong!
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@TwitchSupport @Twitch Indian ISPs like @reliancejio @GTPL_Hathway are now blocking Twitch due to some channel streaming IPL. This is uncalled censorship and cannot be allowed
@AmdavadAMC What do orange zones mean in Ahmedabad City? The relaxations that are applied to Orange Zones at Central level apply to those wards?
@vnehra What do orange zones mean in Ahmedabad City? The relaxations that are applied to Orange Zones at Central level apply to those wards?