Rajesh Jain

Blake Morgan: “Bill [Canady] explains how the 80/20 principle (Pareto Principle) can be applied to business growth, profitability, and customer experience. By focusing on the most profitable customers and products, companies can streamline operations and maximize efficiency, rather than getting lost in low-impact activities.”

WSJ: “Idle chitchat may feel dreary, but it establishes the brain ‘synchrony’ that allows for more meaningful exchanges…Instead of resenting small talk, I now see it as a gateway to a more meaningful connection. After some soothing chitchat, I now feel more confident about taking risks and asking questions that I might have once worried were too far afield.”

Andrew Chen: “Imagine products that automatically adapt based on user behavior, rather than based on the actions of the vibe coder. For example, if the vibe coder has specified that the signup funnel should easy, then after seeing users struggle with it, the software can automatically vibe code itself to improve the flow by dropping steps or adding explanatory text. Right now we are in a paradigm where PMs specify behavior that software engineers specify in code. Imagine if PMs can specify outcomes, and the software is configured to automatically adapt to hit those outcomes.”

Shivani Tiwari: “The marketers who will thrive in the coming decade aren’t funnel optimizers. They’re community builders. They’re experience designers. They’re relationship cultivators.”

Bloomberg: “I realized that government is not structured around the idea of action, but preventing mistakes. And this is no bad thing. Government is not meant to function like a private-sector enterprise. It is far more complex than any business. For one thing, business leaders don’t have 535 legislators telling them what to do, whereas government often needs authorization from lawmakers, whose interests are not always aligned. The same legislators who like to talk about shrinking the size of government also boast about bringing home the bacon for their districts. Those who imagine citizens as shareholders misunderstand what we want from government: to deliver services, not maximize stock value. And if the principles of business are ill-suited for government, then the Silicon Valley ethos of moving fast and breaking things, which animates Musk and DOGE, is an especially bad fit for an entity that funds schools, food stamps, care for the elderly, medicine for the sick, air traffic control, and on and on. Move fast and break Twitter, that’s fine — you get a bunch of angry Tweeters. But do that in government and you risk lives. Government, in fact, is designed to mitigate risk — to prevent people from improperly being taken off Social Security, Medicaid or disability compensation for veterans. In government, the stakes for failure are a lot higher than for the private sector.”

Jessica Lessin: “At The Information, our formula is just very different. It’s going very, very deep into subject matters, into beat reporting. I think the most ambitious, world changing, impactful stories come from gathering string around companies and people and areas of expertise. And I worry, because I see a lot of other newsrooms with very talented reporters put those reporters on very broad and enterprise-like beats. How can we hold companies and leaders accountable without that kind of reporting day in and day out?”

Dalton Conley: “Do genes determine our destiny, as the hereditarians would say? Or do we enter the world as blank slates, formed only by what we encounter in our homes and beyond? What started as an intellectual debate quickly expanded to whatever anyone wanted it to mean, invoked in arguments about everything from free will to race to inequality to whether public policy can, or should, level the playing field. Today, however, a new realm of science is poised to upend the debate — not by declaring victory for one side or the other, nor even by calling a tie, but rather by revealing they were never in opposition in the first place. Through this new vantage, nature and nurture are not even entirely distinguishable, because genes and environment don’t operate in isolation; they influence each other and to a very real degree even create each other. The new field is called sociogenomics, a fusion of behavioral science and genetics.”

Economist: “If you had to define the indispensable power of a leader, which would you pick? Would it be probing intelligence? Boundless energy? Or perhaps just being lucky? One ability may not come to mind for many, but really should. For if there is a talent that every boss needs to master, it’s the ability to say the same thing over and over and over again without seeming bored. You don’t have to spend a lot of time with executives to hear repeated words and phrases. They might be drumming home the critical elements of their strategy to investors. They might be reciting talking-points with the media. They might be inculcating the company’s culture at town halls with employees, or telling the firm’s origin story for the thousandth time. What they are not doing is starting afresh every time.”

SaaStr: “There is one common factor, that founders know, but often lose track of in their pitch: every VC, at any stage, is looking for outliers. No matter the price or how early or late. Your pitch, your team, your metrics, your market position, your vision, your TAM, your everything, should honestly and transparently but aggressively and positively show how you can be an outlier. It is hard to make money as a VC, as odd as that may sound. You generally need several unicorns per fund, and 1 per year, to truly do well…Now, VCs have a benefit in that not every single investment has to be a unicorn. They do have the benefit of a portfolio approach, which founders don’t. But 1 or more from each “batch”, from each, fund, does need to be to do extremely well.  Far more than just 1 for a bigger fund.”

FT: “Why is poetry such a powerful way to access our deepest emotions? And how can it be useful for business leaders? I asked Deborah Alma, founder of the Poetry Pharmacy, and co-author of an unusual book published this week, The Poetry Business School. In it, Deborah and Mark Constantine, co-founder and chief executive of Lush, the global cosmetics group, have collaborated with Kate Downey-Evans, a business psychologist. Their aim is to show how poetry helps us towards decision-making, dealing with failure and uncertainty, and taking risks — as well as soothing us when times are hard.”

NYTimes: “Historically, migration to places like Dubai has been highly stratified: lots of migrants from poor countries doing difficult and sometimes dangerous construction and service work, alongside a handful of Western expats engaged in the classic arbitrage of living income-tax-free in a relatively inexpensive place where their education, skills and complexion command a premium. But governments in the Persian Gulf region have been liberalizing their migration policies, opening up opportunities for ambitious and talented people from across the globe by offering longer-term residency to skilled workers without a sponsor. In a bid to diversify and grow its economies, the region is throwing open its doors to entrepreneurs, engineers, artists, chefs, teachers, medical workers and educators, encouraging them not simply to work there for a few years and go home but to consider building their lives there long term.”

WaPo: “Caffeine works mainly by blocking receptors for adenosine, a compound that builds up in our brains during the day. “We think that adenosine serves as an important signaling molecule to let us know we need to rest. It’s sleep-inducing,” said Shawn Arent, a professor and chair of the department of exercise science at the University of South Carolina, who has studied caffeine and performance. When caffeine binds to the receptors, “adenosine can’t as readily induce that fatigue state because caffeine is taking up that receptor,” Arent said. “From an alertness standpoint, caffeine is acting on that adenosine receptor to really prevent adenosine from doing its job. We’re trying to prevent fatigue, we’re trying to delay sleepiness or overcome fatigue if we’re, for example, sleep-deprived.””

ET: “[Beyond AI], there’s a simpler, cheaper and more immediate opportunity that India is overlooking, one that could change the world just as dramatically, if not more: CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats). CRISPR is not just a breakthrough, but it also allows us to rewrite the very code of life. With a few chemicals and a basic lab, scientists can edit DNA with precision unimaginable a decade ago. This is as monumental as the transistor or sequencing the human genome.”

DeepSeek founder [Zhen Fund’s Dai]: “We are at the early stage of a revolution where the technology improvement curve is steep…Companies should focus on breakthroughs instead of monetisation because a high school student can’t make much money, while if you train him to become PhD, he can make a lot more.”

FT asks if humans have passed peak brain power: “There has been remarkably little consistent long-running research on human attention or mental capacity. But there is a rare exception: every year since the 1980s, the Monitoring the Future study has been asking 18-year-olds whether they have difficulty thinking, concentrating or learning new things. The share of final year high school students who report difficulties was stable throughout the 1990s and 2000s, but began a rapid upward climb in the mid-2010s. This inflection point is noteworthy not only for being similar to performance on tests of intelligence and reasoning but because it coincides with another broader development: our changing relationship with information, available constantly online. Part of what we’re looking at here is likely a result of the ongoing transition away from text and towards visual media — the shift towards a “post-literate” society spent obsessively on our screens.”

WaPo: “Eat a fiber-rich diet. This time-tested recommendation remains one of the strongest-studied ways to promote and preserve a healthy microbiome and improve your overall health. Eating a low-fiber diet leads to the loss of major categories of bacteria — and once certain groups are lost, they can be lost for good, even if you try later to ramp up fiber intake later. So the time to act is now. The more diverse your diet, the more diverse your microbiome, and the healthier you are. So choose a variety of high-fiber plants, nuts and fermented foods to feed your microbiome the nutrient buffet it deserves.”

McKinsey: “CTOs should instead think of data like a product. Product development requires dedicated management and funding, performance tracking, and quality assurance. So does data. Ideally, consumer organizations would deliver high-quality, accessible data to employees across functions. Our research shows that companies that treat data like a product can significantly reduce the time it takes to implement new use cases for their data, as well as the total cost of ownership. For a consumer player, high-value data such as customer ZIP codes should be managed with data infrastructure and APIs by cross-functional teams, which should include clear data product owners and have joint tech-business responsibility for outcomes.”

Dean W. Ball: “Manus is not a technology innovation story. It is a technology diffusion story…[William] Ding describes how, in the 19^th century, Europe led the world in scientific innovation. The best research universities in the world were there. Aspiring researchers from all over the world—especially America—would travel to Europe to learn in their top-tier research institutions. But Europe did not use their innovations to their maximum advantage; instead, that honor went to America—the hungry, less sophisticated upstart. Europe led in innovation, but America led in diffusion (and eventually innovation also, but this took time). America thus reaped just as many, if not more, of the economic benefits of new inventions—even if those inventions were not primarily made on American soil. This pattern has repeated itself with the United States and China today—except this time, America is in Europe’s position. The United States led much of the innovation on lithium-ion batteries, solar panels, and electric cars, yet it is China that has exploited those technologies to their fullest advantage. Manus is evidence that something similar could happen in AI.”

Semi Analysis: “This is a Call for Action for the United States of America and the West. We are in the early precipice of a nonlinear transformation in industrial society, but the bedrock the US is standing on is shaky. Automation and robotics is currently undergoing a revolution that will enable full-scale automation of all manufacturing and mission-critical industries. These intelligent robotics systems will be the first ever additional industrial piece that is not supplemental but fully additive– 24/7 labor with higher throughput than any human—, allowing for massive expansion in production capacities past adding another human unit of work. The only country that is positioned to capture this level of automation is currently China, and should China achieve it without the US following suit, the production expansion will be granted only to China, posing an existential threat to the US as it is outcompeted in all capacities.”

Jaspreet Bindra: “In this new era, differentiation will rely less on having the most advanced AI and more on integrating it in support of established business strengths. Factors such as physical product innovation, brand equity, distribution networks, relationships and proprietary data will again become primary business moats. AI alone is not a business differentiator. How it is applied within these foundational assets will determine long-term success.”

Arnold Kling: “The key characteristic of the new AI is not encyclopedic knowledge. It is its personality. For the first time in the history of computing, we can relate to a computer using human language. We don’t have to learn how to write code or navigate a menu. I think that the economic effect of AI will depend on how far this can be taken.”

Ruchir Sharma: “With signs of a slowdown starting to surface in the US, India and other recent economic stars, many people are looking for the next promising growth stories. The “circle of life” is one guide: it is the cycle of politics in which crisis forces reform, which generates recovery but then breeds complacency and decay. The cycle then starts again, crisis to crisis, ashes to ashes. At any point in time, a nation’s prospects can depend on where it stands in this circle…Let’s not forget that when a nation has its back to the wall, it is often forced to carry out serious reform. And recovery follows. The cycle turns constantly, and the circle of life is always creating new stars somewhere.”

WSJ: “The builders of an app called World—including Chief Executive Alex Blania and his co-founder Sam Altman of OpenAI fame—envision a time in the not-too-distant future when you can’t do much without an ocular check-in. AI agents will be so prevalent, and so humanlike, that we’ll need to repeatedly prove we’re real to prevent those AIs from masquerading as humans on everything from payment platforms to social networks…World says its network is anonymous and secure, and only proves you’re a person—but it could be made part of a broader identity system. One of World’s distinguishing features is that it is an “anonymous proof of human” system. That is, its eyeball scan can verify that you’re a human being and not an AI, but without additional software and systems, it can’t identify who you are. What could drive people to adopt a system like World’s will be the rise of ever-more-sophisticated AIs that will make doing business on the internet almost impossible without something like it, says Tiago Sada, chief product officer at the company.”

Forbes: “To understand Manus, imagine an invisible assistant who can use a computer just like you do—opening browser tabs, filling out forms, writing emails, coding software, and making real-time decisions. Except unlike you, it never gets tired. The key to its power lies in its multi-agent architecture. Rather than relying on a single neural network, Manus operates like an executive overseeing a team of specialized sub-agents. When assigned a complex task, it divides the problem into manageable components, assigns them to the appropriate agents, and monitors their progress. This structure enables it to tackle multi-step workflows that previously required multiple AI tools stitched together manually. Its cloud-based asynchronous operation is another game-changer. Traditional AI assistants need a user’s active engagement—Manus does not. It runs its tasks in the background, pinging users only when results are ready, much like a hyper-efficient employee who never requires micromanagement.”

FT: “DeepSeek’s R1 and other so-called “reasoning” models, such as OpenAI’s o3 and Anthropic’s Claude 3.7, consume more computing resources than previous AI systems at the point when a user makes their request, a process called “inference”. That has flipped the focus of demand for AI computing, which until recently was centred on training or creating a model. Inference is expected to become a greater portion of the technology’s needs as demand grows among individuals and businesses for applications that go beyond today’s popular chatbots, such as ChatGPT or xAI’s Grok. It is here that Nvidia’s competitors — which range from AI chipmaker start-ups such as Cerebras and Groq to custom accelerator processors from Big Tech companies including Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta — are focusing their efforts to disrupt the world’s most valuable semiconductor company. “Training makes AI and inference uses AI,” said Andrew Feldman, chief executive of Cerebras. “And the usage of AI has gone through the roof . . . The opportunity right now to make a chip that is vastly better for inference than for training is larger than it has been previously.””