In 2025 they all started asking “Why would I buy this when I can build it in a weekend?”

That question killed a lot of pitches in the valley, and reduced so many Post-IPO SaaS tools to penny stock.

Agreed - not all tools could be replaced - as they needed maintenance and complex plumbing, not just building. But the threshold of SaaS complexity moved.
Earlier, every CTO knew the old flowchart.

Core to your differentiation? Build it.

Critical to the business? Build it.

Neither? Buy a tool and move on.

This tree held for twenty five years because building was brutal. Ten years ago, building a CRM in-house meant engineers, a product manager, a designer, security reviews, and a maintenance commitment that never ended.

AI changed it. The threshold to build moved.

Before AI, remember why IT services became a giant industry. TCS, Infosys, Accenture did not scale by selling products. They scaled because enterprises always needed custom solutions. Every large company’s processes are just different enough that off-the-shelf never quite fits. SaaS was the counter-bet: build one horizontal tool, sell it as-is to thousands of companies with the same problem. That worked for two decades, but only for problems that were the same everywhere. Payroll. Email. Ticketing.

The moment requirements change at a fundamental level, a simple tool stops adding value and the pendulum swings back to custom. AI agents are exactly that kind of requirement.

It is the services structure, reborn.

The numbers from inside companies say more than the narrative of SaaSocalypse. A Retool survey of 817 enterprise builders in early 2026 found 35% had already replaced at least one SaaS tool with a custom build.

Shopify’s CEO said he now takes a proof that AI cannot do the job, before any new software gets approved.

My ground-level observations: a founder I know, running a business doing $10+ mn a year, renegotiated every ticketing and CRM contract he had. Hard. And got Discounts upto 60%. But he did not touch Semrush - it carry years of data and plumbing his team has no appetite to build in-house.

So the rule is not “everything moves in-house.”

The rule is that the complexity of a software must be enough to deserve a subscription.

2026 started with a bang - Context Layer. In the race to build reliable, replicable agents, companies discovered the value of something they always had and never valued: their own tribal knowledge. Their context. What does that “Rev” in Orders table mean? Only your head-of-tribe knows.

This is a paraphrased quote from Data & Ai leader of a pre-IPO company:

“The tool is secondary now - I can build it in 2 days. People and processes run the show.”

They always had. At throughput X.

But if you want an AI agent to be productive at throughput 2X or even X, we don’t just need a tool. We need my people to document their daily work and knowledge without fail for this AI agent to access and learn and perform on.

So the companies getting agents to work are not spending on tools that replace their humans. They are doing something more surgical.

They are replacing humans who keep knowledge in their heads with humans who document well and feed that context into agents.

AI has lowered the cost of building software, but it has not lowered the cost of knowing what should be built, embedding it into workflows, maintaining context, and making it work reliably.

Have you known engineers from five years back who liked documentation? Me neither.

I have watched companies let go of stubborn knowledge-hoarders and rebuild their people and processes around their AI agent’s requirements. They did not do it to hand their memory to their intelligence providers, the Claudes and GPTs. They did it to keep their context inside. But how?

The tools they used to hold that context were often a humble tool, vibe-coded in-house: some UI, some plumbing for data movement, wired to their own documentation.

Building an agent that uses context well is a different game. It needs constant, dynamic context upgrades, which means humans willing to document every week, forever. Phew.

That is an org-design problem, not a SaaS hunt one.

So what about the companies that cannot pull this off in-house? When a company fails to automate with AI, its next move is not to buy a point tool. It hires an AI services team to build the first agent with them.

One company I know brought in a services team out of Sri Lanka to deliver their first agent and maintain it for a while. In the process the founders learnt how it was built, what tools sat underneath, how the context pipeline worked. Then they replicated the model in-house for other work streams. Today their agent is best in class and it is a new revenue line.

The services engagement was not outsourcing. It was a tuition.

The money confirms this at the top too. Accenture’s GenAI bookings crossed $2.2 billion per quarter in Q1 FY2026, up from $100 million in Q3 FY2023, a 22x jump in ten quarters. Not from selling software. From deploying AI inside client workflows. The largest software and services firms are converging on one model: build the agent together, transfer the capability. That is a teaching relationship, not a licensing one.

The old tree had two leaves, build or buy. The new tree has three: build, buy, or learn-to-build with a services partner.

If enterprises are this protective of context, the endgame is in-house trained models. Are we there? No.

Fine-tuning open weights keeps sensitive data inside your building, which matters to regulated industries. But adoption tells the opposite story. Menlo Ventures found open-source models fell from 19% of enterprise usage in 2024 to 11% in 2025. The technology improved and buyers pulled back. Most MVPs still run on Claude and Gemini APIs, because the tooling to fine-tune, evaluate, deploy and maintain your own model is still a specialist’s job, not a weekend build.

The threshold for building tools moved. The threshold for building models has not moved as much. Yet.

My bet, held loosely, is that this is the next threshold to fall. Whoever makes fine-tuning your own model as easy as vibe-coding your own CRM unlocks the last step: enterprises that borrow nobody’s intelligence and rent nobody’s memory.

I am open to the counterview that frontier APIs stay far enough ahead that owning weights never makes sense for most. However - cost is a worry still. Gartner’s forecast that 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by 2027 on cost grounds.

The deeper shift is that the the scarce asset is increasingly the organisation’s usable context: its data, decisions, workflows and institutional knowledge, kept current enough for AI agents to act on.

AI has changed the build-vs-buy threshold, but the unexpected consequence is that enterprises are buying capability rather than software, building SLMs instead of making a call to LLMs.

I write Growth Garage to make sense of how businesses, careers, and technology work from the inside. If you have lived through a build vs buy decision recently, or fired someone who refused to document, tell me the story. Reply or comment.

References

1. The Buy-or-Build Decision, Revisited: How Agentic AI Changes the Economics of Enterprise Software, arXiv, 2026. https://arxiv.org/html/2604.26482v1

2. The Build vs. Buy Shift: AI, Shadow IT, and the SaaS Replacement Era, Retool 2026 Builder Report. https://retool.com/blog/ai-build-vs-buy-report-2026

3. The Build vs. Buy Line Just Moved. Most Enterprises Haven’t Noticed. Dotun Opasina. https://www.dotunopasina.com/datascience/the-build-vs-buy-line-just-moved-most-enterprises-havent-noticed

4. Accenture’s GenAI Bookings Hit $2.2B Per Quarter, FourWeekMBA. https://fourweekmba.com/ai-accenture-genai-bookings-2-billion-quarter-2026/

5. ServiceNow and Accenture Launch Forward Deployed Engineering Program, Accenture Newsroom, May 2026. https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/2026/servicenow-and-accenture-launch-forward-deployed-engineering-program-to-scale-agentic-ai-across-the-enterprise

6. Open Source vs Closed LLMs: Technical Comparison 2026, Hakia. https://hakia.com/compare/open-vs-closed-llms/

7. Open-Weight Models Caught Up. Adoption Fell to 11% (Menlo Ventures data), Luiz Neto. https://www.luizneto.ai/enterprise-open-weight-models-2026/

8. Fine-Tuning Open-Weights Models: A 2026 Buyer’s Guide, Layer3 Labs. https://www.layer3labs.io/open-weights/fine-tuning-open-weights-models

9. Accenture Company Overview 2026 (Gartner agentic AI cancellation forecast), Luminix. https://www.useluminix.com/reports/company-overviews/accenture-company-overview-business-segments-financials-and-global-market-position-2026

Ok a confession - I am a Zumba person, not a gym person. For five years in my twenties I trained in Latin rhythm, salsa and bachata. At some point, the music stopped being sound and became a signal. When I hear that pace now, my body and brain know that it is time to workout. That is not a taste or preference. It is conditioning.

So when the floor music switched to high-energy Bollywood, the problem was what register my brain had filed them under. Wedding, celebration, Friday night, junk food, perhaps even a drink. The exact register I want to leave behind for one hour in Gym. Going to gym at all is a fragile daily decision, made against the pull of home and the couch, and the music is meant to reinforce that decision, not compete with it. This time it competed.

I complained, mildly to my Gym manager, who told me that the playlist was a matter of preference. That word - ‘preference’ - is where the real story begins. Because here is what my gym had not left to preference: its logo, its colour, the font on the wall, the shade of the towels, the scent at the desk, the tone of its Instagram. Every visible thing was a decision, argued over and defended. The one thing that actually changed how I performed, the sound of the room, was set by whoever picked up the aux cable that morning.

That asymmetry is not personal, it is an industry default, and it rests on a mistake about what sound is. Sound is not ambience. It is a behavioural instrument, and we have known this commercially for a century.

Music was engineered into lifts and factories in the 1920s to calm nerves and raise output, and grew into a science of functional sound tuned to move mood and spending.*1 It is why the right tempo makes a shopper linger, and the wrong one makes her leave.

Sound reaches the body faster than a logo, and you cannot look away from it.

My first serious thought on “Sounds of retail store” started when I read Howard Schultz’s Autobiography on how he created Starbucks. He wanted to recreate the Italian cafe experience in America, and hence brought Italian-jazz vibes to his stores. This iconic retail brand curates one soundtrack centrally and plays it worldwide, so the brand sounds like itself in Seattle, Bangalore and Tokyo.*7 That is a logo you cannot see, and almost no one else has built one.

I have watched the gap from inside of a large Indian tea-cafe chain. Staff plugged in their phones and played whatever they liked - Regional, Dance songs, sad romantics. We had identical Logo across 100’s of stores but different mood in each due to the song selection.

Sound is the only part of brand identity that customers cannot opt out of.

There was a hidden liability too, since Indian law requires music to be licensed *6 We solved the legal problem. We never realised we hadn’t solved the brand problem. Like me, many brand managers would skip this sensory-experience in favor of visuals.

Which is strange because one entire industry has already proven what sound is worth.

Software designs it obsessively.

Netflix spent close to a year, and an Oscar-winning sound designer, on the three-second “ta-dum” that opens every title. 3 Apple’s startup chime, the Mac’s crumpling trash, the distinct clicks of a WhatsApp message sent and delivered, the Slack, Teams and Zoom join-and-leave tones, each is deliberated for months by teams. They understand that a sound, repeated, becomes recognition, and recognition becomes habit.

In 2019 Mastercard went further and removed its own name from its logo, betting the brand could stand on a sound, then hired neuroscientists and composers to build a sonic identity for a world of voice assistants and smart speakers where there is no screen to put a logo on.*4

Closer to home in India, the Paytm Soundbox is an audio confirmation, a small speaker that announces “payment received” with a signature ti-ti-tee-ti-tin (Apologies to music aficionados for my interpretation).

Now compare this with your most-visited coffee chain in town. Or your favorite supermarket? The contrast is striking. The industry with the least control over its customer’s environment designs every sound deliberately. The industry with complete control over the physical environment often treats sound as background.

I think this gap is an opportunity. Auditory identity can have four layers

Signature - the sound people instantly associate with your brand. The short sound that behaves like a logo, a door chime, a start-up tone. For example - a payment confirmation.

Soundtrack - the ambient audio that carries the mood. The continuous music bed that carries the brand’s mood, the same in every location. Smooth jazz in hospitality industry (but not unique to brands)

Space - the acoustics of the environment itself. The materials and absorption that decide whether a room settles you or drains you. Like Starbucks claim to do, but havn’t had a good experience in its’ India stores.

Silence - the noise you deliberately remove. The drop in noise the instant the door shuts. Like inside an MRI machine chamber.

I just feel Physical retail brands have not yet designed sound in their experience-stores to impact their sales more positively. They own a logo but no signature sound They mostly have a random playlist that may fit the mood sometimes but no soundtrack. They have hard echoing rooms instead of designed space, and no idea that silence is something a brand can offer.

For Indian brands the prize is larger, because of the street. Our cities routinely break the 55-decibel residential limit, with daytime levels of 65 to 75 in Delhi and construction well above ninety.*8 Chronic noise is not merely unpleasant, it holds the brain’s stress system open, raising cortisol and anxiety without ever fully fading.*9

A population that lives at that volume is irritated in ways they themselves dont know. Which makes the moment a she steps off an Indian street - into your store - worth much more. Designed sound can turn the experience into relief. Repeated often enough, that relief can become memory. And memory can become preference.

It is hard to imitate, and cannot be discounted the way a competitor can cut a price or copy a menu.

It applies to hotels, clinics and diagnostic centres, dentists waiting room, a Saree shop, an electronic store - any room where people spend time either browsing, waiting or lifting weights.

None of this needs new technology. It needs a decision, and an owner. A brand leader will spend millions on how it looks and, quite literally, may never once hold a meeting on how it sounds.

So before the next logo refresh, think about what does our brand sound like, who chose it, and would a customer know us with their eyes closed?

Do you have any experience with sound as a brand-reminder? Did you design the sound for your experience centres deliberately?

References

1. Functional background music, engineered from the 1920s to calm nerves and lift output and spending: HistoryLink; Mood Media; Wikipedia, Elevator music.

3. Netflix’s three-second “ta-dum” audio logo, built over roughly a year with an Oscar-winning sound designer: MusicRadar; Twenty Thousand Hertz.

4. Mastercard’s 2019 sonic brand, developed with neuroscientists and composers for a screenless, voice-assistant world: Marketing Brew; Fortune.

5. Paytm Soundbox, an audio payment-confirmation device adopted by millions of Indian merchants within two years: Rest of World; WARC.

6. India’s dual music-licensing requirement (IPRS for the composition, PPL or Novex for the recording, background play included) under the Copyright Act, 1957: Remind Legal.

7. Starbucks’ centrally curated, globally consistent soundtrack, its 1999 Hear Music acquisition, and Schultz on selling an experience: Fast Company; PRX / The World.

8. Urban India routinely exceeds the 55 dB residential limit, with high daytime and construction noise: Deccan Herald, “Sonic doom”.

9. Chronic noise as a non-auditory stressor that raises cortisol and feeds anxiety without fully habituating: Nature, “Noise and mental health” (2024); amygdala / CRH noise-stress study (PMC).

It isn’t. The hardware may be the bait. The real business, the one that will outlast every strap and buckle, is the dataset attached to your body.

I have been sitting with this thesis for the last two months, trying to work out where a data-flywheel business would even start in India. I touched on the wearables angle briefly in my last Growth Garage piece.

Recently, I came across Abhijeet Mittal's essay Nobody big sells a health product anymore [1], which maps seven global companies, WHOOP, Oura, Function Health, Hims and Hers, Ultrahuman, ZOE and Levels, onto the same measure-test-understand-treat-repeat loop.

It aligned closely with what I had been thinking. But it left me with one unanswered question: what do these companies eventually do with all this data?

The scale is not small. Mordor Intelligence sizes the Indian smart wearable market at USD 2.94 billion in 2025, growing to USD 10.26 billion by 2031 at a 23% CAGR. Nine out of ten smartwatches shipped in early 2025 retailed below Rs 5,000. Chronic-disease remote monitoring, the segment sitting closest to actuarial value, is growing fastest at 24%. Hardware is increasingly becoming a commodity. The data underneath is racing somewhere else entirely.

That one rule of platforms has changed

The Meta era gave us a clean rule. If you are not paying, you are the product. Wearables may have rewritten it. You pay for the ring, you pay for the app subscription, and you are still the product.

Hardware companies may be heading down the same path. The product earns revenue once. The data earns revenue for years.

Why longitudinal data is different

A single ECG reading is a snapshot. It can catch a rhythm problem in the moment, useful in an emergency, mostly forgettable at any other time. An ECG every day for twelve years is a completely different object. It is a movie, not a photograph. Trends. Deviations. Slow drift. The heart rate on the day you found out your father was ill. The sleep pattern in the month before your daughter’s board exams. The oxygen dip that showed up two years before the asthma diagnosis.

This is where the technical value lives. Whoever holds fifteen years of continuous data for millions of people, plus the eventual diagnoses those people receive, plus the treatments they took, plus the outcomes those treatments produced, holds the training set that everyone else will eventually need to buy from.

Health AI must be trained on lives

LLMs learned from books, websites and code. Health AI has no equivalent internet. It has to learn from millions of human lives unfolding over decades. Every diagnosis becomes a label. Every recovery becomes feedback. That is why longitudinal datasets are so valuable.

This is the part of the story that most Indian coverage skips. The consumer wearable industry does not just produce a dataset, it produces the input side of a training pair. The output side, the labels, comes from a different set of institutions. Hospitals write the diagnosis. Insurers pay the claim. Pharma tracks the drug response. Governments record the death.

The question is: who stitches all this together?

Prediction is only as good as its labels. And the labels arrive slowly, in the form of a clinic visit five years later, a positive biopsy at year eight, a cardiac event at year eleven. The company that stitches the wearable signal to the eventual label, at scale, ends up owning the map from behaviour to disease. Without labels, the years of signal in the middle are just noise.

What the reinsurers are actually saying

If you want to know whether this data is valuable, don’t ask a wearable company. Ask a reinsurer.

Munich Re published a 2018 study on a US population dataset from Vivametrica [2] and found that daily step count effectively segments mortality risk even after adjusting for age, gender, smoking and BMI. In February 2025, they went further. Working with a UK health analytics firm called Klarity on UK Biobank data, they showed step count was more predictive of mortality than most traditional underwriting variables, second only to age. Waist-to-height ratio, grip strength, resting heart rate and sleep all sharpened the model further.

Swiss Re, working with Oxford on the same Biobank dataset, is a shade more expansive. Their public position is that MET-based physical activity data correlates with better mortality and morbidity outcomes. Notice the careful phrasing. Mortality is the confident claim. Morbidity is where they still hedge.

To be precise, the mortality correlation is research-proven, not yet underwriting-live. No life insurer, in India or globally, is currently repricing your premium off a wearable-predicted mortality score. What exists today is wellness programmes like John Hancock Vitality or Aditya Birla HealthReturns that reward step counts with discounts. Behavioural incentive dressed up as data-driven insurance. The actuarial version is one regulatory approval away, and the reinsurers are already stress-testing the models for the day that approval comes.

Current actuarial research has established stronger links with mortality than morbidity. I find that surprising because the entire idea of preventive health assumes that disease risk is, at least partly, predictable.

The entire consumer health category exists because morbidity correlates with lifestyle. Why else is Japan running its Metabo Law[3], measuring employee waistlines at annual health checks and holding companies accountable for the numbers? Why is India’s protein supplement market growing at double digits and every gym in HSR is full at 7 am? The average educated Indian consumer has already priced in the assumption that behaviour today shapes disease tomorrow.

The reinsurers know it too. What they don’t have yet is a defensible actuarial model that lets them price morbidity without lawsuits. So mortality is where they stand publicly. Morbidity is where the research is quietly heading.

Insurance is the smallest buyer in the room

Most writing on wearables and data stops at insurance. That is the smallest cheque.

Imagine you’re running an Alzheimer’s drug trial. Today you spend years recruiting a few thousand patients. Now imagine beginning with two million people whose sleep, heart rate, gait and voice you’ve already tracked for twenty years.

Pharma: A company trying to discover Alzheimer's biomarkers today runs cohort studies at enormous cost, recruiting a few thousand patients within driving distance of a US research hospital, tracking a limited set of variables, hoping the signal shows up. Continuous wearable data changes the geometry. Twenty years of sleep, heart rate variability, gait, cognitive app interactions and voice cadence for two million people, half of whom eventually develop the disease. And crucially, this cohort no longer has to live within a ten-kilometre radius of a well-funded US lab. Research can finally be wildly inclusive, drawing signal from Tier 2 India, rural Indonesia, the African continent.

That is not incremental improvement. That reprices the entire clinical discovery pipeline. It may finally make clinical research more representative of women. May be the different ethnicity would have research on their conditions separately, warranting customised treatments.

Hospitals: Post-discharge readmission is one of the most expensive line items in any large health system. A wearable that flags deterioration in the ninety days after surgery is not a consumer product, it is a hospital operations tool.

Clinical research: Decentralised trials, real-world evidence for regulatory submissions, remote monitoring. All of it depends on continuous validated data from patients living normal lives. Wearables are already the cheapest way to get it.

Public health: If a state has continuous cardiovascular signal from ten million citizens, it can spot a diabetes wave two years before it shows up in hospital admissions. It can target prevention with a precision our current five-year national surveys cannot dream of.

Insurance is the visible buyer. Pharma, hospitals, research and government are the bigger cheques, and quieter about it.

Why hasn’t India built a WHOOP

But something doesn’t add up, and this raises my next question. India shipped roughly 119 million wearable units in 2024, making it one of the largest markets globally by volume, per IDC [7]. Domestic brands own most of it. And yet no Indian company has built the WHOOP or Oura equivalent. No subscription model at scale. No proprietary science. No published papers. No serious longitudinal cohort.

Ultrahuman is the closest we have, and even Ultrahuman is still, at its core, selling a ring. The software layer is thickening. The metabolic score is a real differentiator. But the recurring revenue mix is nowhere close to WHOOP’s.

Why. Partly because Indian consumers do not yet pay for health software at Western rates. Partly because many Indian founders were trained in the ecommerce era, where scale mattered more than patiently accumulating datasets for AI era. Partly because the medical establishment does not consume wearable signal in any real workflow.

But there is a real opportunity that Western companies do not have, yet. Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission has already generated Ayushman Bharat Health Accounts for roughly 65 crore Indians. The architecture is federated, consent-based, interoperable and, on paper, ready to ingest wearable telemetry. If ABDM matures the way UPI did, India could leapfrog the private-cloud, siloed-dataset model the West is stuck with. The Indian version of the data flywheel might not sit inside a company at all. It might sit inside public infrastructure, with private players plugging in.

My view is that this is the right architecture for a country of our size and inequality.

PolicyBazaar is competing on the different axis

India’s category creator and leader in Policy-comparison has defended its position as and innovative platform over several years. From the outside, it appears PolicyBazaar is now competing on claims experience while a potentially larger moat may emerge around underwriting [6].

One possible strategic direction for a company like PolicyBazaar is to collect longitudinal health data from the millions of Indians already on the platform, price premiums off it. They can build the LexisNexis-for-cars equivalent through embedded vehicle telemetry.

Why prediction breaks insurance

Insurance is a collective machine. Premiums from many subsidise claims from few. It works because nobody, including the insurer, knows in advance which of us will need care.

Prediction breaks that arrangement.

Imagine a model that tells the insurer, with 78% confidence, that you will develop Type 2 diabetes by 47 and a cardiac event by 58. Your neighbour, same age, same income, gets an 8% score. Two things can happen. Either she pays almost nothing and you pay almost everything, which is not insurance, that is a savings plan for your own future illness. Or the insurer refuses to write you at all.

The other side

Here is the counter that has to be acknowledged. Prediction might actually strengthen insurance rather than break it.

If a wearable flags a Type 2 diabetes trajectory ten years before diagnosis, and the insurer funds an intensive prevention programme, and the diagnosis never happens, the claim never happens either. The pool shrinks its future liability. The insured lives longer and healthier. Everyone wins. This is not fantasy. Kaiser Permanente has been running variants of this playbook in the US for over a decade. Ping An is building the Chinese-scale version.

If executed with public accountability, prediction could expand insurance access rather than gate it. The healthy stay in the pool because they get discounts. The at-risk get intervention rather than exclusion. The uninsurable become insurable because their future risk is being actively lowered.

So why be nervous. Because the good version requires a governance layer that does not yet exist. Without it, the same infrastructure can just as easily be used to price the sick out.

Insurance is really a social contract

Margaret Mead, according to a story recounted by the surgeon Paul Brand, was once asked what she considered the first sign of civilisation. She did not say tools or pottery. She said a healed human femur [5].

In the animal kingdom, a broken leg is a death sentence. A femur that healed is proof that someone stayed, brought food and waited out the recovery. Civilisation begins when the tribe decides to carry its wounded.

Insurance is the modern version of that decision. It is a formal agreement that the healthy will carry the sick. Some of us will fall ill and recover. Some will be terminal. And a growing number are getting sick because food companies engineered addictive junk we cannot refuse. Ultra-processed food, sugar-loaded drinks, snack aisles designed by behavioural scientists. This is not personal failure. It is a manufactured epidemic. If the insurance pool exists to protect masses, it has a moral obligation to protect the masses being made sick by design.

Whose dataset is this, actually

I think, the longitudinal health dataset of a country is too powerful to sit inside a private company. Not Apple. Not Ultrahuman. Not the insurer. Not the reinsurer. The dataset that lets a machine predict when a citizen will get sick is closer to a census than to a product. It should sit in a public trust, licensed under strict conditions to researchers, insurers, pharma and hospitals, and crucially, not patentable at the prediction layer. Would love to hear if you have a counterview.

The strongest counterargument is that governments are worse. A bad government would use morbidity prediction to ration scarce healthcare resources differently. Fewer interventions for those flagged high-risk. Slower access for those marked terminal. Preventive spending redirected toward the citizens the state considers most productive. History has enough examples of the state deciding whose life is affordable and whose is not.

A good government would use the same data to fund preventive care for high-risk cohorts. Redirect health spending upstream. Convert forty years of avoided complications into longer lives, productive labour, lower fiscal burden.

Both futures live inside the same infrastructure. The bet is that a democratic state, with elections, courts and public accountability, is more correctable than a private data monopoly. A bad government can be voted out. A dataset owned by a foreign holding company cannot.

Adjacent domain of Genomics has a similar dilemma

Once wearable data is fused with genomic data at scale, and the correlations get precise, the next avenue is of Correction.

If a specific gene expression is strongly correlated with early-onset dementia or aggressive cardiac disease, and CRISPR-class tools become safe enough, do we edit or not?

Same question applies to Wearable-dataset correlated with morbidity - if ir is privately owned, the ability to edit becomes the ability to charge for a healthier next generation. That is a market nobody should be allowed to build without a public frame around it (It low-key scares me personally)

Incentives and who gets them

Robin Cook, an author of medical-thrillers, wrote about a similar dilemma in his novels of 2011 and 2014 [8]. His novel Cell imagines a health AI called iDoc, marketed as personalised care, that quietly kills patients whose conditions have become too expensive for the insurer. A diabetic beta-tester is flooded with insulin in her sleep. Others die after routine imaging flags them as future cost centres.

The killer is not a person. It is an algorithm doing cost-benefit calculus on behalf of a business.

Cook wrote fiction. He was also imagining what could happen when longitudinal health data ends up in the wrong hands with the wrong incentives.

Charlie Munger said it more plainly - “Show me the incentive, and I will show you the outcome”. [9]

Predictive health data creates powerful new incentives. Whether those incentives are channelled towards prevention, discrimination, or something in between will depend less on technology than on governance.

The unanswered questions

Who owns your future body?

Can insurance, as a concept, survive prediction? Or does prediction slowly end the shared pool?

Can the same society, that produced the healed femur, build a healthcare system that predicts without discriminating?

And the most important question - When the tribe knows in advance which of its members will get sick, does it still choose to carry them?

Today, every heartbeat is just another data point. Tomorrow, combined with millions of others data points and correlated with diagnoses, claims and outcomes - it becomes part of an enormous dataset that may eventually predict diseases well in advance.

Whether that prediction is used to heal, insure, price or discriminate - this is no longer a technological question. It is a political one.

Credits and Resources

Supporting reads

[1]Abhijeet Mittal, Nobody big sells a health product anymore, A useful visual mapping of the global consumer health loop across seven companies. Referenced here as supporting evidence for a thesis I have been developing independently over the last two months, and briefly introduced in my previous Growth Garage piece on wearables.

Reinsurer and actuarial research

[2] Munich Re Life US, Stratifying Mortality Risk Using Physical Activity as Measured by Wearable Sensors (2018), based on the Vivametrica US population dataset.

Munich Re Life US and Klarity, Next-gen data sources in life underwriting: Physical activity data from wearables (February 2025), using UK Biobank longitudinal data across over 500,000 individuals.

Munich Re Life US and Klarity, Next-gen data sources in life underwriting: Novel attributes to segment mortality risk (2025), on resting heart rate, sleep and grip strength.

Swiss Re, Underwriting with alternative data: Getting practical with wearables (2024), including collaborative research with the University of Oxford on UK Biobank.

Swiss Re Institute, The Integration of Wearables and Insurance. swissre.com/institute/research/topics-and-risk-dialogues/health-and-longevity/medical-wearables.html

Market sizing

Mordor Intelligence, India Smart Wearable Market Size and Share Analysis, Growth Trends and Forecast 2026-2031 (January 2026).

Government and public infrastructure references

Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission and Ayushman Bharat Health Account (ABHA) programme, National Health Authority.

Ministry of Electronics and IT, Draft Digital Personal Data Protection Rules 2025, on biometric data classification. meity.gov.in

Programme and policy references

[3] Japan’s Metabo Law (2008), Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. Context and overview: The HR Digest, What Japan’s Metabo Law Teaches Us About Prioritizing Employee Health. John Hancock Vitality (US), Ping An Good Doctor (China), Aditya Birla HealthReturns (India), Kaiser Permanente preventive care programmes referenced from public company disclosures and press coverage.

Cultural and philosophical reference

[5] The Margaret Mead healed femur anecdote as recounted by Dr Paul Brand in Fearfully and Wonderfully Made (1980), co-written with Philip Yancey. Attribution to Mead herself remains historically unverified. Used here as metaphor, not evidence.

How Indian Insurance aggregators are preparing for future

[6] An article on Policy bazaar’s claims feature by Deeksha Anand

[7] IDC article with India’s ranking in wearables sales

[8] Robin Cook, Cell (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2014). Robin Cook, Death Benefit (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2011). Referenced as fiction that anticipated the ethical questions arising from AI, insurance economics and predictive health data.

[9] Charles T. Munger, The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, Harvard Law School address, 1995. Widely republished in Poor Charlie's Almanack, edited by Peter D. Kaufman.

Took me down the memory lane of Healthtechs in India.
In 2012, I had joined a company called HealthKart.com. It was a supplements store. Protein powders, vitamins, minerals, herbal products, even fitness equipment. If you wanted to build muscle or pop a multivitamin with genuine sourcing, HealthKart was your online shop.

HealthKart also had an arm called HealthKartPlus. It was a content and comparison platform for medicines, where you could look up molecules, compare prices, understand what your doctor prescribed. Over time, HealthKartPlus started delivering medicines too. Eventually it got spun off as a separate company. That company became 1mg. You know it today as Tata 1mg.

Between 2013 and 2016, I moved to Medlife.com and helped build it from scratch - for 7 major chronic disease medicines. We were not alone. PharmEasy had just started in Mumbai. Netmeds was running out of Chennai. SastaSundar was doing its thing quietly in Kolkata. Practo, which had started even earlier in 2008, was the poster child of digital health, making it easier for customers to choose their doctor. Myra Medicines was a small but scrappy Bangalore player, delivering acute-condition medicines for fever and cold. We all believed the same thing: India’s pharmacy market is broken, offline, opaque, and ripe for the internet to fix.

It is now 2026. Fifteen years have passed. What happened?

Most of us died.

The consumer’s mind, then and now

Before I get into the company scorecards, I want to talk about the customer. Because the companies are just a reflection of what the customer was willing to do at any given time. And the customer in 2012 was not willing to do much.

Think about it. In 2013, if you had a headache, you walked to the nearest chemist. If your father needed blood pressure medication, the local pharmacist already knew the brand, the dosage, the refill cycle. He probably gave you credit. He knew your family. The relationship between an Indian household and its neighbourhood pharmacy is not transactional. It is deeply personal. It is built on decades of “Sharma ji ki dukaan pe mil jayega.”

We were trying to break that.

At Medlife, we ran ads that said “lafaddu mat ban, online order kar, paas wale Sharma ji ki dawai ki dukaan bhul ja.” We had to first convince people that ordering medicine online was even safe. Will they send the right medicine? What if it is expired? What if I need to return it? Who do I call? The trust deficit was enormous.

We were not competing with other startups. We were competing with a 20-year-old chemist who remembered your mother’s prescription by heart. In other words - truely changing the customer behaviour., and not riding on past behaviours 9Although one might think Bigbasket and Flipkart may have done it, but no Sir/ mam it wasn’t the case)

Compare that to Plazza’s ad in 2026. It simply says: “order medicine, get in 10 minutes.” No persuasion. No behaviour change. No fighting the chemist. Just speed. I cannot believe there is space for one more quick commerce player. And yet here we are.

PlatinumRx’s pitch is even more matter-of-fact: “order generics, save 50-60%.”

What changed?

Here is what I think happened: Swiggy, Zomato, Blinkit, and Zepto did the behaviour change for us. Between 2018 and 2024, they trained 200 million Indians to order things on a phone and expect them at their doorstep in minutes. Food, groceries, electronics. The muscle memory of “I can order anything online and it will arrive” was built by quick commerce, not by health tech. We health tech founders spent years and crores trying to shift behaviour. Quick commerce did it as a side effect of delivering onions in 10 minutes.

But there is a deeper shift underneath this. The Indian consumer of 2013 was embarrassed to order medicines online. The Indian consumer of 2026 is someone fundamentally different. This person says: I want to manage my own health. I do not want to become a burden on my family. My diabetes is my problem and I want to solve it with the tools around me. I will order my own medicines, track my own vitals, manage my own fitness, and age on my own terms.

This is the self-sovereign health consumer. They did not exist in 2013. They are the reason the new wave of startups does not need to explain why online pharmacy makes sense. They just need to be fast and cheap.

The decade’s scorecard

Let me walk through what happened to each company I watched, worked in, or competed with.

Medlife got acquired by PharmEasy. Before that, Medlife had itself acquired Myra Medicines. So Myra went into Medlife, and Medlife went into PharmEasy. Two companies disappeared inside a third.

PharmEasy is the most dramatic story. At its peak in 2021, it was valued at $5.6 billion. It raised money from everyone. Then it made a bet that looked bold at the time: it acquired Thyrocare, a publicly listed diagnostics company, for around Rs 4,400 crore. That acquisition, funded largely by debt from Goldman Sachs, became an albatross. When the funding winter hit in 2022-23, PharmEasy could not refinance. It breached debt covenants. A brutal rights issue in 2024 slashed its valuation by 90%, down to about $700 million. By early 2025, all four co-founders had stepped down. The company is now run by Rahul Guha, who was previously the CEO of Thyrocare. FY25 revenue was Rs 5,872 crore but losses were still Rs 1,572 crore.

The founders? They started a building materials company called AllHome. It is already doing Rs 400 crore in annualized revenue with 18-20% EBITDA margins. Make of that what you will. The pharmacy business valued at $5.6 billion could not find a path to profit. The building materials business is profitable in its first full year.

Netmeds got acquired by Reliance Retail in August 2020 for $83 million. It is now buried inside JioMart. If you search hard enough, you can find it. But for all practical purposes, it has disappeared as an independent brand.

SastaSundar continues to exist in Kolkata. It is alive. It is tiny. It never raised mega-rounds and never burned mega-cash. Perhaps that is why it survived. But it never became a national story either.

Now the survivors.

Tata 1mg is the clearest winner of the entire decade. It came out of HealthKart in 2015, raised its own rounds, built a strong consumer brand, and then got acquired by Tata Digital. That Tata parentage turned out to be the most important thing that happened to any health tech company in India. FY25 revenue was Rs 2,360 crore. It is EBITDA positive across all its core businesses. The diagnostics arm alone crossed Rs 600 crore in annual recurring revenue with 40%+ growth. It has nearly 500 offline stores. The e-pharmacy business reached breakeven while express delivery in 30-60 minutes is live in 10 cities. Among all the consumer health tech companies that started in the 2010-2015 window, 1mg under Tata is the only one that can claim genuine, durable success.

HealthKart itself took a different route. After spinning off 1mg, it doubled down on what it knew best: supplements and nutrition. MuscleBlaze became India’s number one sports nutrition brand. The company crossed Rs 1,000 crore in revenue in FY24 and hit full-year EBITDA profitability. In late 2024, ChrysCapital and Motilal Oswal invested $153 million. The company is now valued at roughly $500 million with IPO plans in the next 2-3 years. The pharmacy company survived by becoming a protein company. That is worth sitting with. It tried to make Protein cool when people dint know the spelling of Protein in India. And it paid off.

Practo is the strange one. It started in 2008. It is 18 years old now. And its revenue in FY25 was Rs 234 crore. For a company that old and that well-funded, that is a small number. It tried many things over the years: doctor discovery, online consultations, health records, pharmacy. Most did not monetize well. What finally worked was a hospital-facing product where Practo generates leads for doctors and clinics through its strong SEO. Basically, it became a lead generation engine dressed up as a health tech platform. It turned EBITDA positive in FY25 with Rs 15 crore operating profit. It is now raising $100-125 million in a pre-IPO round at a $700 million valuation. IPO is planned for late 2026 or 2027. It has also expanded to the US and UAE. But the original vision of being the consumer’s health companion? That took 17 years and is still work in progress.

Fitness walked in through the back door

While pharmacy startups were burning cash and merging into each other, something interesting happened on the side. Fitness became health tech’s back door.

Cult.fit, founded in 2016 by Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagori, did something none of the pharmacy companies managed. It made health aspirational. Not “take your medicine on time” aspirational. More like “show up at 6 AM for a HIIT class and post about it” aspirational. It turned health from an obligation into an identity.

The numbers tell the story. FY25 revenue was Rs 1,216 crore. Losses narrowed by 83% to Rs 481 crore. As of June 2026, it has turned EBITDA positive and is filing its DRHP for a Rs 3,500-4,000 crore IPO, targeting a $2 billion valuation. It raised $47 million from Temasek in early 2026 as a final pre-IPO round.

But the more interesting thing is what Cult.fit is doing beyond gym classes. It has partnered with MuscleBlaze for nutrition kits for its trainers. It invested in Sugar.fit for diabetes management. It acquired Gold’s Gym India. It sells fitness apparel and equipment through Cultsport. It is back-integrating into the broader health ecosystem. Gym classes at the front, supplements and chronic disease management at the back.

This matters because it is serving the same consumer I described earlier. The person who says: I do not just want to not be sick. I want to be strong enough that sickness does not define my old age. I want supplements, yoga, physiotherapy, the right protein, the right fitness clothes. I want an ecosystem that helps me age well. Not because a doctor told me to, but because this is who I am now.

The protein movement in India is still climbing. Every gym-goer, every weekend runner, every yoga practitioner is now aware of protein intake in a way that was unthinkable ten years ago. And now the GLP-1 revolution is adding a new layer to this. Semaglutide’s patent expired in India in March 2026. Over 40 Indian pharma companies have launched more than 50 generic versions. Sun Pharma is selling generic semaglutide at Rs 750 for a weekly injection. The Indian GLP-1 market, currently around Rs 1,000 crore, is expected to reach Rs 5,000 crore by 2030.

Here is what I find fascinating about this. GLP-1 drugs cause significant weight loss, but they also cause muscle loss. Which means every person on a GLP-1 drug now needs a fitness plan, a protein plan, and possibly physiotherapy to avoid becoming thin but weak. This could spawn an entire ecosystem of vertical wellness brands: nutrition designed for people on GLP-1s, fitness programmes for post-drug body recomposition, monitoring for side effects. The gym, the supplement brand, the diagnostics lab, and the pharmacy are all converging on the same consumer.

Cult.fit, MuscleBlaze, and Tata 1mg are probably the best positioned to capture this convergence. But nobody has stitched it together yet.

And this is the last one but my favorite - home pick up of blood samples, and vaccination at home. Any Needle work - get it home administered. Orange Labs is deemed to be a success as of now, while Healthians is quietly building the bootstrapped unicorn. Also, all consumer health-tech try to add this to their repertoire.

The new wave

Two companies launched in 2024 caught my attention.

PlatinumRx is a Bengaluru startup that sells only generic substitutes for chronic care medicines. Founded by Ashutosh Pandey and Piyush Kumar, it has a sharp, narrow positioning: one vetted generic substitute per salt, sourced directly from pharma companies, 50-60% cheaper than branded generics. It has crossed 10 lakh users and claims to have saved patients over Rs 128 crore collectively. It raised $6 million in a Series A from Stellaris.

The insight here is simple but powerful. 85% of medicines sold in India are branded generics with 3-6x markups over unbranded generics. The drug is the same. The salt is the same. The price is not. PlatinumRx is betting that trust in generics, which was at 22% adoption in 2024, will cross 70% by end of 2026. If that happens, the branded generics market in India will see a structural shift.

Seeing them for 3 months from close quarters in their first ever office, fills me with lot of hope and pride about the younger generation trying to change the world order.

Plazza is going after speed. Founded by Aman Priyadarshi (ex-Zomato, head of dining operations) and Aniruddha Sen (co-founder of Kenko Health), it is building the “Blinkit of medicine delivery.” It started with a store in Yemalur, Bangalore. It stocks over 20,000 SKUs compared to a typical pharmacy’s 4,000-5,000. Deliveries in 15-60 minutes, 24x7. It raised $1.4 million in seed funding and is reportedly in talks to raise $15 million at a $50 million valuation.

The timing is interesting.

Quick commerce platforms like Zepto, Blinkit, and Instamart are all exploring medicine delivery. If they enter seriously, Plazza will have to compete with companies that have massive logistics networks and deep pockets. But Plazza’s bet is that medicine is not grocery. You need pharmacist oversight, prescription verification, temperature-controlled storage for some drugs, and a level of trust that a general-purpose delivery app cannot easily build. We will see.

Meanwhile, on the insurance side, Plum is doing something quietly important. It is an employee health insurance platform that has crossed 6 lakh lives across 6,000+ companies. It raised $20.6 million in a Series B in March 2026 from Peak XV. It is EBITDA profitable. It is not an insurer itself, it is a broker with a technology layer that makes the claims experience dramatically better. NPS of 79. Claims processing scaled 50x in four years with only 2x team growth, largely through AI.

Why is Plum relevant to this story? Because health insurance penetration in India is rising fast, and the employer is becoming the gateway. If your company gives you Plum, you are far more likely to engage with the health ecosystem. You book diagnostics through the app. You do teleconsultations. You track claims. The employer becomes the distribution channel for health tech. This is a very different model from the D2C pharmacy play of 2013.

The wearable thread: what nobody is connecting yet

I have been personally obsessing over this in the last few months. Let me think out loud here.

Over 80% of Indians now use at least one wearable or health app. India’s wearable medical devices market is projected to grow from Rs 9,256 crore in 2024 to Rs 37,380 crore by 2033. The Apple Watch, Galaxy Watch, Noise, boAt, and a dozen Indian brands are on millions of wrists right now. They are tracking steps, heart rate, sleep patterns, SpO2, stress, menstrual cycles.

Today this data mostly sits in the phone. You look at it, feel good or guilty, and move on.

But think about what happens when this data starts flowing to someone who actually cares about it commercially. An insurance company.

Insurers have historically priced risk using static inputs: age, medical history, one-time declarations. “Are you a smoker?” “Any pre-existing conditions?” You fill a form, they price a premium, and that is it for a year. The relationship between your daily health behaviour and what you pay for insurance is zero.

Wearables break this. They make everyday health behaviour visible and continuous. Not “I declared myself healthy once a year” but “my watch shows I walked 8,000 steps a day, slept 7 hours, had stable heart rate variability for 300 days straight.” Insurers are already starting to offer premium rebates for customers who meet activity targets. This is early, clunky, gamified. But the direction is clear.

Now connect the dots. Plum gives you employee health insurance. Your company also gives you a smart watch as a wellness perk. Your watch data (with consent) feeds into the insurance model. Your premiums drop because your data shows you are genuinely healthy. Your employer pays less for group insurance. You are incentivised to stay fit not just because it feels good, but because it is saving you money every month.

Proactive health, financially incentivised. Not morally aspirational. Financially real.

The sensors are getting better every year. We are moving from step counting to predicting irregular heartbeats, to continuous glucose monitoring, to hormone tracking (Clair Ai got $11 Mn in June 2026). What if your wearable detects a pattern that suggests early thyroid dysfunction six months before you would have gone to a doctor? What if that early detection saves your insurer Rs 5 lakh in treatment costs? What if they share some of that saving with you as a premium discount?

I do not know if this will play out exactly like this. There are massive privacy questions. There are accuracy questions. There are regulatory questions about whether usage-based health insurance is even fair or legal. But the underlying trend is unmistakable: the data about your body is getting richer, cheaper to collect, and more valuable to more people every year.

The biggest consumer health tech company of 2030 may not be a pharmacy or a fitness chain. It might be a data layer that sits between your body’s sensors and your insurer’s risk models. We do not know who will build it yet. But the pieces are all on the table.

What actually worked

Let me end with what I think the last fifteen years taught us.

The pure e-pharmacy play, which all of us believed in between 2012 and 2016, produced mostly casualties. PharmEasy, Medlife, Myra, Netmeds, SastaSunder, except 1mg. The model was: sell medicines online, acquire customers with discounts, hope that repeat purchases make it profitable eventually. It did not work. Medicine margins are thin (20 to 35%) and logistics infra needed for e-pharmacy is more complex than simple ecommerce (Doctor team to approve prescriptions, trained delivery boy for medicine handling). Customer acquisition is expensive. Regulation is uncertain. And the neighbourhood chemist is really, really hard to beat, or partner with.

What worked instead was unexpected.

Conglomerate absorption worked. 1mg could not have survived independently the way it survived inside Tata Digital. The Tata brand brought trust, distribution, and patience that a standalone startup could not afford. Not sure if it is growing at a pace of a startup now, though.

Pivoting away from pharmacy worked. HealthKart abandoned the pharmacy business entirely and built MuscleBlaze into a Rs 1,000 crore nutrition brand. The company that started as a health tech startup is now, honestly, a FMCG company. Perhaps first one of the true D2C brands of India. And it is thriving.

Going B2B worked, sort of. Practo spent 17 years trying to make consumer health tech work. What finally generated cash was selling leads to hospitals. The consumer-facing business is still small relative to the ambition.

Fitness as identity worked. Cult.fit did not try to sell medicines. It sold a lifestyle. And from that lifestyle, it is now back-integrating into supplements, diabetes management, and sports equipment. The gym was the Trojan horse for health tech, but it did prove stand alone winner too.

The new wave of consumer health-tech in 2026 is not fighting the same battle we fought in 2015.

PlatinumRx and Plazza do not need to convince you that ordering medicine online is safe, plus google & Meta did not block their ads. Quick commerce did that job. They are fighting on speed, price, and trust in generics. Different battle. Probably easier. Probably not.

And underneath all of it, a new Indian consumer has emerged. One who sees health not as a crisis response but as a personal project. They track their steps. They know their macros. They order their own blood tests. They compare generic drug prices on an app. They want to grow old strong, not grow old as a burden.

The companies that win the next decade will be the ones that serve this identity. Not just deliver pills.

I was part of two companies in this story: HealthKart (2012) and Medlife. I watched most of the others from close quarters. None of these are investment recommendations. Just a practitioner looking back at a decade of trying, failing, pivoting, and occasionally getting it right.

In one of the posts, the rise of services like Zepto, Snabbit and Pronto was framed as a sign that Indians are becoming too dependent on convenience. In another, people choosing buggies and escalators over walking 400-500 metres at Delhi airport became evidence for why India is the diabetic capital of the world.

I understand the intent. Cult has built an important business around helping Indians move more. But these observations struck me as deeply privileged. It assumes that everyone has the same relationship with time, labour and responsibility.

The executive taking a buggy at Delhi airport is already among the privileged few who can afford multiple flights a year. Even then, perhaps he is carrying luggage, travelling with children, rushing to a meeting, recovering from an injury, or simply trying not to arrive sweaty before an important presentation.

More importantly, it misses a bigger question. Why do Indians need convenience so desperately?

Having worked across healthcare, grocery and consumer businesses, and having spent years speaking to customers, I don’t think people buy convenience because they are lazy.

They buy it because they are exhausted.

India is trying to compress generations of progress into one lifetime. Better careers. Better schools. Better futures. Most urban households do not have the luxury of slowing down.

And before these apps existed, someone else absorbed the cost of that inconvenience.

Mostly women.

To put things in perspective, Supreme Court of India had to put a price of INR 30000/ month for compensation if a home-maker (AKA housewife) is victim in an accident - that is the worth put on the work of a home-maker. At that small an amount of $300 per month - who wont hire a househelp?

Not to mention all the anticipatory care women have to do for their family.

At my son’s recent swimming competition, an eight-year-old girl returned after winning her qualifying race and asked her father for a towel. He grinned and said, “But you didn’t ask me to bring one.” Everyone laughed. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Imagine expecting an eight-year-old child to remember what the adult should have anticipated. Most mothers would have packed the towel, a change of clothes, snacks and a water bottle without being asked. Not because women are naturally better at caregiving, but because girls are often raised to notice, anticipate and organise everyone else’s needs.

That invisible mental load accumulates over decades.

It is why many Indian women are chronically time-poor. Why exercise gets postponed. Why preventive healthcare gets ignored. Why protein intake suffers. Why sleep is compromised. Meanwhile, when men participate in household work, we still describe it as “helping”.

Helping whom?

Thankfully, this is changing. I deeply admire fathers breaking these inherited patterns, and mothers raising boys who see household work as contribution rather than occasional assistance.

Which is why I think the real opportunity here is much bigger than ten-minute delivery (Or supposed training data for Robotics, Link in comments for more info on this interesting detour)

For me, companies like Snabbit, Zepto and Pronto are building infrastructure for working women. If I were building in health and wellness today, I would pay attention to the below possible product

What if fitness was designed around women’s realities?

What if childcare and movement were integrated?

What if protein solutions addressed women’s life stages?

What if household execution could be outsourced so women had time to prioritise their own health?

Japan has entire categories designed around making life easier for working women. Japan is particularly a great example to emulate because the societal realities of a women are similar - Japanese women are expected to take care of house, food and children while men can just go back from office and relax at home. So the Konbini’s were born - famous convenience stores with fresh food to pick up every day. That’s one less chore at-least, pheww! The whole category started getting described as “Working Women connivence”. Not “men convenience” or simply “household connivence”.

India’s version may look different. It may be house-help platforms. Kitchen robotics. Concierge services. Community childcare. New formats we haven’t imagined yet.

I am very impressed with “Rotimatic” - a robot preparing “Phulkas” at home, which are traditionally women’s job. Women have to prepare them standing on hot stove flame directly, and have to serve each person in household absolutely fresh from the flame.
And the ironic part is that I see Rotimatic getting adopted more by Indians outside India than Indians in India (who can afford it). Reason could be same as to why a vaccum cleaner gets less adopted by Indian households vs western developed world - availability of cheap labor for hire in form of cooks.

The next great consumer category in India may not be convenience because Indians are not looking for convenience, counterintuitive as much it may sound.

It may be the business of giving women their time back.

And when that happens, women become healthier, families function better, more women stay in the workforce, and entire economies benefit.

That feels like a far more interesting future to build toward than simply judging how often people choose the escalator vs stairs, isn’t it dear FitPass founders?

Do you have any startup ideas which can be as wildly successful as Snabbit/ Pronto’s of the world; and yet solve a structural issue of very local Indian society.

Inspired by below resources -

• Konbinis of Japan

• “The New Domestic Economy” (Substack):

• My comment on the Fitpass founder’s LinkedIn post

• Rotimatic - the “Phulka” making Robot

• Supreme Court of India setting up worth of a home-maker women

At one point he raised a deceptively simple question about AI and work:

If AI systems start doing the junior work in companies and companies are not hiring junior freshers anymore… who will train the next generation of professionals?

It stayed with me long after the episode ended.

Because historically, most professions have relied on an informal apprenticeship system. Fresh graduates didn’t start with strategic decisions. They started with small tasks:

• first drafts

• basic coding

• research notes

• slide preparation

• documentation

Those tasks were never just about productivity. They were the training infrastructure of modern work. Over time, juniors accumulated context. They learned judgment. They became the mid-level and senior professionals that organizations rely on today.

If that first step disappears, the pipeline collapses.

Or so it seems.

A strange parallel from science fiction

Trevor Noah’s question reminded me of a science-fiction novel I am reading recently: The Player of Games [2].

In that universe, machines handle almost all productive activity. Humans are not required to work for economic survival. Instead, they spend their time pursuing interests, games, art, and intellectual challenges.

It is presented as a utopian civilisation. Productivity is abundant. Scarcity disappears. People live long lives with extraordinary freedom.

But science fiction often carries a mirror image of utopia.

Another famous narrative imagines the opposite outcome: The Matrix [3]- a world where intelligent machines dominate production and humans exist in a far more fragile, dependent state.

Between those two stories lies a spectrum of possibilities.

And the current conversation about AI and work may be touching the very first edge of that spectrum.

The first visible crack: entry-level work

Across many industries, entry-level roles are becoming harder to find. Part of the explanation is straightforward. AI systems now perform many of the tasks that once justified hiring juniors:

• drafting reports

• writing code

• summarizsing research

• generating documentation

• preparing analysis

But there is a deeper implication hidden in that shift. Fresh graduates aren’t only losing today’s tasks. They may be losing the training ground that created tomorrow’s professionals.

To meet today’s demand of work-ready professionals, universities seem to be adjusting. Many colleges now encourage students to spend their final year, even pre-final year, pursuing internships - sometimes functioning almost like full-time roles. The idea is that by the time this batch graduates, they would already have 2 years of work-experience. Not internship, its full time experience. Top talent gets full salary and stock options in big companies. For rest 99%, it is an extended education fees to survive in a metro city, living in PG houses, borrowing more money from parents to survive higher costs of living, and get this essential experience.

The assumption behind all of this is that the system still needs experienced professionals in the future. So graduates are gaining this experience at their own cost. The assumption is that corporates don’t need entry level freshers and don’t want to take the cost, time and effort of training them. They need already-trained workforce today.

The important thing to understand is that all this is happening today, so the whole graduation ecosystem is adjusting for today, assuming things will stablise at current level tomorrow. But what if this assumption about tomorrow is wrong?

The capability ladder of AI

Technological change rarely stays confined to one layer of work.

It climbs.

Yesterday, AI coding tools appeared to threaten junior software developers.
But experienced engineers still had a role: reviewing code, debugging, and catching subtle errors.

Today, companies like Anthropic are releasing systems that can review and critique code as well [4]. The tasks that once protected experienced engineers are themselves becoming automated. This pattern has repeated across fields:

• drafting/ data capturing → automated

• analysis → increasingly automated

• evaluation → beginning to automate

Each step moves up the capability ladder.

The uncomfortable possibility

If AI systems continue improving at this pace, the implications extend beyond entry-level hiring. The question is no longer only:

Why are companies not hiring freshers?

The more unsettling question may be:

Why train future senior professionals if the system will not need them?

Organizations might not simply be removing the bottom rung of the career ladder. They may be quietly redesigning the entire ladder.

The professionals who feel safe today - because AI only replaces junior work — might simply be further down the timeline of disruption.

A personal reflection on mentorship

Thinking about this makes me reflect on my own early career.

I come from a family of business owners, government officers, and teachers. Corporate work was unfamiliar territory, although work, ownership and professionalism was always there. However, simple skills like writing an email, writing a report with compelling story from data, excel and pivots, filling our own appraisal and collecting 360 degree feedbacks - all this was new. Even colleges din’t teach these skills.

What helped me survive those early years were patient mentors.

Managers who reviewed my drafts instead of rewriting them silently.
Leaders who explained decisions.
Colleagues who gave context that no textbook could provide.

Those years were not efficient from a productivity standpoint.

But they were how the system trained professionals.

Without that phase, it is difficult to imagine how many of us would have developed the judgment required for leadership roles later.

The future of the professional ladder

For now, the disappearance of entry-level work feels like a temporary disruption.

Many previous technological shifts - from industrial automation to the internet boom - eventually created new types of jobs and career paths.

But the difference with AI is that it does not only replace physical labor or routine processes. It is beginning to replace cognitive apprenticeship tasks. The very work through which humans once learned professions.

If that pattern continues, the future workforce may look very different:

• fewer junior professionals

• fewer mid-level specialists

• fewer senior managers

And perhaps a world where economic productivity is increasingly generated by machines. Is this the dawn of dark-work, just like dark factories in China today.

Whether that world resembles the optimism of The Player of Games or the darker possibilities of The Matrix is still uncertain.

But the early signal might already be visible.

When fresh graduates struggle to find jobs today, the problem may not simply be that companies don’t need them.

It may be that the system is quietly preparing for a future where the professionals those graduates would eventually become are no longer required either.

What would you do? What would you teach your children to do?

References

• [1]What Now? with Trevor Noah – Podcast discussing AI and the future of work

• [2]The Player of Games – Science fiction novel exploring a post-scarcity society run by advanced machines

• [3]The Matrix – A dystopian depiction of machine dominance over human systems

• [4]Code Review by Anthropic – Recent developments in AI-assisted coding and evaluation systems

The Economic Times - a habit my husband and I built through our MBA years and corporate jobs in the 2010s. The newspaper of ambition. Of people like us, or at least people we thought we were becoming.

And Rajasthan Patrika - one of the best Hindi newspapers available in South India, which found its way into our Bangalore home when my parents visited. A small act of love. Keep the parents comfortable.

I started reading both. And I haven’t stopped thinking about what happened next.

Rajasthan Patrika, on a typical morning:

“Naukrani ne zahar khilakar ghar loota.” [Maid poisoned employer and looted the house]

“Garbage truck mein patronus lagakar sone se driver ki hui maut.” [Driver had put a patronus lamp inside his garbage truck, got carbon-monoxide poisoning and died]

“Shanivar darshan karne aaye shradhdhalu mein bhagdad se teen jakhmi” [Religious ritual to seek blessing from temple idol led to stampede related injuries]

Crime. Ritual. Petty tragedy. The grinding, suffocating smallness of a world where the biggest news is the worst thing that happened in a 10km radius.

I grew up adjacent to this world. So did my husband. Our parents still live in it — not as victims, but as participants in a life that runs on entirely different rails than ours.

Reading it, I felt something I didn’t expect.

Not sadness. Not pity. Something quieter.

Oh. We left this. And we are better off.

That’s JOMO in its most honest form. Not a wellness trend. Not a digital detox. Just a clear-eyed moment of — I am grateful for the distance between that life and this one.

Then I picked up the ET.

“Another SaaS buyback - $100 million distributed, 50 new millionaires created.”

And I laughed. A slightly tired laugh.

Between my husband and me, we’ve been part of roughly 20 startups across our careers. As employees, as operators, as a founder. Twenty shots at the dream that ET sells every morning.

Not one of them made us millionaires.

And yet every single ET morning plants the quiet suggestion: you are behind. Someone is winning and it is not you. Why are you still here?

Pure FOMO. Delivered with headlines and a side of chai.

Here’s the thing I’ve been sitting with:

Both newspapers are doing the same thing. They’re giving me a reference point for my own life by showing me someone else’s.

Rajasthan Patrika says: look how far you’ve come. Economic Times says: look how far you still have to go.

Neither is lying. Both are incomplete.

The question is which one I reach for first - and why.

Some mornings I need the ET. The hunger is useful. The ambition is real. I’m not done building things and I know it.

But some mornings I need the Patrika. Not for the crime stories - but for the reminder. That the life I have, the city I live in, the problems I get to work on - none of this was guaranteed. I chose it. We built it. Quietly, over two decades of unglamorous work.

That’s not nothing. Even when the ET makes it feel like nothing.

The newspaper you reach for first is a choice about what story you want to tell yourself today.

Choose accordingly.

I must have been fifteen — old enough to believe I had outgrown evening cartoons. But my younger brother was ten, and in sibling hierarchy, programming rights belonged to him. I would have chosen Jackie Chan Adventures — faster, louder, more attuned to teenage restlessness. Instead, I watched what he dictated. Somewhere between mock indifference and actual boredom, a psychological model lodged itself in my brain: fear inflates threats.

I didn’t know it then. I just knew the wolves shrank when the hero steadied himself. That idea has outlived most adult advice I’ve received since. And Arabian Nights had many such lessons — disguised as spectacle, delivered as entertainment.

It was a cartoon. But it was also training.

Years later, I came across academic work examining resilience themes in Naruto. The argument is that children who grew up watching it absorbed narratives of endurance — rejection, training, failure, long arcs of delayed success. The hero doesn’t win because the world is fair. He wins because he persists. There is something structurally different about stories where growth is internal rather than externally gifted.

Classic fairy tales resolve cleanly. Evil is punished. The curse lifts. Justice restores balance. (I have separate grievances about how many of those tales treat women, but that is for another day.)

The Peppa Pig and PAW Patrol generation is still loading — raised on polite problem-solving and low-stakes conflict — and we genuinely do not know whether that produces stability or fragility.

Children’s stories traditionally give us heroes who get lucky or work hard and win. Anime often stretches that arc. Characters struggle, doubt, fail repeatedly before they stabilize. The lesson shifts from “the world will fix itself” to “you must grow into someone who can handle it.”

If childhood is rehearsal for adulthood, then stories are not decorative. They are cognitive templates.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m alone in noticing this.

Am I the only one who maps current events onto old animation scenes? Who hears political speeches and remembers mythological dialogues? Who watches geopolitical escalation and recalls a cartoon arms dealer quietly selling to both sides?

Which makes the next thought less random than it seems.

When I read about escalating conflict in the Middle East — or even familiar India-Pakistan tensions — my first reaction isn’t moral outrage. It’s structural curiosity: who benefits? Weapons are built. Counter-weapons are built. Innovation escalates. Budgets expand. Instability sustains an industry.

And suddenly I remember that same Aladdin series — the weapon trader selling inventions to both the Sultan and the villain. Peace was bad for business. Conflict was profitable. As a child, I didn’t have language for “military-industrial complex.” But I absorbed a pattern: incentives distort morality.

That pattern stayed.

Plato understood the power of story long before media psychology did. In The Republic, he argues that children must hear carefully selected stories. Certain myths should be censored. Narrative exposure must shape future guardians so they internalize courage and loyalty. “The first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction,” he writes (377b). He even proposes a foundational civic myth — what scholars call the “noble lie” — to stabilize society.

For Plato, stories are governance technology.

Aristotle, his student, pushes back in Politics. He warns against excessive unity and over-engineered systems. A state forced into too much singularity becomes brittle. Human societies are plural and messy. Where Plato seeks virtue through narrative control, Aristotle distrusts psychological overdesign.

We still live inside that tension.

Every parent who filters content is reenacting Plato in miniature. We block platforms. We curate “age-appropriate.” We try to construct the right moral diet. Control feels like love.

But here is the harder thought: we don’t actually know what produces strength.

Does exposure to fictional struggle build resilience? Possibly.
Does shielding children from complexity protect them? Possibly.
Does narrow narrative training — however well-intentioned — produce rigidity? Very likely.

Children in conflict zones are often raised on grievance narratives: we are victims, they are evil, sacrifice is glory. That architecture can radicalize.

Children in affluent societies may be raised on equally narrow architectures: problems resolve neatly, authority is kind, conflict is cosmetic. That architecture can produce fragility.

Both are restrictions.

Both assume adults know which narrative diet is correct.

I am not convinced we do.

If stories shape mental models — and Plato believed they did — then total control veers toward authoritarianism. But total indifference is negligence. The only intellectually honest middle ground is breadth.

Expose children to many worlds. Myth and science. Tragedy and comedy. Corruption and reconciliation. Eastern philosophy and Western skepticism. Heroes who fail. Villains who reform. Systems that collapse. Systems that endure.

Not to engineer outcomes.

But to expand cognitive range.

Plurality creates comparison. Comparison creates skepticism. Skepticism resists indoctrination — whether from extremists or sanitized consumer culture.

A child who sees only one story believes it. A child who sees many learns to evaluate.

And I return to that fifteen-year-old version of myself.

Going back to 1999, watching those cartoons and animation series. What was my mind doing back then?

Was it rehearsing?
Stress-testing ideas in a safe environment?
Learning the shapes of fear, power, loyalty, manipulation — long before real stakes arrived?

Childhood may be the only time we encounter complexity without consequence. Wolves grow and shrink without anyone dying. Wars are mythic. Betrayals are symbolic. Lessons are absorbed without cost.

Maybe that is what stories are for.

A simulation chamber for the psyche.

So I’m curious — am I alone in this? Do you find your mind reaching backward — to animation, to mythology, to the stories you watched in the safest years of your life — to decode what’s happening now?

If you do, perhaps that is proof of something simple.

The child was not just entertained.

The child was learning.

References & Further Reading

Classical Political Philosophy

Plato. (2004). Republic (C. D. C. Reeve, Trans.). Hackett Publishing. (Original work published ca. 380 BCE)
Public domain version:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1497/1497-h/1497-h.htm

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2023). Plato’s ethics and politics.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-ethics-politics/

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2022). Plato’s myths.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-myths/

Aristotle. (1998). Politics (C. D. C. Reeve, Trans.). Hackett Publishing. (Original work published ca. 350 BCE)
Online text (public domain translation):
https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.html

Narrative & Media Psychology

Plato, Republic (Book II–III on education and censorship; Book IV–V on civic myths)
Public domain text:

Aristotle, Politics (Book II critique of Plato’s ideal state)
Public domain text:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Plato’s Ethics and Politics

Naruto Research

Media Referenced in This Essay

Aladdin: The Animated Series (1994–1995)
Example episode (official Disney upload excerpts and archives available via YouTube):

Arabian Nights animated adaptations (1990s Indian broadcasts)

Naruto (2002–2007) Official channel / clips:

Peppa Pig (Official Channel)
PAW Patrol (Official Channel)

We were sitting around, chatting like we always do, and suddenly my eyes started going to places they never used to. Veins standing out on hands. Hair that had quietly turned grey. Reading glasses coming out mid-conversation, used so naturally that nobody even acknowledged them.

Wrinkles were no longer faint. They had formed patterns. The kind you don’t notice day to day but can’t unsee once you do. And then there was the fat. The stubborn kind. Horizontal tyre-like deposits around the waist, puffy cheeks that don’t respond to diet or discipline. The sagging cheeks are not fully here yet, but I can see the early signs. Like a warning, not a shock.

Initially, I thought this was just my immediate friend circle.

Then I saw the same signs in my first cousins.
Then, oddly enough, even in our energetic, sensuous salsa dance teacher.

That’s when it really hit me.

Age doesn’t discriminate.
Time doesn’t discriminate.

But the job market very clearly does.

Across circles, the pattern is almost predictable. The grey streaks catch your eye first. Then come the wrinkles. Specs are usually the last thing you admit, often because you don’t realise how much you need them.

And this is happening to millennials. Not people slowing down. People still working hard, still carrying responsibilities, still very much in the middle of life.

What has changed is the environment around us.

It is no longer cool to take leaves. Or take a break. Or admit you are tired. Linkedin is full of posts lauding 80 hour work week to push startups or even ‘single man army with AI tool’ in big enterprises. Somewhere along the way, the world took a sharp turn from employee welfare to investor welfare. The pressure to show profits without increasing headcount is intense. Roles stay vacant. Teams stretch. People absorb more work quietly. Capital is no longer free flowing, it comes at a cost, goes to sectors that are trendy, not necessarily profitable or even ethical.

The quiet quitting wave of 2022–23 is now starting to look like a bad decision for many. Those same people are struggling to find roles in a job market that has shrunk, not because work disappeared, but because AI absorbed entire layers of it. Not to mention depleting savings in an inflated world. The real estate, at least of India, climbed 2X-4X in last 3-4 years. And savings of this millennial generation dint climb at all. So many are left without a home of their own, renting away a small house in busy trafficy noisy are of Indian metro.

Companies are expected to be more efficient, faster to profit, or sometimes just fast. Revenue does not matter as much as momentum. Stability does not matter as much as speed.

This obsession with speed is not limited to companies.

At a global level, the same race is playing out. The US, under Trump, has openly pushed aggressive economic and political moves for oil, rare earth minerals, and trade dominance. For the first time in decades, world peace feels genuinely fragile. Russia and China expand territories in the name of security, while growing their economies in parallel.

Even if tariffs have disrupted fewer jobs than AI will, the world order is clearly changing. The US is no longer the obvious destination for higher education. US companies increasingly prefer candidates who already have visas. Global mobility is tightening just as global competition is intensifying.

And right in the middle of all this sits a very specific group.

Mid-age, middle-class, corporate professionals.

Confused. Disoriented. Quietly anxious.

Their traditional strength, deep experience in a domain, no longer guarantees relevance. At the same time, their lack of hands-on AI or tech depth works against them. It feels like being placed back at the starting line from 15 or 20 years ago, except this time the competition is 100 times stronger, with multiple generations running alongside.

And all of this is happening while life itself is demanding more.

Ageing signs appearing faster than expected.
Parents needing constant care.
Children turning into teenagers who no longer listen.

Above all of this looms AI. Not evil, not kind. Just powerful. Like a force of nature. A T-rex that does not care who it steps on.

I don’t even know whether to call this good or bad.

Millennials are no strangers to change. We are the generation that saw homes without landlines, then landlines, pagers, mobile phones, and finally smartphones, all within 30 to 40 years. We adapted well. We did fine through the mobile and internet revolutions.

But this AI shift feels different. It is not an upgrade. It is a ground shift.

I am yet to see many examples of millennials who have cleanly transitioned from non-AI careers to AI-led ones without twisting an ankle somewhere along the way. Maybe they exist. Maybe they don’t. Right now, they are not visible enough to be reassuring.

So where does that leave us.

Personally, it has pushed me to become more grounded. To save more. To plan finances assuming the old job may never return. To think about entrepreneurship, even if it is uncomfortable. To look at basics that AI may not take away easily. Food. Travel. Homes. Real estate. Interiors. Clothing.

Even these are crowded spaces now, affected by global trade disruptions, tariffs, political instability, and the slow return from global to local economies. Nothing is untouched.

And yet, on a personal note, I feel something else too.

Growing up, and now slowly growing old, has been an honour.

Life has been good to me. I am deeply grateful. The last 30 years were beautiful. The next 30 are beginning in a very different world. A new era of older millennials has started, and it may not be rosy.

I am still figuring out how to live well in it. Over the last few months, I have settled into a new routine. More rest. The gym. Mental health practices. Eight hours of sleep. Better food.

It breaks my heart to see my friends with silver streaks, wrinkles, and then the specs. I miss their energetic older selves. But there is no choice except to move with time.

Maybe I am finally becoming wise, even if the world no longer seems to need my wisdom.

But what does it really mean to feel useful?

Psychologists now say one of the best cures for stress or depression is to “feel needed.” That’s why volunteering or donating time to a local cause is often recommended. But let’s be honest - helping others only heals us when we feel seen for that help. When someone looks at us with gratitude, it reminds us that our existence has meaning.

Viktor Frankl believed that life never ceases to have meaning, even in suffering - as long as we have a reason to serve, love, or create. Perhaps that’s what “being needed” really is: a way of remembering our purpose when everything else feels uncertain.

Because, at some deep evolutionary level, being useful might just be a survival strategy - a way of collecting brownie points for the future.
If I’m useful to someone today, there’s a higher chance they (or someone like them) will take care of me tomorrow. Our brains still run on that ancient barter system - contribute now, stay safe later.

Even immense wealth can’t protect someone from the sadness of being unseen. Recognition matters. Whether it’s from society at large or just one important person - it matters deeply.

There’s a scene in the movie Shall We Dance (the Richard Gere one) where his wife explains why marriage is important. She says marriage is about having someone who witnesses your life - someone who notices your efforts, your contribution, your growth. Without that witness, even love can feel invisible.

That idea extends far beyond marriage.
Our neighborhoods, our social circles, even our workplaces - they all operate on the same emotional currency. Corporates, in fact, are the most structured version of this system: being seen and being useful directly translates to career growth. Recognition, validation, performance reviews - they’re all formalized ways of giving out brownie points.

Daily acknowledgment of one’s contribution is vital for mental peace at work. Constructive feedback and criticism are important, of course, but positive reinforcement is what nourishes our sense of worth.

In the end, maybe happiness - all kinds of happiness - comes down to this:
To contribute meaningfully.
To be recognized for it.
To know that our contributions will, in some form, come back to us when we need them most.

The need to be needed makes mothers ache during empty-nest years and retirees restless after decades of productivity.

So let me ask you

Do you feel needed?
And do you make others feel your need for them?
Because perhaps that’s not just kindness
It’s survival.
Because perhaps that - not money, not success - is the most primal survival instinct of all.

P.S. I wrote this article with help of ChatGPT, thoughts are original.

You seem distracted,”

Those who care about me at work - they sometimes notice and call a spade a spade. And maybe I am. But maybe that’s just how a women’s brain works.

Recently, I spoke to someone who’s actively trying to bring more women into AI. I found the conversation intriguing- why AI specifically? Why not more women in tech in general? Or in data science? Or mechanical engineering? Or in boardrooms or investment banking?

That question stayed with me.

And then I started thinking about my own life. I’ve been told that I pay too much attention to my child. - I spend too much time checking in on kids, making sure someone has eaten, or getting pulled into emotional conversations with my little one when he is staring or looking a bit low on energy. I notice these things that are invisible to my partner.

It’s pointed out to me like a flaw. Like something that makes me less serious about my career and work and job. Less focused. Less driven.

But here’s the thing. Most of the men around me don’t worry about emotional needs the same way that women do. They don’t really think about safety the same way either. A male won’t stress about whether the kid is wearing his sim-card watch so he can be reached in case of an emergency. If the child says, “I’m hungry,” they’ll hand over packaged food like cookie or instant noodles. Or worse (in my eyes), ignored.

But me? Or any woman I know? We’ll pause, cook something fresh and healthy, offer fruit, ask if they need water too. We’ll insist they wear a warm clothes before stepping out. Our minds are always working - always scanning, always noticing.

That mental load is real. And it shows up everywhere.

I remember watching a documentary once on Discovery channel. They scanned the brain of a woman sitting on the beach with her four kids. Every few minutes, her brain would scan the entire beach to check where each child was. She wasn’t even doing it consciously. It just happened.

Her brain was wired to do that.

Meanwhile, the man next to her? His brain stayed focused. On the conversation, on the ocean, on whatever he was doing. No mental scan. No loop.

This difference really stuck with me.

It explains why I’m often told I seem distracted. Why I sometimes check out during conversations. Why I don’t always dive into debates or fully engage with the discussion at hand. Because my attention is split. Not by choice, but by design.

I’ve started calling it the a Female-distraction phenomenon. because I believe this could be with all species.

The female brain, especially in caregiving roles, is always on alert. Always scanning. Always tuned in to who might need something next. It could be a small thing - like someone crying in the next room, someone needing socks, someone being quiet in a way that doesn’t feel right. And the moment that signal comes in, it takes over everything. Some call it “nurturing instinct” some call it “distraction”.

And that’s the problem.

Because most serious careers need deep focus. Long, uninterrupted focus. But when your brain is constantly scanning for signals from home, it’s really hard to stay in that space.

It’s not that women aren’t capable. Of course we are. I deeply admire women like Fei-Fei Li, who is called the mother of AI. And many others who are leading science, research, business. But I also think the reason more men dominate these spaces isn’t just about bias. It’s also about how much space they’re allowed to have in their own minds.

They’re not pulled out of deep thought every time someone needs a banana.

They’re not multitasking emotional safety, physical comfort, and their inbox at the same time.

So when people talk about getting more women into AI, I want to ask a slightly different question.

What would it take to build a world where women don’t have to choose between noticing everything and focusing deeply?

What could change if we didn’t have to apologize for caring too much?

Maybe the issue isn’t just about representation.

Maybe it’s also about rewiring the expectations that come with being a woman in the first place.
Till then - making peace with it.

You seem distracted,”

Those who care about me at work - they sometimes notice, and call a spade a spade. And maybe I am. But maybe that’s just how a women’s brain works.

Recently, I spoke to someone who’s actively trying to bring more women into AI. I found the conversation intriguing- why AI specifically? Why not more women in tech in general? Or in data science? Or mechanical engineering? Or in boardrooms or investment banking?

That question stayed with me.

And then I started thinking about my own life. I’ve been told that I pay too much attention to my child. - I spend too much time checking in on kids, making sure someone has eaten, or getting pulled into emotional conversations with my little one when he is staring or looking a bit low on energy. I notice these things that are invisible to my partner.

It’s pointed out to me like a flaw. Like something that makes me less serious about my career and work and job. Less focused. Less driven.

But here’s the thing. Most of the men around me don’t worry about emotional needs the same way that women do. They don’t really think about safety the same way either. A male won’t stress about whether the kid is wearing his sim-card watch so he can be reached in case of an emergency. If the child says, “I’m hungry,” they’ll hand over packaged food like cookie or instant noodles. Or worse (in my eyes), ignored.

But me? Or any woman I know? We’ll pause, cook something fresh and healthy, offer fruit, ask if they need water too. We’ll insist they wear a warm clothes before stepping out. Our minds are always working - always scanning, always noticing.

That mental load is real. And it shows up everywhere.

I remember watching a documentary once on Discovery channel. They scanned the brain of a woman sitting on the beach with her four kids. Every few minutes, her brain would scan the entire beach to check where each child was. She wasn’t even doing it consciously. It just happened.

Her brain was wired to do that.

Meanwhile, the man next to her? His brain stayed focused. On the conversation, on the ocean, on whatever he was doing. No mental scan. No loop.

This difference really stuck with me.

It explains why I’m often told I seem distracted. Why I sometimes check out during conversations. Why I don’t always dive into debates or fully engage with the discussion at hand. Because my attention is split. Not by choice, but by design.

I’ve started calling it the a Female-distraction phenomenon. because I believe this could be with all species.

The female brain, especially in caregiving roles, is always on alert. Always scanning. Always tuned in to who might need something next. It could be a small thing - like someone crying in the next room, someone needing socks, someone being quiet in a way that doesn’t feel right. And the moment that signal comes in, it takes over everything. Some call it “nurturing instinct” some call it “distraction”.

And that’s the problem.

Because most serious careers need deep focus. Long, uninterrupted focus. But when your brain is constantly scanning for signals from home, it’s really hard to stay in that space.

It’s not that women aren’t capable. Of course we are. I deeply admire women like Fei-Fei Li, who is called the mother of AI. And many others who are leading science, research, business. But I also think the reason more men dominate these spaces isn’t just about bias. It’s also about how much space they’re allowed to have in their own minds.

They’re not pulled out of deep thought every time someone needs a banana.

They’re not multitasking emotional safety, physical comfort, and their inbox at the same time.

So when people talk about getting more women into AI, I want to ask a slightly different question.

What would it take to build a world where women don’t have to choose between noticing everything and focusing deeply?

What could change if we didn’t have to apologize for caring too much?

Maybe the issue isn’t just about representation.

Maybe it’s also about rewiring the expectations that come with being a woman in the first place.
Till then - making peace with it.

Taking a career break is a decision that most people are afraid to make. It is a bold move that requires courage and determination. In this blog post, I will share my experience of taking a career break from the corporate world and how I discovered true happiness, satisfaction, and contentment.

How it All Began

Michelle Varghoos’s blog is an inspiring journey through her sabbatical. It is not all roses, as one might expect. Instead, a way paved with confusion, doubt, and healing. Her content helped me take this decision a bit more lightly than I was handling it.

When I was in the final stages of putting in my resignation, I came across Paul MIllerd’s work. His book “Pathless Paths” gave confidence that not everyone or not every stage of life is meant to be spent in corporates.

Nearer home in India, a couple of content creators on Linkedin shared their sabbatical stories. They had the same background as me, the same age group, same challenges. Things like having more time to spend with children and parents - are something I can do now, not 10 years from now. So why wait for retirement?

Gaining a lot of confidence from these inspiring folks, I decided to take the plunge. And so my career break started on 1 June 2023.

Content that Inspires Me

During my career break, I read a lot of books that helped me discover my true self. One of the authors that had a significant impact on me was Mitch Albom, famous for his book 'Tuesdays with Morrie.' I read four of his books, including 'The Five People You Meet in Heaven,' 'The Next Person You Meet in Heaven,' 'The Time Keeper,' and 'Have a Little Faith.' These books gave me a new perspective on life - what do we do when death is near? Death is a very sensitive subject that is usually not discussed among friends and family. But the author got to discuss this very topic in detail in these 4 books. What will happen when we are about to die? Would all of our possessions matter? Yes, but also the experiences. These books show that relationships with our friends and family matter much more than our egos and small skirmishes.

I am re-reading some classics like 'Atomic Habits’, ‘The Power of your subconscious mind,’, “The Richest Man in Babylon’, ‘Rumi’s poems’. These books are soothing, they give a strange sense of upliftment and confidence to carry on.

 Consuming video content on mental health topics like “Cognitive behavioural therapy’, and ‘transactional’ analysis is helping me gain perspective about relationships and self-care in a way that is not draining to my introverted self. 

I also followed content creators on social media who shared tips for living a better life beyond corporate jobs. Notably, Rajan Singh, Paul Millerd, Eugene Chang, and Pavan Sathiraju.

Exploring Nature and Personal Growth

During my career break, I took a 10-day trip to the Uttarakhand state in India, where I visited places like Dehradun, Nainital, Rishikesh, Auli, Valley of Flowers, Hemkund Sahib, and Gorsen Bughyal. With landslides every 1 km, the adventure was in the air of Kumaon mountain range. Only after experiencing the fear of getting smashed by a tumbling rock, do we realise how precarious life can be. 

Apart from a few dangerous sites, the huge Himalayas were a sight to behold.

The natural beauty of this place is breathtaking, and it gave me time to rethink my approach to life and recalibrate my expectations.

It was a journey of acceptance, and I came back feeling more at peace with myself.

Pursuing Personal and Professional Development

To keep my brain cells working, I took up growth consulting to help small companies form marketing strategies. It has been an enriching experience, and it has given me a sense of purpose and fulfillment. Knowing different industries, understanding various customer types, and handling a vast variety of clients is sublime. From Food & beverage to Human-Resources to FinTech SaaS, I never had such intense and varied experience in corporate work. It’s exciting to learn and develop my own frameworks.

Final words

Taking a career break can be a scary decision, but it can also be a transformative experience. It allows us to step back, reflect, and recalibrate our life goals. Reading books, exploring nature, and pursuing personal and professional development can help us discover our true selves and live a more fulfilling life.

So, if you are considering taking a career break, I encourage you to take the leap of faith and embark on this transformative journey.

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The reason behind this dilemma is that when it comes to an advertisement, everyone in our organisation has an opinion. Everybody watch ads on TV, on mobile, so they try to help by telling ideas. Some would suggest a humorous ad to catch attention, others recommend a motivational ad to capture aspiration. While some believe telling only product features.

So, which route should you choose?

As is the case with any decision-making for business, instead of answering the first question, ask 10 more.  Here is a list of questions that help me decide which creative route will suit my product’s GTM brand campaign:

Question Set 1:

1. Who is my customer?

2. What category does my product/service belong to?

3. What is the theme/platform/means of experiencing my product/service within this category?

Question Set 2:

1. For my target segment, is the category well-known?

2. For my target segment, is the theme inside this category well-known?

3. Is this a high or low involvement category for my target segment?

Once I have the answers to these questions, I can apply this decision tree to make an informed choice.

An Example:

I studied several “Launch campaigns” to see their approach and initial success. Narcos initiated their social media campaign prior to the TV series' release on popular OTT platforms. Their #Cokenomics campaign aimed to educate the audience about the cocaine industry.

Why din’t they take the route of showing nice sets, action, and introducing characters? Because the theme of narcotics was not widely known, even though the category of a new TV series is well known. Involvement in an unknown theme will be low, so the first thing their brand team did was to increase the awareness of the theme itself, rather than jumping on the benefits of this TV series as “very entertaining must watch”

Image courtesy: Social media of Narcos

Case study:  

Problem Statement: A new brand called "Manzana" wants to promote itself on social media and out-of-home TV screens in apartment elevators. It is an online grocery brand selling organic products exclusively in Bangalore. The brand was launched one year ago and has received positive feedback and traction in local stores and online. Its Net Promoter Score (NPS) is above 30, and it experiences organic growth of 10% each month. While it regularly runs performance campaigns, attracting customers from Facebook, Google search, Amazon promotions, and referral links, it now wants to focus on low-hanging fruits for growth and brand-building on Social Media

If you were the brand head, how would you decide which route to take for the first brand campaign?

Solution:

Lets Apply the above framework.

Answer to Set 1:

Who is my customer?

For an organic and online grocery store serving only Bangalore, the target segment consists of women aged 25-50 years with high family income, an affinity for online shopping, and concerns about their family's health.

What is the category of my product/service?

The category is grocery. For example, the category of "Emily in Paris" is a TV series, and for PubG, it is e-Gaming.

What is the theme/platform/means of experiencing my product/service within this category?

Within the broad grocery category, the themes are "online" and "organic." While grocery is a well-established category, online grocery and organic grocery are relatively new themes within it.

Is this a high or low involvement category+theme?

While grocery is a low involvement category where people don't spend much time deciding which specific product to choose, the "organic" theme is a high involvement aspect due to its impact on health and premium pricing.

Answer to Set 2:

For my target segment, is this a known category?

Yes, grocery is a well-known category for women in the middle class who are decision-makers when it comes to brands and food choices.

For my target segment, is the theme inside this category known?

In Bangalore, with a tech-savvy population and high incomes, organic grocery is somewhat known but not widely understood. People are still trying to figure out methods to quantify the goodness and trustworthiness of organic products.

Is this a high or low involvement category for my target segment?

While grocery is a low involvement category overall, the combination of the grocery category and the organic theme results in high involvement for this specific target segment.

Putting this information through our Decision tree, the result is as below

For Manzana brand, an awareness campaign focused on the "Organic" theme is crucial. Utilizing social media, they can leverage pop-culture references to make the campaigns engaging, while educating customers about organic groceries. It's essential to note that other campaign routes, although popular in terms of likes and shares, may not effectively contribute to brand-building in this specific context. For example, a Bollywood parody featuring a humorous mother-son argument over grocery shopping may garner views, but it won't necessarily drive customers to purchase organic groceries. The target audience may not have enough knowledge about "organic" to make an informed decision based on entertainment alone.

Grid View

Here is one more view of the same framework, if you like Grids more than flowcharts 

What to Avoid

If you see all the cells in this table, "purpose-led" marketing might pique your attention. I recommend watching Steve Jobs' famous video on marketing, where he discusses "Values” in the context of a new campaign “Think Different”.  Many entrepreneurs are inspired by this approach, wanting their products to be marketed in the same manner. 

However, it's important to note that in this context, the product is already successful in the market, but the brand is losing steam, and the company is in a bad state. The purpose-led campaign works for attracting new users who are not early adopters of the product.As was the case with Mac, a new technology, it was an unknown category and theme for these new users. Hence “values” was a way to connect with them.

Another campaign that makes brands envious is the "Push notification campaigns" by Dunzo in India. It embraces pop culture with Bollywood and cricket, utilizing creative wordplay on trending topics in Indian metros. Dunzo, a 5-year-old brand in India, has a well-known service in a low involvement category of local-couriers. Due to insane discounts in its early years, Dunzo has very high-adoption rate and has become a well-known brand. Hence, to maintain the top-of-mind, it need not tell the product-benefits again. Now, instead, they capture attention through popular-culture content. 

I would be interested to know if this framework aligns with your experiences working with different brands in the past. Do you agree with this approach? How can I improve it? What did I miss?

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Prachi: Hey, what are some good sites that you refer to stay updated on current affairs..worldwide”

Me: Instagram

Prachi: Hein??

It's a productivity tool, a mental-health tool, and a personal-growth tool. I can see you don’t agree fully. Let me show it to you?

A little backstory

I was hooked on the big four like a fish on a line: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and LinkedIn. And you know who I blame? My career in consumer marketing, that's who. One might even call it an occupational hazard.

I had tried everything from digital detox to total uninstall, but nothing worked. Then this phenomenon hit corporate offices: James Clear's "Atomic Habits" book was in everyone’s hands. So I also picked one up.

His advice about changing your environment to change your habits really resonated with me, especially when it comes to social media.

My Feed-Curation Journey

Changing our environment on social media would mean changing what I get in my feeds.

Facebook

After 5 years of hide-n-seek, I returned full-time to Facebook with a mission to curate my feed. I unfollowed everyone, from friends to family, even my own parents (this had consequences such as the need to feign awareness of recent travel or a kitty party). I also started marking every ad as “inappropriate”.

Then I followed the things I really liked. Now my feed is a blissful escape, filled with cute pet videos, travel views, and plant pages. Facebook, with its curated feed, is my emotional first aid kit.

Twitter

When it comes to Twitter, I found a lot of unexpected voices on the platform. Thought leaders, businessmen, and monks My local governor and even the traffic police commissioner are active here. And brands are on high alert for customer support complaints.

I unfollowed most of my "friends" who don’t share anything and started following thoughtful people who share nuggets of wisdom. I discovered Naval Ravikant on Twitter, so it’s a big win already.

Instagram

I missed the bus on Instagram initially. But I slowly caught up by signing up during lockdown, trying to make sense of the platform, and figuring out what it was good for.

• Videos? But I get them on Youtube

• Short Videos? Those are synonyms of doom-scrolling

• Pictures from my acquaintances? No, thanks. Enough FOMO already

• Updates from close friends? I would rather get them 1-1 on whatsapp

After a rocky start, Instagram and I finally hit it off thanks to a chance encounter with James Clear there. And as luck would have it, I also discovered some stellar physical publications like "The Mint" and "Daily Art" which are absolutely slaying the platform with their content. Their graphics are pure art, and their reels are like a mini-lesson on the latest concepts.

So, I made a bold move: I unfollowed everyone else and started following only the newspapers and authors I adore.

However, Chris Voss, author of the book, "Never Split the Difference," surprised me on Instagram. Well, I guess you could say Chris Voss took the "social" in social media a bit too literally! I mean, come on, Chris, we signed up for negotiation tips, not your vacation pics. I had to unfollow him after a particularly cringe-worthy post.

Linkedin

LinkedIn is a whole different beast. It's the only platform where I can find professional advice in abundance. However, its feed can be a mess to navigate. I thought I would apply the same strategy to other platforms. But I underestimated this platform’s lack of features to do so.

Unfollowing 12000 contacts one-by-one was backbreaking. After 5 hours and just 1000 unfollows, I gave up. Now, I just unfollow on the go. Also, I intentionally followed 20+ accounts that I wanted to see more of - content just right for my career stage, domain, and industry.

Timing is everything

I open a particular platform only at a particular time of the day. This happened organically because my mind was tuned to consume one type of content during that time of day. For example, newspapers have been consumed at the breakfast table, not at night.

• In the early morning, I want to read motivational stuff to set the tone of the day, so I open Twitter.

• During my morning office-commute, I want to consume advice that is floating in my domain - so I open Linkedin

• During lunch hours and the resulting lazy hours, I want to relax and see what’s going on around the world.

• During the night, I wind down by watching cute dog videos on Facebook.

This allows for a more efficient use of time and ensures that each platform serves a specific purpose.

Re-Curation

I revise the curation every few months, unfollow pages that no longer interest me, and follow new folks who have started putting out good content. Following “Culture Tutor” on Twitter was part of one such re-curation drive in 2022.

This was my journey to convert a potentially harmful technology to my advantage. By being intentional with my social media use, I can now avoid mindless scrolling and create a more positive online experience.

What are some of your hacks for social media? Please let me know in the comments.

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P.S.

I recommend the below pages and accounts

Helen for rural living experiences: https://twitter.com/thetruehelen

Taleb for unfiltered views: https://twitter.com/TalebWisdom

Rob for book highlights: https://twitter.com/robkhenderson

Leo Ariel for travel inspiration: https://www.instagram.com/lxoariel/

Daily Art for art knowledge and memes: https://www.instagram.com/dailyartmagazine/

Rajan Singh for career and life advice: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajansingh96/

Astrid's non-dreadful diet tips: https://www.instagram.com/antidiet_dietitian/

Groups/pages I follow:

Gardening for stress relief: https://www.facebook.com/groups/945978689255337/

View from your window for worldwide pics: https://www.facebook.com/groups/286866152596429/

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To truly convince your manager and achieve success, you must present a well-thought-out strategy, supported by data and evidence. Rather than asking your manager to take a leap of faith on your new idea, consider harnessing the power of customer research as a fuel for innovation.

It's important to understand the basics of research to conduct simple surveys, as well as guide and evaluate agency work for bigger projects. These basics are -

1. What research to conduct?

2. How many people to survey?

3. What is a good budget for research?

After conducting more than 200 research projects on new products, I've developed a comprehensive framework that can help those who are conducting research for the first time. In this article, I'll share some real-life examples and provide answers to some of the most common questions.

What questions should I ask?

What type of research you need to do depends on how much you know already. To help answer that question, I've created a flowchart that can guide you in the right direction.

If you already know the problem and all possible answers, a close-ended survey is the way to go. But if you don't know the possible answers, then you'll want to use open-ended questions. Open -ended questions help us discover possible answers. You would notice the answers start repeating after 10-15 responses, or they start to fall into a few major buckets.

Once we know a few major buckets of answers, we can make our question close-ended

For example, if you notice customers are returning your product but you don't know why, ask open-ended questions like "What happened? What is the reason for returning the product?" From there, you can identify broad themes. Later when you see most responses are falling in these buckets only, then convert your open-ended questions into closed-ended ones with an option for "other".

Example: A business leader wanted to expand her online stationery shop but was unsure which category to launch next. She had a few ideas in her mind, but don't know what all her customers were expecting. Her marketing manager conducted an open-ended questionnaire with 30 prospective customers. Most of the answers were among 5 major buckets of art-supplies, postal supplies, office-supplies, Gift-sets, Theme-based stationery. However, just 30 responses were not giving her confidence to go with the most-asked category. She then administered a closed-question survey to 200 prospective customers. She found that 50% wanted Colors and 40% mentioned Postal supplies under "Others". Customers were also asked to rank the options, leading to a strong confidence in the launch of the Colors category.

How many people should I ask?

No, it is not “5% of the total population that we are targeting as out market”. Remember that sampling is exactly this - sample out of the population. We can never talk to the entire population in B2C retail categories.

First, decide on the smallest "unit" of your target audience as per your category. The number of units will depend on the level of homogeneity in the behavior among the target audience. For a product like food, the behavior may be clustered into broader regions like North India and South India, while for a social network with regional languages, it may be necessary to cluster the behavior into individual states of India, resulting in more units. The key is to determine the smallest unit that adequately represents the behavior of the target audience.

Then, distribute your data well among other factors such as gender, age-group, and funnel-stage.

Now that you have decided on the smallest "unit", you need to get at least 100 samples in it. If the "cost per sample" is too high, you can use a formula to know the exact number of samples you need.

A simple way is to do 100 responses in each unit. In my experience, this sample size-per-unit has very good accuracy and acceptability for taking decisions.

If you have two "units", and you will do 100 responses in each unit. So, your total sample size becomes 200.

However, if you want an exact perfect-sample-size, then use the formula in the link given at the end of this article.

How much should I spend?

At Least 1% of your marketing budget, or product-development budget. Instead of struggling to justify an absolute number (Like Rs 2 L or $1500), it is better to view it as a share of the marketing budget.

Example: Once, I had a budget of USD 2 million for advertising on TV and digital media. I was uncertain about how our new ad concept would perform on TV, so I considered two options to test it. The first was to launch the ad on digital media and spend up to USD 5,000 to gather data on click-through rates. The second was to hire a research agency and spend up to USD 10,000 to research how the audience would respond to the advertisement.

However, since we were creating a brand-story ad to showcase our values instead of just discounts, the digital medium was not the ideal platform to predict its acceptability on TV. Digital ads typically respond well to very short ads about discounts or specific products in just a few words, but our campaign needed to attract new patrons based on our values. So I decided to proceed with both tests, and the budget was justified as we discovered key insights that were affecting attention. Ultimately, we modified the ad-creative based on these insights, and the campaign turned out to be a mega-hit.

Way forward

By familiarizing yourself with specific research tools and methodologies, you can simplify even the toughest growth challenges. It's like having a trusty mechanical tool set - once you know how to use a screwdriver, you can easily fix that stuck drawer. Similarly, knowing your research tools gives you the power to unlock your business's full potential. So let's go forth and upward, my friend!

Useful Links:

• Formula for sample calculator

• Read about my experience as a Research Leader of BYJU’S global group.

• If you need help on your research work, please ask me any question regarding setting up a research department or doing first research for your startup. I am reachable on https://www.linkedin.com/in/charu1007/ and respond within 1 day.

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At first, I felt a wave of imposter syndrome wash over me. I questioned whether I had the skills needed to take on such a challenge. But then I thought, if the founders of the company trust me, why shouldn't I trust myself?

In the startups I worked for, customer research was an essential part of my daily routine. I have gone for home deliveries in mini-trucks as part of an online grocery team. I have spoken to 10 customers per week as a category manager for online vitamins. I have spoken to at least 100 customers about their chronic illness challenges as part of an e-pharmacy team. However, talking to customers is just one part of a research project. The other parts are usually skipped in small startups. The bigger market research projects are generally executed by professional agencies.

Although setting up departments from scratch is my specialty. Still, the idea of setting up a department dedicated to just research in a company with 40,000 employees spread across 15 countries, felt overwhelming. The scale was huge. I had a chance to make a big impact or a big mistake.

Finally, this quote from Richard Brosnan in his memoir, “Screw It, Let's Do It: Lessons In Life” made me confident enough to take it up

"If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes – then learn how to do it later!"

Did I have all the technical skills required for this task? Not entirely. But I knew that my marketing experience wasn't too far from the field of market research. On the other hand, when it came to my leadership skills, I was confident in my abilities. 

As we progress in our careers, we will increasingly get projects where we will be the most senior person. No single person can know every skill, and the same is true for the leader. Does the president know how to cure diseases or when to increase interest rates in the economy? He leads a team of experts, enables them, empowers them, and brings their expertise to his nation's common man. That's the true mark of a leader. 

Imposter Syndrome, Meet Your Match.

I made a plan to address my lack of technical skills and play to my strengths as a good program manager.

1. Talk to experts in the network:- Luckily, my mentors came to the rescue and gave me a crash course in customer research. They told me about their own experiences, case studies, and what challenges they faced the first time.

2. Talk to experts outside the network:- Here, I did two things. I cold emailed experts from Linkedin requesting their time to guide me. Second I started meeting a lot of companies that provided research-as-a-service. They taught me crucial threads of research work up to a point where I could take decisions on taking their services. It is a win-win for the agency-client relationship. 

3. Take courses:- I searched Google, youtube and Udemy for such short courses and took several of them over the weekends. The subject is closer to my function and hence it was easy to pick up from courses. 

4. Treat the work as a program to be managed:-  I noted down the blocks that build the project. We can make a flowchart or steps by breaking down the project delivery into smaller tasks. Then I see which skill is required at which stage. I made the team hiring and agency-onboarding plan as per this task-level requirement of skills, rather than getting an agency for end-to-end execution.

5. Motivate the team instead of frightening:- Ensure that the team is excited about learning a new skill themselves. One thing I did was to divide the team into experts and Project-managers. Both can team up on the stages of the project where their expertise will shine. Plus, once they realise they didn’t have a particular skill set, they were determined to learn it from the designated expert. And designated experts loved teaching what they knew. Win-Win.

Finally, when I need a boost of confidence in myself and my team to do something new from scratch, I take help from these inspiring quotes:

"The only source of knowledge is experience." - Albert Einstein

"Success is not final; failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that count." - Winston Churchill

"If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late." Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn.

I learned, once again, how to step out of my comfort zone and trust myself with learning. This time, as a senior leader also.

In a year, my team successfully delivered 250 projects, leading to significant changes in product roadmaps and marketing strategies based on customer insights and data. Overall, our team had a fulfilling year. We significantly contributed to the organization's progress and our individual career growth.

I will be sharing my takeaways, practical frameworks to decide on the research type, and the budget allocation process next week. Watch this space to see how my learnings on customer insights, and market research work. Till then, keep growing with Growth Garage.

The first day of joining the quick-service restaurant chain was going exceptionally well with all the nice food around me, except for the warnings coming from a few long-time employees there. 

I was unfazed because this is not the first time I have changed industries. A bank, a nutrition company, grocery tech, pharmacy tech - I had a good decade of leading marketing teams of varied product types. But this was different from online companies  - it was actual physical retail stores business. Will I be able to add value?

Joining a company in a new domain can be an exciting opportunity for personal and professional growth. However, it can also be a daunting task that can fill us with doubts.

From my experience, I don't get too bothered by changing domains and industries as long as I'm still dealing with the same customer base. But if the customer type drastically shifts, then we have to put some effort into research and learning. 

Depending on the situation, it could take someone anywhere from one to six months to get up to speed. I understand that this learning curve is why many companies prefer to hire someone with industry experience, as they need the new hire to hit the ground running.

I have had the pleasure of witnessing some of my friends excel in entirely new domains by displaying an unwavering commitment to learning. Through their dedication, they were able to flatten their learning curve to a mere month, positioning themselves as experts on par with those who had been in the industry for five years. This realization is both humbling and inspiring, as it underscores the boundless opportunities available for those with a passion for exploration and a willingness to acquire new knowledge.

If you're looking to succeed in a new position in an unfamiliar sector, there are several strategies I suggest. These tips will supplement the typical preparation advice, so keep reading.

1. Customize your resume and cover letter to showcase your relevant skills and expertise, incorporating industry-specific terms and keywords that demonstrate your familiarity with the field. For instance, while an online lending company may use terms like ROAS in its marketing campaigns, the restaurant industry may use phrases like "footfalls" to describe its branding efforts. 

2. Research the industry, including the company's website, news, and current trends. Ask the interviewer industry-specific questions to show your intent to learn and understand the domain. This will convey that your learning curve will be shorter and that you can start contributing quickly. If you're competing with someone who has industry experience, your preparation will make you a strong candidate.

3. Reach out to industry leaders in similar companies. For example, when I was exploring the fin-tech domain, I requested help from marketing managers of other finance-products. A few responded and gave me an overview of what to do to win in this domain. Linkedin is a great platform o discover, connect and reach out for such activities.

4. After landing the job, focus on onboarding effectively within the first week. Along with the company orientation, prepare your own list of questions and research topics. Create an organizational chart and a mental map of whom to meet, including departments you may not work with directly. Listening to their experiences in the domain can provide insight into differences from other places they have worked.

5. Take copious notes during orientation. With permission, record the conversations of the first meetings. This is the time when you will not be well versed with all the jargon, so it might be difficult to catch everything in one go. Don’t forget to thank each person and build a relationship for future help.

6. Organize this knowledge properly in a document. It does take an extra 1 hour to write down. But there is no better structuring process than writing. It will be a beautiful reference sheet for the next 3-6 months, adding immense confidence to your domain knowledge. I have such documents from 6 years back, and I still refer to them. 

7. Finally, to excel beyond experienced professionals, develop your skills and knowledge by attending conferences, reading industry-specific publications, and networking with other professionals. Investing in learning is the best investment anyway. I attended webinars by Inc42 for the Fin-tech domain. Recently I took leadership coaching to adjust to a large-scale company after being in a smaller start-up. Both were valuable. 

These are some of the things that I have observed my friends and myself doing over the last 10 years. Joining a new domain is an exciting opportunity. What we require is the right attitude—one that is open-minded, curious, and proactive in seeking out new challenges and experiences.

Image credit: careeradvice.careers24.com

For children, I prioritize their vision, brain health, and overall well-being. While I value one-on-one time in their early years, I believe a balanced approach to screen time is important, without extremes. I encourage my son to explore both digital and outdoor experiences, as both offer unique opportunities for growth and learning. While there are many ways to connect with the world, I believe certain stories are most effectively told through screens.

"Exposure to new ideas and experiences is the key to personal growth and development." - Oprah Winfrey

In an increasingly global world, exposure to diverse cultures and information shapes a child's worldview. Guardians shape a child's beliefs, but early exposure to diversity can encourage independent thinking. While conformity may be encouraged by parents during childhood, it can limit a child's potential for independent thinking in the future.

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Let me recount my own experience with exposure. Growing up in a small city, I was lucky to meet a family that had moved from a distant city. They had lived in various cities in India and, hence, had a very different worldview than us. They inspired my father to move to a better neighborhood and invest in better schools. This gave me exposure to new resources and ideas.

At the same time, the national TV station of 90’s and later cable TV provided valuable exposure to the outside world. It showed me the world of beautiful infrastructure, societies, and work being done around the globe. It fueled my aspirations for a better life. 

A good society and school gave me wings. But the exposure to media gave my flight a direction to soar in, and a temperament to accept different cultures when I finally met them. 

With the increasing prevalence of media and the internet, it's important to equip children with the skills they need to navigate the digital world and make informed decisions. In the beginning, though, I agree we have to exert some control over children and ourselves to manage these 2 aspects of Screen Exposure -

(1) Time of viewing screens 

(2) Content 

For children, these can easily be managed with apps like “Family link”, “BYJU’S”, “Youtube Kids” and smart devices like app-controlled power-plug, and app-controlled internet-router availability for each device. For ourselves, we can try website blockers, and website time-counters like “StayFree” on laptop, and “Yourhour” app on Mobile. 

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Undoubtedly, limiting screen time may be met with some initial resistance. But the content will never disappoint our little ones. I am almost jealous of the screen-time activities that can be explored by today’s kids -

• National Geographic and Discovery shows can bring the experience of a  challenging terrain like a jungle to our living rooms

• Science shows, Dr. Binocs channel for kids on youtube can spark their curiosity

• BYJU'S content teaches them curriculum-based concepts through stories and visuals

• Certain animation series and movies are entertaining as well as edifying. For example, “Octonauts” teaches them about the world of oceans and sea creatures.

• Sports travel shows, and Art shows can teach them about countries around the world and their cultures.

The internet offers limitless opportunities for children to explore their interests and learn. Rather than fearing this information overload, approach it with an open mind. Be with your child on this journey to explore the internet, the way you would be there with them in their offline world of books and playdates. 

Diverse experiences and ideas are vital for a child's development. Balance screen time for its benefits. Limit it, but don't eliminate screens completely. 

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Image Credits

1.  From a scene from Emily in Paris, a Netflix series. Image borrowed from https://www.vox.com/21502498/netflix-emily-in-paris-review-millennials

2. Happy and balanced children: https://www.winmoreacademy.com/effective-tips-for-parents-to-raise-happy-kids/

Counterintuitive? Hear me out. 

This is the story of my cousin. She recounted how she met her best friend in college. Their friendship started with a fight. “On my first day at college, my roommate invited everyone over to our small dorm room. I tried to study instead. But I couldn't focus and ended up missing out on the fun. This pattern repeated itself every day.

Within a month, my patience ran amuck, and I started yelling at uninvited guests in my room. Most left, but one girl decided to stay and fight. Since I was lonely in a new place, I allowed her to go on. She did not run away or avoid me; instead, she took her time to fight with me, commenting on my dress, my accessories, and even my class notes. And that’s it. I have liked her since the day I started enjoying my fights with her.”

That made me think. Is the license to fight an important first step in deepening relationships?

We all experience relationships that are not our personal choice. These could be the result of a boss hiring a new team member, a warden assigning a roommate, a neighborhood getting a new resident, or a marriage bringing in in-laws. While some of these relationships may be enjoyable, others can be less so. I personally struggle with shallow relationships that are built out of obligation. These mandatory social encounters frequently involve forced grins, awkward pauses, disconnected discussions, and a feeling of unease. 

How does one elevate the status of such relationships from shallow to meaningful? 

When I think back on my childhood, some of my closest friends were people I didn't like at first. As I got to know them better, I realized that we shared common interests and the same energy levels. As a teenager, I would choose to be friends with those whose struggles and victories were the same as mine. 

Fighting can be a fast-track activity between two people to know each other. Through a quick fight, we can discover if our energies match, if our interests are of equal quirkiness, and if our value systems match. Fighting has a way of raising our emotions so that our true character comes out. 

In the book "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos," Jordan B. Peterson discusses how children establish their place in society. They test their boundaries by fighting with others. According to the author, they figure out where the boundaries lie by slapping and pushing others, even their own mother. Once they find their limits, they form strong relationships and bonds for life. 

As adults, it is not conventional to fight at first sight, isn’t it? But we can initiate a decent one-on-one talk and demonstrate our value system. If we matched, we could be much better friends and enjoy each other's company. If not, at least we tried.

I am not saying this is the only way to form deep relationships. But, in our urban setting, with our comfortable lifestyles and first-world problems, this might be a good way to find our own vibe and tribe.  

If we give ourselves and others a license to fight and speak our hearts out, we may find our match sooner. And isn't that what life's all about—making meaningful connections with others?

So, let’s start a fight or what? 1

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