Inverted Passion - [Inverted Passion] 2024 wrapped

2024 wrapped

By Paras Chopra on Dec 31, 2024 02:31 am

This year’s review is going to be shorter than 2023 (and previous years) because I’m in Goa right now for a holiday and I don’t feel like being in front of a screen for long.

I mean, just look at this view and tell me that you’d rather be in front of a screen writing a review.

But traditions must be upheld, so here’s a quick review of my eventful year.

/> Shut down Nintee

Earlier in the year, I shut down my startup Nintee and returned (the remaining) ~75% of funding back to investors. Everyone in my team got 6 months salary as a severance and an open offer to join my other company Wingify.

I’m grateful that everyone (investors and employees) left Nintee with a smile on their face.

I shut down Nintee because the original hypothesis did not turn out to be true and I could not see it being a VC funded business. I had raised funding for a specific hypothesis, so when it didn’t work out, I felt obligated to return the money.

In retrospect, I made three major mistakes with Nintee:

[#1] Trying to change people’s habits

I always knew that what people say and what they do is often at odds, and what they do is the more honest signal of their motivations. But I didn’t internalize it until Nintee failed to catch on. At Nintee, we were initially trying to build an AI-driven weight loss coach that evolved into AI-based habits coach.

The idea was to convert the science of habit-building into a neat AI coach who can be your sidekick as you improve your life. I quickly learned that the only people who were attracted to this idea was those who were already strongly motivated to make a change in life (and they would have done the change whether or not the app existed). After this realization, we pivoted and did a bunch of experiments to build highly-engaging consumer experiences around learning but that turned out to be tough too, and we had strayed too far from the original hypothesis.

In our dopmaine-addicted culture, building for consumers is tough (especially as a VC-funded business where you have to deliver growth on schedule)!

[#2] Taking VC funding before product-market fit

Even though my investors were super-chill, once I took funding, I had a valuation target for the next round, which implied that the clock for hypergrowth had started ticking.

Before PMF, it’s impossible to deliver growth on schedule so I should have only raised funding once I knew I can predictably convert $1 of investment into >$1 of value (and that happens at growth stage, much beyond initial PMF).

It’s funny that I didn’t need external seed funding. I could have bankrolled Nintee’s initial days myself, but I wanted accountability that comes with taking someone else’s money. I got accountability, but pre-PMF wasn’t the right time for it. Early stage needs exploration, and money wasn’t a constraint for it.

[#3] Hiring a team before product-market fit

I had an amazing team of ~10 people. They worked hard and never shied away from doing whatever it took to launch the next experiment. But everyone has a limit to their patience and if traction isn’t visible after several launches, it’s hard to remain motivated.

As Nintee progressed, I found myself trying to motivate the team and making sure their time was sufficiently utilised. In retrospect, I should have work with consultants and outsourced dev agencies until I had discovered PMF and only then should have hired a full time team.

/> Finished rewriting my book and got a publishing contract

I’m grateful that a lot of lessons I learned during Nintee are finally going to find their way into my book, which is due get published in print in 2025.

This book is a rewrite of my Mental Models for Startup Founders, with many new chapters and significant edits. I got a contract from Harper Collins India and the print version is due to come sometime in mid 2025! Aakanksha is doing illustrations for it, and they’re a radical improvement over mine.

Getting a physical book in my hands that I wrote was a dream of mine ever since I had fallen in love with books as a teen. So, I’m very happy that it’s finally happening!

/> Skydive in Dubai

Another dream of mine was skydiving and this year on my birthday, my friends gifted me that experience!

/> Health updates

I’ve been tracking my blood markers at regular intervals.

This year I got scared because my Hb1Ac had climbed into the pre-diabetic range (>5.6). My family has a history of diabetes, so I’m strongly motivated to not get it. As you can see, I worked hard to push it back into the normal range (it’s 5.6 right now).

Type 2 diabetes and, its precursor, metabolic syndrome is reversible through exercise. I had been lifting weights 3 times a week since 2022. But cardio was missing from it, so this year I started running. Now, I exercise each weekday: 3 days of strength training and 2 days of running.

Bangalore’s perfect weather, beautiful gardens and machine learning street talk helped a lot into building the habit of running. When I had started running, I would get tired after 2 kms. But my brother-in-law suggested that the key is to run slow (as slow as walking). I tried it, and was able to get to my personal best: 6 kms of running!

new personal record for running: 6km!

The trick is to run really slowly – almost at walking pace. Build stamina first and then gradually increase pace.

I sprinted at the end and got my heart rate to 184. pic.twitter.com/CzJfAmrPd3
— Paras Chopra (@paraschopra) November 21, 2024

/> Read 47 books in 2024

As compared to reading 39 in 2023, and 19 in 2022, I read 47 books this year.

I’m not optimizing for the number of books, but it’s good to see that my natural pace has picked up. I tend to read for ~30 mins in the morning, ~30 mins in the evening on weekdays and for hours at stretch on weekends. Taking a book to a cafe in Indiranagar and reading it at length is a big joy in my life!

Looking at my reading list, I’m increasingly finding myself fascinated by history books. Conquerers was an eye-opening account of how the Portuguese took over the world on the back of their oceanic prowess. And right now I’m reading an account of the French Revolution. I’m sure my 2025 is going to be full of history books for me.

/> Reinventing my self-image!

This year I pushed myself to re-invent how I look. I owe all of it to Aakanksha, who helped me look beyond the limited view I had of fashion and recommend clothing items and accessories.

Growing up as a middle-class kid, I always assumed men had to look plain: jeans and t-shirt. But, of course, that’s a bias implicitly planted in my head.

It’s a joy to experiment with one-self and I’m glad to have pushed myself in 2024!

/> Started therapy (and it changed my life)

This year I also started therapy. I thought I didn’t need it because nothing in particular bothered me and I had already read a lot of cognitive behavior therapy books. But since I kept recommending therapy to people, I decided to take up therapy as a personal experience.

In my first session itself, I realized that therapy is less about talking and more about equipping yourself with tools to correct the deeply-entrenched ways of thinking and acting that work against you in your daily life. Something as simple as ‘notice the intensity of your feeling and rate it on a 1-10 scale before reacting‘ can do wonders to your long term mood.

But a great therapist is not just a replacement of a self-help book. S/he would earnestly and gently remind you and motivate you incorporate these tools in your life, until helpful thought patterns become a part of your life. Therapy is easily the highest bang-for-the-buck investments I’ve done recently.

A brain cannot fully debug itself. So even if you reflect regularly, a therapist can help you look at things you didn’t even notice are there.

It’s a shame that in some circles therapy is still seen as something what people should seek only when they have something to “fix”. Instead of that perspective, I urge you to think of the therapist as a life enhancer. In addition to giving you tools to dix what’s wrong, a great therapist elevates your total experience of life.

If you’ve been on the edge of making this decision, I strongly recommend seeing a therapist in 2025 even if you have “nothing particular to talk about“. It’s their job to probe. All you have to do is to show up and be honest.

/> Started an AI hackhouse: Turing’s Dream

The highlight of the 2nd part of the year was the launch of Turing’s Dream. I took up a space near my home & started inviting bright folks who were keen to spend 6 weeks exploring / building something interesting in AI.

This decision was motived by my selfish desire to be around smart people. So, far two batches have graduated. I’m proud of the people who joined and the projects they built as part of batch 1 and batch 2. I’m continuing the initiative into 2025 and applications are open, if you’re interested.

By the way, I’m very happy that the hackhouse has started attracting a flock of curious minds from Bangalore and those who’re visiting Bangalore to give a talk about what they find interesting.

We also started recording these talks and publishing them on our youtube channel.

/> Deep dive into AI research

After shutting down Nintee, I started diving deep into AI. I read research papers. Wrote a lot of code. Developed deep intuition about why deep learning works. This has made me very, very happy!

I posted my explorations online:

/> Wrote less on blog

I’m aware that this year, I published just a handful of posts here on Inverted Passion. But this didn’t mean I wrote less. In fact, I think I wrote significantly more than previous years. It’s just that a lot of my writing is in private documents. During my Nintee days, I was constantly writing what was working and what wasn’t. And at Turing’s Dream, I filled several notebooks with my understanding of deep learning. Perhaps I’ll take out time in 2025 to put more of them online.

/> Traveled to Bhutan, Edinburg and Milan

The highlight of Bhutan was the Tiger’s Nest and Punakha Dzong.

Edinburg was a blast! Aakanksha and I went there to attend the Fringe festival. It’s the world’s largest performance festival with thousands of performances across the city during over two weeks.