 | If I told you that "ignorance is strength", edwardlorilla1986.paxforex@blogger.com, we wouldn't get off on very good terms this Sunday, right? Of course we wouldn't. Because those of us who have read George Orwell's ridiculously prescient and timeless novel 1984 would recognise the phrase as Ingsoc Doublethink. WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. Even those of us who are perhaps yet to read 1984 (what are you waiting for?) will recoil at the idea that ignorance could be a strength. How are you this Sunday? I'm back again with the second edition of the First Principles newsletter. And today I hope to change your mind about ignorance. Baskar Subramanian is the co-founder and CEO of Amagi, a company that provides cloud-based software and infrastructure for video delivery. Last valued at over US$1.5 billion, Amagi processes, hosts, and delivers video for TV and OTT companies globally. I've known Baskar since 2012, when I first met him as a journalist with Forbes India. He's one of those founders who are always curious, always learning, and always ON. He says he's been a self-learner all his life. He dropped out of his master's program from the prestigious IIT Bombay because the entire system was geared towards courses and professors that would ensure good grades and, hopefully, good careers. Baskar had gone there for the seemingly quaint purpose of… learning. When he found a course he really liked, he tried enrolling for it. Only to find it cancelled. "I went to the professor. And the professor said, 'You know what? I cannot take this course because you're the only person who wants it. I need at least three people.'," says Baskar. "And I couldn't really convince any of my classmates, because everybody was looking for a career. For them, grades mattered. They didn't matter to me. I just got frustrated. So I just packed my bags and called my dad and said, I'm going to come back. And I just came back," he says. True to character, he and Vidya—his spouse and co-founder—have been homeschooling their teenage sons for years, in spite of also running a large and growing company. I phoned Baskar to ask him what was the one First Principle he found himself relying on most frequently to make decisions at Amagi, a company he co-founded in 2008. "The key mental model that I use in my meetings is to start from ignorance. If we knew nothing about the issue at hand—what would be the first steps that we would take and how we would go about solving the problem," he emailed me back from Amsterdam airport. | I had a second follow-up question. Could he share one or two major decisions that he'd made using the First Principle of "starting from ignorance?" "Most of our product roadmap stems from this, as we start with a blank sheet with no legacy of sorts. This has helped us re-imagine products/solutions differently from the industry and has led to interesting breakthroughs. "One of the key audio-watermarking tech that we built in the early days of Amagi was, and even currently is, an unusual way to solve the problem of identifying points for inserting ads in TV channels. Audio watermarking is typically used for content identification. We used it for ad insertion where we had to create a watermarking tech that allowed us to identify the content in less than one second and frame-accurately identify the point of insertion. This algorithm was very different and we have a patent to this effect. "The other one where we went against the grain of the broadcast tech industry was using CPUs for all the graphics and video processing, instead of the norm of using GPUs. This reduced the cost of our tech to 1/6th of our competitors." Ignorance, or "lack of knowledge or information", is usually assumed to be a bad thing. But that's a one-dimensional view of it. Ignorance can also free us from pre-existing notions and conventional wisdom. | Many people think of science as a deliberate process that is driven by the gradual accumulation of facts. Legions of smart scientists labor to piece together the evidence supporting their discoveries, hypotheses, inventions and progress itself. But according to Stuart Firestein, a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University, this view is fallacious. Working scientists don't get bogged down in factual swamps, he says, because they don't care all that much for facts. Facts are not what science is all about. It's only when the facts fail that scientists really put on their thinking caps. Scientists, Dr. Firestein says, are driven by ignorance. In this sense, ignorance is not stupidity. Rather, it is a particular condition of knowledge: the absence of fact, understanding, insight or clarity about something. It is a case where data don't exist, or more commonly, where the existing data don't make sense. | | | Viewed in this new light, ignorance is a state that can be harnessed deliberately. Use it to create new ideas and products without the baggage of the past. Or to strive for more clarity than existing knowledge can provide. At The Ken too, we use ignorance to guide our writing and communication. We don't presume active interest or prior knowledge in our subscribers when it comes to our stories. Instead, we assume the opposite. That a subscriber is probably ignorant about a topic we're writing on. That they probably don't have the time. Or the interest. By embracing this wholeheartedly, we force ourselves to do whatever it takes to make them interested in our stories. Their ignorance is our opportunity to inform and interest them. | | Listen to the full episode here: | Here is a bit of our conversation where we talked about ignorance and first principles thinking. | The biggest success for us as a company has always been ignorance. It was a very important part of the whole equation. Starting from ignorance always provided us perspectives and unique insights, which, if you're an industry veteran, unfortunately, you're conditioned from. My biggest fear and the biggest opportunity lies in being ignorant, and continuing to have that curiosity from an ignorant standpoint to start off with. And that's what we do in all our meetings and design discussions and our product discussions, saying, hey, let's go back to the basics. What are we trying to accomplish? How do we go about it? And assuming we didn't know anything about it, what would be our first step? Being an outsider is always a fun way to look at things. | | | I asked him if he would hire "ignorant" people? He said he would. When would he hire such a person over an experienced "expert"? | We do prefer people outside the industry. In fact, a lot of the people that we hire are people who are not in the industry because for me, we were outsiders, we could learn through the whole thing. And there was no good reason why we cannot get everybody else to learn through. So learnability is important. Problem solving is important. And then the foundational or fundamental first principles of whatever they've done. In fact, I remember getting into an (interview) meeting with somebody who had, I think, studied chemical engineering. So we started talking about chemical engineering and its core aspects, and what did they love about their courses? It was nothing to do with what we did. Because if you know foundational elements, you know how to solve problems in life and you're curious about new things and you know how to learn, that's all the three things you need. | | | And here are a few other guests who also talk about ignoring conventional wisdom and seeing things through fresh, "ignorant" eyes. InMobi founder Naveen Tewari gets candid about survival, innovation, and playing the game by changing the rules | Episode 4, 22nd Sept, 2022 | | Listen to the full episode here: | Don't come and tell me a trend if it's written somewhere because it's not a trend. It's done. You don't need external validation for a unique idea. You have to be convinced yourself. Let's just use first principles to figure out if this is the right thing to do and how we should go about it and we will back it and go for it. […] The sense that I've gotten is it's very hard to break the mould of external validation for people in the world. They seek external validation to say, hey, oh, this company is saying this, then I should also do it. But by the fact that the company is saying they'll do it, they've already spent two years so you're already late in the game and technology cycles are three year cycles, at best. So you're going to come in to lose. Part of why I say that we feel we are being innovative as a company is we see something which is not a trend and we try to build it. | | | Amit Agarwal of NoBroker talks about his single-minded mission to disrupt brokerage, building a cockroach company, and why his office address is a secret | Episode 9, 8th Dec, 2022 | | Listen to the full episode here: | One is that we have always assumed that if we could make the slate clean how would we start? For example there was no concept of a phone relationship manager. Ever in the real estate industry. We said, 'Hey, let's assume that there is not a single broker who can take you and put you on the back of a scooter and show you houses.' We are starting afresh. Now how would you connect to people? And what information would that person need? For example, a tenant, I'm digressing a little bit, for example a tenant is often deluded into believing that this property is very hot. When it is not. Right, so the broker once he guesses that you are interested in this property often says, 'Hey the token you have to give the token by tonight otherwise there are five more people going…' […] So, our first principle which has helped us immensely is to always think from ground up, assuming nobody has done this before, so how will you do it? | | | That's all from me this week. I'm meeting Krish Subramanian, the co-founder and CEO of subscription billing software platform Chargebee this week for the next episode of the First Principles podcast. If you have some interesting questions for me to ask him, please do drop me an email. And thanks to everyone who took my survey last week on how to improve First Principles. I've got a TON of feedback and ideas. I'm still trying to figure out how to prioritise and action them. If you haven't taken the survey yet, I'd love to have your views too. Here's the survey link. See you next Sunday with a new First Principle! Regards, Rohin Dharmakumar firstprinciples@the-ken.com | | | | |
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