Episode 72: Part-2: Becoming a Billionaire, Impact of Paul Graham & Marc Andreessen Essays, Productivity Hacks, Books w/Prasanna Sankar
About Prasanna Sankar:
What changes after one becomes a billionaire? How does one maintain a sense of purpose and drive after accumulating wealth?
Welcome to The One Percent Project, where we continue our captivating conversation with Prasanna Sankar, the co-founder of Rippling, and a true trailblazer in the world of technology and entrepreneurship. In our first episode, we discovered Prasanna's early successes, his coding prowess, and his ability to identify and seize opportunities. We explored his insights on building and optimising for pace and efficiency, as well as his views on the future of crypto.
In part two of our conversation, we dive deeper into Prasanna's extraordinary life, understand how his world transformed after achieving billionaire status, the profound influence of Paul Graham's writings on his thinking, and the unique superpowers that have propelled him to great heights. He also shares his book recommendations and unveils his thoughts on productivity, providing counterintuitive insights on how to make the most of your time and achieve remarkable results.
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Key takeaways:
When one accumulates a certain amount of wealth, they recognise the inherent limitations of spending. That is when the focus shifts towards making bigger and better bets and finding enjoyment in the process. This change in mindset reveals the game-like nature of capitalism, presenting an opportunity, blessing, and responsibility to generate impactful outcomes for the world.
The internet is a transformative power of the 21st century. Just as the steam engine revolutionised the world in the 20th century by enabling advancements in transportation, communication, and energy utilisation, the internet has connected human brains, creating a collective high bandwidth brain that accelerates the exchange of knowledge and experiences. This connectivity has been a catalyst of significant disruptions and has brought exponential progress.
Majority of people worry about job security in a world of abundance because of the conventional societal conditioning that traps in a fear-based mentality, resisting change. With basic needs taken care of, individuals should embrace their roles as explorers, pushing the boundaries of knowledge instead of clinging to the status quo.
One should consciously allow oneself to have some periods of non-productivity. It gives one time to think, follow curiosity, and create the right conditions for putting in the best work. In productivity, the direction of one’s efforts matters more than the velocity.
One should be careful of what one wishes for in the twenties, for it shall be granted in the thirties.
Prasanna’s book/blog recommendations:
Paul Graham's blogs: Paul Graham's blogs have significantly changed his perspective on various aspects, particularly in the early stages of his journey.
Marc Andreessen's blogs: Marc Andreessen's blogs, especially when he was young and focused on the internet, to be fascinating and influential in shaping his viewpoints.
Peter Thiel's "Zero to One": Prasanna considers Peter Thiel's book "Zero to One" as a transformative read that profoundly impacted his life. The book provided a broad zoom-out perspective on culture, human life, and the dynamics of change, offering eye-opening insights.
"The Thoughtful Investor" by Basant Maheshwari: Prasanna suggests this lesser-known book by Basant Maheshwari, an Indian investor, as an underrated gem. The book explores Maheshwari's journey of making fortunes in the stock market by continually betting on important bubbles and provides unique frameworks for understanding societal changes and generating wealth.
In this conversation, he talks about:
00:00 Intro
02:24 How has life changed after becoming a billionaire?
06:30 The impact of Paul Gramham's blogs and first principle thinking.
08:15 The balance between pace & efficiency.
13:44 His superpower
14:04 Three Books & Productivity Hacks
18:36 Moments that have defined his career.
19:57 Advice to his younger self
Transcript:
Pritish: How has life changed after becoming a self-made billionaire?
Prasanna: It has changed a lot in certain ways but not in others. It has definitely changed a lot in the sense that I can now make the bar for a bet; the bar for where I spend my time has gone up quite a bit. I don't do almost anything that I dislike at this point. The bar has changed quite a bit, on the use of my time and on ambition, on what you want to bet your time and money on, and the scale at which you want to do things. The bar has gone up quite a bit. It struck me in a weird way. On the one hand, I was very obsessed with making a lot of money. I hate the idea of having to work and trade my time for money. I really hated that idea. I was very bad at taking orders. I really wanted to make a lot of money from a very young age. On the one hand, suddenly, when I have a billion dollars, all that comes into question. I didn't come into this space to make a billion dollars. I came here to make a few million dollars. I overshot by quite a margin, and now I realise there is no way that my lifestyle will spend anywhere close to the money I've accumulated. There's just no way. And the benefit of being in the YC network is that you've seen a lot of other people work through this journey, and you've seen them try out and grapple with these existential questions. For example, Sam Altman, he's made a lot of money, he's one of the best investors in the world, once he's made much money, he's gay, so he's not having kids either. Then you start to think about why you make more at all. The original goal has been accomplished. Then at some point, you think, okay, maybe I should give it away. What are you going to do with all this money? And then you realise, not all, but some realise, that this charity thing is nonsense. It's not changing the world. These are temporary band-aids. It's not fundamental technical wealth creation. It's zero-sum in many ways. Your left hand is used to the right hand. It's not like a permanent solution to things. And the quality of brain power is very poor. You made your capital with the highest calibre, highest IQ people who had systems thinking, and then you want to take all this capital and give it to allocate to like very poor IQ people who are often just ideologically driven; they don't even see the results, there is no market feedback. So, I think charity doesn't work for many tech-wealthy people for many reasons. Then it comes back to the most profitable companies and the best non-profits. There is a weird intersection. OpenAI started as a non-profit. Sam Altman would funnel all his wealth and burn it on fire on OpenAI. That was the sort of thing where he was going to give away all his wealth. And then it turned out to be one of the most successful companies in history. So, you end up in the cycle where Elon did the SpaceX. SpaceX is supposed to be the money-burning dumpster fire that Elon charitably donates to take us to Mars, and that turned out to be one of the most valuable companies in history. So, in a weird way, at some point, you realise, okay, you just want to bet it, put it back on the line. You don't need much to live. And now you think in grander scales. In some way, you realise, okay, this is all a game. This is all like a scorecard in some weird way. And capitalism is a game where the world thinks that because you created many impacts and a lot of net positives to the world, it gives you a lot more resources to do it again the next time. It's an opportunity, a blessing, a responsibility in a lot of ways. And it's okay if you blow it up. There's no way we're going to spend it all anyway. So now the job is to make bigger bets and have more fun doing it.
Pritish: You have had much influence from Paul Graham’s writing. You have a strong belief in Six Sigma principles and first principles. So how has all of this played a role in your life?
Prasanna: I've been fortunate to get to the centre of the action, where a lot is happening in the world. I'm also fortunate to be in a time when a lot is happening in the world. It is not a normal time. Only once in a few hundred years do you live in a time like this. The previous such time happened in the early 1900s when people invented the steam engine, and it was immediately followed that you could channel energy into all kinds of things. It created cars, trains, the telegraph, electric appliances and aeroplanes, and so on and so forth. That just created an explosion of transformations in the world. And then similarly, right now, it is creating a far deeper explosion, where I would argue that human beings excelled because they invented language. We could all learn from each other's experiences, but now we've accelerated that by connecting all our brains at the speed of light using this thing called the internet. So now we almost share a collective high bandwidth brain, which is creating exponents on a lot of even the traditional technologies like nuclear fusion. So, many things are breaking, thanks to the internet. I'm lucky to be alive at this time. I'm also lucky to have accumulated the skills to play at the centre of this battle, which is happening in a very computer science-centric manner on the internet, and crypto is one of the biggest drivers going forwards. I've been very fortunate to be amongst the select few who can play this battle. If Alexander was born today, what game would he be playing? He would be like Mark Zuckerberg playing the internet. I'm fortunate to be on that battlefield, and it's also a position of extreme privilege. Like Alexander was born as the son of a king, not everyone could have played that battle. Most people in the world who were alive at that time could not even compete with Alexander. So, he happened to be one of the smartest among these tiny thousand people whom he competed with, and he was able to take over the world. It's also a privilege to be an early participant in this YC network. Anyone who was around at the time when I was around has gotten stupendously rich. An insane amount of wealth was created around that small place. I find it fascinating that one of the insane movies is playing out in my lifetime, and it's just fascinating to watch, regardless. And then, on top of it, to be able to have the skill sets to play in that and to participate and change the outcomes of the movie, it's like a blessing.
Pritish: Actually, the example of Alexander the Great is amazing because his father, who was a king, as you mentioned, doesn't get any credit for what he had imbibed into Alexander the Great. Whatever Alexander accomplished, his father put his plans in motion. But again, marketing and history make only one hero. And that basically comes back to the environment that we are born in. And every five years, there's a transformation. And there are two ways of looking at it. One is that every transformation brings you many challenges because you need to upgrade your skill sets, or you may run out of a job or money or whatever. On the other hand, as you mentioned in your mindset, it's an opportunity to play a bet that may or may not work.
Prasanna: I also mean once you step out of the matrix, you are always a little bit confused about this narrative that people are like, hey, I might lose my job. I need to upgrade my skill set. I've always been fairly confused about that. And once I've made these bets, like repeatedly, there were points in time where I had little to no money. I had $10,000 in my bank account, and I put 5,000 in Bitcoin, and it's almost confusing to me why not? Why don't people do that? And if you zoom out long enough in the arc of human history, it's like, what's actually going to happen? Okay, let's say Bitcoin blows up. I have only $5,000. Now let's talk about whether I will run out of food? Not really. I don't see a possibility of that. Humanity has invented farming, and there is enough food for everyone to go around. Am I going to run out of clothes? Not really. Early humans wore only one or two clothes. At a point in time, they just made clothes out of leaves. That was their clothes for years. We've seen the food, shelter, and clothing like we are not going to run out of that. Like we are in excess of that. So, it's always would they have imagined, would the early prehistoric humans have imagined a world of abundant food and shelter and clothing, we would be thinking about, what if I get out of a job? How about I upgrade my skill set to stay relevant? That is crazy. Like, why would you do that? You don't need to do any of that stuff. You don't need a job. The world is going to feed you. So, it's insane how much that basic understanding of the larger picture of the human arc of history is absent from the matrix, and I don't fully understand why. Certainly, people wouldn't have predicted this is the way to reward; the need for safety somehow created some meta programs in our brains. Of course, if a lion is going to hunt you, you shouldn't die. So those things put in some programs in our amygdala, which created the matrix, which from a foundational constraint perspective if we were way past that. But we are still stuck to the reptilian programs. Those vestiges seem powerful. It's not dominating some 10% of the human population; it’s dominating our popular culture, like 99% of the population, and only 1% are truly doing what we've been freed to do. If you don't need any of this stuff if all your needs are taken care of, what are you supposed to do? You're supposed to be an adventurer, an explorer. You’re supposed to push the limits of human knowledge, and most of the world is still in the cop territory, just maintaining the status quo, and they're worried about change and disruption. It's insane. They were born because of a story of change.
Pritish: That's fascinating. I have an example of juggling. The best jugglers or the jugglers who really become good at juggling balls or whatever or knives are the ones who focus on keeping the knives of the balls in the air rather than having the fear that they will drop. The ones who pick up juggling naturally and the fastest are the ones who are not thinking about it. Am I going to drop it? Because the ones who are thinking about it, I'm going to drop it, are the ones who never learn and stay in the fear sector. But the ones who think about just keeping and figuring out the techniques on how to keep it in the air, don't care if it falls a hundred times. What they care about is that my core objective is to keep it going in the air and keeping it and moving it as fast as possible, and probably adding many more objects while I'm juggling.
Prasanna: Right.
Pritish: What is your superpower?
Prasanna: The biggest one is having the good taste to identify the big changes happening in the world and following that with curiosity. I enjoy that a lot. I really enjoy finding the butterfly flap that's going to create the tornado.
Pritish: Three books or blogs that have influenced you the most.
Prasanna: Obviously, PG’s blogs were very influential early on. They changed my perspective of things. And then post that I enjoyed, like Marc Andreessen's blogs when he was really young, into the internet. Those were fascinating reads. That definitely changed my perspective. And then I got the upgrade when Peter Thiel’s ‘Zero to One’ came out. That was a much bigger zoom-out. If PG is micro on startups, Marc Andreessen has a little bit of zoom out on high-growth companies and the economy in general. Peter is like a zoom-out on culture, human life, and how change happens. That is just eye-opening for me. ‘Zero to One’ changed my life. I mean, there are also a couple of other books which have influenced me, like Taleb’s books around asymmetry and asymmetric bets. I came across them back in college, and they've stuck with me. The one less known one, which I think is super underrated, is a book by this Indian dude called Basant Maheshwari called ‘The Thoughtful Investor.’ This guy out of Kolkata made his fortunes in the stock market, starting with absolutely nothing, and I didn't expect to learn a lot because he doesn't speak fluent English. But the book was fascinating because the way he made his wealth is by betting continually on the next important bubble. And that's how, that's how you make the 10x, 50x, 100x on a stock, and he's doing this in all in the public markets. So, it's even more fascinating. And so that was the really good zoom-out around what changes societies and creates pessimism to moderate realism and extreme optimism. And then, if you right this curve, you can make generational wealth. So, his frameworks for how to think about that are actually very contrary. I still don't see it in any of the works out there. So, it's uniquely Indian, and he's done it a few times. So, I think that was very fascinating. The book ‘The Thoughtful Investor’ was fairly fascinating to me as well.
Pritish: That's on my Amazon list right away after this call.
Prasanna: Sure.
Pritish: Three productivity tools and hacks that you use.
Prasanna: Yeah, I think one is I try not to be productive enough because we live in a vector world where the vector’s direction matters a lot more than the velocity. Velocity matters, too, by the way, but the direction matters more. So, there is a healthy portion of time when I'm not productive; I’m not doing anything. I'm just thinking, following my curiosity, and then setting up the right conditions where naturally you are working for the true and the right reasons, which is actually insanely gratifying to provide to the world, what you're really good at, to do your best work. It's like setting up a condition where you're rolling down a hill. You find the right hill to roll down on. That's task number one. And then you set off the rolling motion. The rest of life takes care of itself. So, you put in the right defaults. You hang your own people who care about doing something important. You spend time with people talking about what's actually going to happen to the future of the world and living in the future almost, as PG calls it. So those set up good defaults. The things that drive me to do anything because I don't need anything now. For a while, money was the driver. I wanted to make it big and all that. At this point, things that drive me are like the video game model, which is like, life doesn't have a purpose. There's no grand meaning. It's all a grand, beautiful video game. You get to play a few lives, and you want to maximise your thrill of what is actually happening. So, that keeps me grounded. That gives me a reason to wake up in the morning and do something. What is the most interesting way by which I can fuck up the world? And then there is the movie theatre model, which is that no matter what I do, there is something amazing happening. You can watch it from the front-row seat. What do you want to watch? What is the most interesting? What is the most interesting butterfly flap that people are not noticing that they will notice down the line? So, playing that prediction game and finding the truth is fascinating. And then lastly, it's the great work model, which is just what am I really good at? What can I give to the world to the best of my abilities? So those keep me grounded and motivated.
Pritish: Three moments that have defined your career.
Prasanna: The big breakthrough moments in my life are winning the Google Code Jam and being number one in India when I was 18. That gave me an insane amount of confidence, that hey, listen, maybe I'm really good at this stuff. I am just very special. That increases the number of years of delayed gratification you're willing to go for, willing to be misunderstood for. At a point, you crave to be misunderstood. And then the next big thing obviously was Y Combinator, moving to the Valley and being a part of this massive trend where the centre of the world was moving from New York to Silicon Valley, and I was early and right to the trend. And I was also at the centre of the centre, Y Combinator, which was fairly underrated at that time. And it created an insane amount of wealth and changed the world. So, YC was my second biggest defining moment. And then, finally, I'm going to skip the most obvious one, which is obviously Rippling. Rippling made me a billion dollars, and it was fairly obvious. We spoke about why. And then beyond that, like right now, it's crypto. Crypto's new YC. And that's fairly early to that. In fact, believe it or not, I made my first liquid million dollars in crypto. No, not rippling. I think crypto is a new YC, and I think that's the next big career-changing move for me.
Pritish: And before we close, what advice will you give your younger self?
Prasanna: I'm super, first of all, super glad and thankful for how things have turned out. You couldn't have asked for a lot different. The growth has been insane. I would say these mental models; if I had known earlier and had more conviction, I could have been more fearless and less nerve-wracking. At some point, you get desensitised to the highs and lows, so I do enjoy the highs and lows that I went through early on in my career, but it's just, it's okay. It is hard to believe, but people told me at that time, Naval told me at that time that this old age is actually true. Be careful what you wish for in your twenties, for it shall be granted in your thirties. It's totally true. I didn't believe it, but only a handful of people wish for the same thing consistently over a decade or so, and they tend to get it.
Pritish: Brilliant. Prasanna, that's a great place to close this conversation. Thanks for being on the show.
Prasanna: Thank you, man. Cheers.
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