Aneesh Sathe

The year was 1989, Solapur, then a small town in India. I’m about 4 years old attending one of the kindergarten years at St. Joseph’s Highschool. The days feel endless and everything has a sheen of significance. During recess me and a friend haunt the area just off from the main playground. This was an area that we’re not exactly allowed to go to, but not exactly forbidden either. What makes this place worth the apparent risk is that it’s full of pebbles. This is a place where treasure is to be sought. You see, a few days ago I had found a particularly interesting shiny stone and given it to my mom, who said she loved it. I won’t know if she meant it or it was just a thing to be said to little boys who bring home random things while the newborn sister is fussing. It was now my mission to give her more of the same.

The first few days I took home just a few, and collected my love. One day however, I wanted to go all out. I decided with my unnamed accomplice that I would collect at full capacity. Two whole pocketfuls. That recess we skipped the food and dedicated ourselves to collecting the shiniest, the sparkliest, the best of all the stones in that infinite sea of gravel. Soon the large brass bell was being rung by a peon and it was time to go back to class. We had succeeded. Our pockets were as full as they could be.

This turned out to be a problem as we attempted to sit down at our benches. The full pockets wouldn’t allow it. Being moderately intelligent munchkins, we of course promptly emptied out all the shinys into the little shelf below our desk. Then as the teacher asked us to pull out our books, we pulled the desk towards ourselves. All the stones rattled. Loudly.

We were asked to dump the stones. My friend did this most willingly, his love for the things was apparently a borrowed thing. Not me. I said no. I pleaded. Explained how they were just for my mom, and that I would be careful to not make the noise again. To no avail. Tears and all, I threw them all away. We were forbidden, expressly, from going to that part of the school again.

I don’t remember anything of what happened afterward. What is deeply etched is the deep sorrow of being denied, for reasons out of my control, the opportunity to give something out of love.

It’s fall 2023, in Carlsbad, a small town near San Diego. My son is almost 4. His teacher, Ms. Emily, in school ran a project over a few weeks asking the kids to collect interesting leaves and twigs and sticks as the trees prepared for winter. He was the first to get some to class and got much love and appreciation in return. He was hooked.

Over the next several weeks, he diligently took a stick or a leaf to class everyday. Full of pride, and joy, and love. Some days Ms. Emily wasn’t in class and there were tears, but the leaf collecting persisted. Then over Thanksgiving, while we were away visiting family, Ms. Emily was moving away. We and Ms. Emily explained it to him in the days leading up, hoping to shield the little heart. However come the Monday after Thanksgiving weekend, he rushed to the nearest tree to pick up a lovely crisp and complete dried leaf. There was of course no hand to place that lovely leaf in, there were plenty of tears.

It’s been a few days, the leaf collecting continues. The tears are now sad little pouts. Deeply etched in his little furrowed brow, is the sorrow of being denied, for reasons beyond his control, the opportunity to give something out of love.

It’s 2014, Singapore, I’m now towards the end of my PhD and proficient in image analysis. So good that I write code for friends so that it may save them weeks of manual analysis time. I do it for fun, I do it out of love for them. Soon I pick up machine learning, and apply that to do more faster, better. I enjoy transforming biological problems into computational ones. I love seeing happiness in the faces of my friends. This love took a meandering path and was poured into my first proper startup. I wanted to give this gift of automated analysis to those who could use it as a lever to change and save lives.

A startup isn’t a lab though, I take on and learn new things everyday in the service of that love. Fundraising, sure I’ll do it. Finance, easy. HR, headache, but will do. Translate between different domains and make everything make sense, that’s a core personality trait now. But, after leading the startup for 6 years, through multiple countries, and funding rounds, I decided to stop. The company of course goes on, led by the best I could hope for. Doing anything new is always difficult, my ability to do and give my best, both for the company and my family, was hampered by stress and health.

Deeply etched in that little strategic game theory decision, is the sorrow of being denied, for reasons beyond my control, the opportunity to give something out of love.

We want to make and give good things to people. Collecting, building, and inventing are all forms of the same love.

Nowadays Mr. Almost 4 uses leaves he finds to make wings. Perhaps there’s something to that.

—

Pair with: Butterfly Net by Caroline Polachek

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Summary #

Leaders are by the nature of their job, alone. Good leaders are thinkers, they explore and map their territory and lay out a course. That is they lead with vision. To develop a clear and confident vision leaders need to be able to concentrate on what’s important to take decisions with courage and conviction. Leaders don’t have the expertise to tackle every problem. Leadership teams have a wider expertise and should be structured such that there is openness and space to explore from a place of vulnerability. Good leadership teams are also good friends who are able to fearlessly point out mistakes and pitfalls. Leaders should go out of their way to create and maintain that culture of intellectual honesty in their leadership teams enabling the same kind of introspection as one would with close friends.

Good leaders are courageous thinkers #

Leadership is a frame of mind. You don’t need to have a title to be a leader, but if you do have a title you better have the right frame of mind.

As a leader, you need to be able to think for yourself. Take in, organise, and make sense of data coming to you and then take a call. You also need to have a strong moral sense. This takes courage. It is trivial to let things proceed as they are or to con your superiors into generating a list of tasks for you to do. But to point and say that we need to do this and not that, takes courage and mental faculties to argue for your point in the face of opposition.

In books on leadership, one often reads saying “no” and creating time for yourself in your schedule, the main purpose of this is to give yourself time to think, to marinate in the data and ferment out decisions. Leaders (in my startup experience) are pelted with requests and activities that would easily fill up 48 hours every day if they let them. For people like me, who come from research, the importance of creating time to think and plot ahead is implicit and we naturally make that space.

Good leaders make that space, put in thought and make the tough calls.

Good leadership teams are capable, great leadership teams are capable friends #

There is a central problem here. No leader can be an expert in everything. Even if data is staring you in the face, you may not (and often don’t) have the experience to correctly surmise what the next step should be. This is what the leadership team (or just your team) is for.

There is an excellent article by William Deresiewicz on Solitude and Leadership (here), where he talks about how being a leader is essentially an activity done in solitude. However there is also an important point he makes about the need for friendship as a means of self-discovery and solitude:

“So solitude can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading. All of these help you to know yourself better. But there’s one more thing I’m going to include as a form of solitude, and it will seem counterintuitive: friendship. Of course friendship is the opposite of solitude; it means being with other people. But I’m talking about one kind of friendship in particular, the deep friendship of intimate conversation. Long, uninterrupted talk with one other person.[…] what Emerson meant when he said that “the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude.”

Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul. One other person you feel safe enough with to allow you to acknowledge things—to acknowledge things to yourself—that you otherwise can’t. Doubts you aren’t supposed to have, questions you aren’t supposed to ask. Feelings or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities.”

Leaders should go out of their way to be friends with their leadership teams. In my experience of running projects, large and small, without a tight-knit leadership team the projects are hopeless and fail miserably. The main reason for this is not the capabilities of the individuals but their ability to openly discuss and question assumptions. To an external observer this make look like the leader is generating a coterie or a clique around them, but that’s exactly what one needs. A good leader is nothing without a leadership team that is textbook definition of coterie: “an intimate and often exclusive group of persons with a unifying common interest or purpose”.

A good leadership team enables the leader to take tough decisions and make what seem like courageous calls from the safety of having thought things through.

Most people know my love for  Norah Jones (I bought the cassette for Come Away with Me before all the awards), most people don’t know that I’m a long time fan of Anoushka Shankar also. To hear the sisters talk and play together is something else!   If for some crazy reason you don’t want to listen to the podcast, here are some of their songs from albums:   https://youtu.be/kEJSWIftX98   https://youtu.be/Wi7F-MlKLG4 https://youtu.be/wnkopIHRH3Q https://youtu.be/jguri1qOCY0 Here’s one of Anoushka with Sting: https://youtu.be/TmnDLMzpXLE   And the best tribute I saw to Chris Cornell: https://youtu.be/XbQ08Ixczvo Now go listen to the podcast 😉 https://youtu.be/VNz7kzO9vS4

As I start to build up my web presence during, what seems to be the fall of twitter, coming across article like these is heartening. Glen says:

The hardest thing we can do, but the most vital, is to start building amateur websites again! […] Building amateur web pages increases the quality of content on the web as well. A status update or a tweet on a huge social network is a lot like fast food; it’s immediately satisfying, but it’s not good for you, and ultimately leaves you feeling empty. But writing content for your own site - something that you feel so passionate about that you needed to build your own site to get it out into the world - is like cooking your own meal from scratch. It’s immediately filling, and satisfying in the long run the way fast food could never be. But it’s not enough to build our own site. We need to connect to others. Geocities was one of the pioneers of early web hosting, and even though it’s gone, there are still lessons we can learn from it. When you built a site on Geocities your site was sorted into a neighborhood, along with other sites that shared a common theme. This is a concept that we can borrow and build upon. We need to get to know our virtual neighbors and build a community around common interests, linking each other’s websites to form our own microweb of related content. So seek out new and interesting sites, and link to them on your site. Reach out to them, and see if they’ll link to you. Start a dialog. The way to build a better web is to build a better web of people.

After an unusually wet season the wildflowers have gone into a superbloom. I can’t seem to get enough of them.