Outliers Season 4 Finale with Anand Deshpande

Outliers with Pankaj Mishra · Outliers Special Ep14: Anand Deshpande Ever since I started Outliers podcast in December 2016, it’s been an amazing journey of conversations, almost like a free flowing river, navigating the ups and the downs, and the unexpected twists. Sometimes fulfilling, and at times leaving me even more hungry to keep seeking.  […]

Quaranteenagers: Healing Today for Shaping the Future

If you have been following the Outliers: Season of Resilience, you would have heard conversations about everything from navigating a startup through this pandemic, future of jobs, lessons learned from different journeys, and so on.  Most of the topics covered so far have been focused on us, the adults.  But the next decade of our […]

“Have an insanely optimistic belief about the distant future”

Entrepreneurship is all about undying optimism. Founders are known for being crazily in love with their ideas even when the world is falling apart.  This week’s Outliers Podcast is with Amit Somani of Prime Venture Partners. Amit has never been an entrepreneur himself, but over the years, he has worked closely with some of the […]

“How do we explain our place in the universe?”

Outliers with Pankaj Mishra · Outliers Special Ep 08: This week’s Outliers is an outlier for so many reasons. And that’s not just about his humble beginnings.  Deep Nishar grew up in Mumbai with four siblings, in a 300 square foot residence where the living room would become a bedroom at night and there wasn’t […]

“Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional”

Outliers with Pankaj Mishra · Outliers Special Ep 07: Many of you will remember the story I wrote exactly three years ago titled “The making of  Girish Mathrubootham.” The story chronicled how Girish used lessons from his troubled childhood and early entrepreneurial failures to build Freshworks, one of India’s fastest  growing product startups, and whether […]

“Time to reflect who are you as a company”

At FabIndia, William Nanda Bissell, has combined the mission of building a profitable enterprise with the higher purpose of doing good to its community of craftsmen and women. In June last year, William told me in the Outliers podcast that business needs to stand for a higher purpose.  “Giving just returns to your investors and […]

“It’s liberating to be in charge of your destiny”

In the startup world, Sridhar Vembu has the positioning of a monk. And that’s not just because of the way he talks and his strong idealism, but more importantly, because of the way he has built his startup Zoho–without raising any external funding.  In this week’s Outliers episode, I had a long conversation with Sridhar, […]

“Hope is not a strategy”

Entrepreneurial optimism can be blinding, especially at times when startups are facing existential crises, and are being led by founders who desperately want to script heroic turnarounds.  It’s not surprising to find many startup founders clinging on to their companies hoping they navigate out of the pandemic soon, and regain their original positioning in the […]