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 any running tap water. He’s also the first person in the family to go to a college, both his parents were self-taught without any formal education.
Deep is also among the most admired product builders, having created impactful products at Linkedin, Google among many companies. He’s now Softbank’s senior managing partner based in Mountain View, California.
So how’s he reading the ongoing pandemic?
“There is perhaps one fundamental thing in my opinion which is how do we explain our place in the universe,” Deep tells me in this episode of Outliers.
“We will have scars, physical, emotional, and we have 2 choices–we can view those scars as ugly marks that we need to somehow pretend didn’t happen, or didn’t exist, and cover them up or we can view them as badges of honour and a proof of our resilience.”
“I think this is a time of reflection for us, to think about what we are going to take away from this brief period in history, forward in our lives and in the lives of our loved ones.”
In an earlier podcast with me, Deep mentioned how he would sneak in the school library every weekend, and spend days reading books.
Please tune in, listen and learn from Deep’s journey.
Additional listening: “A great product manager has the brain of an engineer, heart of a designer and tongue of a diplomat.”