Inverted Passion
I’m Paras Chopra and this is my digital home. These days, I’m building an AI lab called Lossfunk. Explore 👉 Start here to get an overview 🖱️ Explore all my projects 🌱 My knowledge garden 🧠 Mental models for entrepreneurs (my book) 🧵 (250+) Twitter threads I’ve written Recent essays All essays and po
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- 669 from 27 Mar 2005 to 9 Oct 2026
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2026 31
- Vibe Astronomy: discovering exoplanets!
- How funny are the frontier AI models?
- Modern LLMs have tiny GPTs hidden inside them
- Asking agents to make money to survive
- Why AI agents aren’t adopted widely
- Write the first damn draft yourself
- Unsolicited advice to the Indian govt on frontier models
- AI is challenging what words mean
- Why are Indian companies not developing frontier models?
- Why frontier labs are scaling-pilled
- LLM are universal simulators
- Why math works so well in describing our universe?
- How mind bootstraps itself
- Science often proceeds one grave at a time
- Brain optimizes for bits per ATP
- Why aren’t things changing faster?
- What domains will be the last ones to get automated from AI?
- How to coach someone
- How does behavior change happen
- Learning flywheels are all you need
- The two views of rationality
- What does your AI dream of?
- Making a product that Marl loves
- My Claude Code workflow
- Words are minimum-viable coordination tools
- Nobody cares about your idea.
- A proposal to prevent job losses from AGI
- Science of habit building
- Will we forget what pre-LLM era looked like?
- Are we headed towards a stable dystopia?
- Crossposting from X to my WordPress
2025 8
2024 9
2023 17
- Review of 2023
- Notes from the book “Hooked”
- Notes on how Facebook ads work
- Notes on how Supercell is run
- How to increase wealth for everyone
- Notes from the book “Decoding the Why”
- Notes from the book “Magic Words”
- Why you will skim this article
- Don’t sell your soul to the algorithm
- Games are problems people pay to solve
- The Anti-Productivity Manifesto
- Wealth is not money, it’s the things we use money for
- You can only succeed if you know how you can fail
- Notes from “Ogilvy on Advertising”
- Startups live and die in a multidimensional landscape
- Social media of the future will be human-to-AI, not human-to-human
- Think from first principles before you Google (or ask ChatGPT)
2022 35
- Bye 2022. Hello 2023.
- Stop assuming that your customers want things that you want
- Ask people what they did, not what they will do
- Never ask your friends or family if they like your idea
- Always seek disconfirmatory evidence
- Map is not the territory
- You’re probably not a good leader (because being that is hard)
- Notes from the book “The Shallows”
- How to change habits
- Your company’s org chart is more important than you think
- Aim to be a cult by hiring people who obsess about the same things
- The number one job of a founder is to communicate clarity
- People don’t leave companies, they leave their bosses
- Don’t hire for roles, hire for a change
- Your team’s culture is defined by your behavior, not your words
- Your north star metric should be a leading indicator of profits
- Study your most successful customers to set your direction
- What kills startups is the lack of feedback
- Profit overpowers ethics, if left unchecked
- Great entrepreneurs think like investors
- Investors will prioritize financial returns over your ambitions
- Business quality is determined by one metric: return on invested capital
- Your business is worth all future profits it is expected to generate
- Recruit exceptional people by showing them a promised land
- Moats for deeptech startups
- Raise funding by showing how you can raise even more funding
- Startups shouldn’t solve technically hard problems
- Startups thrive under uncertainty (of the right kind)
- Get press by giving journalists something surprising
- Your 30 second pitch shouldn’t be about you
- Notes from the book: “The Spike”
- Consumers want stuff for free, companies want to pay
- It’s winners-take-all in B2C, while B2B is a long tail
- How my 2021 went
- Why we don’t have a science of consciousness yet
2021 41
- Consumers hate getting sold to, companies love it
- Consumers want to conform, companies want to differentiate
- Your product’s price determines your business playbook
- What people pay for something is determined by its perceived alternatives
- Generating profit requires creativity
- Marketing needs to deliver more than it asks
- People evaluate emotionally and then rationalize their decision
- Notes from the book ‘First Three Minutes’ by Steven Weinberg
- All new products compete with Instagram for attention
- Assume most people are lazy but market to those who aren’t
- Notes from the book “The Mind is Flat”
- Market leaders get killed by non-competitors
- Never stop creating network effects in your business
- Do what’s hard (because everyone’s doing what’s easy)
- Use all your unfair advantages
- Your competitors are just like you: smart and hard-working
- Compete on cost or quality. You can’t do both
- Switching costs determine the valuation of your business
- Commoditize your value chain before it commoditizes you
- Solve the most important problem that you can personally impact
- How much can science tell us about reality?
- What you build your business on doesn’t limit how big it can grow
- Find partners who can grow their business by building on top of your business
- My moral code
- Crypto is the future of our society
- All startups belong to an ecosystem that makes or breaks them
- Steal successful ideas from everywhere
- The week rule to prevent failure
- Can an economy keep on growing?
- Habits prevent people from switching from the familiar to the new
- How we do science determines what we discover
- Deliver value only on dimensions that customers care about
- Artificial general intelligence is risky by default
- All sophisticated solutions start extremely simple
- Is the world becoming better?
- Reality is an evolved illusion
- People don’t like using technology
- Most surgeries are ineffective
- Define your market as narrowly as possible
- We may be alone in the universe
- How money works
2020 17
- 20 lessons from 2020
- Only two types of startups exist: technology-led and culture-led
- Don’t be a first-mover, be the first one to get it right
- Search for market-product fit, not product-market fit
- Be in the desires market, not the solutions market
- Evidence of desire is in people’s behavior (and not in what they say)
- Businesses exist to fulfil human desires
- Capitalism rewards rare and valuable
- How to be a Bayesian
- How to think about risk
- On the strangeness of giving advice
- Perils of binary thinking
- Twyman’s law
- Horizon based thinking
- The three levels of Hindu philosophy
- Money, entropy and climate change
- My intellectual progress in the last decade (2010s)
2019 12
- Making peace with the ambiguity of progress
- Big ideas that I suspect to be true
- What does the soul of the Marionette say?
- Why are we rich but hopeless
- Life is fractal, but markets are square
- The meaning of life is unthinkable
- Modes of living
- How to get rich by investing your savings
- What Gita teaches us and what it doesn’t
- What is truth?
- You cannot plan for happiness (but you can discover it)
- Writing is defragging brain
2018 54
- Inverted Passion 2018 in Review
- Why is enterprise software so ugly?
- Notes from ‘Nonzero: the logic of human destiny’
- The Reverse Turing Test and proof-of-human currency
- Only the paranoid survive
- Why do introverts get depressed easily?
- Simpson’s paradox, or why your intuition about averages is probably wrong
- Why deep neural networks work so well?
- Logistic maps (and what they tell us about free will)
- Notes on entropy
- Your company’s org chart is more important than you think
- On the inefficiency of machine learning algorithms
- Evolution explains everything
- Thinking in analogies is dangerous
- Building mental immunity against depression and anxiety
- How to become a leader in 10 hard steps
- How to critically dissect a success story
- The metathinking approach to making big decisions
- Notes from The Elephant in the Brain
- Cognitive biases that lead to poorly designed products
- Notes from Founders mentor Founders [SaaS edition] – April 2018
- Philosophy is politics
- Copying ideas is highly underrated
- Mathematicians and startup founders
- Your cold emails compete with cat pictures for my attention
- Review of Life
- Notes from Inverted Passion Unconference in Bangalore [March ’18]
- Your first sales hire should be two sales reps, and other tips
- Notes from ‘Skin in the game’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- The Motivation, Emotion and Repetition (MER) framework for marketing
- The (de)centralization continuum
- Notes from Berlin on crypto and blockchain
- Organizations are habit maximization machines
- Reliably detecting humans on the Internet
- Reading Recap #4: The many wonders of prediction markets
- Businesses get killed by non-competitors
- How to create legal monopolies via network effects and economic moats
- Reading Recap #3: Governance systems beyond democracy
- Bitcoin’s value beyond hype
- Bitcoin is mother of all network effects
- Reading Recap #2: Basics of Ethereum and mental models for blockchain
- Cryptocurrencies are belief systems
- Meta mental model
- Reading Recap #1: Basics of bitcoin and blockchain
- Speaking your mind is a public service
- What fidget spinners teach about making hit products
- Deconstructing startup decks: Spext (Google Docs for voice data)
- Why startups need to be cult-like
- Why many B2C startups pivot to B2B
- Staying relevant in a changing world
- To get good startup ideas, look for anomalies
- Details and structure matters: lessons from Facebook’s foundation in 2004
- The winner takes all fallacy and the structure of network effects
- The long (psychological) guide to achieving your new year resolutions
2017 14
- Why you shouldn’t set prices based on value created
- Endowment effect in business
- What food delivery companies can learn from Netflix
- Librarians make more money than scientists
- Don’t go where the puck is going
- Revenue requires investment, profit requires creativity
- Nobody likes using technology
- How to avoid cognitive biases when you get paid to think
- Singapore’s foundation and lessons for entrepreneurs
- Good engineers make terrible leaders
- Why people jump red lights and what it says about startup failure
- I turned 30 and here’s my scorecard
- The Outer Limits of Reason: A Summary
- Best books that I read in 2016
2016 5
2015 2
2013 7
2012 15
- Why time is not running out
- Free will, facticity and their (not-so) surprising consequences
- For startups: how to deal with large enterprise customers
- A boring poem
- A CEO has to do only two tasks: hiring and setting vision
- A perfectly normal life – Part I
- That thing we call happiness
- On (not) having heros in life
- It’s OK to disagree in a face-to-face conversation
- Why do people fall in love with nostalgic past?
- Defying parents is mark of a thinking man
- The essential startup team: content, analytics, design, engineering
- Validate your startup idea by asking 3 simple questions
- My Mixergy interview! Hear the story of Visual Website Optimizer
- Pick experiences over relationships
2011 15
- Here’s the Wingify story!
- Professional success and personal success: two independent dimensions
- What matters in life (and what doesn’t)
- Wingify nominated for Red Herring Asia 100 and NASSCOM Emerge 50
- Stupidity of free markets
- On Internet, you are at mercy of private organizations
- How to market your startup or new product without spending a penny
- The kick of a startup
- Customer service is not cost of sales. It’s a marketing expense
- Growth startup v/s lifestyle startup: why should there be a difference at all?
- What’s wrong with Indian startup scene?
- How to find startup ideas that make money
- Startup: an emotional roller coaster ride
- What Facebook needs? A killer search engine
- Sorry, your “cool” webapp is probably not going to make money
2010 10
- Do a startup or travel around the world?
- Appointment Reminder: Patrick’s new startup launches!
- Business ideas are dead; chase after market opportunity
- Startups and Nihilism don’t go together
- Who says successful product startups can’t come out of India?
- The Turing-roulette Game
- How making money changed my perspective on startup ideas
- Compilation of revenue figures for different kinds of startups
- Why should the world care about your startup?
- What exactly makes entrepreneurship so hard
2009 15
- Views en-route from office to home
- Startup evolution – from idea to IPO in 10 really hard steps
- How to do research on a new idea/target industry using Twitter
- Single biggest problem with entrepreneurs
- The only alternative is to work harder
- ContextSense on ReadWriteWeb
- Wingify in HT Mint
- Wingify: Why your conversion rates suck?
- Digital Evolution Basics
- Are soft lies in sales okay?
- The mystery of number 23
- April Fools Pranks on the Internet
- So, you have a million dollars. Now what?
- Luck, Randomness and Success
- Wonders of Probability
2008 71
- Music Genres and Programming Languages
- Golden Rule for Startups
- Stanford Engineering Courses Online
- Article on Kroomsa in Times of India
- Greatest Living Thinkers Today
- BarCamp at IIT-Delhi, India on 11-12 October 2008
- What Hackers Need to Learn
- Vote for my Startup Kroomsa: Music for Help
- The Indian Version of Hacker News
- Startup 101
- Will MyJugaad.in be worth $6.3 million in 3 years?
- A New Internet on the Anvil?
- How to Start an Online Business
- For Entrepreneurs: Why and How to Network?
- New Features in MyJugaad.in – Slideshow for Webpages
- Precimark: An open source stripe ad network
- PyPond: A digital life simulator in Python
- Hindi’s First Social Network – Kindo.com Launches in Hindi
- Hilarious Chinese Translation
- Mnemonic Dictionary: A Quick Review
- How I built a web app in six days for Rs. 350 ($8.75) only
- How To Find a Dream Job with Startups in India
- Are you Web Sick?
- Are You Guilty of Not Solving World’s Problems?
- Business and Startup Incubators in India
- Is Universe = Mathematics?
- Introducing MyJugaad.in
- This Blog is One of the Most Popular Blogs in India
- Startup Lunch Delhi 2: How was the experience?
- 30 by 30
- For Startups: How to Find Problems to Solve?
- 10 Blogs Indian Entrepreneurs Must Regularly Visit
- Quick Statistics On Indian Entrepreneurs and Indian Startups
- Indian Music Search
- Google Cannot Serve more than 1000 results
- Sneak Peek into DesiWiki
- The HIV Game
- Switched to Feedburner
- I’m Hacker of the Month
- Why (Most) Internet Startups Suck?
- Introducing StartupLogic.com
- 200,000 books by an author
- WTF 2.0
- Beautiful Design by Jay
- The New Avatar of ParasChopra.com
- Risky
- Today ===> Tomorrow
- A masterpiece?
- No comments
- Hence Proved
- Noise —Brain–> Signal
- Click
- Google it you moron
- You never know what they know
- Maybe
- Parallel Universes
- The Dilemma of Justification
- Evolution of Epiphany
- The Inquisitive Mind
- Narcissist’s Love Triangle
- Science
- Life Cycle Of a Philosopher
- The Uncertainity Principle
- Cocoon of Conviction
- A Lifestyle Entrepreneur
- Self cloning by a creature
- Craig Venter trying to creating CO2 eating life
- The Entrepreneurship Myth
- Finding My Passion
- New Venture Creation 101 – Man, you are lucky…
- Hacking Successful: 24 Jan 2008
2007 65
- The Genesis
- The Conviction
- The Birth of AI
- The Answer is 42
- An Argument with Nuts
- Nostalgia
- The Theory of Relativity
- Unintensional Stupidity
- The Deluded Cartoonist
- Future predictions about Me
- Utopian Dream
- Are we living in a simulation?
- Is Dust another form of life?
- Bacteria makes Gasoline
- Time may not exist at all
- The essence of CAT
- Simulating future
- Synthetic Biology Primer
- My (chinese) LITTLE POLY-COLOURED FLUORESCENT
- Identity crisis
- A robot powered by rat brain
- A talk on regenerative medicine
- iThink iWant iPhone
- Lessons in Entrepreneurship @ Precimark
- Times have surely changed: a DIY guide for becoming a cyborg
- How to attain nirvana?
- My Philosophy dated 15th June 2007
- My New Company: Precimark
- This is Synthia talking
- Video of Rat Neurons flying a Jet Plane
- Fences of the mind
- NewsWeek covers Synthetic Biology
- My Idea: Location based games through SMS
- The Purpose of Life
- Does your house number starts with number “1”?
- Chimps better (read more evolved) than us
- A Youtube for Biology?
- More one liners
- Bacteria not allowed to mutate
- What makes me unique?
- The meaning of life
- Tips for the young computational biologist (like me)
- Mice get a third eye
- Biology as the Grand Unified Theory of the universe
- I wish I could ignore the complexity, but, damn, I am part of it!
- Designing Humans
- Microsoft awards ~USD 50,000 for Synthetic Biology Proposals
- My GRE is over…
- DNA for information storage
- Why do I remain bored 90% of the time?
- How do I live my life?
- Humans are not the only biohackers
- The startup guide for students
- Odds of dying…
- Bizzare Universe
- The Immortal Love
- Flagello-matic
- GEB v/s Lila
- Bio::Blogs #7
- Bio::Blogs #7 – Call for links
- Digg that Science at ScientificDebate.com
- The need for a revolution in biology
- A bacteria living inside mitochondria…
- Protein Structure Prediction using Python
- Almost 1000 Molecular Biology Databases
2006 128
- I am at NCBS
- Grad School Links
- Evolved cellular automata for protein secondary structure prediction
- Mathematical model of tumor growth and evolution
- Biohackery
- Classical Papers in Genetics
- Noise as the basis of complex decision making?
- The more you know, the less you believe
- Journal of Visualized Experiments, a Video-journal for biological research
- Why there is something rather than nothing?
- Systems Biology Review papers
- The best philosophy…
- Resurrection of a virus
- Microsoft announces Synthetic Biology
- iGEM 2006
- Intellectual Property Issues in Synthetic Biology
- The Artificial Being Project Updated
- Democracy as a paradigm for Artificial Intelligence
- Mangta – google your way to cool stuff
- Misc. Philosophy Questions
- Why do I write this blog?
- The limit of genomic tinyness
- What are we doing here?
- What if the human species is wiped out tommorrow?
- Synthetic Biology makes (bio) diesel
- The Virus Transistor
- The bliss of ignorance…
- End of Science?
- God and Evolution
- Search strategy in a Random Grid
- Jeev – October, 2006 issue released
- Budding (Bio)Entrepreneur
- How to get rich fast?
- Self Organizing Maps in Python
- I am an ENTP
- Game Theory and Cancer
- Perl V/S Python
- YASBC – Yet Another Synthetic Biology Coverage
- Engineering life through Synthetic Biology
- Training the immune system to fight HIV
- Digital Evolution
- Plants show evolvability!
- Bunch of neurons are alive…
- The Handicap Principle is Handicapped
- Evolvability: It is a misnomer or the basis of life?
- Computational Biology Documents
- The March of the Penguins
- Tomatoes to contain vaccines for HIV and HBV
- Constructive Biology by George Church in Edge Magazine
- Quantum Mechanics and The Theory of Evolution
- Do you have GUTs in you?
- The Origin of Life — Metabolism first or Genes first?
- Things I have learnt at IISc
- Nanobacteria or self-replicating calcium crystals?
- Virtual (Molecular) Biology Experiments
- Bgl operon aka Cryptic Genes
- Reached IISc
- Going to IISc, Bangalore tommorrow
- DNA as dinner
- Jeev – June, 2006 Issue Launched
- Genetic Rules rewritten: RNA can carry genetic information
- Livescience.com Special Report on Immortality
- Synthetic Biology 2.0 Conference at UC Berkeley
- Meet the Biohackers..
- Ants – The wonderful and most diverse creatures
- IISc here I come..
- Get-A-Life: How true is comparison of Artificial Life with the real one?
- Philosophy Questions
- Evolution is speedier at equator
- Is evolution reproducible?
- Should Life neccessarily be tangible?
- Organisms get fooled in the Urban Jungle
- Weird (but killer) uses of human tongue…
- Genetic Programming gets a patent
- Immune System inspires Computer Paradigm
- Plants sucking up harmful arsenic from the soil
- The future of Tissue Engineering
- Misc Questions/Observations…
- Evolved Cellular Automata for Protein Secondary Structure Prediction
- BioHacking for Dummies
- Viruses hacked to Assemble Batteries
- The Genomics of Dragon…
- The Mystery behind Genetic Code
- Jeev – The Online Life Sciences Magazine launched…
- The Future of Computing
- The Selfish Gene completes turns 30…
- Self-Aware rover in Mars may cheat humans..
- A formal definition of Synthetic Biology
- Why Exams?
- Fooling bacteria into powering tiny robots..
- Virus hacked to act as an electronic capacitor
- Bacteria V/S Bacteria
- Hacking insects for military uses
- Hacking Biochemistry of DNA to create Art…
- Anyone with NewScientist Premium membership?
- Nanotech hacks Biology via Nanobiotechnology..
- Is Evolution Predictable?
- Life without DNA?
- More Answers than Questions…
- Viruses are our Ancestors? – Hmm…
- RNAi as a method of Biohacking
- RNA Editing
- Fly-eating robot powers itself
- Putting Man on the Moon….
- Artificial Neural Network to judge beauty?
- Make BioBombs at Home
- A robot powered by Biology
- One Gene -> One Polypeptide theory is wrong..
- Explore sourcecode in Python
- The Paradox of Intelligence
- Protein Structure Prediction using Neural Networks
- An Idea: Spam Detection using DNA
- Laws of Biology
- Review Paper on Synthetic Biology
- How to tackle Evolution in Synthetic Biology?
- Custom-Made Microbes, at Your Service, NYTimes article
- The importance of mathematics in Biology
- Ant School: The First Formal Classroom Found in Nature
- Geniuses are Just Like Us
- An All-in-One resource for Synthetic Biology
- The Future of Human Evolution
- Ants were the first Biohackers
- Biotechs Mine Bacteria for Industrial Use
- Is this life?
- What is your most dangerous idea?
- The M-Prize
- How to increase lifespan indefinitely…
- Immortality – News
2005 98
- The History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less
- Biocomputing – Computers marry Biology
- Bio-Intelligence: Creating chess playing bacteria
- Two more resources on synthetic biology
- An Evolutionary Approach to Synthetic Biology
- Get questions answered from experts for FREE!!
- Metaevolution: Evolution of Evolution
- What is the effect of intelligence on evolution?
- Tunatic – A great App..
- Two great resources on Evolution
- Evolution as Breakthrough of the year 2005
- Metaevolution
- The New Science of Cell Hacking
- Artificial Chemistry
- Biotech societies you may join
- Uncyclopedia
- Resurrection of Mammoth..
- The Hypothetical Book Names
- How E. coli Bacterium Generates Simplicity from Complexity..
- Want to become Bioentrepreneur?
- Do all the Biotechnology experiments
- Brain -> Body
- TAQDOT – A news site for Synthetic Biology
- Interactive Online Biology
- Online GAMES Galore…
- Where is that article?
- How to hack DNA?
- Bacteria modified to combat HIV
- Microbial Intelligence or Bacterial Intelligence?
- BioHacking at WikiPedia
- A few links about learning synthetic Biology
- Learn Synthetic Biology the interactive way
- Explore algorithm implemented (and modified!)
- The leading scientist…
- OpenWetWare Wiki
- My agenda for winter holidays
- An Evolutionary Approach to Synthetic Biology
- Chance and Necessity
- Ugly bots
- A comics on Synthetic Biology
- My new BioHacking Blog
- Synthetic Life
- What is the Philosophy of Biology?
- What is Microbial Intelligence?
- What is Synthetic Biology?
- Huge bunch of links for BioHacking
- Welcome to BioHacking
- Synthetic Life
- Bioprinter!!! Wow
- Identitiy of a biological cell
- Types of philosophies..
- Mmm. It is del.icio.us
- Is mathematics independent of science?
- Why is Artificial Intelligence DEAD?
- Can you imagine your non-existence?
- Micro-organisms may be turned into nano-circuitry
- A new discovery..
- A lame personal post
- Cellular Automata
- Google Talk
- Interesting things about biology
- Biology is the reason
- BARC presentation
- Intelligent Bacteria..
- Scary thought?
- ASES Singapore Summit 2005 Agenda
- Genetic Programming System in Python
- Crtitical Consciousness
- The relative theory of consciousness
- Machine Consciousness [Theory of consciousness]
- Sponsorship for ASES summit
- The law of Consciousness
- New article on Particle systems
- Project on Bioinformatics
- Brand New Blog
- First interview of my life
- Commenting and traceback enabled
- New article: Protein design
- Ngage buy
- Hello Im back
- Evolution – a balance of two forces
- Immortality… do u want it?
- What if terrorists become immortal?
- INDO-PAK Tension
- Bored
- Morals and ethics….
- Queries to the almighty
- Multicellular organisms
- Demo Scene
- I Think why I wonder….?
- Definition of Life
- Purpose/Aim of life
- Gmail anyone…
- Black Tuesday (11 September)
- Profit Strategy for Nokia using NGAGE
- Ngage QD: Should I buy or not??
- Alter egos
- Science questions….