Sriram and Aarthi
Aarthi Ramamurthy and Sriram Krishnan are founders, angel investors, and product leaders who host the podcast Aarthi and Sriram’s Good Time Show. They have both held leadership roles at major technology companies including Meta, Twitter, Snap, Microsoft, and Netflix. Aarthi and Sriram share their lessons from past failures, their experience building communities, and their techno-optimism, and Sriram offers his hot take on the Jobs to Be Done framework.
Communication Skills
Meeting failure often occurs when the purpose (update vs. decision) is not explicitly stated.
"Clarify what kind of meeting is it. Is it just an update?... Or is it a decision in which case, what are the pros, cons, et cetera?"
Growth Skills
Bootstrapping a social network requires attracting high-status individuals who are underserved by current platforms.
"When you have a new network, think of it as a new country, you want the high status people and high status mean they're interesting, people want to be where they are... And there's exactly an interest..."
Identifying a specific activation milestone (like 10 friends in 14 days) is critical for driving long-term retention.
"Facebook knew that it needed to get you to 10 friends in 14 days. If you got your 10 friends in 14 days, you were probably going to use Facebook."
Leadership Skills
Effective leaders clarify their level of involvement and the 'rules of engagement' for every review meeting.
"He would tell you what the rules of engagement were for every meeting... He'd be like, 'Look, I'm going to give you a spectrum of A, how much I care about this topic. Everything from I don't care... a..."
Product decisions should be made by analyzing the incentives of all agents in the system (users, competitors, supply chain) rather than just one user's 'job'.
"Systems thinking. Think of all the players in the system, think of all of their incentives and how they interact with each other."
Sriram explicitly proposes 'Systems Thinking' as the superior alternative to Jobs-to-be-Done for handling complex product trade-offs and multi-agent incentives.
"Systems thinking. Think of all the players in the system, think of all of their incentives and how they interact with each other."
Marketing Skills
Consistency and 'reps' are more important than high-production value when starting content creation.
"The most important thing... is just get started and do something every single day... it builds muscle, it gets you familiar with the medium and you start understanding what works in that medium and wh..."
Successful communities start with small, passionate niches rather than attempting to scale immediately.
"Find the niche, start really small and find the niche... don't start to build this super scaled community. Start with few people who are passionate about a particular problem and want to get together..."
A community host must curate a diverse mix of personalities (the boisterous, the quiet, the thoughtful) to create the right 'vibe'.
"I like to think of things like a dinner party or church... as the host, you have to curate the original set of people and you need a mix... you need a mix of different kinds of energy and that's almos..."
Product Management Skills
Startups often fail by chasing industry 'memes' or fads (like shared ownership or specific AI implementations) that don't fit their core hypothesis.
"Don't fall for fads. It's do the thing that your customers are asking for and are willing to pay for... if you have something that is working, don't get distracted."
JTBD is often too idealistic and fails to account for the complex trade-offs and multi-agent systems inherent in real-world product development.
"I hate Jobs-to-be-Done, I think it is a terrible framework, I think no successful company has ever been built on top of JTBD and if you pick JTBD, you're probably doomed"
JTBD may work for a V1 hypothesis but typically falls apart when scaling due to hard trade-offs.
"The problem with that is it's just too idealistic. And most frameworks are, but this one just takes it up a notch where it's like it's almost meant for people who are so naive about product building a..."
Sales & GTM Skills
Cold outreach and content creation are powerful tools for building high-value relationships and partnerships.
"I just had a conversation on the internet. I have this whole thing where I do think a lot of people trying to get ahead in their career, especially in technology, should just write cold emails, cold D..."
Internal networking within a company builds a resource pool for future hiring, role-seeking, and problem-solving.
"Go and meet every single peer that you have you don't directly meet with. Go get coffee with them and ask them, 'Hey.' Have no agenda. Just ask them what's going on in their life, who are they, what t..."