What if I tell you that you put 11 yrs AND lifetime of work bootstrapping your biz with minimal funding, it is in best shape ever after multiple near-death encounters, including covid where your travel co was almost certain to end up as roadkill, and didn't. Still fucking here. And on Friday, millions in your bank account disappeared in an instant, causing the worst professional day of your life. And all that money came back Monday morning! Your guess would be, oh well, sure, Silicon Valley Bank. And you would be wrong.

This should be the most mindblowingly significant storyline of 2023, that India’s population will surpass China in mid April. There are hundreds of stories to be told, nuances & implications of this to be unearthed, this alone can be a whole journalism beat or two by itself. There is a whole book or documentary series waiting to happen in this last sentence there.

There is a mass delusion in travel industry about recovery, if my LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos from travel CEOs, or analysis from consultant types: if you just hold on for few more months, the world will come gushing right back out, come Q3 or Q4. Add inspirational song here... A huge number of travel businesses, majority small biz, will be gone. Majority of our livelihoods are stopped, maybe gone. Events are done, for most of this year. Human habits have changed in an instant, business travel will forever be lower than the peak we had.

We’ve all been waiting for Superapps to emerge in West, following Asian superapps like WeChat, Meituan, Grab, Paytm, GoJek. But we’ve been ignoring the biggest Superapp we’ve had & using all along for years now: Google Maps. It is & will become the biggest app of our lives. I am betting that Resy’s mystery buyer is Google, just a guess, no insider knowledge, to be subsumed with integration into Google Maps. recode.net/2019/3/7/18254…

Bigger things I’m learning — reinforcing in my own mind — reading these business history books: whatever explanation anyone today is offering about current affairs of world — in news/commentary — almost always explanation is bigger picture, few levels higher, than apparent. There is *always* an explanation beyond what everyone else is explaining today.

Since everyone is down on media companies these days, let’s run through what’s good news about many of them. 1) Our democracy may have crumbled this year had NYT, WaPo & CNN not existed, incredibly important role of all three as we end 2017. Yes Vice and Buzzfeed may have missed targets BUT both are past the stage of escape velocity & have a long future. And doing important journalistic work in between their main body of work.