In October 2007, two friends stood outside a bookstore on Church Street in Bangalore, handing out bookmarks with a website address, hoping someone would go home, type it into a browser, and place an order. That tiny experiment became one…
In 1962, a small team led by Vikram Sarabhai set up shop in Thumba, a fishing village near Thiruvananthapuram, it sat almost exactly on the magnetic equator, ideal for the atmospheric research they wanted to do. There was no facility…
On the night of June 23rd, a 30-year-old in Seoul sat with his phone, watching a third of his savings disappear. He’d put his money into a product that promised to double whatever SK Hynix’s stock did that day, expecting…
Six years ago, I became a first-time founder. This year, I’ve become a first-time author. Around three years ago, I started writing about ESOPs online, mostly because I kept meeting accomplished people with meaningful equity and no real framework to…
In 1930, John D. Rockefeller broke ground on a 22-acre complex in the heart of Manhattan that would become one of the world’s most valuable pieces of real estate: 14 office towers, Radio City Music Hall, the NBC studios, and…
In the White Mountains of California, there is a bristlecone pine tree that has been alive for over 5000 years. It was a sapling when the pyramids were being built. It has survived ice ages, centuries of drought, and weather…
Walk through a colliery town in Yorkshire or South Wales in the 1850s and coal is everywhere, stacked at the pit-head, loaded onto barges, feeding the steam engines that had turned Britain into the workshop of the world. For most…
Something interesting happens when wealth in India crosses a certain threshold. Below it, the decisions are relatively simple, where to park savings, which mutual fund to pick, whether to buy or rent. Above it, the questions change character entirely. A…
On April 13, 1970, an oxygen tank exploded aboard Apollo 13 more than 300,000 kilometres from Earth. What was meant to be a Moon landing became a desperate fight for survival. Using only the equipment already on board, NASA engineers…
Earlier this year, some of the world’s biggest asset managers, BlackRock, Blackstone, and Morgan Stanley, started receiving an unusual volume of calls from investors asking for their money back. Some funds limited withdrawals while others delayed them. Blue Owl, one…