Ruchir Jajoo

About me:

• Raised by the internet, physically a city-dweller, intellectually a twitter-dweller
• Founder at Identity Labs, a consulting firm
  • reverse engineers social media algorithms
  • software for precision controlling virality, audience detection intelligence, account intelligence, weighted engagement algorithms that predict virality in the first 30 minutes
  • our creative team helps companies go from ‘very bad’ to ‘world-class’ at product and company marketing and our software helps them be less dumb about their spend.
  • creators of the viral twitter launch playbook in 2024 that’s now ubiquitous
  • Work with: OpenAI, Anthropic, Lovable, Deel, Airwallex, WisprFlow, +more on custom tooling, creators, launches, and strategy.
  • Collaborators: Sequoia, a16z, Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, General Catalyst, etc
  • Vision - $1T was spent on Meta and Google in the last 3 years. >$1T will be spent on organic content in the next 10 years. Companies really want to figure out how to build distribution and Identity Labs is growing at 700% YOY because of the incredible demand.
  • We will get to $100M revenue with 30 people, 12 spots left: We’re hiring engineers, creative directors, thinker-writers, heads of growth, consultants, designers, and any outlier twitter-native person to work on hands-on with our clients.

Some things I believe and often remind myself of:

• The smartest people are self taught, even if they went to school.
• First Principles understanding is rare
  Say you’re making bread. The recipe is flour, yeast, water, oven, and some waiting. But to understand bread, you need to know wheat cultivation, soil types, yeast biology, fermentation, chemistry, thermodynamics, supply chains, and everything in between. Someone who understands bread controls every variable and can invent recipes. The recipe only teaches you how to make the same bread again.
  First Principles get substituted by popular recipes in every domain.
  
  Health is mind, physiology, energy, food, sleep, relationships, but gets reduced to a recipe. ‘have 2x your body weight in protein and lift weights’
  Business Value is about product, industry, margins,+100 more things but gets reduced to ARR and multiples.
  
  I can give you a recipe but I can’t give you an understanding. True understanding is rare, because it holds the subtleties of many connected domains at once. It can’t be transfered because the other person needs a model of the world for it to latch onto.
  
  So all we transfer are recipes. Recipes make society stop looking for the real thing. National Wellbeing gets ‘simplified’ into GDP. Education ossifies into grades and degrees. Happens in all companies and teams.
  Understanding > Recipe
• Seven-Star quality is understudied
  Three stars is bad, five is good, seven is enchanting, magical, memorable. All the returns in business come from seven-star quality products. All the largest companies in the world were catapulted to where they are by seven-star products.
  
  Seven-star things share a common cultural pattern:
  - a different belief about what “good” means (SpaceX: Best part is no part. Apple: Design isn’t how something looks, its how something works)
  - a truly committed and micromanaging artist, (Disney, Jobs, Musk)
  - team motivated to do their life’s work,
  - an R&D lab because the technology isn’t good enough yet,
  
  also, no surprise but seven star things make a lot of money (10-100x)
  12 Disney Parks make $36B/year.
  Apple Glass-Cube 5th Ave store makes $440M/year alone.
• The real bottleneck is people’s own limiting identity.
  Identity is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because beliefs prompt actions.
• To make more money, create more value.
  You only capture part of the value you create, so grow the whole. Don’t ask for more money for the same work (value capture), ask what you can do that wiill be worth 10x more (value creation).
• In six months, you can hyper-learn your way to the top 0.1% of almost any field.
• Building a business is a tiny subsection of a larger problem you’re trying to solve which is how to live a meaningful life. Don’t lose the plot. If you aren’t happy with a cup of coffee, you won’t be happy with a yacht.
• People make decisions emotionally but use logic to justify them. It doesn’t matter what you say but how you make them feel. Persuasion is the subtle art of feeling control.
• Education is having a functional worldview. Here’s a worldview-correcting reading list (lifetime work in progress)
  
  The outer world: Factfulness, How the World Really Works (Vaclav Smil), Every book by Will and Ariel Durant, From Third World to First (Lee Kuan Yew), The Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith), Leonardo Da Vinci (Walter Isaacson).
  
  The inner world: Vedanta Treatise (Parthasarathy) Bhagavad Gita, Thinking, Fast and Slow, (Daniel Kahneman)

LONDON / SAN FRANCISCO / BLR

@ruchirjajoo