Food For Thought #1
Writing and deep tech
I thought of sharing some of the most interesting essays, tweets and videos I’ve come across. Recommendations are invited.
On Writing
I’ve been writing this blog for ~2 years now — it’s helped me improve the quality of my writing, and I’ve met some fascinating people who reached out after reading something I’d written. If you’re intellectually curious and enjoy discussing ideas with other curious people, I would encourage you to write a blog.
The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online by David Perell. This is the essay that inspired me to start writing online. A comprehensive, detailed guide on why you should write online and how to do so. I’ve shared this piece with a few friends and I’m glad some of them have started their own blogs.
A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox by Henrik Karlsson. His thesis is that you should write stuff that you would love to read yourself. This is exactly my philosophy in writing this blog.
On Deep Tech
I’m very interested in all things deep tech — recently I’ve been thinking about AI, data centers, solar, and batteries.
Casey Handmer’s podcast with Dwarkesh Patel. They speak about all things solar and AI data centers. Towards the end, he suggests the possibility of integrating solar cells with chips (since both are made of silicon, simply of different purities).
A presentation by Andy Bechtolsheim about liquid cooling for AI data centers. He was the first angel investor in Google! This talk is extremely insight-dense. The future of cooling is immersion, not air.
A tweet by Sridhar Vembu about the importance of deep tech R&D in India. He explains why we need to develop indigenous technologies and how to do so in a long-term, sustainable manner. He is the founder of Zoho and a deep thinker; I always look forward to his tweets and interviews.
A tour of Ola’s lithium ion cell factory. It’s quite a complicated process with electrode winding, electrolyte filling etc. The entire factory is a clean room. This is a tour of CATL’s factory — a Chinese company with 37% global market share in batteries. One of the largest alongside BYD, Gotion and EVE — all Chinese companies! Just compare the two:
Ola (India’s first cell factory) can make 0.1 to 0.2 million cells per day.
CATL makes 2.2 million cells per day in just this one factory. And they have 13 factories globally.
Feedback and reading recommendations are invited at malhar.manek@gmail.com