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Weekly roundup: Public Speaking, Media & Philosophy of AI

What we learned together on Network Capital this week

This is Network Capital’s newsletter that helps 100,000+ millennials and GenZs build their category of one. To receive this newsletter in your inbox regularly, subscribe here.

Dear community members,

Happy New Year! Hope you had a rejuvenating weekend. This is a quick overview of the week gone by on Network Capital. You can get access to all our offerings once you subscribe.

🚀 Registrations open for the Public Speaking Fellowship.

📚 Open House for YouthINK with Network Capital

🧑🏻‍🤝‍🧑🏾 Sign up for the Network Capital Learning Retreat

🎙️New Subgroup on Media

The Public Speaking Fellowship

2020 plunged us in front of the video conferencing tools. We were learning, working and connecting online. There was no option but to get in front of the camera and start talking. While we spoke more, we communicated less. More importantly, communicated less effectively. Things are unlikely to go back to the way they were. In this new normal, it is time all of us adapt our communication styles.

If there is one skill you should work on in 2022, it should be effective public speaking. If you are already good, try and get better. If you struggle, like roughly ~75% of the world’s population, it is time for deliberate practice.

Public speaking is not something you can get good at by downloading an app. Just like you can’t learn driving by reading instruction manuals, you can’t become a good public speaker with a hands-off approach. You need to immerse yourself.

Starts Jan 15, 2021

INKTalks and Network Capital have joined hands to set up “Youth INK with Network Capital” to help school students build their category of one. It will be a yearlong immersion program where students will spend an hour every weekend learning from top CEOs, academics, artists, scientists and policy makers.

Our larger goal is to spark a sense of wonder and curiosity among students. They will graduate as top-notch public speakers, writers and thinkers – skills that will be invaluable for the rest of their lives. They were celebrate JOMO (joy of missing out) and abandon FOMO (fear of missing out).

Lakshmi and I (Utkarsh) will personally teach in this program and we will bring the best of INK and Network Capital for our students.

Have questions about the programme?

Masterclasses

Neel Ghose is the founder of the the Robin Hood Army, (RHA) a volunteer organization which redistributes surplus food to the less fortunate. With a zero funds policy, the team has served meals to 83.9 million people across 255 cities through a family of Robins across the world - the RHA is now a Harvard case study. From a work front, Neel manages partnerships for Google Pay, he previously launched international markets and worked for Zomato from the seed stage.

​Neel has done his bachelors in Shri Ram College of Commerce and has an MBA from Harvard Business School. A passionate fan of cricket, Neel spends most of his free time struggling on the squash court, and procrastinating with friends and his 6 year old niece Tara. He believes the Robin Hood Army's work is just 1% Done.

PS. The transcript of this conversation is available for subscribers only. You can access it here!

Aarti and Aditya fell in love with water lily pops all the way back in school. This love for the snack followed them into college. The husband-and-wife team shared their ‘pop’ romance with their friends, classmates, and professors too. They’d pop ‘em at home and share the little goodies on campus. This was the start of it all.

​They were onto something… They started small. They kept it simple. Salted was the first flavor, but a lot more would follow.

​Since that moment, Aarti and Aditya have worked hard to ensure the Taali supply chain is sustainable and the ingredients are 100% natural. And given the fact that these two young founders have no prior food or entrepreneurship experience, we can imagine the effort they have had to put in to make Taali the delicious reality it is today.

On Network Capital, we want to help you build your category of one not only in terms of what you bring to the workplace but also the values you live by. In this 3 day retreat, we will enjoy myriad outdoor adventures curated by Laidback, a venture by one of our subscribers Nakul.

​Through these adventures and activities, we will embark upon the journey from Zoom conferences to the real world. We will learn the art of storytelling not about a third person or an external experience but about our larger vision.

We will consider the retreat successful if you go back with cherished friendships, deeper knowledge about your selves and ideas for connecting with others in order to add specific value to them. Your personal and professional growth will be a natural byproduct.

​There will be 4 workshops organized by fellow subscribers

  1. Storytelling

  2. Standup comedy

  3. ​Stoicism

  4. The world in 2022

​The adventure kickstarts in a quaint, luxury camp near Chail. See you on 25th evening.

New Subgroup on Media

To get the action on the subgroup going, we have our first NC Salon for the Media Subgroup on Jan 12, 2022. The theme for the Salon is ‘Mega Trends in Media in 2022’.

Newsletter

Here is the three sentence answer - The New York Times wants more subscribers and has more than $1 Billion in cash reserves. The Athletic has lots of subscribers but an unviable business mode. Combine these two and something might come out of it.

Let's unpack this bit by bit. Let’s get started by understanding NYT’s business model. We covered it in our newsletter but here is a summary.

Discipline and reason were key tenets that inspired Greek philosophers to great achievements. Pythagoras explored the connection between mathematics and nature, Thales of Miletus established a scientific method comparable to the modern one, Aristotle classified knowledge. The logic employed by each of these philosophers became educational vehicles that fostered innovation of products, policies, cities and learning..

Ambiguity became mainstreamed. Relativity of perception was the new order. Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein who left academia to become a gardener and school teacher argued that knowledge was to be found by observing generalizations across phenomena which he termed “family resemblances”. The quest to catalog and cluster things in neat buckets was challenged by him and intersectionality of knowledge became more accepted. Later in the 20th and 21st century, this thinking informed the essence of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

An Invitation to Network Capital

Not a subscriber? Intrigued by Network Capital? Now would be a good time to subscribe.

💝 If you want to learn how to navigate the Network Capital ecosystem, please read this article.

💞 Read our founder Utkarsh Amitabh’s book Seductive Illusion of Hard Work. The foreword written by Klaus Schwab, the founder of World Economic Forum.