# sincerity, intrinsic value & making dreams come true (*No AI was used for this article*) Last week, I visited a nostalgic Parsi restaurant in Mumbai, Britannia & Co. I was in Mumbai only for two days, but my friend Joe was adamant that we try their Mutton Berry Pulao. Located in a quiet and old part of town with buildings that conveyed the old-world charm of Mumbai, the restaurant transports you a few decades back in time. Old ceiling fans mounted on long rods spun gently, and photographs from a bygone-era covered the textured walls with peeling paint. There was not a single printed font in sight, only hand-drawn signage and menus on chalk-boards. Amidst all that, waiters with graying hair flit about from table to table, wearing black bow ties and white button-down shirts that seemed a size too large for their lean frames. At the entrance, a stoic old man marked transactions by hand on a large notebook on the glass desk-top of the an old wooden bakery counter. His left hand rested gently on the head a striped tabby cat napping on the desk-top, and a dog sat up next to his feet facing the scattered queue of customers waiting for a table. The Parsi community is a small Zoroastrian ethnic group with Iranian heritage that run many such classic establishments in the city, renowned for retaining their old-world charm. These old establishments often have strong values and an honor code they live by, setting aside the temptations of quick money for sincerity towards their work and building lasting trust with their patrons. As we sat down to order, we ordered two mutton berry pulaos, a salli botti and a kheema. "One Mutton Berry Pulao", replied our waiter in the bow tie. "No, two Mutton Berry Pulao", said Joe again, correcting him. "One", said the waiter again assertively, indicating with his index finger that he meant one. My friend looked at me, puzzled, and then looked at the waiter for an explanation. "Let me bring you one and then you can decide if you need more, it's a big portion," said the waiter. The waiter almost sounded rude, a stark contrast from the (almost performative) politeness I experienced during my beach vacations. There were no smiles of subservience or superficial hospitality in his speech, just a confident sincerity to do his job well and a desire to do right by the customer. It felt uncomfortable at first, but when the food came and we were done with the meal, he dropped in to ask: "would you like me to bring you another mutton berry pulao?" We smiled at him, and said no, this was the perfect quantity. Any more and we'd be nauseous from eating. No food waste, money saved and just enough appetite for a good dessert recommendation. ### Amazon, Warren Buffett & delighting your customers This incident reminded me of a value that the wholesale markets of Mumbai ingrained in me during the time I spent there: an appreciation for delivering true value and utility to customers. Not grand promises or instant gratification in exchange for large sums of money, but lasting, reliable and honest service for a fair price. In 2019, when I moved to Dublin, this was a crucial factor in my choice of career. Despite having offers from Google and Stripe, I chose to work at Amazon as a software engineer against the advice of many. Amazon in its early days valued customers and long-term trust over short-term profits, and this became evident in my conversations with my interviewers. Product managers narrated stories where they reached out to high paying customers to show them they could be spending *lesser* (millions of dollars lesser) if they stopped using a redundant feature. I recall how we refunded a customer whose daily bill went up from almost nothing to $10000/day due to a feature we released that was too complex for them to understand, leading to incorrect use. During our onboarding, we were shown videos of how Amazon gave power to customer service agents to remove faulty products without having to go through the bureaucracy of a corporate product management cycle. I'm not so sure if the corporate behemoth that Amazon is today still retains those values, but it definitely contributed to Amazon's rise to what it is today. ### Intrinsic value Warren Buffett repeats time and again: delight your customers and success will follow. Over the years, I've been drawn to his school of value investing. My interest in isn't driven by the financial success of the strategy--that's secondary--but due to how a value mindset drives the forward, even if one tiny step at a time. In value investing, stocks of companies are assumed to have an intrinsic value which is different from its price: price is what you pay, value is what you get. In this sense price can fluctuate a lot relative to value based on what a market is willing to pay for a certain type of value, and value isn't always quantifiable the way price is. Value itself is a highly subjective attribute: two different people will likely find differing value in the same product. And for a company with many customers, value is an 'intersubjective' concept, i.e. we often want things because others think it's good and this shared opinion drives up the value of goods. A common trap for early-stage founders is selling what *they* think is right for the customer, but the value that a customer pays for is what *they* think is right for them. It's fair that founders wants to execute a vision or change the world for the better, but at the end of day, lasting businesses last because they provide some true intrinsic value to their customers. ### What users want vs what users do I recently watched an economics podcast episode where MIT professor Sendhil Mullainathan pointed out an interesting consequence of social media algorithms and software recommendation systems. The recommendation algorithms that are ubiquitous today often optimize short-term engagement, leading to situations where we distrust or dislike the algorithms **for giving us what we like**. You can find many users then doing a 'social media reset' and deleting the app for a while because it isn't serving them anymore. You would think companies do this because they want our attention and money, but isn't it in their best interest for users to stay on the app in the long term? Instead, what if we could communicate back to these recommendation algorithms? What if we could say something like, "Hey algorithm, I know I always watch sleazy content, but can you push more physics content to me so I can learn more about the universe?" And then the algorithm could respond with honest feedback, "I've tried that a few times but you ignored it, would you like me to try again?" Sendhil does a good job of communicating his recent research interests at the intersection of behavioral economics and algorithms. However, it also gives us a deeper insight into how we as humans want different things for ourselves from what our actions imply, and at the heart of this insight lies an opportunity to help people transform their own lives by aligning their actions with their dreams and desires. ### Service and true love What does it then mean to serve customers with sincerity? I believe it means to first ask then what they really want, have a conversation about whether you can do justice to their desire, and then do your best to help thm realize it. I'm intrigued by cultures that display hospitality to their guests without any concern for the guests' preferences. The loving grandmother that feeds her guests, even if they're stuffed, nauseous and battling diet-related health issues. The kind neighbor who insists on inviting you over to their house to have a drink or a snack, without even stopping to ask about how you're feeling and what you've been through during the day. These actions come from a place of love, but it is a self-centered kind of love that projects our own desires onto others. Real love is harder. I read this quote in a book once: "True love is not wanting for others what you want for yourself, but it is wanting for others what they want for themselves." It is definitely a fine line between doing what you believe is right vs. serving the needs of others. And an even finer line between serving them to do what they say they truly want in the long run vs. meeting their short-term needs. If a good friend tells you they really want to quit smoking and seek your help, will you still find them a cigarette when they're a few drinks down a Saturday night out and start asking for one? As mentioned in our blog post about the detrimental effects of instant gratification on learning, this gets especially tricky with learning and education because real learning is always preceded by productive failure--that just seems to be central to the neuroplasticity of the brain. ### What this means for learning What has all this got to do with Explorable? As I think about the values I want to practice in my work, delivering true value is of paramount importance. Fads come and go, bubbles grow and burst, and much wealth is made and lost through all that. As Jeff Bezos often harped, what will ***not*** change in the next ten years? Changing markets offer opportunities to new businesses to compete against incumbents on even grounds, but utility to customers is a strong foundation for a solid business that moves the world forward little by little. I'm not talking about hyperscaling and the growth ambitions of venture backed startups, but trying our best to deliver true value to customers, small or big. As we discover and deliver the needs of our customers and patrons, what offerings can we stand by with sincerity instead of making promises that even we may not truly believe in? How can we be honest about our limitations and imperfections, yet still offer our services to our customers who might still value them despite the shortcomings? Profits may come and go as market dynamics shift, and I admire businesses that strives to be sincere to its customers in the services it offers amidst all that. In learning, we have to ask our students: what do you really want? Why do you want to learn what you're learning? Do you hope to grow as an individual by pushing yourself to your limits? Do you expect to find engagement that you can lost in? Do you want a better paying career? Are you battling insecurities around missing out on the new trendy technology and the effect it might have on your career? Or are you simply looking for some educational entertainment? You don't want an instructor to assume what you want out of this experience, but you want them to help you discover what gives you deep satisfaction and then show you a path to achieve it. ### Making dreams come true When we have such early consultation conversations with our students, we're bound to encounter students with a different world view and desires than ours. The sincere thing to do then is to be honest about we're good at, and recommend alternative products and services that are good at what the student wants. Especially when you're bootstrapped, you have to stay focused on the niche that your strengths lie in. For Explorable, this strength is serving those who learn for learning's sake. We created Explorable to satisfy a desire to learn challenging things the hard way, to follow our curiosity for its own sake and to grow by stretching our own cognitive limits along the way. Further, we want to show people how to enjoy the process of learning a specific subject, not just the result or outcome. A new job, better professional credentials or understanding the latest fad might be a consequence of learning, but it's not the primary focus. Having done a distributed systems course, we want someone to feel like they have another reason to feel awe and a new hobby they can pursue, not just a skill they can advertise to their prospective employers on their resume. The market for this kind of learning is indeed a niche, and one of the reasons why we prefer bootstrapping or investors that are aligned with this vision. In the post [Make A Dream Come True](https://sive.rs/ayw4), Derek Sivers explains that he created CD Baby trying to make a dream come true for himself and his friends, not trying to make a big business. This isn't necessarily the optimal path for profits, but it treats the business as an opportunity to bring a little bit of the beauty that we love into the world.