​​Hope all of you are doing fine. Over the last two weeks, w | Abhinav’s Channel

​​Hope all of you are doing fine.

Over the last two weeks, we participated in Free Your Data hackathon (Account Aggregator) organised by Setu, Github India & Devfolio and we won! Account Aggregator (AA) is quite a deal for our digital India dreams and the hackathon was fairly a big platform. Just to give you a perspective of the importance of AA, have a look at the line up of people who spoke at the hackathon – Pramod Varma (Chief Architect, Aadhaar), Nandan Nilekani (Infosys), Nithin Kamath (Zerodha), Vasanth Kamath (smallcase) and people from Sequoia, iSpirit and Sahamati.

To be honest, winning at this stage is quite unusual for me personally and it was one of the firsts. This made me start thinking about what really worked for us and I could come up with few things that I want to share with all of you.

1. Inversion: This is an amazing mental model to have. In the beginning of the hackathon we were so pumped up that we wanted to build a huge platform given we had two weeks time. Midway through the brainstorming, we decided to figure out how we can ensure that we don’t fail and built just the minimum lovable product. The judges actually loved it!
2. Team: If I have to be frank, winning was just 10% of what was exciting. Rest has to be credited to the team. They have been absolutely amazing. Having the right team is insanely important and the energy that people carry can take you from 200 rpm to 1000 rpm. Together we spent sleepless nights, coded day-in/ day-out, enjoyed ourselves and made little sacrifices. Goutham, Ashank & Himanshu – Thanks guys for this experience.
3. Execution: Ideas are easy to get by, execution is everything. In our country, ideas are celebrated and execution is dramatically under appreciated. We should strive to change our DNAs to start thinking about execution rather!
4. Trust (Yourself): This is quite personal an emotion. Over the last month, I have been very fragile emotionally and have questioned my abilities time and again. During the hackathon, I started to do what I really love to do, without worrying about trophies, ranks and vanity and now that has given me the kick to be positively energised to continue pursuing things the way I want to and very importantly trust myself that it will all work out just fine.

Thanks for reading this through, have a great week and good morning.
Peace!