essays
Where To Start Learning Tamil
3 years ago, I couldn’t speak a full sentence in Tamil. Today, I can hold 45 minute conversations with native speakers. If I hadn’t found The Tamil Channel (Sabtha) on Youtube, my mother tongue would have died with me. A question I often get is “Janahan, where do
Detroit: Easiest Pizza To Make
Have you wanted to make pizza but worry it's too much work? For 15 years, I’ve been making pizza from scratch. For 13.5 years, those pizzas were mediocre. In the last 1.5 years, I purchased all five of the pizza guides from Notorious PIE. Those guides transformed
Kill Your Culture
Or live it. There is no in-between. I didn’t realize this until I left Maryland, where I grew up, in 2012. I missed my parent’s goat curry. The symphony of spices, aromatics, and tender meat that falls to pieces between my teeth. I couldn’t buy it. There
Lessons I Learned From Going Broke
We always hear about founders risking it all to go after their dreams. The Zuckerbergs of the world. The Bezos’s. These stories dominate the discourse. We never hear about the Janahan’s of the world - risking it all. And losing it all. In June 2015, I quit my
Ask For a Raise
With inflation skyrocketing, getting a raise could mean the difference between keeping a roof over your head and being homeless. So I start every 1-on-1 with this question: “When’s my next raise?” I wasn’t always like this. For the first 5 years of my career, I wasn’t
How To Give Your All
After quitting my job to start my own company, I became paralyzed with fear. I would lie in my bed worried about whether I’d ever be able to find another job. I was watching my savings dwindle. One day my co-founder, Sahil, asked if I wanted to go on
Colloquial-Written Tamil
People want to connect with each other. The easiest way is to speak the language, the way people do, colloquially. I want to minimize the time it takes to accomplish that in Tamil. When I first started learning Tamil, I concentrated on the formal flavor. I didn’t realize the
How I Learned Tamil In My 30s
I learned a hyper-specific regional dialect of Tamil from the Northern Province of Sri Lanka (SL) while never having left New York City. In fact, I’ve never even been to SL. I used to think this was impossible, until I did it myself. My Why When I was 23,
How to Migrate From Ghost to Substack (Pt 1)
Last week, I migrated the TTT newsletter from Ghost to Substack for 2 reasons 1. Better email deliverability 2. Network effects to grow the community Since switching, I've grown subscribers over 10%. It's not just me, see this thread from Louie Bacaj... In a prior role, systems my team and
Reduce Urgent Crises
In 2015, I quit my job to start a company with some buddies of mine. I did 14 hour days. I built real-time data pipelines with Kafka. I’m still impressed with what we built. But after 9 months, we ran out of money. I was so tired. I couldn’
