E47, Industry sees layoffs but the dark web has been hiring. A frightening trend observed for two years

Hello All,

How is your week?

I have been working on a few campaigns for several weeks now.

We are launching new services and I am focused on making them amazing for our customers.

It is exciting but a lot of work.

Distilling down and communicating a complex message is challenging yet fun. You know it if you have done it.

Here is some nourishment for the week.

Estimated Reading Time: 3 Minutes, 4 Seconds

  • The importance of choosing Leading Vs Lagging Indicators for building anything
  • 3 books and an article I am reading
  • Dark Web Hiring, while the industry lays off
  • Is Merc really beating tesla on its own game?
  • PhonePe claims a pole position in the Indian fintech ecosystem

Leading vs lagging Indicators

If you have reviewed technical charts, You have seen technical indicators. There are leading and Lagging in nature.

Lagging indicators give you a signal after an 'event'.

Example- a 100-day Moving Average

Leading indicators give you a signal before an 'event'.

Example - Moving Average convergence divergence

These apply to business outcomes and building own systems too.

Most business environments focus on 'lagging' indicators. Sales Revenue etc.

But, there is a 'lag' between your efforts and outcomes.

That 'lag' can be a few days, months, or years.

And that 'lag' means there is nothing you can do to change the outcome (elapsed time).

It is better to focus on 'leading' indicators. They help you focus on today.

For example,

A Lagging goal - Reading 52 books in 1 year.

A Leading indicator - Reading 30 mins every night.

I am happy to report focusing on leading indicators works!

What I am reading

I am done(almost) with Cal Newport's book " Deep Work".

Last Week, I wrote a short piece about it on my blog. https://www.isaurabhmittal.com/how-to-do-deep-work-and-accomplish-great-things-learnings-from-cal-newport/

It is an actionable book that reminds us of the meaning and value of deep work and why it is a need of our time.


I read a few chapters from Joe Sugarman's book during my daughter's swimming class. Tons of notes have come from it.

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I have gotten started with "The Unicorn Project".

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The book came recommended by a senior friend at Microsoft.

I am not a big fan of reading a tech topic as a novel.

But, I will report back on how this goes.

Will we solve bigger and better problems if we had more people?

Seth writes really well and some of his posts can be intriguing. This is one of those.

https://seths.blog/2023/01/population-and-big-innovations/

While industry layoffs, Dark Web is hiring

I read an analysis post from Kaspersky services and it blew my mind. I saw the dark web as a place where hackers sell info and exchange illegal information. But, I learned - The Dark web is also used to hire attackers.

Kaspersky Services analyzed 155 forums for over 2 years and saw the trends. 200,000 employment posts.

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There are requirements for Attackers, Coders, Reverse Engineering skills, and designers.

It is not surprising as we have an uptick in the number of cyber-attacks taking place. The number of attacks is expected to grow 3x during 2023/24.

Most of this work is illegal but the effect on jobs and the economy may fuel the dark web hiring in times to come.

Mercedes Benz claims to have beaten Tesla on its autonomous driving capabilities.

Tesla has been famous for not following the set standards (SAE) for driving automation. By the way, It was Elon's genius in the first place to disrupt the industry. So nothing new if his company doesn't want to play by someone's rules.

Telsa has attained only Level 2 automation if you compare it to the 6 levels of automation (industry standard).

Mercedes is now at Level 3 approved.

Did you realize how fast Mercedes has come to the podium?

Level 2 - driver supervises the car's tech.

Level 3 - Car completely takes over driving. Expects human intervention.

Level 4 - Level 3, plus the car can handle a no-human intervention scenario too.


PhonePe Claims a pole position in Indian Fintech

PhonePe a Walmart-backed company has clocked in a revenue of $234M in 9 months in 2022. It is currently valued at $12B though not profitable post-2025. The payments industry is growing globally, and India has seen many unicorns in this space.

UPI, a network built by the Retail bank's coalition has led to this transformation.

India Transacts 7 billion transactions/per month and PhonePe is now covering 40% of it.

I am happy to see PhonePe becoming a major player in the fintech ecosystem of India.


That is it.

Have a great week

Saurabh

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