Essays

Essays about building companies and software.

Most are about Routespring, applied AI, travel, and decisions that look different once customers use the product.

Series

Latest

• Pivot gates

  How founders can distinguish a slow strategy from a broken premise before sunk cost makes the decision for them.

  Mar 31, 2026 · Building Routespring

• Routing optimization isn't a shortest-path problem

  The hard part of flight routing was never finding the cheapest itinerary. It's that 'cheapest' and 'best' are different questions, and one of them is a hard rule while the other is a matter of taste.

  Jan 19, 2026 · Thinking in Public

• The first question in any outage: whose system is it?

  Most production failures in integrated systems aren't yours or theirs. They're the handoff between the two, and that's exactly where nobody looks first.

  Dec 8, 2025 · Operating Notes

• Build versus buy is really a question about who owns the interface

  The standard framing — compare the cost of building to the cost of buying — misses the question that actually decides it: does the vendor's product expose the interface you need, or just the outcome?

  Nov 17, 2025 · Operating Notes

Archive

The original tarun.me blog, from 2009.

• Why web designers are over-rated

  Wired did a competition inviting designers to improve craigslist .

  Sep 28, 2009 · Archive

• when good people resign (to join you)

  You make an offer to an A+ player at a big company, they accept — and then their employer rolls out the red carpet to keep them. Mark Suster calls it the counter-offer, and it's an all too familiar phenomenon worth planning for before you extend the offer.

  Nov 18, 2009 · Archive

• 2 things every good startup needs

  Robert Scoble has a great article today on his take on mistakes startups make .

  Nov 21, 2009 · Archive

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