I attended a meetup organized by Product School in New York a few weeks back. The speaker was Aditya Subramaniam, a Product Leader at Ro and he spoke on driving cross-functional consensus at tech companies. I wrote down some of the things I learnt from this brilliant talk. Huge shout-out to Aditya for this presentation and for patiently answering my questions post the talk.Here are my notes: 

For what purpose, then, do I make a man my friend? In order to have someone for whom I may die, whom I may follow into exile, against whose death I may stake my own life, and pay the pledge, too.

… So said Seneca, some two thousand years ago. I’ve been reflecting a lot on friendship lately, in the context of my own life. In the last five years itself, I have gained several friends, gone through a phase where I took some for granted, a phase where others took my friendship for granted, lost a few friends and strengthened ties with few others. As I look back on these experiences and phases of my life, I ask myself what the meaning of true friendship is and how does one form and keep true friendships.

"Yes, there is an app for that" or at least, there will be, hopefully soon... In my last blog post I wrote about the challenges of staying in touch in today’s world. In this post, I share an idea I had to solve some of these problems through technology.

Back in the day, people lived in the same place throughout their lives. Life was simple. Staying in touch was never a challenge, it wasn’t even an idea. It was just something that happened by default. Why wouldn’t it? You went to school with the same friends all throughout, you married your high school sweetheart, got a job in the same town. Everyone you knew lived within a couple of miles. Now of course things are different. Migration is a lot more common than it has ever been in human history. You move to different states for college, again for work, and maybe again when they change jobs, and so on. And if you’re like me, maybe you’ve moved to a different country. Personal aside: I spent the first 14 years of my life in Delhi, India. Then moved to Mumbai in 2010, where I spent the next 4 years of my life. I then came to college in upstate New York, where I spent the next 4 years. And few months ago, after graduating I moved all the way to Seattle in the West coast. Naturally, my close friends from both college and high school are now scattered all over, and across countries. Such a story is certainly not uncommon in 2018. And so, staying in touch becomes a challenge and an aspect of life that I’ve come to realize requires conscious effort. You would think that with technology, things would be easier- we have tools at our fingertips that enable us to share our lives in whatever format we like- text, video, pictures, voice. Yet, so often I hear people say things like ‘I’m really bad at staying in touch’ … why is that?