Hello Niket Desai, VP Product at Time by Ping
Niket Desai has helped Time by Ping since the early days — from day-0 advice, to seed fundraise decks, to finally joining TBP’s ranks full-time in early 2020. He is not only an incredible thinker and operator, but his life experience, spanning studying mathematics at Berkeley, and surviving stage 3 cancer in his 20s, means he’s one of the people at the company who truly understands the sanctity of time. From the talented people who have followed him to Time by Ping, to the high-caliber product he builds, we couldn’t build this company without him, full stop.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Hi Niket, a fun one to start it off. What’s your superpower?
I see the world in systems — where different systems intersect and interplay, and how the levers that you might use between them affect one another. So I can usually pick up complex ideas quickly, and see how they interact.
What’s the most important thing that’s happened to you in your work life?
There are three things that shaped the course of my life: Singapore, UC Berkeley, and the Mortgage crisis of 2007.
When I was a kid, we moved to Singapore. It was highly impactful for how I view the world because when you’re born and raised in a certain kind of model, your assumption is that the model you’re in is not only the right one, but probably the best one. During my formative years, it taught me that the American way was just one of the few, and it wasn’t even the best.
That’s impacted almost every decision I’ve made — from going to Berkeley, to starting Punchd, to moving to India to help scale Flipkart. I knew there were alternate routes.
After Singapore, a close second was the mortgage and credit crisis of 2007 to 2009. The decision to get into tech was primarily dictated by the job market cratering right as I exited university at Berkeley. Since I couldn’t join a place where people were building stuff because there were no jobs, I decided to build my own stuff with my friends.
That never could have happened without UC Berkeley. Some of the most important people in my life came through Berkeley — they’re some of my best friends, old cofounders, and now some of us are back together at Time by Ping.
The entire thing is like a Butterfly Effect — you can’t predict that you’re going to meet excellent people doing amazing work, and you can’t predict how the macro environment is going to affect you because by the time you’re born a lot of those collision courses are already set.
So while some of the jobs I’ve had are great, and exciting things happened, like selling Punchd to Google, I attribute the vast majority of that to luck, being at the right place at the right time, and having an attitude that allowed me to take advantage of the opportunity when it arrived.
You’ve been a founder of a company that sold to Google, shepherded an E2E product, and led a hyper-growth company through a reorg. How do these experiences inform your philosophy for Time by Ping?
If you think about those three things, they are all related. Essentially they’re all systems.
When we were building a company like Punchd, the idea was, “Well the iPhone is here, and people have computers in their pockets with them all the time. It’ll change the way that we do things in the world.” Our team intuitively understood that things were going to change, and decided to work together to explore what that could look like without worrying about whether we were right or wrong.
Do you think the systems that you see working are going to be impacted by this new technology, and if so, what would be the new setup?
Working at big companies like Google, or building long-lasting product and organizational structure at Flipkart are, again, very similar. Those external questions were, what does the Indian e-commerce ecosystem look like, and what are the individual systems there — people, technology, societal norms, government, and policy, among others. How do these all interplay off of each other?
Once you know the external landscape, then you ask internal questions, like, what are we building, and what kind of systems exist within this pretty brilliant company, Flipkart, then how can you map the two to work together to create the changes in the new world that you were expecting to see.
In particular, in India, it was really about this burgeoning middle class that was getting used to a lot of the conveniences that modern and Westernized societies were getting, like access to consumables that you can easily buy online and have delivered to your door.
Something that I learned from a friend of mine, Vivek: He says in companies, you try to build a jazz group where everyone is awesome at different instruments, but more importantly, they can play off one another without having sheet music in front of them.
I aim to see how external and internal systems can be leveraged to work together at Time by Ping, and how great can we make complex improv sound.
How do you see the systems of Time by Ping coming together and playing off one another?
The big parts for Time by Ping are that we live in a society in which we sell our time. This is a very old construct — prostitution is one of the earliest jobs, which was a specific version of a time sell. Selling our time made our systems and society more efficient.
Today, the world has been compartmentalized into two types of work — professional work services, and labor-centric work.
The cool part about the world is we’ve done an excellent job of taking the chaos of labor and finding order and structure around it, and we reduce that time so you can think about anything — from pickers at Amazon, to people who make fries like I used to at McDonald’s. In any case, there was an understanding of what the cost of goods and your time are, and how quickly you can do a task repeatedly and safely. That’s all been priced.
In the world of professional services, and specifically with lawyers, we actually don’t have a great sense of how much anything costs. We apply time with the billable hour model, but there’s no upper bound on the cost, so you have clients who can go bankrupt. You’re going to run out of money, time, effort, energy, or sanity before you achieve your end goal.
But in the world of professional services, and specifically with lawyers, we actually don’t have a great sense of how much anything costs. We apply time with the billable hour model, but there’s no upper bound on the cost, so you have clients who can go bankrupt. You’re going to run out of money, time, effort, energy, or sanity before you achieve your end goal.
We want clarity on repeatable tasks in our world, because you don’t want things like human creativity to be bounded.
Great example: building contracts. You’re helping people negotiate and speak to each other in business terms so there’s an understanding between two parties. A lot of things like this people want over again in variants, which can be accurately measured. But if you said to someone, “Hey, can you go be creative?” time can’t really be bound in that scenario.
Those working models are big things that our society is predicated on today. And that’s going to continue to change because over the last 50–60 years, digital systems have helped our society become better at tracking and understanding where our time goes, where it’s inputted, and what the outputs of those times are, so you can start to ask, “Is my time being well spent?” which is a very difficult exercise to do.
Speaking of spending time thoughtfully, you had a life-altering brush with cancer in your 20s. How did this impact you and your view of time?
Cancer forced me to deeply understand taking advantage of life. I had to actually have that visceral discussion with myself, which is, “Niket, if this is it, are you happy with the way you lived your life?”
Cancer forced me to deeply understand taking advantage of life. I had to actually have that visceral discussion with myself, which is, “Niket, if this is it, are you happy with the way you lived your life?”
In between hospital visits and speaking with friends, I’d wonder if that was the last time I’d ever see them and carefully thought about what I’d say to them, in case that was the last thing I’d say to them. It made me realize a lot of people probably have never had that conversation because it’s difficult to do honestly.
There were aspects of my life that I was dissatisfied with, so I felt a sense of remorse and regret that if I were to die in that moment, I hadn’t moved through my life in the way that I wanted to.
After you leave cancer, if you’re fortunate enough to survive, you commonly have a great sense of guilt, because you’re not entirely sure why you were left to survive when others were taken away. In essence, the remainder of your life becomes a discussion of why you survived. Cancer, life — it’s all a numbers game that you play with statistics.
As people get older, we use phrases like, “Man, time really flies,” but in reality, time was there, we just weren’t paying attention.
That’s an intense thing for people to experience, even though I believe every person has a clear understanding of their mortality. They just don’t discuss it. And you see it a lot because as people get older, we use phrases like, “Man, time really flies,” but in reality, time was there, we weren’t paying attention.
Each time you create a tool you must also assume it can be used as a weapon. How will you ensure your product doesn’t have nefarious and unintended side effects?
Humans and tools, in my opinion, are one and the same. Humanity is an extension of technology. And technology is an extension of humanity. We’re building tools as a function of already entering the digital age.
People might look at other companies, like social networks, and question, “Should this exist? Is this good for humanity?” But the truth is, those things are going to exist no matter what because of digital systems. Take, for instance, back when email began and humans were conversing with one another through electronic means. Modern social networks are an extension and variant in that ongoing evolution.
At Time by Ping, we’re building a better version of tools that help us manage our time. It’s no different than all of the work built by companies like TIBCO, SAP, or IBM back in the day. Business intelligence machines were just trying to build a more modern version of tooling that existed before the digital era.
To say that any single person can control these things is difficult. What you can do is find the best parts of society that you think are ready to change, especially from their incentive structures, and build tools that actually move them away from incentives we know to not be productive anymore.
Once the tools are out there, people will find different ways to use them. Our hope is that we build it and use it in the long shot in a way that society finds beneficial.
What happens after that is up to society in part because once the tools are out there, people will find different ways to use them. Our hope is that we build it and use it in the long shot in a way that society finds beneficial.
Moving onto People, one of your other secret skills. You hold yourself and those around you to the highest of bars. How do you think through threading the needle between motivating excellence and achieving greatness?
I often say an enterprise is just a group of people trying to do something. That’s it. We conflate it with these large systems and bureaucracy, and those things do come along, but it’s just people at the beginning and end. Creating a culture where you’re deeply curious, want to build stuff, and have hopes for your tools to elevate society are key to having people understand why they should consider chasing excellence.
The truth of the matter is, a lot of people don’t even know why they chase excellence — they assume they should. There are tons of books that tell you to be excellent. Even Bill and Ted say so.
Threading the needle is about asking people genuinely, within the context of information they had, where they grew up, and how they think about the world: are you happy with the way things are? Do you believe your curiosity attached to your skills could help change society — even just a tiny bit?
Motivation comes from feeling like there’s something in the world you’re seeing that you want to do like art.
Motivation comes from feeling like there’s something in the world you’re seeing that you want to do like art. That’s why a lot of people see what they build as an expression of themselves, and might take themselves too seriously when it comes to work (certainly not me *winks*).
One thing about Ryan and myself is that we’re genuinely interested in migrating away from places where people work to produce stuff that just doesn’t matter and can be automated but isn’t, because the incentive structures are backward.
If we build a society that actually wants people to spend more time doing what they want to do, rather than what society wants, that’s where the ambition comes from — having faith that society will take what you’ve built and use it in a way that helps it itself, rather than use it against those who are in it.
What’s great about humans is that they’re deeply curious and creative beings. So I’m not really worried about what people are going to do. If we build a society that actually wants people to spend more time doing what they want to do, rather than what society wants, that’s where the ambition comes from — having faith that society will take what you’ve built and use it in a way that helps itself, rather than use it against those who are in it.
Thanks, Niket, for the deep discussion on systems, life, time, people, society — and how they all intersect.
Stay tuned for more interviews from Time by Ping’s leadership.
