The Unbearable Heaviness of Being: On the Passing of Naren Gupta (Part 7)

After we received our vaccines this year, we started getting together in person once again. One August evening, we spent five hours on Naren and Vinita’s lawn. Conversation flowed, tumbling effortlessly from topic to topic.

We had originally only planned for a socially distanced, masked, one-hour of catching up.

We ended up still physically distanced, but in a five-hour intoxication of serious and frivolous conversational intimacy.

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The Unbearable Heaviness of Being: On the Passing of Naren Gupta (Part 6)

Naren was very close to his brother. They used to speak everyday. Sometimes several times a day.

I always found it beautiful to hear him talk about his brother and how much he meant to him. How they went to Madagascar, just the two of them. One of their most recent trips was to go see polar bears in Canada. Just the two of them.

My father was repeatedly swindled by his brothers.

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The Unbearable Heaviness of Being: On the Passing of Naren Gupta (Part 5)

I have been writing for almost four hours. The rain has stopped. It is sunny outside. There are fewer golden leaves on my pear tree. The ones that are left now glisten as the soft winter sun touches them.

I am unspooling reels of memory.

I am playing recordings of conversations.

Naren loved to travel. Wilderness held a particular appeal for him. Denali. Bandhavgarh. Kaziranga.

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The Unbearable Heaviness of Being: On the Passing of Naren Gupta (Part 4)

In the Spring of 2020, as we were each trying to understand the pandemic, the six of us started doing Zoom calls regularly. In addition, we were sharing a lot of notes that each of us  unearthed. Science. Politics. History. Anthropology. We looked everywhere for clues.

Politics, in particular, was a highly contentious subject. Dominique, Vinita and I are centrists. Naren and Pierluigi are conservatives. Our ideas clashed. Especially around the caricature figure of Donald Trump, against the backdrop of post-truth America, conservatives have had a difficult case to defend. The Republican party has become a poodle on leash, led astray by an aspiring fascist.

At first, Dominique and I resisted getting drawn into political discussions. Naren wanted to discuss politics. Enrica wanted to discuss politics. Naren refused no for an answer.

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The Unbearable Heaviness of Being: On the Passing of Naren Gupta (Part 3)

Yesterday, as I cried in Dominique’s arms, he said, gently, Naren was a father figure for you.

Naren was a father figure for a lot of people in the industry.

What he was to me was more than that.

Naren was my friend.

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The Unbearable Heaviness of Being: On the Passing of Naren Gupta (Part 2)

Naren and I met in 2010. My Vision India 2020 book had just come out. We were invited to be on a panel together at Stanford. The Indian startup story was just starting to find some traction in Silicon Valley.

The Indian startup story, by the way, is different from the Indian entrepreneur story. Indian entrepreneurs, by this time, had already found acceptance in Silicon Valley. TiE played a major role in legitimizing us. Naren played an active role in that effort. Naren and Vinita each founded a technology company, took it public, and were flag bearers of a talented, highly entrepreneurial diaspora that would go on to change the technology industry for good. Shantanu Narayen, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Parag Agarwal are each milestones in that continuum of success.

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The Unbearable Heaviness of Being: On the Passing of Naren Gupta (Part 1)

Naren died.

Suddenly.

My pear tree

still has some golden leaves.

Rain drips disbelief.

It can’t be.

It is.

These are the only lines I could come up with on Sunday afternoon.

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IPOs 2021: ZipRecruiter Leverages AI to Deliver Ideal Employee Match

The global online recruitment market is expected to grow at 7% CAGR from $29.3 billion in 2021 to $47.3 billion by 2028. Santa Monica-based ZipRecruiter (NYSE:ZIP) went public earlier this year, and continues to deal with the uncertainties of the pandemic world.