25 entries Every essay, dispatch, and note

The & Archive

2019–2026 by Narendra Nag
2026
MAY 2

The Unit Economics of Boredom

Streaming P&Ls optimize for minutes produced, which is cheap. The scarce variable is minutes earned — attention that is genuinely arousal-weighted. The winning service...

Media
APR 29

The NBA's Next Decade Will Not Look Like Its Last

The eleven-year, $76 billion media rights deal was priced against a world that is already moving — generationally, geographically, and through the betting layer — out ...

Sports
APR 26

The Measurement Problem in Creator Economics

CPM, followers, watch-time, RPM. The canonical creator-economy metrics are inherited from businesses that no longer exist. Modern creator revenue has three components,...

Media
APR 20

A Short Taxonomy of Bundle Collapse

Since the streaming bundle wave began in 2024, the industry has tried many bundle shapes and almost all of them have collapsed into four recurring modes of failure. Th...

Streaming
MAR 26

The Verdict Was Always ComingDispatch

A jury just told Meta and Google what parents already knew — their platforms are unsafe for children. We built Kidoodle.TV because we believed it didn't have to be thi...

Media, streaming
MAR 26

The Danger of Binaries

We love sorting the world into two buckets. Left or right. Growth or profit. Success or failure. But the most important things in life — and in business and politics —...

Media
MAR 22

One Book a Month: Growing Up with the Famous Five

My brother and I pooled our pocket money to buy one Enid Blyton book every month. We fought over who got to read it first. Thirty years later, I still remember the sme...

Personal
MAR 21

The Language That Built the World's Databases: Clipper, ASCII Art, and the Golden Age of DOS

Before the web, before Windows, before most people had ever touched a computer — there was a language called Clipper, a compiler that turned dBASE code into executable...

Development
MAR 19

The Game That Was Always There: Women's Soccer, the NWSL, and Why Sunday Night Just Changed Forever

Women's soccer in America has endured two collapsed leagues, decades of underfunding, and a media ecosystem that never matched the demand. With the NWSL's record-shatt...

Sports
MAR 13

Building a Family Recipe BookNote

Project
MAR 11

Building a 10,000-Book Library from ScratchNote

I built a curated digital library of 10,001 books spanning serious literature, science fiction, detective fiction, science, and a dozen other genres — with a REST API,...

Development
MAR 10

Zeitgeist — Which Sports Teams Are People Actually Paying Attention To?Note

I built a dashboard that tracks digital attention across all 92 NBA, MLB, and NHL teams using seven data sources — from Wikipedia and ESPN to ticket demand and betting...

Sports
MAR 10

Oil vs Stock: Seeing the Relationship Between Oil and EquitiesNote

I built a dashboard that overlays crude oil prices with any stock ticker — because sometimes the best way to understand a relationship is to just look at it.

Development
2025
SEP 11

Leapfrogging vs. Stepwise Growth: Two Paradigms of Progress

From India's telecom revolution to Kenya's mobile money miracle, the most transformative progress often comes not from climbing the ladder rung by rung — but from skip...

Socioeconomics
JUL 3

What Isn’t Changing: The Enduring Power of Live Sports in an Age of Acceleration

In an era of compounding disruption from AI and shifting demographics, live sports endure as a uniquely resilient cultural and economic force.

Socioeconomics
2024
NOV 19

The Many X Opportunity in Sports Streaming

Free sports streaming is delivering many times the audience of traditional media — here is what the data shows and why it matters.

Sports
SEP 23

What solving 3650 New York Times crosswords puzzles has taught me

Ten years and 3650 puzzles later — lessons in patience, pattern recognition, and persistence from a daily NYT crossword habit.

Personal
SEP 9

An Ode to the Remote Control

The demise of the RSN model is forcing sports franchises to rethink how they reach fans — and the remote control holds the key.

Sports
AUG 10

Where in the World is Naren – Building An Interactive Travel MapNote

Building an interactive travel map with Leaflet.js to showcase every place I have visited or lived in around the world.

Project
AUG 4

Sports — The First Frontier

From watching the 1990 World Cup final on a tiny black and white TV to understanding why live sports remain the most powerful form of media.

Media
JUL 12

The Architecture of Attention: Why the Only Finite Asset Is the One We Understand Least

Human attention is the only truly finite asset in media. Three cognitive models from the 1950s through the 1970s explain more about how we watch, scroll, and subscribe...

Media
JUL 4

Rebuilding a personal siteNote

After twenty-five years and multiple false starts, finally rebuilding a personal site the right way with Jekyll and GitHub Pages.

Development
2020
JUL 6

Learnings from launching KBITS Live — the new streaming home for the world’s best Cisco networking trainerNote

How we helped a top Cisco networking trainer break free from aggregation platforms and launch his own streaming service.

Streaming
JAN 3

Since Hindsight is 2020

Reflecting on twenty years of career transitions — from web design to journalism, digital marketing to building a streaming platform.

Career
2019
JUL 29

Essential Reading for FoundersDispatch

A curated, living list of the most influential books for startup founders, with video talks where available.

Startups