Amit Gupta on Optimism in a Pessimist's World

Converge: The Business of Creativity Podcast with Dane Sanders

Amit Gupta is an entrepreneur, writer, and serial optimist. He’s also a personal friend of Dane’s, and in this episode, Dane and Amit discuss the past, the present, and - with Amit’s own brand of optimistic clarity - the future.

Amit is, in his own words a “relatively successful entrepreneur”, though we would argue his success is more than relative. Among other various startups, he is the founder of Photojojo, an online photography store which he sold in 2014 after recovering from an aggressive form of leukemia. From there, he began exploring his creative side as a science fiction author, which is what inspired him to develop his most recent project with fellow writer and business partner, James.

Sudowrite is an AI writing tool that Amit and James invented to help writers get real-time feedback and suggestions. His hope is that not only will their program help people overcome writers’ block, it can also help solve some of the issues of isolation that writers experience.

You can learn more about Amit and Sudowrite here:

sudowrite.com

amitgupta.com

jamesyu.org

[2:57]Amit tells a bit about his history as a tech entrepreneur, from playing around with HTML in college to his first startup and working as an intern with Seth Godin.

[5:08]Amit tells a story about a traumatic event that happened to him with some friends on the train tracks, which Dane says shows not only Amit’s resilience, but also that he hasn’t led a charmed life of the entrepreneur destined for success..

[8:07]In 2011, Amit was unexpectedly diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia, throwing him into a whirlwind of treatment and recovery, and subsequently began a national campaign for stem cell donation awareness.

[12:44]“Suffering is never an inevitability, it’s a universal human experience. But those who suffer and respond to suffering, in a way that somehow transcends the suffering is the kind of person that I want to learn from.”

[14:02] After his recovery, Amit changed the course he had been on and began to write science fiction, to pursue a passion for imagining a world made possible by technology.

[15:39] “The fiction that we're deluged with is so often dystopian. And it really concerns me that if we are just seeing the imaginations of our most creative people being devoted to how terrible the future could be, we're not going to be able to dream other ways that could be wonderful.”

[20:13] Amit shares some of the ways that getting sick changed his perspective and choices in life, and how he struggles to remember what the things are that really matter.

[22:21] The book Replay by Ken Grimwood is a reminder of the universal possibilities that exist for each of us in this life.

[24:10] Amit introduces us to his newest creation, Sudowrite, an AI-based creative writing tool.

[29:00] Dane admits to gushing when it comes to how cool Sudowrite is, and how much it could change the landscape for writers and open up new possibilities.

[32:14] Amet shares his thoughts on where he thinks the future is going.