Anupam Ghosal is the Founder & CEO of Riple, a social news platform that uses AI to personalize your news feed and emphasizes user engagement and community moderation.

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Let’s start with your background! Can you share with us your career journey and what you’re currently up to?

Hey everyone, I am Anupam Ghosal and the founder and CEO of Riple. Riple is a revolutionary social news platform that builds a community around news and shares all the latest and greatest news around the world in a short 100 words format all catered to our user’s taste.

We make news short and interesting for our users and also provide them a platform where they can directly share their stories to our other users. About me, I am a computer science graduate from Trinity college, Cambridge and the University of Essex.

I have previously worked as a developer for a significant time in my life. Professionally I have worked as a Product Manager for a multinational tech company before quitting the role to work on my business full time.

We’d love to know what a typical day is like for you. Could you describe a recent workday?

I am working on the business full-time, alongside my two founding partners. I am based in London, UK and generally work around 50-60 hours a week, but I am able to work to my own timetable and coordinate my schedule with colleagues and employees based across the globe.

I look after the overall operation of the platform, so I oversee almost everything from the technical development to marketing to meeting investors to refining the business model. I have no fixed routine for my day-to-day job, but the average day would be me getting up around 8am in the morning, grabbing a coffee, going through my emails, prioritising my tasks on our Trello board and starting working.

For work, these days it’s mostly been getting back to our potential investors and enquiring the ones we have not heard back from in a while. Most of my meetings are between 11am to 6pm GMT.

I keep a check with the rest of my team and go through the progress they have made or if there are any blockers or not etc. And that’s about it, for a business like ours new challenges keep coming every other day. My first task is to resolve them as soon as possible.

Can you define work-life balance for yourself and share with us your approach in maintaining it?

If I am being honest, I don’t have a separate work and personal life at the moment and I am happy with it. I work at any given time during the day from when I am up in the morning to when I go to bed at night. Things come up all the time and I am ready to face them at any point of time.

My family and friends understand that and respect that. I do spend time with the people I care but it comes after my work at this point in my life. There is nothing more important to me than my business and the growth of it right at the moment. 

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Change is constant, and it’s essential for growth. Have you made any lifestyle changes in the past year to improve your work-life balance?

There have been a few significant changes to my lifestyle since I started working 60-hour weeks. Most importantly the conscious effort I’ve put to look after my physical and mental health and having a healthy diet.

I try to go to the gym at least 4 times a week, meditate for 30 mins every day and eliminate junk food. With all the added work pressure it’s normal to ignore our health and mental well-being, and it’s the worst thing one can do to themselves.

We’re always on the lookout for new resources! Can you recommend any books, podcasts, or newsletters that have helped you in your journey towards balance?

I am not the best reader, but from the ones I have read I’d recommend Atomic Habits, Ikigai and Rich Dad Poor Dad, they are pretty popular books already but there is a reason they are so popular. An unpopular book I’d recommend to every reader is The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari by Robin Sharma.

Before we wrap up, do you have any final words of wisdom or insights on work, life, or balance that you’d like to share with our readers?

If you have an idea, don’t overthink it, just go out and do it! Find out what you need to know and focus on getting it to market. If people don’t take to it, forget it, and move on. The most important thing is that you try.

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