The Hive is a collection of essays about the invisible architecture of how we think — and what happens when you start clearing the room.
I’m Sunil Hebbar. I’m a trader and writer in New York. I’ve spent the last decade inside financial markets, watching how the gap between what’s actually happening and what people believe is happening creates every big win in history. Before that, I spent time on Wall Street, built and lost a startup in India, and convinced my family to bet everything on a conviction the market hadn’t yet priced. It worked.
What I didn’t expect was how much more there was to learn after it landed — from watching. Watching markets, watching people, watching myself. From sitting in the stands at the O2 Arena as Roger Federer played his last match, learning that greatness has a cost nobody talks about until it’s too late.
These experiences taught me the same thing from different angles: most people are carrying an invisible ecology of thoughts — limiting beliefs, inherited assumptions, stories they’ve never questioned — that quietly governs their lives. I call them flies.
The work of transformation is not adding something new. It’s clearing what was never yours to begin with.
The essays in The Hive explore that idea through trading, tennis, relationships, identity, and the frameworks I’ve built from living inside all of them. The lens never changes. The topics rotate.
If you’ve read one essay and felt something shift, the rest of the collection will take you deeper. Start with The Hive — it gives you the vocabulary for everything that follows.
Every essay is free. I write when I have something worth saying.
You can find me on X: @sunil_hebbar
