Building The Machine: #15: The Path Forward
On a long enough timeline all ideas converge. I have been thinking about a lot, and working on a lot, and suffering from a lack of focus. Over the next month I plan to focus more.
What I am Writing✍
I wrote a piece that is meaningful to me called It’s Time To Ship which is an evolution of the Marc Andreesen post It’s time to Build from 2020.
I think that getting something over the finish line is worth celebrating. I also believe its incredibly difficult to ship. I explain this in the post:
So what exactly does shipping mean?
Shipping means a product worth using.
Shipping means producing something to be proud of.
Shipping begets more shipping.
Shipping means completion.
Shipping is about a team coming together in concert to achieve a common goal.
Shipping is movement.
The art of shipping something means that you have worked as a unit to put something out into the world that you can take pride in; a return on investment that helps others.
Balancing that with work and life is important
Shipping faster doesn’t mean burnout.
One of the most common questions we get around engineering time is why they are not full-time or “working” in a full-time capacity. To answer this question, it’s best to first realize that no engineer is actually coding 40 hours a week, even as a full-time employee.
To understand the time and energy spent, simply talk to any founder-level or staff engineer – they will share how they get into the flow state of coding, how they approach their days, and what great output looks like. This shows their worth, productivity, and shipping expertise are not measured by hours or lines of code.
By working on their projects and companies, engineers have the creative and mental energy to dive into a team’s startup with ease. Long gone are the days of worrying whether your top engineer is feeling burnt out. Instead, we know that they are driven to be creative by their business ventures. By hiring an engineer through Gotta Go Fast, you help them afford to pursue their dreams by having them spend the majority of their time working on your startup’s difficulties and encouraging their passion on the side.
Please take a read if you are willing.
What I am Reading📖
🚂 This piece by Doomberg “railroaded” goes in depth in a way I haven’t seen MSM do related to the train de-railment earlier this month. I did not realize the EPA had a website setup with realtime updates related to the incident and was sharing this much info. Its a horrible situation, made better by at least showing the data and citizen journalism happening to make sure it doesn’t get buried.
🧠 Wild progress from ChatGPT
🛸 Aliens among us? Great overview of 12 assumptions for extra-terrestrial life (spoiler: its pro-alien life forms)
🎨 AI with kids? Everyone is talking about AI generated everything, but this is a resource (PlaygroundAI) that I recently used with my kids to enter crazy and zany prompts and they loved it. Obviously you can use this platform how you want, but it was a fun wrapper instead of using DALLE3 or Discord with Mid Journey for image generation.
🎶 Justin Bieber sold his music rights library…
This is a fascinating story, not only because he is only 28, but because of the rising amount of artists doing this, his health issues, and what it means to monetize this and sell parts of it. Obviously fractional ownership could play a role in the future and this is a path to doing so. Its my one my big bets for the decade.
🕷️ Different Spiderman images throughout history with AI? Count me in to look at your thread
🛢️ What happened when this olive oil company apologized? Magic happened with customers. They wrote one of the most heartfelt apologies, typos and all, to their base and so many people came to their side. Its an amazing masterclass in how to handle things when they go “Wrong” and how you can turn them around to go right.
Tools I use 🛠️
As mentioned above I have been having a ton of fun with PlaygroundAI its a great way to generate generative images on the fly, and play with prompts. You can also play with other peoples creations and use the “seed” of them to do other things. I can’t believe we went from discord creation and text prompts to this so quickly and I am excited for what the next 6 months of development is going to look like.
On My Mind 🧠
Related to the title of this email the path forward for many startup founders is unclear.
Celebrate your wins🏆
My friend Scott Britton launched a new Substack called Creator Experiments that publicly documents all his growth experiments on Substack, Youtube, and other platforms. He is a smart founder so check it out!
In my last newsletter I was reflecting on why so many people drop off their new years resolutions in the late Jan/early February time frame. I am not sure why but I am posting my wins of trends and habits here to try to keep up. Here is what January looked like for me and it was a huge win!
Got a win to share? Reply here and let me know.
