January ‘24 Part 2: Hackathons and Launches

1/14/2024 - 2/5/2024

Table of Contents

1. Generative UI hackathon: AssistBot

2. LLM &. Vector Search Hackathon: AiClone

3. Tools for Thought Hackathon: AiCoach

4. Launched BeAgentic.com on Product Hunt

5. Introspective Hikes to Ocean Beach

6. Sunday Evenings at the Center

7. Muay Thai Training

Generative UI Hackathon: AssistBot

On this rainy Saturday morning, of January 20th, 2024 I took off for the AGI House in Hillsborough. I was fortunate to find a ride with a group heading, including an Ai startup founder from Boston, a designer and a fullstack developer that are residents at a co-living space called Agape. We departed from the Mission. At the start there a few presentations from sponsors and other speakers. Then it was time for the short idea pitches. I went up and described my idea for an AssistBot. Afterwards I talked to two people and we formed a team with Eugenia and Yuri. I sensed that we were aligned on the same goal and that we would have a good experience working together. I would do all the coding, and they would help with the design, storytelling and presentation. In the end this turned out to be correct and we had a good time and the end result was a success. We found a spot at a table and setup. From around 12pm to 8pm we worked with focus and good vibes. We had a third member that joined our table and worked with us, at the same time worked with another team, a visitor to SF and startup founder from Norway. It was encouraging to have fellow entrepreneurs be interested in our project and contribute. Eugenia is a CS student in Northwestern near Chicago, Illinois. Yuri is a multiple startup founder, notably having built an Alexa like product before Amazon made it popular. AssistBot is a Telegram Chat assistant that takes your goals, helps you define them, records them, and texts you every day to ask about your progress and to encourage you. The key is here that the conversation would be started by the ai. At the end we demoed the ability to create an assistant, and to send messages to it over telegram and get helpful advice responses. We demonstrated that the chat history is then visible on the user dashboard and it is saved in the Prisma database. The lessons from this were that it is important to tell a clear story about how this tool can be useful, to tell it clearly with good pacing. View the demo here:

LLM &. Vector Search Hackathon: AiClone

On the following Saturday, January 27th, 2024, a similar mission was undertaken by me. It was less rainy during the morning. I got a ride with an Ai startup founder from Europe and his girlfriend that worked at TikTok. We arrived in perfect timing. I took the opportunity to go around to the sponsor booths and get to know them and their products. I met the Codeium team, and learned about their VSCode based coding assistant. It is similar to Cursor. Then I talked to Together.ai team, I have met some of them previously at a hackathon two weeks ago. I was really interested in this platform that is able to run open source models in the cloud for you. I ended up using two of their ai models and won a prize sponsored by them.

This hackathon there was no opportunity to pitch your idea at the start, and that was fine because I mostly felt like working on my own this time. I really liked this idea of having a clone of yourself, and cloning historical figures in order to have conversations and get advice on things. Over the next six hours I focused 100% on building this thing. At some times I stopped to chat with people around me. Here I met new and old friends. I met Earl, who was working on a cool Community Management Ai startup. Later we would work on a hackathon together the next weekend and had a lot of things in common and could help each other out in our fonder journeys. I met some Ai startup founders from Korea, and they were surprised to see that there are not many consumer focused Ai startups in SF. I met with a Ukrainian friend, and over the panda express dinner he introduced me to a former Googler and organizer for Ukraine. He started an organization that funded delivery of hundreds of Starlinks directly to the civilians and soldiers in his home town, that were protecting his mother and sister. He told me the story how he organized this in the critical early days of the war, how his relatives were stuck in a pocket, surrounded by Russian invading forces, in great danger and how he spoke directly to them and was asked to organize Starlink deliveries. He ended up organizing deliveries for entire Ukraine through his connections. Also he organized support for existing organizations through coding DevOps and support from Google for server costs. We exchanged LinkedIn’s and shared ideas about what we could do to reenergize the support for Ukraine in the world.

I built AiClone, it uses MongoDB Vector Search to store embeddings of PDF files that you upload. It has a page where you upload PDF files of documents in order to build the knowledge base of the ‘Clone’. In my demo I uploaded a biography on Steve Jobs. Then there is an Ai Chat interface. Here you can engage the clone in conversations. In the backend it performs RAG (retrieval augmented generation), it composes a query, then searches the Vector database for semantically related content, inserts it into the context window and formulates a response. In this way it is like a ‘Clone’ of Steve Jobs, with the memories and knowledge from Steve Jobs life. It also has an “identity’ input box, where the identity of the clone is defined.

The presentation went quite well. I paced myself, I wasn’t very stressed or rushed. At the end I won the prize for the best project from Together.ai. The reward was a pair of AirPods Max, and 2.5k credits in Together.ai platform. I was very happy with the result.

At the end of the hackathon, I connected with many other participants and I was luck to find a ride with some new hacker friends I met back to SF. Here is a demo of the result:

Tools for Thought Hackathon: Built AiCoach

On the following Saturday, February 3rd, I competed at the ‘Tools for Thought’ hackathon at the AGI House mansion in Twin Peaks in San Francisco. This was the third iteration of this theme. The last one was sponsored by Roam Research and I won second place there with the project ‘garden paths’. I got there around 12:30PM and soon talks started by a former Apple designer behind the Vision Pro, and Jimmy Ba, the head of Ai at X Ai.

I pitched my idea and I teamed up with fellow founder Earl. I came up with doing another iteration on the ‘AssistBot’ idea, this time it would take it further with the ability to set the goals in the database. I had a conversation on how to do this with a fellow hacker I just met, called Dimitri. He advised using JSON mode instead of Function calling.

The whole time building the project was an adventure in learning and problem solving in a really fast pace. It was like a sprint, a battle, a puzzle. It was a lot of fun and at the end we made new connections with people around us, learned a lot, and had a really good demo to show in front of all the participants. This was exactly the reason why I love doing hackathons, you get this perfect blend of creativity, engineering, learning, coordinating and forming connections with other really smart and talented people. You form these bonds that are deeper than everyday conversations and interactions. You create something together and it is really enjoyable. It is really hard to find someone that is compatible, that can move with such agility and speed to match your own. That is why often I prefer to work alone, as most of the team hackathon experiences are always requiring you to compromise on your engineering and creativity in order to accommodate the teammates slower pace and less agility in creativity and problem solving.

At the demo, Earl showed some really good slides that showed that this kind of goal setting, todo list was a new advancement, that we were using existing messaging apps of the Telegram, and using Voice, for the input.

Launched BeAgentic.com on Product Hunt

On Friday January 19th, I made my first product hunt launch. It was of beagentic.com the blog writer. The purpose of this is to promote the product, to be featured on their website, and to get feedback from the first users. The result was pretty good, with 35 upvotes. I posted on twitter, LinkedIn, facebook, community WhatsApp groups, discords and slack groups. I got good feedback on iterating on the UI, that it’s critical for gaining trust of the customer, enough for someone to buy. This came from a community member from a Saigon Entrepreneur group. It was great to get feedback on a call, where he showed me his SAAS companies. I spoke with a potential customer. He said that it was not quite ready to be an MVP. This was humbling and I made a list of things I needed to improve, including: make it longer length, include images, auto post to Wordpress, keyword research. On the following week I made new release of a chat with PDF feature. Here is a demo of the launch:

Introspective hikes to Ocean Beach

On every Sunday I had a regular routine of going on a long walk, from my home in the SOMA neighborhood, through Hayes valley, through the length of Golden Gate park, and ending on Ocean Beach. This coincided with listening to Tony Robbins seminars and audio books.

I took time to refresh my mind from the daily focus on building a business. I contemplated life purpose, how I can achieve my goals, about my dreams, about my values, about what I can do to make my dreams reality. I got interested in Tony Robbins after recalling that Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum mentioned in some interview that he was inspired by his event as a kid. Also that a former house mate was inspired by it, finally that I had listened to other motivational speakers like and Zig Zigler, and found it very encouraging to broaden your mind. I recognize that having this intense belief in yourself is critical for inventors and founders, because you’re doing something new, something no one else dared to do, it takes courage, determination and conviction, after facing so many obstacles, setbacks, without any external guides but yourself.

It also reminded me of how Steve Jobs was in a way a motivational speaker, to his collaborators, his investors, his customers and his employees. Another part of the routine was visiting the center on Sunday evenings. It is a very cool tea shop run by volunteers. I completed writing exercises, did journaling, reading code bases, reading newsletters, reading tarot cards, as well as deep conversations with people around me, going to the open mic.

Muay Thai training

One of the most important routines is the Muay Thai training. It is something that I do for 1.5-2 hours every 2-3 days per week. This is an important practice because it teach you how to control and direct your energy. A punch and a kick, directed with good form and skill, is similar to other kinds of skills that you perform in your work, that are not physical but mental. Being able to perform them in the physical space, gives you the confidence and mental preparation to perform them in other areas. It is even more effective to performance improvement by recording yourself and seeing how your form is, seeing that you are putting your entire body weight behind a kick or a punch, and correcting based on this feedback.

conclusion

This time has been characterized by deep spiritual introspections. Asking myself questions like, what is it that I want to do with all the resources I have for this one life. Opening my mind to new possibilities, thanks to inspiration by speakers like Tony Robbins, the potentiality of what truly a human being is capable of, if I am willing to give everything I have to achieve some goal. I have been getting energy from building at hackathons, from meeting other founders and developers, from listening to podcasts by SF based founders that have achieved success that I hope to achieve, going on long hikes and contemplating how I can evolve my mind to be a business oriented person. I have greatly been influenced by a book called ‘100 million dollar offer.’ This was my guide for the product hunt launch.
I end this post with one of my favorite tracks from the last few weeks, enjoy!