Second Week of December, 2023

12/01/2023 - 12/08/2023

contents

1. Things I’m Excited About this Week

2. Writing Your Own Mission Statement

3. Ai X Art Hackathon

4. AGI House ‘Optimize your LLM Stack’

5. San Francisco Week Look Back

6. Conclusion

Things I’m Excited About this Week

building products

There is so much to examine, to study, to talk about, to notice, about building quality products. This means design, the implementation of the code, what the product does and how it feels under the fingers of the user. How people think about it, how they understand it, how you talk about what a product does. To get good at this you need to try a lot of products and write about them publicly. This is what the founder of producthunt.com did when he got started. He wrote publicly in his blog almost daily and developed a following and reputation for being knowledgeable about products. He was working as a product manager, so it aligned with his career path and day to day work. Now he is running the website and he is investing.

studying products of other builders

In order to develop a good taste of products, you have to try a lot of them and you have to study closely what other founders are doing. A great way to do this is to have a network of founder friends and try their products. Study them. Give them feedback on all the features. Have discussions on the pros and cons of certain decisions.

talking to your clients on reddit

This is a great forum to meet people of any specific field. You can post your questions or any other message, and you can respond under threads about topics that are interesting to you to drive the discussion forward.

tech as an art, finding the right tool, believing in yourself

Creating with technology, being a coder and founder is a lot like being an artist. You work individually, often it may feel like your work is not good, you may feel silly working on something that is still developing and not polished. The same process and teachings apply as to those of writers, like for example in the book The Artists Way.

strong set of values, clarity on what you are doing, writing your own mission statement

I believe that great products are clear about their values, their mission and their culture. This creates a compelling product because the client then can sense that the people behind the product put a lot of care, thought and work into it. Such that they can be sure that they can take it seriously, to believe in the product, in the team, because someone already is there believing in it.

Writing Your Own Mission Statement

What makes a good mission statement?

A good mission statement serves as a compass for an organization, guiding its path and ensuring that everyone involved understands and is aligned with its fundamental goals and values. A good mission statement is a concise and inspiring declaration that defines the purpose and core values of an organization. It should encapsulate the following key elements:

1. Clarity: It should be clear and easy to understand. The mission should be straightforward enough that anyone who reads it can easily grasp what the organization aims to do.

2. Purpose: It should reflect the organization's primary objectives and the reasons it exists. This helps in guiding decision-making and strategy.

3. Inspiration: A good mission statement should motivate and inspire employees, stakeholders, and customers by conveying a sense of purpose and meaning.

4. Alignment with Values: It should align with the organization’s core values and culture, helping to create a cohesive identity that resonates both internally and externally.

Ai X Art Hackathon

On Saturday, December 9th, in the morning I went to the Ai x Art hackathon. I formed a team and an idea to use live coding, openAi, and real time Ai image generation to create a DJ music visualization tool. What really inspired me here is this recurrent experience of dancing at night clubs and having so much fun and then wishing that I could build some creative tech thing here that makes the experience of night life more exciting and that it makes the most of the time, so that you are exercising and dancing in more ways than just physically. That you are also engaged in other mediums like words, visuals and communicating with others. Because right now in dance there is only the DJ that outputs the songs and the crowd dances and responds to the music. It is very one way and it is only restricted to the sense of physical being but not language or communication. There is space here to make an art that produces some beautiful experience.

This makes me think of Burning man dancing. The experiences from Burning man are seeds of a new world, of new possibilities. I had some of the most amazing moments dancing until sunrise in the playa. Imagine the scene, in the middle of the desert night, seeing lit up art cars and people riding on bicycles with neon lights. This fantastic scene is very surreal. Then dancing all night in the desert until the sun rise and feeling the wind come down from the desert, feeling the gust and the desert sand, and seeing the stars in the sky, while around you people are dancing free and you are there too and part of this, being yourself, and expressing yourself and moving with joy and love.

Dancing is something that is not written a lot about. It is so ephemeral. There is a whole world happening there during the dance, but it is not integrated (usually) with the rest of your life and your world as it is not happening in language. It is a process of integrating your mind with your body, your thoughts and your emotions. It is therapeutic, because you can’t be depressed and dance at the same time, at least not in an enjoyable, authentic and free way.

Indeed, the drugs in this world of music and partying are something that can’t be ignored. My stance on this is that it is a tool and a technology that can be used for good and for bad. It is dangerous. People in this space have a responsibility to be thoughtful about expressing their viewpoints about drug use and about using them of course. Promoting it universally can encourage destructive, mindless, soul killing, harmful relationships with drugs. I believe that when we speak and make decisions regarding illegal drug use in public, it is useful to imagine that you are being observed by all the people in the world, all your ancestors and all your future offspring, so that you are acting in alignment with your deepest and most true your values. This is living with integrity.

In the hackathon we brainstormed and researched technology that could work for this idea to generate visuals and music. The result was great. We all went out for lunch and talked about our interests and got to know each other. This is the highlight of these events, making new friends. When we got into the completing the project, I started to feel that there wasn’t alignment with what I wanted to do and with the team and decided to leave and go to another hackathon.

AGI House ‘Optimize your LLM Stack’

Opportunity to meet ai companies building in this space tools that can be helpful. At this hackathon I talked to people in the space. Made connections with the operators of AGI House. Met new people, some going to neurIPS conference. Some working on the Ai startups. Some building really exciting futuristic Ai things like Ai Agent Swarms. Inspiring to see with your own eyes, founders that are able to form communities around their open source code projects, like the train of thoughts and agent swarms projects. The founder shows this capability of identifying the most world changing new software paradigms. If you go to the cutting edge, if you are in the right place and the right time, you can ride the new wave of innovation and help shape it’s trajectory. This requires good instinct to see clearly the power of some new software technology.

San Francisco Week Look Back

Coworking at Noisebridge

Observation: we can organize communities around causes we believe in to advance our own growth as technologists, agents, professionals and entrepreneurs. The maker space Noisebridge comes from a long line of community organized around technology, some organizations formed like this in Europe. The mission statement on the wall is very clear about what this place is about. I found it very inspiring and compelling. I have been attending this space every time I would come to visit SF, especially when I lived here last year. I am full of ideas about building coding, Ai tinkerer, indiehackers, robotics and other social meetups in this space, to help foster innovation.

Nights out in SF.

Dancing to music and mingling with diverse crowds is inspiring and breaks you out of static and stale modes of thinking, moving and feeling. It is letting the energy flow from your chakras. One of the big ideas I got while dancing with freedom on the dance floor was this realization that you can change the world, believe in yourself, believe that you have the power and you can change the world. I had this vision that I needed to build writing tools to stop the war in Ukraine.

I envision building a not for profit that documents and exposes the evils of the Putin’s bloody and evil rule. I will build the tools for people to make reports and to document all the instances of war crimes, of every battle, and for soldiers to speak their minds, and for the truth to come out and be understood by all the people in America, so that democracy can prevail and that we can best navigate this time and let democracy survive as a system.

Memories From Digital Nomad Life
Vietnamese food brings back awesome memories of getting street food with friends in Saigon. How good were those moments. Coding all day, then getting food with housemates for a few dollars, discussing code, projects, plans, etc.

The SF Commons Writing Club

Writing the weekly substack at the commons sf is great for getting new fresh ideas from conversations, from sharing your writing in person with people around you, hearing what it sounds like, and giving advice to other writers about ideas and writing itself. It’s a great way to make new friends and have inspiring conversations. The energy is really positive, I feel very alive and happy when surrounded by people writing.

I happened to join the weekly ‘week review’ at the commons, where we write down answers to sets of questions to get us to reflect on our week, then in a group of about ten other people, each one of us spoke up, giving your name, and acting out what physical body movements and positions described your past week, and which you wish to describe your upcoming week. I filled in a few pages in notion of the answers to the prompts. To describe my past week, I made a pose with my arms in front as if at a laptop, very stiff, under stress and pressure, standing still, kind of stuck, overwhelmed under time pressure and not productive.

Then I said that there were a few other body poses that describe my week. The next one I stood up and took the Muay Thai fighter pose, with my back foot wound up on my toes, my hips square with my shoulders, my front foot a bit in front and the toe forming the top left corner of a square with my back foot on the rear right corner. My arms up, guarding my head and temples. My body swinging gently from front to back. Next I took a third position, this was of dancing, I said, ‘I danced too, feeling freedom, self expression, and joy.’ Then I swung my arms and my body side to side, I made a few dance movements, gentle and aware of the body, gently leaning into the movement of a dance. Then I sat down, and said that for the next week, I hoped to be in a more relaxed and flow state of working on a laptop on my work. I made this movement of my hands as if they’re on a laptop. Slowly typing, and feeling this flow of energy out of me into the laptop and back to me. This cycle was relaxed and free. I used the word ‘flow’ to describe it. People commented ‘cool’, ‘awesome’, ‘great’, and then we moved on to the next person. Throughout the week I was reminded of this intention, and when sitting down to work, this picture and body position came to mind. It was helpful to have a north star for the week, and especially in the form of a body movement and position. We often remember things more with our bodies, and can unlock intellectual progress through our muscle memory.

Coworking at the noisebridge place, meeting interesting people there, birthday party gathering, brewing club tasting.

Tech Meetup Events

Going to meetups on the weekday, at GitHub office and Cloudflare. Conversations with other founders, one is making productivity app using science to improve cognitive performance and learning. Talks about new startup products in Ai and other tech.

Taking the long perspective in time

We stand to gain a lot by being bold and building things with a vision of ourselves acting in the great spans of time and of human history. Always start your project or intention with this view.

The most important thing to focus on is to be building a product in such a way that you feel you are brimming with new ideas, excited to work on it, shipping new exciting features every day. Building new features just for fun. This is the zone you want to be in. Beware of things that make this zone not effective. This is where you will make most progress and the process to make your dreams a reality. If you are in this kind of zone then you are making progress, if you are not, then you should consider changing your process.

Midnight Runners

One of the healthiest social things to do in SF (and in over 18 cities around the world) is midnight runners. Every Wednesday we run 5-8k through SF. It’s a great way to get your dose of exercise and to meet other people at the same time.

Conclusion

This week was characterized by slow progress towards my goal of building a business that makes 10K MRR. This is my main objective. Sometimes It feels like the progress is too slow. The thing to do is to find help from partners, talk to a lot of people, clients and find support and examples from other developers and founders. I have a lot of ideas and I am glad that I am writing them down and its the first step to make them a reality. I am also creating things, like the weekly review, the client work, my own startup and this substack. The most important thing is to keep creating, in the form of writing, of products, of vlogs, instagram posts, drone videos and to keep making startups.

I offer you this song as gift. Enjoy.