Start to a New Year 2024
Week 12/22/2023 - 1/7/2024
table of contents
Robotics Club #2 and #3
Dev Clinic #2 and #3
What are your Values?
Thoughts on Building Products
Conclusion
Robotics Club #2 and #3
On the second and third editions of the robotics club were a major and surprising success to me.
One person from the sowing shop came and joined the meetup. She was interested in building a robotics startup that can detect wood ants and termites. She shared her story with me how she has worked with governments all over the US for government contracts for various projects. She was very interesting and I also helped her organize the sowing room. She was interested in coming to the meetup to meet other people in the robotics space and to potentially learn about how she can build this startup and find a collaborator or cofounder.
The third iteration was really awesome. A long time professional roboticist attended and we talked for the whole time about his experiences in the space, his projects and his work. I took down a lot of notes, like about an electronic motorcycle, built with batteries custom made and an electric motor that was converted from a truck alternator. He told me about First Robotics, a competition in for high school teams that was like a sport. I shared about wanting to create a movement, a brand, and a robotics competition, and robotics startups, starting with this meetup. We talked about Neotropolis, a festival in April that is all in the theme of cyberpunk. We talked about how a wearable computer, modular system, clothing would be really good to make. He is really talented and potentially could be the kind of person that creates some exciting innovations in the space if he partners with the right people.
Later another attendee came with a starter robotics kit. He said he wanted to familiarize himself with it before he built it with his son, who is eleven years old. I deeply empathized with him, (now that I reflect on it, a part of me resonated with it, as I wished I had an adult teach me robotics when I was a kid, especially my dad). I supported him in this effort by searching for the tutorial PDF and the instructions to download the Arduino software and emailing it to him. The three of use, plus others that were coming and going in the conversations, supported him in this effort with helpful and insightful conversations about electronics.
I came away from this meetups with excitement about building this community. The key to the success was a very clear mission statement, values and a defined agenda. People that came across the meetup page, could see that I valued things like:
To foster innovation in robotics, VR and drone space.
To onboard 1,000 new people get into this space in 12 months. (by 1/2025)
To promote education and mastery in robotics.
To be the catalyst for people creating business, hobby projects and building a community around robotics.
The agenda is very clear too, inspired by the sf commons writing club. It is more about getting things done and sharing them with the group. I am motivated to keep building this community, building a blog, a e-commerce store, and then a kickstarter for a robotics product.
It felt like I was doing something right and good for the world. I felt energized. I felt like I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. This gives me more fuel to the fire to pursue this path which is something I have always wanted to do but didn’t really act on. It’s hard to explain, it’s like I found the hidden door, that I was supposed to go through. It is very important to take time to appreciate this fully, as this is an important lesson to be repeated in the future.
Dev Clinic #2 and #3
On the second iteration two people came that were highly engaged. They were on time and I did the format explanation and talk, then we all introduced ourselves and shared our intentions for the session. I went around and checked in on them periodically. Soon I found out about how one of them needed help building a hacker news clone from an open source project using React and NodeJS. I sat with him and walked him through running it on his local machine, setting up a mongoDB Atlas instance, downloading all the dependencies, setting the node version and running it locally successfully. We ended the session with successfully creating new posts on the site and we gave each other a high five.
The other attendee was working on a obsidian shortcut that does web searches from the linux terminal. This was very interesting and I took notes on what software he was using and where he learned about it from. It was super interesting and I really valued having the opportunity to learn about this. I went down the rabbit hole of the original author of the software and the blog post.
At the end they gave me good feedback on organizing the meetup.
On the third iteration, I met a very interesting founder and developer working on a personal finance tracking app. We shared our experiences and philosophies on building a company. I also met the organizer of a very similar developer meetup that happens at 12PM just a few blocks away on the same day. Indeed he came there with a few other people present directly from that meetup.
What are your Values?
On New Years Day I walked in the morning by the piers. It was the day for reflecting. I was struck by this realization that marketing is about getting clarity on your values and how this was critically important. That really this is the core of what work is in the modern day, when so much is/will be automated with Ai. That to be able to get clarity on your values and to be able to reiterate what that is, to articulate it, gives you the power to communicate it to others, and this gives you the power to set the direction for group movement and to give life to this vision. You need to keep reiterating it, to keep it alive, this is your vision and your ability to get clarity on the direction is critical to making it happen. Much like a person that knows who they are, they have to have a story they tell themselves, in the same way, for a company to succeed, it needs to be clear on what it is, what it is trying to do, and where it is going. This is the power of clarity about your values.
To convert it to reality. This is what Steve Jobs did with Apple, especially when he came back in the late 90s. He created the “think different” campaign. Where he narrates over the black and white video clips of people in history that “pushed humanity forward”, that did something unique and believed in themselves. This is what Apple champions and honors. This to me is the best piece of content I have ever seen. This defines the whole purpose of Apple and it’s values. To me it is a model of how to run a company, how to create a movement, how to “make a dent in the universe”, how to express what you are about. This is what I intend to do with my own pursuits in technology and building a company. For me it is about celebrating great hero’s that have inspired you and impacted your life. In one interview Steve Jobs talks about how Nike is one of the great companies because it is clear about it’s mission, that is to honor great athletes. For me the ambition and purpose of my startup, is to honor great thinkers, artists and engineers. I want to shift the culture by creating tools that these dreamers and creators, those that are original, that are brave and inventive, that have this spark of genius and a unique perspective on the world, that have this vision and awareness of how we are creating the new world of the future.
We can only articulate, and expand this germ of an idea with Art. Art is our way of creating models of the world, our understanding of the world modeled in some representation. We can imagine the world, and then we can use Ai to help us discover more of the truth and beauty and goodness in the world, to extend our thinking powers, the Ai will be able to build the castles on the foundations, from the castles you we have made in air (This is referencing Henry David Thoreau’s quote "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them").
This is the great advancement that Ai can do for us. We dream up things, and then we use Ai to make them reality. We can expand, explain and communicate our ideas, our visions, our values through the use of art, through creating fictional worlds, characters, stories. Through creating documentaries on YouTube. Through creating apps, and code.
This week I watched a TEDx talk by Adi Melamed from Brown university who is the founder of the commons sf. I was very inspired by this and I sent a tweet to express my excitement for seeing this articulation of my own deepest values and interests of this brave pursuit of turning dreams to reality, of learning and creating with technology.
My values are to promote technical and artistic education, to foster innovation, to help one billion people become writers, artists and scientists. To cultivate the mind and to improve the social cohesion of the world and make democracies flourish, to improve the lives of people around me. When I read Hull House I cried so hard because I found what inspired me, what made me light up, what moved me. I found in that story the reflection of what values I have. That is to improve the minds of children, of men and women and to improve the lives of the people around me. We have so much potential, we only need to be able to dream it and to turn it into reality. If we can imagine it, if we can dream it, then we can turn it to reality. This is why my startup, has a very clear mission, that of turning my own and other peoples dreams for a better world into a reality. These are not just any dreams but the dreams for people being uplifted, for people being better, for people to be fully themselves and to push humanity forward. This is something I got glimpses of when I pursue things like building robotics and developer meetups.
Thoughts on Building Products
On building a product synducer.com, this is an Ai writing assistant that helps you generate blog posts to build your online presence and to communicate with others your business products and purpose.
The next step of this product roadmap is to create a research assistant. This is an agent that can be used by real scientists and hobbyist to help you find relevant research papers, and to understand them quickly.
The next product feature will be to record audio transcripts and to transcribe it into your notes, then to generate articles from this.
The next product feature will be to record bookmarks and interesting pieces of knowledge, like from photos, from social media, and to have them in one place and to be able to search through them.
One of the most exciting things I have encountered in the last few months is the ability to use Ai to generate realistic images of yourself in different situations. This application of Ai has power to be transformative in our world. We can imagine ourselves in different situations, acting out in different scenarios that we dream to make real. This is something that I need to build a product around. The second after I finish creating the writing assistant. I will make a new feature where a user uploads a photo of themselves, and then is able to generate images of themselves in different situations. To me this is very important that I create this product.
The UX for this app will be that a user will upload a couple photos of themselves, then they will type in a prompt and a new scene will be generated. I can create this beautiful application that is fast and really enjoyable to use. Then the user will have this good experience and want to come back. The key is to start with a small feature launch, the MVP and then to listen to feedback and iteratively improve the product.
There is real power in this tool, because it allows you to visualize yourself in the situations that you want to be in, to achieve the things you want to achieve. This is powerful effect, because seeing is believing. If your mind can believe that you are a CEO of a billion dollar company, by seeing an image of yourself being in that position, then your mind, your subconscious and conscious mind, will think of all the requirements you need to fulfill in order to be in that state. Your mind will fill in the blanks, you will suddenly do all the practices, all the daily habits, hold all the beliefs about yourself, that align with this identity. Then before you know it, it will become your reality.
The UX will be that you can create stories of yourself, a kind of graphic novel with yourself as the main character. Imagine writing a few ideas, a few sentences in a prompt, like ‘a story about how a indie hacker builds a community around robotics club and then creates a world changing robotics company.’ Then the application will expand on the script, making a whole story arc, then it will generate images for each episode in the story, with yourself in the story. Then it exports the graphic novel for you, in a format that allows you to read it, and publish it publicly on your profile page, or your external website.
Conclusion
The last two weeks were characterized by focused work on my startup, of organizing robotics and developer meetups, and of reflecting on the year end and the new year ahead.
For me the most exciting times in my last few months in SF have been at the sf commons writing club, at the weekly review meetings, the year review meetings, the hackathons at AGI house, the meetup events I have organized at noisebridge and the times in Founders Inc when I met other startup founders. It is important to remember this so that I know what gives me energy.
I created this 3 minute reel of my 2023.
And this 90 Second version published on twitter and instagram.
Here is a favorite song from this week:
✌️
1/7/2024