I caught up with a founder who shared an update on his fundraising. The story stuck with me because of how the tariff turmoil is impacting him. That’s not something I anticipated for technology companies raising from venture capital firms.

He’s raising a $1 million round and had a lead investor committed for $500k. He was deep in diligence with a few other firms to fill out the rest of the round. Then, the tariff turmoil hit. All the investors in deep diligence simultaneously pulled out. His lead investor has notified him that it will pull out too if the remaining $500k isn’t raised within a tight window.

This founder went from seeing his fundraising go from a clear path to completion to complete uncertainty because tariff and stock market turmoil rattled the investors he was talking to.

This story was surprising to me since this founder is early stage, but it was a reminder. The tariffs and stock market turmoil they caused are prompting uncertainty, which will show up to entrepreneurs in all sorts of unexpected ways.

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 58
• Total blog posts published: 371

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed this week (link to last week’s commitments):

• Read A Technique for Producing Ideas, a framework for producing ideas by former advertising executive James Webb Young
• Had meetings with two more developers about this project

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Create an opportunity solution-tree diagram for this project

Asks:

• If you can get me an invitation code to Manus, please let me know!
• If you know any senior full-stack developers interested in working on the software for my current project, please introduce us!

Week two hundred sixty-three was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

What I struggled with:

• I struggled to stay focused this week amid all the tariff turmoil.

What I learned:

• I need to be specific about the skills I’m looking for in a senior engineer.
• Visually showing how biographies and other books are connected would be valuable to entrepreneurs.
• Writing blog post series about biographies is a way to both create magnetic luck and connect with entrepreneurs who love to learn.
• The opportunity solution-tree diagram method detailed in Continuous Discovery Habits is a great way to capture all customer needs, pain points, and desires—and to show all the ways you can satisfy or solve them and to determine which of your ideas are good ones.
• I need to apply the methods from the above-mentioned book to this project.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week.

An engineer recently reached out to me, cold. I wasn’t sure how I got on his radar, so I asked. He’s an avid learner who’s trying to round out his business skills to be a better entrepreneur. He shared that he’d read one of my blog post series about a biography I’d read and decided to reach out to me. This engineer is sharp, so I’m glad we connected.

I thought about that conversation more today, and I have a few takeaways:

• This engineer has a portfolio of side projects and cool things he’s building. Seeing them made me curious to learn more about them and him. They showed me that he isn’t just a talker. He’s executing, which gave him credibility.
• Whenever I hear from a reader that my posts helped them, it fires me up. That kind of feedback motivates me.
• In the last year, every person who reached out after reading my blog mentioned a post about a biography adding value to them and triggering them to reach out. I need to write more in-depth posts about biographies.
• Sharing my learnings about biographies has led to my meeting smart and interesting entrepreneurs across the country whom I’d never have met otherwise.
• The posts about biographies are helping me create magnetic luck (see here).
• Posts about entrepreneur biographies have filtered the type of people who reach out. It’s been entrepreneurs who are serious about reading to learn.
• I want to connect with more entrepreneurs who get value from my posts about biographies. I need to figure out how to let those readers know I want to hear from them.  
• I need to turn the old posts about biographies in these posts (and future posts) into a newsletter.
• Cold outreach works. More people should do it more often (in the right way). There’s zero to lose and lots to gain.

I never would have thought it, but writing about what I’m reading adds value to others and is a good way to connect with entrepreneurs who love to learn (my kind of people).

AI is a hot topic among entrepreneurs right now. It’s a fantastic technology that makes the previously impossible possible. In the last few weeks, I’ve talked to several founders who want to use AI in their companies. They’re thinking along the lines of chatbots and other features. This struck me as odd because it’s not clear if these things would add value to their customers.

After I left one of these conversations, I realized that the founder is building technology in search of a problem. To his credit, he knows that AI is powerful and can change his company and benefit its customers. But he just doesn’t know enough about the technology to determine how to apply it in his business. So, he defaulted to building what he’s seen be successful at other companies: chatbots and the like.  

Companies exist to solve problems. By solving problems, they add value to customers, and customers pay them for that value. If a technology doesn’t help a customer materially or help you help the customer, what’s the point of using the technology in your business?

AI is powerful, and all entrepreneurs should explore and use it in their businesses. I think the best approach to adopting it, if you’re unfamiliar with it, is to pinpoint a problem that’s painful for you or your customers—one that you can’t solve or that’s painfully expensive to solve. Then, search the numerous AI tools for one that can help you solve that problem. Evaluating each AI tool to understand whether it can do that will expose the limitations of each tool and the technology as a whole. This process will accelerate your AI learning and help you get comfortable with the technology.

This approach will help you create a better solution for yourself or your customers and give you a deeper understanding of AI capabilities that you can use to solve future problems.

Yesterday, I shared that I caught up with a friend who’s a serial entrepreneur and avid reader. He’s serious about learning and solving problems, so for years he’s made reading a priority. He has time on his schedule early every morning to read books (I do too).

Today, I’ve been thinking about another takeaway from that conversation. One of his book discovery methods is paying attention to other books mentioned in the books he reads. (Many books cite other books when they borrow concepts.) He likes this approach because an author doesn’t usually mention a book if it isn’t worth reading or it’s not helpful—a mention is like a quality filter. Also, the suggested book will likely align with the period, industry, or person he’s studying. Suggested books allow him to go deeper into an area he’s already learning about. They keep him on topic.

I, too, use books to discover books (see here), so this resonated with me and got me thinking.

The pain point around this approach is that you must read a book to find the suggested books. The suggestions are like needles in a haystack. This isn’t an issue with a book I’m currently reading, but what If I want to know what books are mentioned in a book I read awhile back? Or what if I find a book and want to see what books mention it to determine its quality? As far as I know, that’s impossible. It’d be great to see a list of all the books mentioned in a particular book and a list of all other books that mention it. Books are connected, but it’s impossible to see the connections. Visually displaying those connections could unlock lots of value for readers and make it easier to discover useful books.  

Today, I caught up with a friend who’s a serial entrepreneur. He’s an avid reader, so I told him about my book project and asked him a few questions about his reading habits. One insight is something I’ve heard from other entrepreneurs who like to read.

He reads physical books and reads on a Kindle, but he prefers the former. However, when he reads a physical book, it’s too time-consuming to retype sections he’s highlighted into his note-taking app. He reads on a Kindle because he can highlight with his finger and sync to his note-taking app. The problem is that he doesn’t like reading on a Kindle—but it’s the lesser of two pains.

I’ve not only heard this from several entrepreneurs, I’ve lived it. Getting notes out of physical books so they can be reviewed later is painful for me (see here). I endure the pain and read physical books, but I’m determined to solve this problem. If I do—and do it well—I think other entrepreneurs who are avid readers will embrace the solution!

Tariffs and the stock market decline after they were announced were all over the media late last week. I lived through tariffs with my e-commerce company, and it wasn’t fun. I learned valuable lessons about how tariffs impact wholesale and retail markets for physical goods, especially for the automotive parts we sold online.

I was curious about how entrepreneurs think about tariffs, so I talked to a few e-commerce entrepreneurs, who are also friends, this weekend.

A few things I learned:

• Entrepreneurs in retail (online and physical) are worried about tariffs because they can’t absorb the cost of tariffs—they have to pass the cost on to customers.
• All the entrepreneurs saw sales soften in the last quarter or two before the tariff announcements. The tariffs feel like a double whammy.
• Customers are asking when or if prices will increase because of tariffs.
• All the entrepreneurs are looking at ways to do more with less and exploring whether AI can help.
• They’re all pausing any spending on new growth initiatives.
• They all recognize that they can’t do anything about the tariffs and aren’t dwelling on them—but they’re monitoring developments like hawks and navigating them as best they can.

Tariffs are a big deal for e-commerce companies whose products aren’t manufactured in the US. I’m curious to see how this all plays out, and I’m mentally preparing myself to pay more for physical goods.

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 57
• Total blog posts published: 364

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed this week (link to last week’s commitments):

• Read The Father of Spin, a biography of entrepreneur—and maybe even father of public relations—Edward Bernays  
• Connected with two more developers about this project
• Played with Gumloop and Lindi; I’m trying to find an invitation code to Manus

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book

Asks:

• If you can get me an invitation code to Manus, please let me know!
• If you know any senior full-stack developers interested in working on the software for my current project, please introduce us!

Week two hundred sixty-two was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

What I struggled with:

• No material struggles this week related to this project

What I learned:

• Creating a language model isn’t as expensive as I thought if the data set isn’t large or broad.
• I should pare down the features I want before sharing the software. Giving users something that adds value is better and allows me to get feedback sooner.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week.