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 last week

What I learned:

• A developer showed me his new AI solution for enterprise HR teams. His tool uses audio as the input method (i.e., people talk to the software, and it talks back). I asked what powers his tool, and he told me about Pipecat and Livekit. These two open-source, orchestration frameworks can be used to build real-time voice and multimodal AI agents (e.g., phone bots, web voice assistants, or software that the user interacts with solely via voice). “Multimodal” means able to handle multiple input/output methods (text, audio, video, etc.). These tools let you build agents that can accept spoken questions or instructions from a user > convert that speech to text (STT) > feed that text to an LLM (which processes it and provides a text response) > convert that text to speech (TTS), and speak to the user (e.g., answer questions or respond to instructions).

That’s what I learned and struggled with last 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 last week

What I learned:

• Access to books or other resources that document solutions that have worked for other entrepreneurs isn’t always enough. Many entrepreneurs need to have conversations about what’s in those resources to help them think. Other people’s perspectives uncover their blind spots, foster faster ideation, and help them determine how to apply information to their own situation.

That’s what I learned and struggled with last 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

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 81
• Total blog posts published: 532

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

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

• Read The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, a framework for thinking about marketing that describes 22 laws that are foundational to marketing
• Added four more books to the library on this site—see more here; these, which I read in 2018, were about the Enron scandal, fracking, process improvement, and investing in post-Soviet Russia

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Add two more books that I read before 2024 to the library on this site—see more here

Asks:

• No ask this week

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

Last week, I shared my decision to pick up the pace on my weekend project—updating my library—so I can finish it by mid to late October.

Last weekend, I set a new goal: add a minimum of four books each weekend until I’m done. If I have the bandwidth, I’ll add more.

This project has been fun, but I’ve started thinking about other things that also would be fun, and I’m ready for a new project. This one began at the end of May (see here), so if I wrap it up in October, I will have worked on it every weekend for five months with no breaks. To date, I’ve added 132 books to my library.

I’m in the final stretch. Wish me luck!

Earlier this month, I shared that my weekend-only project to update my library won’t be completed until November at my current pace. I could either make peace with that or ramp up my pace to add more than two books per weekend.

Pondering the situation, I decided to finish the project well before the holiday season kicks off. I’m afraid that if I finish in November, I’d be more likely—with all the holiday distractions—to not begin another weekend project. I want to have established the habit and momentum of a new project before the holidays.

I’m going to add more books to the library every weekend. Four, or maybe even five. I’ll test it this weekend and settle on a number. My goal now: complete this project by mid-to-late October.

Wish me luck!

Weekly Update: Week Two Hundred Eighty-Five

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: 80
• Total blog posts published: 525

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

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

• Read Invested, Charles Schwab’s autobiography detailing his founding of Charles Schwab Corporation and how he built it from a pioneering discount brokerage into a financial services company catering to individual investors
• Added two more books that I read in 2018 to the library on this site—see more here; they were about the $5 billion Malaysian 1MDB scandal and the high-stakes underground poker world

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Add two more books that I read before 2024 to the library on this site—see more here

Asks:

• No ask this week.

Week two hundred eighty-five 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 last week

What I learned:

• The lawsuit by a group of authors against Anthropic, parent company to Claude AI, resulted in a $1.5 billion settlement last week. I’m still learning about this and similar cases brought against firms like Anthropic. From what I can tell, using books to train the Anthropic models isn’t what got Anthropic in trouble. The lawsuit was for copyright infringement and Anthropic not compensating the creators of the copyrighted books. Anthropic used pirated books to train its models, which means authors weren’t paid for the use of their books in model training, a key issue that appears to have led to the settlement. I get the impression that if Anthropic had purchased the books, it could have used them freely to train the models because the authors would have been compensated for the use of their copyrighted work.

That’s what I learned and struggled with last 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

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 79
• Total blog posts published: 518

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

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

• Read The Harder You Work, the Luckier You Get, Joe Ricketts’s memoir detailing his journey to found Ameritrade, pioneer the discount brokerage model, and sell Ameritrade for over $2 billion
• Added four more books that I read in 2019 and 2018 to the library on this site—see more here; they were about an empire built on cocaine, how twins turned their Facebook winnings into a billion via Bitcoin, the Theranos fraud, and how Ross Ulbricht built the Silk Road and got arrested

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Add two more books that I read before 2024 to the library on this site—see more here

Asks:

• Seeking technical lead or cofounder – I’m looking for a senior full-stack developer skilled in AI retrieval. If you know one who’d have an interest in working on the software project related to books, please introduce us!

Week two hundred eighty-four 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 last week

What I learned:

• Anthropic, parent company to Claude AI, settled a lawsuit for $1.5 billion this week (source). A group of authors accused the company of copyright infringement arising from downloading millions of pirated books and training their models with this pirated content. This is a huge settlement in monetary terms, and it could also be a precedent-setting settlement with respect to using book content for training models. Claude is paying about $3,000 per book for each of the 500,000 books covered in the class action lawsuit. That’s pretty expensive relative to the ~$8 that I pay for books (used, of course). It must also destroy the pirated books it downloaded. The good news is that their revenue run-rate went from $1 billion at the start of this year to over $5 billion as of last month and they just raised $13 billion from investors at a $183 billion valuation (source). I want to understand this better and will be digging into the specifics of this and possibly other related cases. This case could have a material impact on LLMs’ ability to use copyrighted book content legally.

That’s what I learned and struggled with last week.

I’ve been updating my library’s backlog of books since May. Every weekend, I upload two books. I’ve uploaded all the books I’ve read from 2019 to 2023, so, five years’ worth. I’ve still got a few years’ worth of books to do. I was looking at my list and doing the math. Considering this is a weekend-only project, it will likely take me through November to complete it.

I’m enjoying having a project to work on every weekend for a few months. I think I’ll keep up with this habit. It’s given me ideas for other weekend projects that I’m excited about working on. The problem is that I can’t start working on any of them until I finish this one, which is a bit annoying. One thing is certain: I can work on only one weekend project at a time; otherwise, nothing will get done.

I either need to make peace with my current pace and timeline or ramp up how much I do each weekend so I can finish this project and start the next one.

I’m not sure which is the right answer. I’ll think about it this weekend and during the upcoming week.