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  

What I learned:

• I overestimated what I could get done during this holiday week. I need to get more realistic about where my time goes during holidays. I always think I’ll have lots of free time, but I never do.
• There’s no easy way for people to share what books they’ve read on their personal websites or blogs. You can share on platforms like Goodreads, but not your own.
• Entrepreneurs (anyone, really) can obtain books for free from many websites, but entrepreneurs don’t use them.
• Sharing what you’ve learned from books is a manual, inefficient process. If it were easier, I wonder if more people would share what they’ve learned from books they’ve read.
• Creating a tool to annotate a book isn’t as technically difficult as I’d thought.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the 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: 38
• Total book digests created: 15
• Total blog posts published: 231
• Total audio recordings published: 103

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Book digests created: 0
• Blog posts published: 7
• Audio recordings published: 0

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

• Read A Memo for the Children, a memoir by Samuel Newhouse Sr.
• Tested methods of storing parsed books in a database for my “book library” MVP

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography or autobiography
• Refine the sub-feature list for the “book library” MVP
• Define data views for the “book library” MVP
• Share taxonomy drafts with one person
• Create a list of competitors for the “book library” MVP

Asks:

• None

Week two hundred forty-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:

• No material struggles this week  

What I learned:

• The last MVP for the “book library” didn’t meet the mark. The issue was that we couldn’t get the data from the book. We think we’ve figured that part out. Now, the focus has turned to how to make data from books useful.
• Breaking down what’s needed for the next version of the “book library” MVP was helpful. I created a prioritized list of features and sub-features that crystallized what problems need solving and what needs to be built to create a superior solution.
• Making use of what someone has read in books usually involves their notes and highlights. Extracting my notes from physical books has been a painful problem since I began this project. I haven’t found an acceptable solution. Solving that problem is the highest priority because it’s the most painful problem and the biggest hurdle.
• A workflow management system for learning from books could add value for serious learners.
• Thinking through taxonomy is difficult. I’ve played with a few drafts but still haven’t landed on the right taxonomy.
• Looking at highly rated applications solving similar problems using AI gave me some great feature ideas and creative solutions to problems I hadn’t considered. After watching a founder demo his AI solution on YouTube, I borrowed some of his team’s ideas for my feature list.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the 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: 37
• Total book digests created: 15
• Total blog posts published: 224
• Total audio recordings published: 103

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Book digests created: 1 (using technology)
• Blog posts published: 7
• Audio recordings published: 0

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

• Read a second book on David Ogilvy—a collection of memos, letters, speeches, and interviews
• Created a book digest for David Allen’s Getting Things Done using the “book digest” MVP
• Tested prompts to improve the quality of digests created using the “book digest” MVP
• Tested different parsing methods as alternatives to retrieval augmented generation (RAG) for my “book library” MVP
• Tested prompts to improve the quality of responses from the “book library” MVP

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography or autobiography
• Test alternative setups for the “book library” MVP

Asks:

• None

Week two hundred forty-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.  

What I learned:

• Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) comes in various flavors (see here), and all of them have shortcomings. The main hurdle is that information indexing can’t be adjusted. It’s a bit of a black box. RAG might not be viable for the “book library” MVP.
• I thought Google Cloud Platform (GCP) was throttling my account last week, impacting the depth of query results from the Gemini LLM. The issue may have been that GCP’s RAG tools could not index a large data set like a book, which led to shallow responses.
• A database can structure and store information, which helps make the data more useful. A database needs a schema. A database might be a necessity for this project.
• The prepackaged solutions meant to save time are good for generic use cases. This project is individualized and may require more solutions to be built from scratch.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the 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: 36
• Total book digests created: 14
• Total blog posts published: 217
• Total audio recordings published: 103

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Book digests created: 1 (using technology)
• Blog posts published: 7
• Audio recordings published: 0

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

• Read David Ogilvy’s autobiography
• Read highlights from David Allen’s Getting Things Done
• Read highlights from Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain
• Read two resources on prompt engineering
• For my “book library” MVP, created a separate agent and RAG to index each book instead of one agent and RAG to index multiple books
• Tested prompts and system instructions to improve the quality of responses from the “book library” MVP
• Created one book digest using the “book digest” MVP
• Tested prompts and system instructions to improve the quality of digests created using the “book digest” MVP

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography or autobiography
• Test alternative agent setups with RAG for the “book library” MVP
• Ask AI developers about RAG alternatives
• Create a book digest for David Allen’s Getting Things Done using the “book digest” MVP

Asks:

• None

Week two hundred forty-one 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.  

What I learned:

• Getting the “book library” MVP to provide quality results that add value is the priority. After that’s accomplished, I can start thinking about how to put it in the hands of other users. Trying to figure out the path to allowing others to use it publicly was premature. I need to get this thing working and adding value first; then I can figure out how to share it.
• I’ve been reading up on retrieval augmented generation (RAG) because the MVP isn’t working as intended. RAG has more limitations when you feed it a ton of information (e.g., multiple books) than I initially thought. It struggles to make connections between related information, but that’s essential. If the MVP can’t do that, providing value-added responses will be hard.
• There’s a good chance that the Google Cloud Platform throttling of my account is impacting the depth of results I get. This is frustrating because you don’t get a warning or confirmation of throttling.
• AI is good at many things, but it isn’t yet good at making sense of large, unstructured text data sets like books. Creating a structure or taxonomy for this kind of data could unlock what AI can do with it.
• Google makes it easier for nontechnical people to test with and tune Gemini large-language models (LLMs). The throttling has me thinking about adding LLMs from other companies into the testing.
• The more I learn from this project, the more I respect the human brain and its ability to store and process information from books.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week!

This week, I worked on the “book library” MVP. My goal is for the MVP to mimic an entrepreneur who’s an avid reader with a photographic memory. I want to query across multiple books, and I want the MVP to make connections that uncover new insights. I also want it to recall any book’s details quickly.

I’m using retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and Gemini LLMs in the MVP. Last week’s testing yielded responses that weren’t detailed enough and didn’t uncover new insights. I was happy to have something working (it felt like a big milestone), but it still needed work. This week I tried using a different RAG setup—a separate agent and RAG to index each book instead of one agent and RAG to index multiple books. I also tested different prompting and system instructions. The changes didn’t improve the responses, which was frustrating. Still too high-level and unable to make insightful connections.

I’m not sure why this is happening. My developer friend and I have a few theories. It could be a limitation of RAG not being great at indexing entire books. It could be limitations with Gemini LLMs, technical limitations imposed by Google Cloud Platform (GCP), or something else. Given that the output I’ve been able to generate from Google AI Studio for an individual book has been pretty detailed, we think there’s a high probability it could be a GCP limitation.

This wasn’t the outcome I was hoping for at the beginning of the week, but that’s part of the process when you’re building something that hasn’t been done before. Definitely frustrating, but such is life. We’ll do more testing to try to figure this out.

Last week, I shared that I wanted to finish Master of the Game: Steve Ross and the Creation of Time Warner by Connie Bruck and another book. Well, I fell short. I finished reading the Ross biography and started—but didn’t finish—another book.

The goal was aggressive and I wanted to check the box, but I didn’t. No excuses. I just came up short. I put a good effort toward the goal but ran out of time.

This week, I’m going to focus on finishing a single book. Every time I try to do more than that, I regret it.

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: 35
• Total book digests created: 14
• Total blog posts published: 210
• Total audio recordings published: 103

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Book digests created: 2 (using technology)
• Blog posts published: 7
• Audio recordings published: 0

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

• Read a biography about Steve Ross, founder of Time Warner and Warner Communications
• Added two books to my “book library” MVP
• Tested prompts, system instructions, and LLMs to improve the quality of responses from the “book library” MVP
• Created two book digests via my “book digest” MVP
• Tested prompts, system instructions, and system settings to improve the quality of AI-generated book digests

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography or autobiography
• Read my highlights from David Allen’s Getting Things Done
• Read my highlights from Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain
• Read two resources on prompt engineering
• Test different prompting for the “book digest” MVP
• Test adding a book’s contents to the “book library” MVP in different ways to improve response quality
• Identify the path to launching the MVPs publicly so others can test them

Asks:

• None

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