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:

• Figuring out what my technical team needs to look like has been a challenge. Evaluating technical talent as a nontechnical person in a landscape that’s rapidly changing because of AI hasn’t been easy. I’ve leaned into a balance of leveraging technical people in my network to evaluate technical skill sets and trusting my gut based on past team-building experiences. Making progress, but slower than I want.

What I learned:

• Finding the right engineer has been a process, but I’ve learned there are a couple of paths I could take: a two-engineer team with a full-stack engineer leading an ML/AI engineer, or a single engineer who’s a full-stack engineer experienced in AI retrieval.
• I’m learning a ton about building a community of people around a particular topic. These tend to be niche, and the members need to add value so churn is minimized. Filtering people on the front end is a mechanism that paid communities use with strict criteria.
• Podcasts and sharing results from member surveys are great marketing strategies to generate leads for communities.

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