Entrepreneur

From Naval Ravikant, in an excellent podcast/article

So no entrepreneur is worried about an AI taking their job because entrepreneurs are trying to do impossible things. They’re trying to do very difficult things. Any AI that shows up is their ally and can help them tackle this really hard problem.

They don’t even have a job to steal. They have a product to build. They have a market to serve. They have a customer to support. They have a creativity to realize. They have a thing that they want to instantiate in the world, and they want to build a repeatable and scalable process around getting it out into the world.

Playing around with AI has got me thinking more like an entrepreneur than I have felt like in a decade. Just so many thoughts, feelings and ideas that want to get out. To assist with my ideation, I created a new folder for holding my ideas. I spun up a codex, and started asking it how I best could currate ideas that come to me. After some back and forth we created a process for considering ideas. We now have the folowing folders :

/ 󰉋  00_inbox/
/ 󰉋  01_concepts/
/ 󰉋  02_research/
/ 󰉋  03_validation/
/ 󰉋  04_builds/
/ 󰉋  05_reviews/
/ 󰉋  06_context/
/ 󰉋  07_misc_research/

And in order to more easily push ideas through the proces, I spellcast a script so that I can just type :

idea "someting I think about" from anywhere in my terminal and immediately the idea will be taken through my research flow. Each folder has a README that defines how the researh should be conducted. Ideas are scored based on how good of ideas they are on some established metrics. Additionally, the AI considers how the idea scores compared to the 7 powers.

When I capture an idea, it'll run for a few minutes and flesh out some resarch on the idea.

In addition to this starting point, i've been dumping various thoughts/questions/ and research into the 07 misc_research folder. I've been trying to think through what I genuinely think is going to happen to general software development. And what kinds of ideas will be good ideas to pursue in a world where AI is created through spellcasting.

What feels really good about this new way to process ideas, is that it's pretty good. And to get started only took me like 20 minutes. Honestly I was to the point in 20 mintues where I had my templates, my script and my ideation workflow happening so fast. The ability to tell my computer what I want it to do based on the context of the documentation that it also helped me create is amazing.

I've also recognized that in addition to taking ideas through a process. I also need to find inspiration in the world. And so i've been kind of thinking about how best to gain experiences outside of staring at my computer screen. That part is difficult. But even reading different books or reading about different things is something that i'm exploring. And I'm also trying to identify the kinds of things that I want to build. Not just ideas that would be successful. It's not worth getting too precious. But it's not a bad idea for me to be thinking about what kinds of work do I want to do longer term? What kinds of projects do I enjoy? Some of this has also lead me to some journaling projects. I'm also considering how best I can translate my thoughts and feelings into more structured data and context that I can analyze ideas through.

One final thought on entrepreneurship, i'm not sure if I'm really cut out ot be one. I've always kind of thought of myself as one. But my working career I have always deferred to my jobby job. And i've never been able to follow through on any of my ideas to create something successful. When I think of being an entrepreneur the word that just jumps to my mind is "action". Make things happen. And don't stop pushing on something until it exists. And then keep pushing things to be better. Action orriented or the project dies.