My irregular newsletter on work and play. Unsubscribe at the bottom. LinkedIn
Picking up the pace this year. Shorter letter!
MENU
1. WORK: Women’s Health, Trips
2. EXPERIENCES: Making Apps, Glucose, Body Damage
3. CULTURE: Tokyo Vice, American Primeval, Franklin & more
4. THOUGHTS: Coding with AI
1. WORK
Matchups
This week I’m running a VC/Founder virtual matchmaking event focused on Women’s Health. It’s an important theme at SOSV and we have over 20 investments in the category.
The event sort of blew up and while we expected about 100 founders and 100 investors, we now have 350 startups and close to 200 investors signed up.
The event is 100% virtual and free. You can register here.
We have other similar events coming up this year on Biomanufacturing, Health Tech and Climate Tech. Pre-register here.
Travels
I’ll be speaking at Hello Tomorrow in Paris in March and joining VC Platform in Miami in April.
2. EXPERIENCES
Making Apps
As ChatGPT has become a very capable developer, I set out to build a “Tinder-like” experience for our VC/Founder matchmaking events to increase the engagement of investors.
The experience felt more akin to product management than programming, aside from a few manual tweaks to the code provided by GPT-4. The app is now up and running!
I also tried to build an AI version of David Lynch to continue his weather reports. Use APIs for the weather, ChatGPT for Lynchisms, a voice clone then a video and finally publish! Or so I thought. It was all well until the video, as services prevent users from using the likeness of celebrities so I had to stop there. I still got the voice though!
Sugar Sugar
I got a continuous glucose monitor (Abbott’s Freestyle Libre 2 - about 50 EUR for 2 weeks). It sits painlessly on the back of an arm.
The goal was to check my glucose and especially response to various foods, sleep, exercise patterns.
Aside from avoiding too much cake or entire bags of pao de queijo, all is well!
Body Damage
After a few twisted fingers, damaged ears and fractured ribs over the years with BJJ, I got a septum fracture which required surgery — my first — with general anesthesia. Cost: 2,200 EUR. While the fracture and surgery were quite painless, the first 2-3 days of recovery were fairly uncomfortable.
Side note: the ER doctor I first saw told me to wait for two weeks. I didn’t listen and quickly went to a ENT specialist, who recommended to operate ASAP.
3. CULTURE
SHOWS
Tokyo Vice (HBO)****
I really enjoyed this show, loosely based on the eponymous book by US journalist Jake Adelstein I read back in 2010 or so. He worked for the crime unit of a Japanese newspaper in Tokyo for many years. In fact, quite a few of the stories I remember hearing about when I lived there! The cast is excellent (with one exception) and the stories mostly true.
American Primeval (Netflix)***
A brutal show about a young lady with a boy traveling to the US West circa 1850. Solid story, acting, sets, etc. The author co-wrote The Revenant, so you can expect quite graphic scenes.
The Cage (Netflix)*
This show is about a young underdog MMA fighter trying to rise to the top. I don’t know what I was expecting but it didn’t have it.
MOVIES
Definitely Maybe***
Cute romcom with Ryan Reynolds.
Lion King 2**
Not bad.
BOOKS
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin***
He wrote it for his son and legacy, and likely removed what didn’t fit his intended narrative, but it was quite a surprise to learn about his upbringing, how he built businesses and community projects, invented things, got into public service… as well as his principles to improve himself, one virtue at a time. It reads very well despite being published in 1791. I tried to read Walter Isaacson’s biography after that but while I suppose Isaacson added his own research I found too many quotes from Franklin’s bio and gave up.
GAMES
Exit 8 (Quest 3)***
Still exploring the occasional VR game. The latest one being this odd game in which you’re walking in a corridor of the Tokyo subway, and have to notice anything bizarre then turn around.
FitXR***
Quite a good VR workout app, with Zumba, fitness boxing and more.
MUSIC
GoGo Penguin****
I went to see a concert by this British jazz/electronica band. It was excellent, and all played with real instruments!
4. THOUGHTS
Coding with AI
Things are moving at breakneck speed in that space, and AI really opens up product development in a big way to amateurs.
Forget the careful “measure twice, cut once”.
In Shenzhen, the supply chain was so efficient that I learned “measure once, cut twice”.
With AI, changing things is so fast and cheap that you barely need to “measure” (define a clear spec). Measure once, and cut 100 times!
I’ve heard several people say that too:
"It's the era of the idea guy." -- Shaan Puri, My First Million podcast
“It’s for the AI PM with ideas.” — Andrew Ng
"Find an industry that you're familiar with and build a GPT wrapper to automate some of the work there. You can do it 100 times and one of them will take off." -- Amjad Masad, Replit
Now I’m experimenting with creating AI agents to write code, review it, create the art, etc. a bit like in the seminal publication ChatDev (already quoted over 500 times in less than a year). It actually worked quite well for simple games!
The future is probably more about how to coordinate / manage AI agents than code, though during this transition phase, knowing some programming helps quite a lot. Along those lines, I recently gave a short presentation explaining how to get started (learning the minimum viable amount of python to use an API).
To the future!
— Ben