Recently I've shared some heartfelt tweet-stories about entrepreneurship. Your support has been so encouraging ๐๐๐
Now I'm doubling down with a personal mailing list: gaganbiyani.com - please help spread the word!
**A thread on what will make this newsletter unique**
1. I'll talk about firsthand experiences.
There are great newsletters that opine about tech, startups, vc. Instead, I'm going to talk about in-the-trenches realities. Real shit that most newsletter writers haven't experienced or aren't willing to share.
2. Global.
Silicon Valley is an extremely insular place. I love it actually, but it isn't for everyone and isn't relatable. I've spent almost 4 years of my life abroad and been to 60 countries.
We're going to get outside the bubble.
3. Action-oriented.
Anyone - investor, founder, employee - will be able to learn from these stories. (I did start an education company ๐ค)
In each post, I'll share actionable insights about how you can learn from my mistakes and successes.
4. Honesty.
I'm not gonna bullshit you; startups are messy and hard.
For a taste, read these 3 stories that got 7M+ impressions:
About @udemy's journey:
We'll play this by ear. Expect me to dive into culture and politics from an entrepreneur's POV. I'll talk about visiting refugee camps in Palestine and indigenous tribes in the Amazon.
Iโve had 6+ different executive coaches over the last 12 years. My favorite thing about coaching is it provides โsystem upgradesโ to your internal operating system.
Collectively, these coaches have changed my life:
Great coaches often identify key growth areas and help you work through the necessary challenges between you and achieving results.
Iโve had coaches teach me how to become more empathetic with my team, improve the quality of my feedback, and enhance my weekly productivity.
I find that different coaches are experts in different areas.
Some of them Iโve worked with for 5 years and others I worked with on one particular area for just a few months.
Each one gave me a particular insight or habit that has changed my internal operating system.
SQL is going to die at the hands of an AI. Iโm serious.
@mayowaoshin is already doing this. Takes your companyโs data and ingests it into ChatGPT. Then, you can create a chatbot for the data and just ask it questions using natural language.
This video demoes the output.
๐คฏ
Mayo is going to teach a course on Maven. Heโll walk you through how to do this and by the end of the course, youโll have a fully working AI chatbot that anyone in your company can use to query your data.
I've seen it behind the scenes and it is powerful.
Sign up the waitlist so you can get more information on how this works and where you can apply it: bit.ly/mayo-oshin-couโฆ
How to Control Midjourney using โAdditive Promptingโ - a lesson from @nickfloats
AI prompt recommendations are useless. Itโs far more useful to understand the underlying technique to build your own prompts for your custom use case.
Letโs dive in ๐
Midjourney is the most powerful AI visualizer out there. It enables anyone to build photorealistic images with words. The challenge is that Midjourney prompting is finicky and requires experience to truly master.
Additive Prompting involves these 4 steps:
1. Start simple.
Many prompters try to start by getting a beautiful image like Nickโs on the first try. The problem is you donโt really know which part of the prompt actually made the difference.
Instead, start with a basic prompt and then build from there.
Before, you needed to use almost a dozen tools to get a course off the ground.
With Maven, you can spin up a new course w/our all-in-one tool that covers: email marketing, landing page, Zoom integrations, syllabus, community, & more.
A few ways Maven simplifies your ops:
โข Record and upload Zoom sessions
โข Send calendar invites to your students
โข Pre-written email campaigns
โข Ready-made surveys
โข Spin up a community
With admin and logistics off your plate, you can focus on teaching.
The last two weeks in SF have been amazing. I've also learned a few things that make me optimistic for its future.
The food, the vibe, the drinks, the people. I grew up in the Bay Area and while I wish SF was more favorable to tech, it is amazing to see SF in its "true form". Eclectic, stunningly beautiful, and urban.
TBH the homelessness is still heartbreaking and I see people doing drugs in public way more than I'd like. But it's actually not that different from my experience in Austin in 2021 and people forget this but it's way way better than SF in the 90's.