Yesterday I made a major life announcement: I’m starting a NewCo after 3 years of exploring
More of you cared than I expected; thanks for the support! 🙏🏾
What the hell did I do for 3 years?
Thought I’d share the back-story...
**Read On**
In 2017, my life blew apart as I shut down @Sprig. Shock + relief.
Even as we shut down, new opportunities were coming my way.
Funders for new ventures. Hotshot CEOs asking me to be an exec.
There’s always opportunity in SV.
What opportunities would I miss by stepping away?
After some good advice, I needed to resist the FOMO.
I know people who grinded for 20 years straight, constantly chasing more success and more money. That wasn’t for me.
I decided on the first rule of my transition: GET AWAY.
I packed my bags, left SF and went nomadic.
The second rule: Don’t obsess over “What’s next?”
If I dwelled on “what’s next” every day, it would drive me mad.
It can be so unsettling to be without work, without purpose.
Yet that was what I needed, so I leaned in and forced myself to be present.
In the background, my mind churned.
I spent my 20s building. Non-stop grinding. Finally, I took time off.
I was reclaiming my personal and social life. I fed my non-work passions: learning, reading, and connecting with humans from all walks of life.
I followed my instincts and channeled my inner hippie backpacker. 😉
I traveled to places that evoked my curiosity. And I stayed (relatively) true to one rule:
No work.
No public speaking.
No “coffees.”
No networking.
This freed my time for more creative pursuits
After 18 months of travel, I found myself. Nothing had changed but everything had changed.
The freedom opened me up to new things. The most important things.
I met a girl in Kigali and fell in love. I don’t think this would’ve been possible if I hadn’t gone on this journey.
She started at Oxford MBA in Sept 2019. After 2 years as a nomad, I was ready to start working.
This was a big decision.
@naval advised me not to rush such a big decision.
I made a hard rule: I would not make long-term work commitments for 12 months.
Over that 12 months, living between Oxford and Austin, I explored lots of ideas.
Every few weeks I was doing something new:
- I wrote the first draft of a memoir.
- I launched 2 online courses (and took 4).
- I mentored entrepreneurs.
- I interviewed for potential roles.
There was no “process.” For me, my creative brain needed the freedom to flit from thing to thing.
Yet, there was intention: I gave myself 12 months to figure out what’s next.
Instead of over-planning this, the intention was enough.
Slowly, my interests started to converge.
I noticed themes amongst the various projects I’d worked on.
By month 6, I was exploring a few ideas:
starting an education venture studio,
building courses for entrepreneurs,
or joining an existing high-profile education business.
By month 9, all of those had fallen through.
A studio would be too much stress: one company is enough!
Teaching wasn't enough: I wanted to build!
Joining wouldn't work either: I love partners, but need to be there from the beginning.
Just as it felt like things were falling apart, I figured out the pattern and the mystery was solved.
In Sept 2020, exactly 12 months later, I decided on an idea.
I don't know if it will work. But I made this decision clear-eyed and clear-headed. That’s the best I could do.
Thanks for the continued support. You can hear more about my journey / follow along via my newsletter: gaganbiyani.com
And feel free to ask questions in the comments!
🤜🏾🤛🏾
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I’ve had 6+ different executive coaches over the last 12 years. My favorite thing about coaching is it provides “system upgrades” 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.
I’ve 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 I’ve 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. I’m serious.
@mayowaoshin is already doing this. Takes your company’s 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.
🤯
Mayo is going to teach a course on Maven. He’ll walk you through how to do this and by the end of the course, you’ll 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-cou…
How to Control Midjourney using “Additive Prompting” - a lesson from @nickfloats
AI prompt recommendations are useless. It’s far more useful to understand the underlying technique to build your own prompts for your custom use case.
Let’s dive in 👇
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 Nick’s on the first try. The problem is you don’t 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:
• Record and upload Zoom sessions
• Send calendar invites to your students
• Pre-written email campaigns
• Ready-made surveys
• 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.