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:

• No struggles this week.

What I learned:

• Matching to existing data sets that have unique identifiers is a good way to start building a database about people and companies from scratch. It reduces the number of duplicate records.
• This summer I published 100 podcast episodes about autobiographies and biographies I was reading. To learn, I wanted to get reps quickly. To prepare for those episodes, I distilled the books into a series of blog posts. Analytics show that my series on Ted Turner, Henry Singleton, Ed Thorp, and Jim Simons are the most popular. I have 1700+ blog posts, but most visitors are for the blog post series I did this summer. I need to do more of this kind of post.
• Looker Studio is a good business intelligence tool to easily display data, especially from a database.
• Many of the AI thinkers are open to chatting about new projects. I cold emailed one of them, and we chatted this week. He was open to sharing how he built his latest project and even showed me his database. Builders like connecting with other builders and sharing their projects. Cold outreach works. I’ll do more of this going forward.
• Some AI models trained on books without permission by using the infamous Books3 data set (article).
• NoteBookLM released a paid tier and an enterprise version this week via NoteBookLM Plus (article). This could be game changing and get people more comfortable using their own source documents with AI, especially for learning.
• NoteBookLM also released the audio interactivity feature. You can listen to a podcast generated using the source documents you uploaded and interrupt the podcast mid-play to ask it questions (article).

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week!