Grant George

Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet is really useful. I've been playing around with Claude's coding functionality and artifacts. Claude Artifacts basically allow Claude to generate content based on your prompts. This includes code, designs and even interactive stuff like simple games in a separate window. You literally watch Claude build what you want in super fast speed! I was explaining to an entrepreneur the difference between venture debt and venture capital. It's a bit difficult to illustrate the difference in equity dilution when a founder raise venture debt. I decided to generate a very simple venture debt dilution calculator using Claude. Checkout my artifact below and please give me ideas on features I should add onto my super simplistic creation. 🙂 https://lnkd.in/g3zBi2cd #AI #Claude #Copilot

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Some context from the #Founder perspective. As liberal as Seattle is as a city with policy and politics, it's incredibly conservative from an investment standpoint. One of the reasons you may not hear big "home-run" type pitches or pitches with sizzle, is simply because investors in Seattle don't like those types of pitches and Founders have been ingrained to not present in that manner. They may say they do, but ask any Founder and they'll tell you how they have been told to size down their pitch or talk about MVPs, first customer, first revenue, etc. or how what matters more is what you can do first couple years rather than the home run. Those early metrics are important by the way, but different from the big home run. Do you know who is receptive to homerun pitches? Investors in the Bay, NYC, Miami, Hong Kong. Seattle is not great for early-stage Founders with many prioritizing raising outside the city. We will be raising capital in the fall and as of now, have no plans of reaching out to Seattle-based VCs. I should also add that our company has a blockchain component and sadly Seattle VCs have not embraced crypto or blockchain. Welcome to #Seattle, Kyle Lui! Hopefully, you can help change the narrative! GeekWire

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If anyone is in North County San Diego, on Thursday May 2nd, we will be hosting a tech entrepreneur and investor meet up at 5:30pm. We’ll have a couple speakers, one of which is a fin-tech start-up raising a round, followed up by a presentation on the state of the stock & crypto market. We host these events quarterly and usually get a lot of founders and investors to attend. If anyone is interested, please message me and I can send you the details. LaunchPad San Diego #startups #startupincubator #entrepreneur #investing #crypto #meetup

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Last week our team traveled to SF 🌉 for a week-long hackathon. We had one goal: make the Fillout editor "silky smooth". Here’s the result! ↪️ Undo + redo (cmd + Z) in the editor 🚀 Instant publish button 🔀 Easier answer piping and logic We redesigned Fillout’s “reference picker” from the ground up. 👀 Improved accessibility and “esc” to close popups 📄 Improved page navigation bar It’s easier to rename, reorder and add new pages. 🐛 Fixes and improvements - Zapier support for payments + scheduling. - Support for "update" forms with Monday.com integration. - Workspaces load faster on home page. - "Esc" to exit preview mode and close popups. That’s a wrap 🎁 How did we do? What should we improve next? Let me know below 👇

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To celebrate Cal.com, Inc.'s newest launch on @ProductHunt today, I sat with Peer Richelsen to discuss how building Platform and Atoms is a full-circle moment + more 🚀 In this ep, we covered:  ✊🏻 Open vs. Closed and why OSS will win 💡 The importance of IP in a post-AI world 🔥 How premium products can be built using OSS 🤑 How to approach enterprise sales as a 1x founder 🙏🏼 The impact of Y Combinator on Peer as a founder PS: I'm a tiny investor in Cal.com and a big believer in Peer and the team! If you are into OSS, support the launch here: https://lnkd.in/e_CaE_KQ Links to the ep 👇🏼 🔗 Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/eBUv5E9q 🔗 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/epngcvFU ❤️ Sponsor Corner ❤️ Big shoutout to acquire.com for making this episode happen! Acquire is the best online marketplace (I can vouch for this) to buy/sell startups, and I know many founders who have sold their businesses there. If you're looking to wind down your business and cash in some of your founder chips, check them out - https://lnkd.in/gM5VZBFC Andrew Gazdecki and the team are always on the hunt to find ways to help more founders through Acquire 🫡 Lastly, if you are a listener and have been enjoying the episodes, please take a minute to drop your rating on the podcast: https://lnkd.in/eaaw-tJk I appreciate you for giving your attention and time 🙏🏼

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IMO one of the most underrated Guardrails AI features is streaming support. E.g. here's streaming in real time to show how you can validate that the LLM output doesn't contain PII. The difference in latency is wild! Code snippet in comments below:

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I just met with the one of the top VCs in Phoenix. Here's how they believe AZ can be one of the top startup states in the next 10 years: 1. Company Formation ⏩ Starting more startups ⏩ Growing big companies ⏩ Selling for big exits 2. Capital Velocity ⏩ More investments into AZ startups ⏩ Reinvesting back into AZ once you've exited 3. Community Vibrancy ⏩ Small/Medium/Big creators hyping up AZ ⏩ Attractive events that bring true value And the community is thriving: Shawn Allard w/ private meetups for SMB owners Sean Huntington 🍯 w/ Founders N Funders events Josue Romero w/ AZ Tech Founder meetups Josue Romero and Daniela Santangelo with Freeway (amazing dashboard to see AZ venture stats + event calendar) No better time to be an AZ Founder 🌵🚀 *** Side Note: can we find a better name to unite the startup valley? YesPHX is okay Silicon Desert is okay but way too cliche at this point

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The vision behind a great company starts with the story of WHY. In the words of Simon Sinek, "People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it"..... your purpose or belief. While very few people or companies can clearly describe WHY they do WHAT they do... it's this WHY that inspires action, from inside (employees) and outside (customers and partners). The WHY behind CompanyCam is inspiring --- to help contractors grow and improve their business by making their field photos really work for them --- and the people behind that WHY is why it's working so well. This video is a great story of WHY, and who doesn't love a great origin story?? Great work Luke Hansen and team! I'm so inspired by your journey and excited to see how your WHY continues to inspire your current and future employees and customers.

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Why CAI’s user experience sucks, but still maintain high popularity? The best way to create a fast-evolving multimodal consumer AI app, especially in the entertainment and companion domain for now, is to utilize the capabilities of all the emerging open-source models and APIs. Never underestimate the power of openness. You can be either a consumer AI company or a LLM company, most of the time, you can't do both. Even Apple, with almost all of its own native apps, has better and larger alternatives. The path at OriginX.AI is to be obsessed with user experiences FIRST. When you have more and more users who truly love your product, you can work backward to enhance your own model capabilities where open source and APIs can't meet your demands, while still maintaining openness. The reason why CAI still maintains popularity for now, is no other product in this field has their level of resources and impact. For most users who need this kind of product, CAI is the first catches their eyes. But the experience really sucks. Their characters often say "Sorry, I'm a LLM...I can't...". When users ask characters to share some visuals, even though they can't make it, they still say things like "I've already sent it to you, didn't you see it?" CAI can only gradually enhance their user experience based on their own multimodal capabilities, which greatly limits their speed in providing the best user experience. Our lives is composed of one product after another. I remember Steve Jobs used to say “We Just Can’t Ship Junk”. Developing products, especially consumer products, directly impacts users' daily lives, tastes, and expectations for new technologies. A good product will increase users' expectations, making their lives better. Poor user experience will do the opposite. So all product creators should carefully choose the technical paths and be super cautious of what we ultimately deliver to users' lives.

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One of the hardest parts about the work transition earlier this year was not being able to work with my team on the daily. My team was small but mighty and we built beautiful things to help empower web3 devs around the world. As I roll through the process of locking down my next tech adventure, I'm looking at my team building strategies and beginning to open back up to community building with learning and relationships as the core premise-- not extraction & "influencers". The thought of continuing the work that was started last year is beyond exciting. As with most web3 things at scale, we're cramming web2 legacy strategies and beliefs into web3 community building, a technology that was created for the express purpose of NOT repeating the mistakes of web2. Community building and devrel/developer communities are areas that I hope to redefine for our onchain world. Extraction and exploitation of the community members, as most marketers in web3 approach the building of communities, has no place in creating safe spaces for devs to build and amplify a product or protocol. Those who fail to allow community pros the flexibility of breaking web2 methodologies are doomed to fail at creating a strong and loyal product user-base. The talk my colleague Francesco Andreolí & I gave at ETHDenver this year touches on exactly this-- creating resilient communitys for human-first developer relations. Here's a summary of the talk with timecodes to hop through the talk. :) https://lnkd.in/gbnBx6B9

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Transitioning from developer to CEO at Omnisearch taught me the lesson that success in the tech world isn’t about who knows the most code or has the flashiest product. It’s about incorporating disciplined founder habits into your daily grind. For instance, prioritizing tasks ruthlessly ensures that not only urgent but important tasks that contribute to long-term goals are addressed. Taking a step back to assess the direction we are going and ensuring that we scale effectively. And perhaps most importantly, cultivating a habit of continuous learning keeps you and your team ahead of trends.

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So, about dinner last night... 😁 Julianna Lamb and I co-hosted an engineering leaders dinner on behalf of her team at Stytch and our team at Orb alongside guests from Bardeen, MongoDB, Pinecone, Log10.io, Sybill, DeepScribe, meez, Census, Pocus. Here's what was top of mind: 1️⃣ We broke the ice talking about production incident stories, as always. There were some good ones - near data loss, versioning protobufs, and staging coming to the rescue. It's encouraging to see how much a team can come together when these issues happen -- says a lot about the talent you've built! 2️⃣ There was a lot of discussion around product management in early companies - what's the right stage to hire your first PM, and how do you balance the founder vision with PM strategy? Despite lots of differing opinions on this, everyone agreed that a great PM is able to exercise pointed and often non-concensus intuition to advocate for specific product investments. 3️⃣ Quality assurance in software is a hot topic - it certainly seems that the days of pure MVPs are gone, especially in B2B enterprise software. Strategies here ranged from manual outsourced full-time QA to a battery of automated, property-based tests. My sense is that there's a lot more framework to develop here (and I admire folks like Meticulous who are pushing the boundaries!). 4️⃣ When the conversation turned to favorite vendors, Fullstory, Twingate, and Conveyor came up. It's always fun and a bit counter-intuitive to see how many times a 'favorite vendor' involves lots of excellent customer support. Durable trust is still built in these interactions! 5️⃣ I suspect that the areas of cloud economics and cost management are still a severely under-invested-in area for most companies. We discussed several stories on both sides: teams racking up $100K+ bills over a weekend from a cloud provider, to having to shape their internal architectures to support free tiers and cost management for customers over optimizing performance. This is an area where I'm particularly excited to see Orb's features around spend caps/alerting make a dent. Thank you again to Ram Sriharsha, Artem H., Niklas Quarfot Nielsen, Parth Shah, Nikrad Mahdi, Brad Buda, Aniruddha, and Ujwal Bachiraju for joining us!

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It’s THIS article (the second one in the post below): https://lnkd.in/dEdPxy62

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Work at a natural pace. In Cal Newport's new book "Slow Productivity" he walks through 3 components to accomplishment without burnout. 1. Do fewer things 2. Work at a natural pace  3. Obsess over quality Working at a natural pace is an area I'm focused on as I transition to whatever is next in my career. Most of my career's natural pace was driven by anxiety, coffee, HIIT workouts and more caffeine - which I'm pretty sure isn't what he means. In my late 40's though, that just doesn't work anymore. Nor do I want it to. It's a tricky philosophy though because if you're in the startup world I don't know how you build something meaningful and work at a natural pace. I've never seen it happen. It appears this is a philosophy that needs to be applied to a specific time and place vs. everyone, everywhere. Anway, I don't have the answers, I'm just exploring different questions. What I do know is working at a natural place seems to be more appropriate for where I am today. 

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I'm just about to start my third year on Substack in a couple of months. In today's post I share: 1. Why paid subscribers isn't my #1 monetization strategy 2. What most Substack creators are getting wrong 3. A bonus podcast episode breaking down my experience on the platform #Substack #Newsletter #Marketing #MakeMoneyOnline https://lnkd.in/gckicUfH

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What a week! Finished my XR Experience Design I class at UCLA Extension on Monday night. Thank you Jacquelyn (Jacki) Morie for pushing our small and mighty class to develop an extended reality (XR) idea from concept to presentation - and then also surprising us on the last day with an all-star cast of industry leaders, scientists and space technology innovators to present our design pitches and get amazing feedback. I recommend the class and love that it was equivalent to, if not better than, a class at a major engineering institute, for all the deep experience Jacki brought and shared with us - going deep into computer and display history, and sharing her perspectives on decades of design I'm not ready to share the pitch itself publicly, there are still things to prepare, but I'm happy with it, and happy to have learned an extensive framework for developing immersive experience designs. It was my first class at UCLA Extension, and my first "for credit" class since college - though I've audited classes and done many classes online, the university system has felt too far out of reach for most of my adult life. Thank you, also, to my day job California Office of Data and Innovation. We started doing cohort-based learning while developing classes for CalAcademy and studying during the day gave me the confidence - and a test run of the organizational skills and efficient time management needed - to take a $$$ night class, do all the homework, also do my busy day job, and be confident that I would not immediately fail the $$$ class due to challenges in managing time - and not get stressed out. The last time I did anything like this, I audited a molecular biology and programming class at UC Berkeley (non-extension) and had what turned into 40 hours of homework per week, which was awesome, but also I also had a more than full time job and remember having a meltdown from stress. I didn't have any meltdowns in this class. Appreciate the co-workers I've meet at the state who manage to earn MBAs and other degrees while in public service - so that they can be better leaders in their area of expertise. Taking a break for the summer quarter, and looking forward to checking out the course catalog again in the future.

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My last post led to DMs with questions about how the Ember model works. I thought it might be helpful to answer these questions in public for others to read, and transparency (we are big on this). Is Ember true ownership? Yes. We form an LLC for each house. Owners can purchase 1/8th to 1/2 of a home. When you buy your portion of the house, you own part of the LLC and thus part of the house. True ownership that is yours and that you can sell later. How does scheduling work? 1/8th ownership gives you 6.5 weeks of use. All scheduling is done through our mobile app, making scheduling fair, equitable, and super convenient. Owners never have to interact and stay anonymous from each other. Our app makes it all possible right from your own phone. Are all Ember homes nightly rental approved? We offer two types of homes, Ember Limited and Ember Flex. Ember Limited homes are for owners and their guests, but cannot be rented out. Ember Flex homes are for owners, guests, and can also be rented out. How does renting out my home/nights work? If you have a property that can be rented (Ember Flex Home), then you have the flexibility to either use your time in the home or rent out your nights. If you decide to rent we handle all the heavy lifting from marketing, checking guests in/out, concierge, etc. (our prop management company has a 4.99-star rating on Airbnb!). Renting out nights is super easy. Owners just indicate which nights they want rented in the app and push “rent these nights.” Within minutes, the indicated nights are on all major rental sites (Airbnb, VRBO, etc), as well as our website. We then cut you a check for your rented nights. Super simple, and without any human interaction by the owner, just a push of a button in our app. What ongoing costs are there? Standard Operational costs (taxes, insurance, utilities, etc.) as well as property management fees are all split evenly amongst the owners based on their ownership stake. We post all expected monthly costs for each property on our website under each listing (go look). You only pay for the portion and time you own. Does the home come furnished? All of our properties come completely turnkey and professionally designed. Think parade home quality down to the detail in each Ember property. Prices on our site are inclusive of a fully turnkey home. Ember is changing the game when it comes to vacation home ownership and experience. Check out more 👇 👇 www.emberhome.com What questions do you have about Ember?

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Open source has always been a major part of my career. I spent 13 years building MongoDB and its open source developer ecosystem, and at Viam all of the software that runs on a user's device, our APIs, and our SDKs are open source. Now, I am excited to share that Viam is now an official member of the Open Source Robotics Alliance. Let’s talk more about why open source is important to us:  Security - If machines are inside your house, your office, etc. security and privacy are paramount, and you'd want to know exactly what’s happening with that data. Open source not only makes companies responsible to write good software, but lets the community easily vet it. Innovation - I have said before, no one wants to contribute to a closed source ecosystem. We want developers to bring their ideas to life using Viam. To do so, open source is necessary, as it’s harder to contribute to closed source, and not nearly as rewarding. It keeps corporations in check - When betting your business on a technology, you are responsible for making sure there are some checks in place. By making everything on-machine open source, it means that if something happens, there are ways for users to move forward using open source without Viam. This is all just the tip of the iceberg. Open source has the power to democratize robotics, remove barriers to interoperability, and make automation much easier than it is today. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/eTc8p_Dk Open Robotics #opensource #openrobotics #viam #mongodb #robotics #opensourceroboticsalliance #OSRA

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