Each week I’ll have a curated list of links from the latest tech to just interesting reads or videos, as well as updates on my own entrepreneurial endeavors. Thanks for joining on this journey!

Topics for this week:

• divs.design

• Sora

• Gemini Pro 1.5

• Website Portfolio Hosting

• Angel Investing

divs.design

Progress continues! divs.design is in good shape, and after some tinkering, I have working payment links, so it’s ready to make some money. I have a Trello.com board template ready to go as well, just need to set up a handful of automations on Zapier to fill in some process gaps and the administrative part of Divs Design should be all set for customers.

A sneak preview of the Trello board that customers will be using:

Before getting Trello access, customers have to pay for a subscription through Stripe, which was surprisingly easy to setup. Stripe let’s you create a link you can copy from Stripe and paste wherever so that customers can be directed to a specific product checkout page hosted by Stripe, no code needed.

Connect the button to the link, and it’s good to go. If you’re looking to set up something similar, let me know! And feel free to check out divs.design if you haven’t yet or if you know someone looking for a website, pass it along!

Sora

OpenAI causally dropped demos of what is undoubtedly the best text-to-video AI generation model yet.

RunwayML has been the leader in text-to-video up to this point, and it’s remarkable what it’s been able to produce, although Google’s Lumiere model has showcased some impressive video generation recently.

But OpenAI started showing off Sora, and the videos are stunning. Many of the videos it produced are blurring the lines of what’s real and what’s generated. The following videos were generated from text:

Truly incredible.

There’s a particularly popular AI video of Will Smith eating spaghetti that was generated 10 months ago, and to see it side by side with what OpenAI posted is insane. I’m going to drop a link to the post comparing the two but not embed it because the spaghetti video is kind of disturbing, but also funny in an absurd, ridiculous way. Watch at your own risk, but it really highlights the unbelievable progress that’s been made in 10 months. Comparison here: https://twitter.com/k7agar/status/1758207538649022593

Gemini Pro 1.5

More AI video news! Coincidentally, around the same time OpenAI posted Sora videos, Google uploaded a video about the Gemini Pro 1.5 model and it’s capability to interpret video.

In the demo, they upload an entire movie into their AI, Gemini, and ask it a question about a specific part of the movie. Gemini is able to find the timestamp for the answer, and describe details about what’s happening at that specific part of the movie.

Crazier still, the user uploads a hand-drawn, stick figure image and asks the AI “when does this happen in the movie” and again, the AI is able to find the part in the movie that the image is referencing based on a crude drawing.

The rate of AI is hard to comprehend sometimes, and this is only what’s been approved to announce publicly, so these features are weeks or months behind what’s currently being discovered behind closed doors. Exciting times for sure.

Full Google demo below:

Website Portfolio Hosting

For some practice with divs.design, I plan to build a portfolio of sites to use as examples and showcase design inspiration to customers for their projects.

Right now, I plan to host these portfolio sites on the cheap. Webflow is great for design, but it’s going to cost anywhere from $20 to $32 per website per month depending on the features each site needs and the cheaper price is for the annual plan instead of the monthly. $300 per month to host seems unnecessary at this point, but a more creative option is to pay for one Webflow plan that allows for exporting, build designed sites in Webflow, and offload each site onto a cheaper web host.

I looked through a few options, and found this PC Mag article helpful, narrowing down the choices to AccuWeb and Hostinger. Ultimately I settled on Hostinger since it had similar numbers to AccuWeb, but more highly recommended customer service. I don’t have as much experience in hosting so I figured it doesn’t hurt to have better support in the event that I need it.

But for $60 for a year, I am able to host up to 100 websites all with custom domains, as compared to the $300+ per month for 10 websites it would cost to host with Webflow. Use the right tool for the right job.

I’ve set up a couple sites on Hostinger as of now, and so far so good! More on that next.

Angel Investing

I’m slowly mapping the next 10 years of my professional journey, and I’m very certain investing in businesses, particularly software businesses, will have a role to play. That was the motivation behind purchasing divs.holdings, the future financial arm of divs.ventures. (How about that new hosting, eh?)

Thinking about Divs Holdings, I was poking around Naval Ravikant’s website Angel List, which is essentially a marketplace for tech startups and investors.

I was more interested in the investor side of things, and found their Rolling Funds quite promising. You could start contributing to funds for $5k or less, so I was considering converting some Salesforce stock into a contribution. Digging a little deeper into how to get started though, I ran across this little line:

All investors must be accredited investors. Which means you need to have made at least $200k the last 2 years and have more than $1 million in assets. So I’m not making those qualifications this year.

But the other qualifications for an accredited investor are that you hold one of the following in good standing:

• a Series 7 license

• a Series 65 license

• or a Series 82 license

The exams for Series 7 or Series 82 licenses require a sponsorship from a FINRA member firm, which will be difficult to pull off since I don’t know what that is, but the Series 65 does not require a sponsorship.

The Series 65 exam is a 3 hour, 130 question, $187 test. Doesn’t sound so bad! My wild idea is to study for that, and document the process on divs.holdings (and put my other studies on hold). Why not try to help people learn how to become accredited investors if all you have to do is pass a test?

Angel List does also have that other qualification of “worked for, invested in, or advised a startup” but I’ll come back to that. I would imagine that the guidelines around what constitutes a “startup” are quite gray.

So if you’re looking to jump into the world of start up investing, stay tuned to divs.holdings and I’ll see what I can come up with. AI is quite good at standardized exams so I’m sure it will prove itself incredibly helpful here.

And that’s it for this week! Another newsletter about the complete shift of AI text-to-video, investing, more divs as always, and surprisingly no podcast this week.

Those are the links that stuck with me throughout the week and a glimpse into what I personally worked on.

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