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- Billionaires, Boring Businesses, and Bad Compounding
Every week I’ll dive into a curated list of links from the latest tech to just interesting reads, as well as updates on my latest entrepreneurial endeavors. Thanks for joining on this journey!
Topics for this week:
Boring Businesses
Codie Sanchez may be credited with re-popularizing the concept of “build boring businesses” by constantly promoting the topic on social media. I’ve seen that content in my feed regularly but only recently dove into a longer podcast with her. It’s an interesting contrast to hear her talk about her empire aspirations started with running laundromats and car washes, but how talking to a billionaire transitioned her scope to something much broader. A long listen at almost 3 hours, but the relevant timestamp is below:
Sahil Bloom has a massive newsletter audience, and also one of the largest Twitter/X followings, so naturally I was looking for some inspiration from an expert. His newsletter began as just a fun project to share with friends and family, but when he got serious about it and posting on Twitter, he grew something amazing. One of the key points I’m excited about is that he usually doesn’t plan his content in advance, but rather works off of inspiration, much like a certain newsletter that you are reading that may or may not have been written the day it was published… Link below!
Systematized Content
Completely opposite to the advice above, Justin Welsh, who follows in Sahil’s footsteps with a huge newsletter and following of his own, has a very systematized approach to content. He’s talked about it before on other podcasts, but in this particular video he walks through a system outline for free, which is an ideal price. A dense 28 minutes, but worth taking notes. I’ll be implementing some combination of both last minute, and pre-planned content and see which elements of either approach work best.
It’s Slow Then It’s Fast, But Bad
Clearly I’ve been deep in the YouTube this week, but this one broke my brain a bit.
“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world; never interrupt it unnecessarily.” — Charlie Munger
Such a great quote, but Steven Bartlett pointed out to Chris Williamson the power of compound interest from a negative light, which I had never fully considered. Steven gives the example of not brushing your teeth for a day or a week and it not really having any impact, but not brushing for 5 years will lead to some serious problems. And the problem started when it stopped.
These are experts in the podcasting world so it would be a valuable 2 hour commitment to hear everything else, but the relevant section is here:
OpenAI Recap
Last but not least, I have to talk about OpenAI since everyone else is, and I would be very sad if ChatGPT was no longer an option. There are plenty of alternatives but ChatGPT is the go-to for now.
I'm not going to go into detail because there are tons of articles and recaps but Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI was surprisingly fired by his board of directors, which caused about 500 of the 700 OpenAI employees to threaten to leave, and within 4 days it was negotiated to re-instate Altman.
Rumors are that a new AI model, called Q*, may have some powerful reasoning and cryptographic capabilities that scared the board which lead them to fire Altman in an effort to slow down AI progress. With Altman reinstated in will be fascinating to see how this plays out. Looking forward to Q* access in the future.
Here’s a nice reddit recap, but consider the source with caution!
And that’s it for this week! Another newsletter, about newsletters! Those are the links that stuck with me throughout the week and a glimpse in what I personally worked on.
If you want to start a newsletter like this on beehiiv and support me in the process, here’s my referral link: https://www.beehiiv.com/?via=jay-peters. Otherwise, let me know what you think at @jaypetersdotdev or email [email protected] and thanks for reading!