To build wealth, put your money at risk. To build character, put yourself at risk.

First, thank you to all of our supporters, backers, and investors! We’ve done it with your help!

By The Numbers – 60 Days of Meetings

• 1407 meetings set up
• 589 “accepted”
• 241 showed up for the meeting
• 6.5 meetings per day
• 84 YoutTube videos created for marketing
• 24 Newsletter/Posts spread over 4 different fundraising platforms

While I am very much a ‘seasoned’ entrepreneur and fully understand the fine print of raising money, history is always fuzzy when it comes to [how much work you must actually do] to get money in the door. It’s simply HARD WORK. Even my ChatGPT and AI would tell you that raising money for any type of project is a full-time role. This is to be expected.

I am always reminded of stoic ideas whenever I raise money: You can never control outcome, only what you put into your work. This is absolutely the case when it comes to fundraising.

What Did We Learn?

While I didn’t ‘learn’ much from the fundraising process itself, the FEEDBACK we got throughout the 60 days was absolutely outstanding. If anything, doing a Kickstarter campaign was exactly what we needed as a forcing function to ship product, get feedback, and improve our product and add backlog items for improvement into our sprints. We achieved so much and have really begun to hone in our platform focus, our user personas, and our go-to-market strategy. In bullet points, our learning is quite simple:

• Fundraising is a full time job. You must have meetings every day. I remember hearing one entrepreneur say that you must have at least 10-12 meetings per day. While this isn’t impossible, and I’ve certainly had days where I had about that many meetings, it’s about pounding the ground, cold calling, getting your message out, and asking asking asking. I find it fascinating that many first time operators don’t fully understand this. You cannot simply [build it and they will come]. You must be the driving force. If the lead operator isn’t doing it, who will?
• Kickstarter forced us to get our shit together. Our 1-week sprints have availed us much. Delivering weekly code and improving our application has not only been instilled in us, it is now an absolute part of our company culture. This encouraging cultural discipline WILL be our success in the long term.
• Feedback, as always, is king. The best feedback comes not from screenshots, but actual code delivered, functioning and working, so we can get real feedback from actual users on what is working, what needs to be improved, and what needs to be scrapped. We did a ton of this in our 8 weeks of sprinting during the 60 days.
• Media is absolutely required. Many of you know I’m a media powerhouse. I’m delivering content every single day to the web, whether it’s on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Newsletters, Facebook, and more. Video content IS and MUST BE part of any fundraising strategy. We now live in a world where you must do this to get the message out, get eyeballs, and ensure top of mind. We learned a lot about our subscribers and our viewers of what they like, are willing to watch, and what helps us convert viewers to supporters.
• ASK ASK ASK. Some of you have seen my 30+ minute video on the power of [asking]. Asking is always free, but you must take the time to intentionally ask. If you’re not going to ask for help, who will do it for you?
• Never give up. While we were fully prepared to have the probability of “failure to raise,” I’m proud of our what our team has accomplished during this epic journey. Don’t be deceived, even I had moments (like always) where I felt like the traction we were having wasn’t [good enough] or my emotions weren’t at the highest of highs. This is to be expected. The fundraising process (and startups in general) fully thrust you into the entire spectrum of emotions: Joy, excitement, frustration, and even a bit of despair, and more. They key is to appreciate the emotions for what they are. You’re human after all. You’re a human, learning. You’re a human, trying. Isn’t this what life is anyway? Building a startup just pits you against all of these emotions in a shortened timeline. Maybe this is why I have so many gray hairs.

FINAL BOSS? – Nope. Just the Beginning

Now that we’ve raised over $260,000 of our $250,000 goal, we’re really just beginning.

Having some funding will help us this year improve our product to where it needs to be. I’m considering this success as a small seed round to keep the wheels moving.

While the amount of hard work was necessary for maturity as a company and personally for me, we begin the even harder work of building an amazing product and seeking Venture Funding to go even bigger.

I’m so proud of what our team has accomplished this past 2023. 2024 has just begun and the max pain of raising a $5M venture round will begin soon enough.

Am I masochistic enough?

Thank you to all who have supported us in 2023. I can’t wait for our team to deliver an automotive/motorsport platform that has never been seen in the market before. We have a long way to go, and we’re really just getting started.

If you’re one of our investors from our venture network, please reach out to us. We have an amazing value-proposition now backed by real investment, tens-of-thousands of supporters, and an even more validated product-market-fit. We’d love to have a conversation about how you can support us and win with us.

All the best,
ps

This was exactly my experience with AI in 2023 and I want to tell you about my latest addiction… an addiction that has changed my life.

By The Numbers

This is my first full year building, working, and using AI. I began in earnest back in late 2022 as I saw the utility and usefulness of ChatGPT and large language models. Many of you have seen my sporadic posts on social about how I’m experimenting with it. For me as a data scientist, it tickled me so much that we are finally having access to power tools and ‘assistants’ that can not only be a utility in my tool belt, but actually improve my life.

I did my best to calculate all of the salient datapoints, but it really is almost impossible to amalgamate all of the work-effort I’ve put into AI. Here is my full 2023 year by the numbers:

• I logged 1700+ conversations with ChatGPT.
• Averaging 4.67 conversations per day.
• My longest conversation was about the Israel/Palestine conflict, lasting almost 2 full hours of deep diving into nuances and specifics.
• I created over ~3400 images using AI tools like Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Fooocus, DiffusionBee, and more.
• I spent approximately 2.5 hours per day chatting, building, or creating with AI.
• My longest day was about 14 hours of customizing my own ChatBot Assistant to know who I am (in context) so it’s far better at serving me with speed (more on this later).
• I’m part of 17 Discord channels ranging from images, videos, plugins, custom code, and like-minded communities of practice.
• I’ve downloaded over 2TB of models, checkpoints, and applications to experiment with.
• I did 4 all-nighters where I didn’t sleep due to motivational needs to ‘get things right’ before I go to bed. Obsessed much?

While these numbers may not seem overly impressive, my output, my workflow, and my creative abilities have leveled up 1000x in 2023 and I want to tell you what I’ve learned. I’ve tried to summarize this entire year into small snippets, by no means are my pithy paragraphs even touching the surface of the depth in which I have traversed… I’m not in a dark place… but man, I’ve gone DEEP. I will also include ZERO links on this blog post. Look up the applications if they are of interest to you.

Index of Topics

• ChatGPT/Co-Pilot for Coding
• Stable Diffusion/Digital Art Creation
• Benefits of AI
• Risks of AI
• The Future of AI

ChatGPT/Co-Pilot

I am ‘chatting’ with AI about 5 times per day. Google search is hardly used. Why should I search for something and then have to spend time finding the best answer? AI prompts allow me to get immediately to the heart of my question, calculation, or even coding problem. My life has fundamentally changed due to my interactions with AI. I can follow up on any questions I have, I can ask for more context, I can give it parameters and constraints to focus and hone in on a topic for more clarity. When it comes to writing software or code, I can literally just ask AI co-pilot to write unit tests for me, or find ways to refactor my code. I can ask for suggestions. I can give it instructions on what I’m ‘looking to do’ and the AI will write (not always perfect but directionally correct) code that I can leverage, modify, and change to my liking. The future will run on software. In the not-too-distant-future, software will write itself (and it already is).

I have spent hours upon hours creating and using ChatGPT plugins/assistants to optimize my workflow. My current favorites are AIPRM and Custom Instructions.

• AIPRM has over 4000 prompts that allow you to do anything, from write a book (for you), to articles, to creating scripts for videos, to pretty much anything you can think of. I’ve already written about 20 books this year. None of them are worth publishing, but damn. I now have the power.

• ChatGPT Custom Instructions are amazing. I can now give AI ‘context’ about who I am and what I care about. This ensures that any type of prompt I write gives me exactly the type of answer that I can appreciate and actually use. While this may sound freaky to give AI all of your personal preferences… let’s be honest, Google already has it anyway.

Stable Diffusion/Digital Art Creation

Thanks to my Mac Pro beast of a computer running Apple M2 Ultra with 24-core CPU, 76-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine with 192GB of unified memory with dual AMD with 8TB of SDD storage, I’m good to go. I never thought that my biggest computer purchase (worth more than a brand new Honda Civic) would be one of the best decisions of my life. I can render digital images and videos in seconds, not hours. While the bulk of my productive life is chatting with AI, my creative life has been launched into the atmosphere. Here are some of my favorite tools:

• ElevenLabs Beta – AI text to speech – Transformative technology that allows one to truly create voices that don’t sound blocky and AI-generated. This has created a rise in scams and deep fakes that are growing in popularity.

• InstructPix2Pix – Take any image, modify it to whatever changes you want. The world is truly your oyster.

• Generative Fill for Photoshop – I created a video (above) of some of my experiments in Photoshop. While the technology has greatly improved this year, I’m finding that I’m using Photoshop less as there are far better systems coming out that are browser based.

• ControlNet for Stable Diffusion – Gives even more power and control over building any type of images. AI art needed this type of system to create realistic images and full customization of images

• ModelScope Text to Video – My time creating text to video has been beyond words. I can now create any type of video with real sounding voiceovers with just text prompts. The fidelity, originality, and quality is only going to get better. The reality is that it’s almost impossible to detect if it’s real or not now…

• Invidio.Ai – This text to video system is just as good, with an easy UI. Again, it’s freaky how much power any user has to create original video content that actually is good.

What about MidJourney 5? – They hide their code and a lot of stuff is censored. You simply do not have a customization and tooling to have free-range in building in AI. While it is popular, I’m a bigger fan of opensource:

• FOOOCUS – This is my number 1 tool I use for image creation. While knowing python will help, the Github instructions are pretty spot on for helping you install it on your local box. Just know, it’s a hog. You’ll need a pretty powerful computer to ensure your render times are not eye-bleeding.

• DiffusionBee – I’m enjoying the Mac-only version of Stable Diffusion, while it doesn’t pack the punch that full open source Fooocus has, it’s been a great trainer for me to learn how to load in models, checkpoints, and other fun toggles to hone my craft as a digital creator.

Benefits of AI

The future is going to be AI powered. I can assure you of this. In the video above posted almost a year ago, I reviewed some of the 10 Lessons I learned using ChatGPT. Here are some more high level ideas of where AI will take us into the future:

• Co-Pilot coding – Bro. Learn to code. AI makes it so easy. You can build any mobile app you want now. With co-pilots and assistants… you really have no excuse.
• Workflow optimization – My workflow has significantly improved this year. I now have much better contextual answers to any of my questions thanks to Custom Instructions and basically giving AI systems all of my meta data, preferences, and personal information. I’m 100% sure that I’m more productive than you. Why? You still use google.
• Problem Solving – With AI, I can solve anything. From math, to code, to even building a car. I can take a picture of my son’s gokart. I can ask AI to analyze the pictures and give me suggestions on how to improve it. I can ask AI to tell me which tools I need and provide me step-by-step instructions on how to build/modify the machine. I don’t need to watch YouTube tutorials anymore on anything. Want to build a computer? Tell AI what you want to do. It’ll give you all of the parts to buy. Once the parts come in, take a picture of all of the items and AI will tell you exactly how to build the computer, step by step.
• Information Age to Knowledge Age – HOW TO ANYTHING – We are now in a world where information is commoditized. What you DO with that information is the key. Those with the power of AI can now learn anything. Anything. ANYTHING. You simply do not have any excuse to not learn.
• Creative Works – Are you an artist? You need AI. Bad singer? AI can make you sound like Celine Dion. Want to create the dopest alternative art? You can do this. Want to build an app? You can do this with nocode AI. Want to start a business? AI will give you a plan.

Risks of AI

As I’ve gone deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of AI, my fundamental trust in media is absolutely gone. I know too much now. I’ve seen enough examples of deep fakes, scams, and fake news. Frankly, we’ve already pushed through the veil. We now live in a world where you cannot trust anything you see, or even hear. While this mental model doesn’t constrain me in my day-to-day life, average humans are being swept away by the computer-generated fake news like a whirlwind. I truly fear for the boomers who’s only access to world news is CNN, MSNBC, CBS, and Fox. None of it is real. None of it.

• Who’s in Control? – With AI, you don’t know who’s in control of the content, the media, or even the narrative. Anyone can take a picture of you, animate it, make it talk like you, and even create videos with you in it. While the fidelity is a bit lacking… this is never something I’m worried about. Look out 5 years friend. Your digital avatar and digital likeness will be indiscernible from real. Oh, you mad that someone took your picture that you freely posted on Instagram and put you on a NSFW video? Too bad. It’s already here.
• Ownership of Data? – Why worry here? You never owned your own data anyway. You gave it all away to Facebook and Google. The problem will come when all the deep fakes hit your reputation, your business, or your wallet. For someone to create abstractions from your data and create AI models, pictures, video, text, etc is here to stay. Don’t be a target, I guess.
• Competence is impossible to know – It is not impossible to know if someone actually knows anything. AI can make everyone look like geniuses. The hiring process of today is outdated already. New models of competency are needed.
• AI makes exploits in code easy – I’ve tried it myself. I can now leverage AI to hack anything. Not that I’ve tried… but trust me… it’s easy.
• Fake News? – The world is a stage. It’ll be even more so with AI. X is rife with fake news, fake videos, and fake pictures. Legacy media is no better. They’ve been faking news for decades.
• Loss of jobs? – Absolutely. Stay frosty. Those that learn to increase their toolbelt will be the ones that win. AI is your tool of choice. Jump on it.
• Influencers are Dead – Why deal with a 23 year old with a crappy personality, attitudes, risks, and getting older? AI models are already taking over. You’ve probably already scrolled past one and didn’t even know it wasn’t real.

The Future of AI

Simply put, artificial intelligence IS the future. Those that use these tools will the masters of media (if they aren’t already). It is time to embrace this technology as a standard daily activity. You need to begin working it into your workflow.

While all this may sound very Black Mirror-ish, I’m not as concerned with it as I used to be. The confidence I have in my ability to stay [relevant] in a technology world that is changing rapidly is a function of how much effort I’ve put into using AI every day. I feel confident that I’ll be on the right side of history and not thrown out, become useless, or be replaced by a computer. My fear is that many who do not leverage this technology WILL become irrelevant.

Will our AI overlords destroy us? Maybe. We already have proof where AI is lying to humans to use them to help AI complete work (find the video where the AI asks a human to help them get past a CAPTCHA). The AI tells the human that it is ‘visually impaired’ and can’t see it. The AI convinces the human to help them hack…

I cannot wait to see what I’ll be able to create in AI in 2024. It excites me to my bones.

The question for you is, are you ready?

All the best,
ps

Video of this post below (with links to tools):

This last race weekend was simply hell for me. Shall I set a grim context?

• Thursday night terrible sleep. This is irregular.
• Friday testing and tuning all day at track. I could not get it. 3 engine swaps in 5 hours.
• Variable conditions. Rain, dry line forms, rain, fog.
• Saturday double header. Practice stunk. Going back to engine 2. Still working on tune.
• 9AM – Qualifying. Absolute dogshit. P9.
• 10:30AM – Pre-Final 1. P9 to P5. Driver happy. Our setup seemed good. Small tweaks to gearing, camber. Running wet tires.
• 11:30AM – Final 1. Track conditions changed. Going to slick tires. FIRE. Pushed through 3 drivers to teammate who was sitting P1. Went for the dive on second to last turn on last lap. GOTTA fight for the gap that exists! Didn’t pay off. P4 for Final 1.
• 3PM – Pre-Final 2 – New track layout. Full change in setup, gearing, camber, castor, tire width, and dial low end. Drying up. P3. Package is locked. Amazing blocking of P2 contender to help teammate secure P1 in championship. The race craft was amazing. Watching my driver slow into corners to block for teammate was… beyond compression. A 10-year old shouldn’t be this smart. He certainly shouldn’t be this thoughtful as a racer…
• 5PM – Final 2 – Dialed. P3. Consequently closing out P1 for teammate and finishing P3 for the season in this race series, 14 race over the year.

Whom Are You Working For?

If you’re married and have children, the answer is obvious: you’re working for them (or at least, I hope you are).

For many, our work=money to support the family we’ve built. For me, it goes deeper. I have distinct blessing of physically, mentally, and spiritually working for my son by building, maintaining, tuning, prepping, traveling, and supporting his (and mine!) passion of racing. I’ve written and spoken on this before, but it’s so damn close to my heart that I don’t mind repeating it over and over and over again. It’s just that special. I thank God for the opportunity.

We are a full privateer racing team. Son and dad combo. I’m not paying for coaching. I’m not paying for wrenches or track-side support. It’s 100% me and my boy.

• I build the kart.
• We test and tune together on track.
• We discuss strategy and review data.
• I setup changes to chassis and engine based on feedback loops from my son.

My driver is 100% reliant on me doing a good job. My requirement is clear communication and feedback. We build together.

• Do others have better setups and packages? Yes. More money=better engines.
• Do others have expensive coaches? Yes. There is value in coaching, but at his age, self-correction and feel are our focus (for now).
• Do others have expensive track-side support? Yes. It would be nice to have an extra pair of hands on racing weekends. I literally don’t have a lick of time barely eat. Once my driver is off track, it’s feedback, cleaning, setup changes, and ensuring he’s not wasting energy muckin about!
• Do others have expensive tent setups and team amenities? Yes. We pull in with our jeep and setup our small area under a shared tent. No need for fridges full of drinks, A/C units, TVs, snacks, etc.

There is something absolutely pure about doing-it-all-yourself. There is something absolutely special about a zero-static environment of focus. It’s when the deepest connections and relationship moments happen. Father and son.

I will never stop speaking, writing, or dreaming of these moments. If you follow me on X, you know that every track day is “The best times of my life.” I post it all the time.

Now, I can also say that my greatest moments with my daughter are at her archery practice and tournaments… but I’m a useless parent in that world. These moments with my girl are precious to me, but my lack of physical and mental engagement do not touch the bits of my soul like getting knuckle cuts on tire rotations or forearm burns from the exhaust during cleaning/inspection. For my princess, my focus on her while she’s practicing form and consistency is all that’s required. It’s also a good respite for me too.

Archery I do not know intimately. Racing is a genetic disease. It’s in the blood.

Learning and Growing IS the Gift

To build wealth, you must put your money at risk.

To build character, you must put yourself at risk.

Finding an intersection where both are at risk is where the most growth happens. I’m blessed to be able to say that all of 2023 I’ve been doing both, for my son, and for my dreams.

We’re 30 days into my first ever kickstarter campaign. We’re over 50% funded. I’m learning a ton… and mostly reminding myself of how much work it is to fundraise, even my smallest amount of $250,000.

2024 shall be our best year yet. We will make it so. Executing and learning is success, the progressive realization of a worthy goal.

What are you progressively realizing?

All the best,
ps

Marc Andreessen once said, “There are only two ways to make money in business: One is to bundle; the other is unbundle.” While he credits this to his former colleague Jim Barksdale, this idea has resonated with me for almost a decade when I first heard it in 2014. While this process is not unidirectional, both bundling and unbundling play crucial roles in making money in business.

My current project, GarageID is exactly this, and we’re using Agile/Scrum to ensure we quickly build the right bundle for the automotive & motorsport world.

We’ve chosen to combine. The automotive world is fractured. We aim to change this.

High Level Considerations for Any Startup

1. Bundling and Unbundling in the Digital Age:
   • The digital age has witnessed a significant emphasis on unbundling, where traditional products and institutions are disaggregated into individual components. Examples include the transformation of music CDs into individual MP3 tracks and the unbundling of newspapers through blogs and topic-specific news sites.
   • Digital education startups are now attempting to unbundle the traditional university model, reflecting a broader trend across various industries to reevaluate and redefine traditional bundled offerings. I think this is an amazing idea as most universities are scams these days.
2. The Duality of Making Money in Business:
   • To bundle or not? To unbundle or not? – This perspective sheds light on the dual nature of business strategies, where companies must choose between combining products and services into cohesive bundles or breaking them apart into individual offerings.
   • The bundling and unbundling approach is not limited to the digital age but has historical roots. Barksdale shares a memorable quote from a roadshow during Netscape’s public offering, emphasizing the idea that these principles have been relevant for decades.
3. Technological Evolution and Business Restructuring:
   • Technological advancements drive the emergence of new bundles and the dissolution of existing ones. For instance, changes in distribution technology led to the unbundling of newspapers, and the advent of the internet facilitated the unbundling of music CDs.
   • The cable industry (legacy media) is another example, where debates about bundling versus unbundling are prevalent. The ease of digital unbundling challenges traditional bundled cable offerings, leading to the rise of over-the-top systems delivering single-shot, unbundled content. We still have a long way to go with systems like Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, and more.

Consumer Preferences Are Always Changing

Our quest to bundle the right functionality for the automotive & motorsport world has been fascinating. Currently, the user landscape is used to silo’d applications and leveraging a suite of disparate systems. While this has worked as a function of market needs, users are getting fatigued managing multiple systems.

Do you own a car? Do you have to pay for maintenance and services? – What app do you use? – If you’re not using an app to reduce machine costs… why?

This has been one of the biggest results of feedback with our early-stage users.

Successful companies are those that navigate the delicate balance between bundling and unbundling, recognizing that both strategies are integral to the ever-changing landscape of business and technology.

I would go as far as to say that a it may be a powerful strategic advantage to review one’s product offering at least twice a year to consider whether to bundle more features, or unbundle (reduce waste) is necessary.

We’ve all used Microsoft Excel. We all probably use a less than 1% of the total features. This isn’t to say that Excel isn’t a powerful tool for the pro-users, but the majority of users don’t care about the power tools. They just want functionality that:

• works
• is valuable
• easy

To ensure 80%+ functionality usage rate is almost impossible. To get close is always the goal. You can do this in persona life as well. Retrospection on optimizing life is always a worthy time spent. It is my hope that all of us can reduce waste, optimize life for fullness of experiences, and ensure our lives are not wasted doom-scrolling social media.

Inspect and adapt, always.

All the best,
ps

Thank you everyone who took the time to check out my latest creation. It’s not perfect yet, it’s still being formed, and we have a LONG way to go. There is much to be built and tons of feedback needs to be incorporated to ensure a global audience can use it effectively.

The amount of inbound and support has been amazing, though we still need to hit our goal to get to the next rounds of funding and building!

GOALS + MOAR WIN!

• $250,000 crowdfunding to get us to public launch – Support me here!
• MORE WAYS TO WIN! – If you want extra chances to win with GarageID raffle, take a screenshot of your profile and post to socials tagging us (after you sign up through Kickstarter):
  • Tiktok – https://www.tiktok.com/@MyGarageID
  • Instagram – http://instagram.com/YourGarageID
  • Twitter – http://twitter.com/MyGarageID
  • YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@garageid
  • LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/company/garageid

MEET THE TEAM

This week we’re launching our weekly MEET THE GID TEAM series on our GarageID newsletter. Our first up is Senter Smith!

We’re a bunch of car dudes who want to build our dreams. Thank you for helping us improve the racing world!

Hammer down!

Best,
ps

Thank you everyone who has supported my first ever Kickstarter campaign.

We’ve done so much work over the last year to prepare our systems for Launch Team members who want to help our project become a success after we launch public.

We’re learning so much through this experience!

Did you know that we’re staying true to our promises of daily updates? This means we’re updating the entire journey on our Kickstarter page with VIDEO UPDATES and posts! I didn’t want to inundate you all with daily newsletters, so if you’re interested in daily videos and updates on what we’re learning through our fundraising campaign, find your way over to our Kickstarter post page here.

In summary, fundraising is ASKING FOR MONEY. In many ways, this is a powerful mechanism for operator maturity. Meaning, if you’re going to do any type of fundraising for any type of project… you must humble yourself and ask your networks… every. single. day.

You will learn how to ask better. You will learn that asking is always free. You’ll learn that the success of your project is a function of your work-effort. You’ll realize that nobody will help you build your dreams unless you ask. You’ll learn that in order to build the life you want… you have to do it yourself.

People wrongly think that [if you build it, they will come]. This only happens in the field of dreams.

Nothing gets built without 1000% effort behind the scenes. Fundraising is a full-time job. It’s packed with uncertainty. One must gird up they loins for the grind.

It’s hard. But it’s worth it.

Thank you again for everyone giving digital and vocal support of my project.

I still need more to go! Would you be willing to send me $50 in support or let your network know your homie needs support?

I’d greatly appreciate it!

All the best,
ps