Side hustle day

So the search has officially begun. I spent some time on AngelList, looking for opportunities, and sent a few messages out some founders. All equity stakes, unfortunately, but hopefully I’ll start the conversation rolling.

Also reached out to the team behind a new AI startup. It seems that they’re running various AI projects behind the scenes and offering an API for devs to get the results. Seems like an interesting platform play, providing AI as a service. Reminds me of what Twilio did.

Following the advice of Peter McCormick in The 10% Entrepreneur, I’ve started writing a professional biography. I uploaded my draft to AngelList, and will do so on LinkedIn as well. I have to be careful how I put things, cause I don’t want any blow-back from my boss right now. I don’t think it’s likely, given that they can’t survive without me, but I can’t afford to take chances. Anyways, the point of the biography is to build a coherent picture that brings together where I’m at now, where I hope to be, and encompasses my professional, academic, open source, and political contributions. I think I did a good job.

Today I will focus on making progress on client projects, and following up on any opportunities. One of my clients hasn’t paid in months, so it’s time to have a tough talk with them about the future. I have another advisory project I haven’t spoken to recently, and another relationship that I’m hoping to make the cornerstone of new business.

After assessing that, I need to make a few cuts, finance wise. I’ve been carrying Basecamp, Harvest, and an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription for some time, not to mention my Namecheap reseller account and AWS instance running the IDEX node. Unless I can secure some immediate funding source, I’ll have to cut. I think Basecamp may be willing to offer services for people affected by Coronavirus, but I doubt Adobe would do the same.

On a personal node, I should probably do the same with my Waking Up subscription. Sam Harris is gracious enough to allow people to request free subscriptions, so I need to do that. Taxes are also due in a month, so I need to start working on that. I’ll defer that till this weekend. I manged to eek out a refund last year because of business expenses, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to get away with that this year. We’ll see.

That’s it, time to get busy!

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