Week 1167
We continued polishing ghiblify this week. I tried setting up Stripe but they flagged us for copyright issues. It sucks but we’ll just eat the compute costs for now. We’ll start promoting it on socials next week to see how it resonates with people. While Justin cooks up the social media stuff for ghiblify, I’ve been building a template app we can use to plug and play with other image generation workflows. We aren’t sure where consumer demand will be but our bet is that we can figure it out by iterating quickly.
One thing we’ve been discussing recently is the tradeoff between speed and quality. Given that we are in an exploratory stage, we are going to bias more towards speed. We do realize that lack of quality is a failure case for many products even if they are directionally correct. It’s a balancing act where we want to ship as fast as possible but still launch with enough quality such that we can collect useful signals and feedback from the market. I don’t know exactly what the right threshold is, but hopefully we will develop a better intuition for it over time.
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Justin went skiing for a few days so I ended up spending a bunch of time at the SF library on the days he was gone. I read Kings of Crypto by Jeff John Roberts and part 1 of Edward Snowden’s autobiography Permanent Record. Both were interesting but I don’t have any major takeaways from these readings. My current approach to nonfiction is to absorb as much information as I can and as fast as I can. I want to become a better decision-maker, and in order to do so I need to learn more about the world around me. This has skewed my reading wishlist to be filled with Silicon Valley lore. Sadly, some of my other reading interests have been punted down the list but I’ll get to them eventually.
I also watched Single’s Inferno Season 3 with my roommates. It was super funny and now I want to watch the previous 2 seasons. I don’t know when I’ll find the time for that though. It’s going to be a while before I have another free time block to do so.