Enter 2024

Sharing thoughts on my road ahead in 2024

2023 was a year full of challenges. On the business side, things did absolutely not go according to plan. Despite my repeated efforts I was not able to turn the tables around for EnVsion. Therefore I took the difficult decision to close down the company. For those interested, I explained my rationale for sunsetting EnVsion in this recent post mortem article . 

In my personal life, I am grateful to be the parent of a healthy, brilliant and cheeky 20 months old girl. Children are a gift, and parenting is an honour, but it also requires sacrifices and a reconfiguration of one’s life and priorities. I sometimes found it hard to put the brakes on work and self-improvement to spend more time with my family. As someone who considers himself ambitious, I still feel very far off from where I want to be, and as the years go by, I feel I have a lot more to catch up.  

Yet I remind myself that success is multi-dimensional. On the family/relationships and health planes, I am already very successful. Besides I have a well paid consulting job too. It’s far from being all doom and gloom. But I’m greedy, so I’m working to get more bloom and glory :).

For me, 2024 is the year of rebuilding. I ended 2023 with a defeat, so I am going to build myself up again to be victorious in 2024 and for the years ahead. To do so, I will invest in the following areas:

Health  

I am seriously taking care of my body again. I am planning to become stronger, fitter, and in general healthier.

Last year, I often neglected going to the gym for months on end. I was working on EnVsion early in the morning (often from 3-4AM) before my full-time job started and on week-ends. I had to sacrifice going to the gym to try to save the company. I don’t regret doing this. I was all in on EnVsion, in-as-much as I could be with my day job and parenting responsibilities. Going to the gym was a luxury that couldn’t be granted in this extreme situation.

Now the pendulum must swing back and some balance must be restored. In concrete terms this means that I aim to go at least 3 times to the gym and jog outside at least 2 times every week. I jokingly wrote on an Instagram post the other week that I planned to become a chad like Jeff Bezos since he started working out (or Mark Zuckerberg recently too). There should more tech chads in this world, and I am going to be one of them 😎.

I also aim to reduce my alcohol consumption even further. I don’t drink much already, but I can do with even less alcohol this year. This is not to say that I won’t indulge in a nice glass of Saint-Emilion or rum-based cocktails on special occasions, but the default state will remain sober.

Since our daughter sometimes wakes us up in the middle of the night I can’t guarantee that my sleep will always be optimal. I don’t think a lot of parents of young kids can make this promise anyway. But I’m lucky already because I rarely need to sleep more than 6 hours, so I think my sleep will be mostly OK. 

Going deep and wide into AI

For a long while, I have been very interested and curious about AI. In fact a few years ago I studied self-driving cars, neural networks, and computer vision. While working on EnVsion, I still tried to keep abreast with the fast developments taking place in the AI world. Now that I am not fighting for EnVsion’s survival anymore, I can explore the field of AI again and satisfy my curiosity.

I plan to go both deep and wide during this journey in the strange world of AI. By "deep", I intend to cover advanced papers about specific techniques or model architectures that marked significant leaps forward in the state-of-the-art. I also plan to write PyTorch (and maybe TensorFlow too) code to showcase some concepts and also cement my understanding of specific techniques and architectures.

By "wide", I mean that I will cover different modalities like text, image, video, and probably audio too. While my focus will predominantly be on diffusion models, large language models and the Transformer architecture, I plan to explore good-old Convolutional Neural Networks and traditional machine learning too.

Similarly to building in public for businesses, I plan to learn AI in public. This means that I will share my thoughts and learnings on social media (predominantly Twitter for now). I have also created a Github repository called Adventures In AI Land, which will contain my notes and learnings on many areas of AI. Feel free to star or watch this repo!

Additionally, on my day job I will be doing more data-science related activities. This means I will be approaching AI from multiple angles this year - fantastic! It seems the stars are finally aligned for me to step get into AI land again. 

Launching Products

I’m still a builder and tinkerer at heart, so of course I’m going to ship stuff in 2024.

This year though, I am not planning to work on a single project. I frankly don’t know what will and won’t work, so I don’t want to pigeonhole myself on a single product that doesn’t grow for months on end. I certainly learned this from my previous experience.

I aim to launch 5 digital products for fun and profit. I expect all these products to be infused with AI. It would be interesting if these products could be around different modalities (e.g. vision, text, sound).

Stay tuned for more.

Marketing and storytelling

I want to become a better communicator. I learned the hard way that good products don’t just sell themselves in a void. You must complement the product with good marketing. And your marketing can further amplify your product’s reach when you do it by sharing a brilliant story.

I want to be able to craft brilliant stories.

I want to share my story and thoughts more powerfully and more often, so that by the time I launch my products, I am already known well . 

Getting there will no doubt take time and a healthy amount of discomfort. I am going to have to put my face, voice, and pen out there more often that I’m accustomed. Sometimes I will flop. Other times I may even get vilified or trolled. But I’m stepping into this content arena nonetheless because I know how critical it is to amassing unfair advantages that tip the scales of business in your favour.

This year I aim to write a blog post a week, which equates to 52 posts for the year. I know… It’s ambitious. But I believe I have to maintain this cadence to draw out the storyteller within me.  My content will span across business, AI, programming, and life. 

I also plan to get into making videos for platforms like TikTok later in the year. I’m still not sure how I’ll manage all this, but the worst I could do is at least try my best here too.   

(Still) Making time for good moments in life

Life is not getting any less busier for me. And I actually like it. I presume this situation arises when parenthood, entrepreneurship, and ambition are mixed together into one’s lifestyle.

Having said that, I should remember to sometimes slow down to enjoy the precious moments with my family and loved ones. They’re probably going to be too few of these moments in many cases, but I’ll make sure to treasure them when they happen so that the feelings last like sweet perfume whose scent you remember years later.

And of course, I want to have fun while doing all this, because things are much easier to do when they feel like play to you. 

2024 - LFG 🚀.