It's already been a week since I gave away almost everything I owned and set out into the world of business/solopreneurship (while also moving house and country). I do miss the feeling of walking through the trading floor and having random discussions with top tier engineers, but would still recommend taking a leap since the full ownership and self-directed progression is a very real and exciting challenge.
The deepest realisation I've had is that I'm not yet equipped to deal with the many topics which you need to be good at if you are to experience even a moderate amount of success. I have no experience in sales, I've never done any marketing, and I've never experienced direct commercial competition when it comes to providing some good or service.
This past week has been about understanding which of these skills I should be spending most time developing, and exactly how outside of how I know, which is sitting and studying for hours from textbooks and lectures. If it were possible from textbooks, the world would be a very different place.
My main driver for choosing what to focus on is which capabilities it will unlock. For example, if I spend time learning cold outreach techniques then I build my capability to attract new customers. However, that time cannot be spent elsewhere, which means things like building deep technical infrastructure, branding, and marketing won't move.
There is however one other driver; someone has done it better. There are many cases where other people have just done a much better job than I could do, even after weeks/months of work. This includes things like website design templates, simple subscription contracts, business contracts, and that kind of thing. These are all available for free if you know where to look, and collecting all the lego bricks to build something interesting is actually quite a fun process which I thoroughly recommend.
In similar news, if you're in tech and reading this, you'll be aware of the latest large language models (LLMs) and the roles they are increasingly playing in modern business. Building something from the ground up is nice because it means I can choose how much of a role I want this technology to play. For example, I guarantee that no part of any of these newsletters, nor any of my personal emails, will ever be touched by an LLM . However, I sometimes use Perplexity or ChatGPT to get simple (untrusted) summaries of useful things. I see the outputs much like comments from postgrad students at a bar - very plausible but only probably correct. If you're anything like me and/or interested in serious engineering, then probably correct isn't enough.
Having spoken to several senior engineering colleagues across the hedge fund/trading industries, it's clear that these models are not a threat to full scope discussion-to-deployment engineering, but are more just high tech productivity tools which bring 5 minute tasks down to 30 seconds. This isn't in my opinion worth the $300/month price tag (given their limitations on larger engineering tasks), but if you've had revolutionary experiences and think I'm missing something then please let me know.
The final interesting thing this past week has been all of the paperwork and infrastructure set up for my new company: OJS Group - which I'll steadily be building into a Bloomberg competitor ( just kidding... unless 👀). It's very early days still, but I'm looking forward to sharing more as things come together. For now, please share this newsletter with someone who needs bespoke technology services or a just a push to take a risk on something new. Future episodes will include topics like building advanced technology on a shoestring, branching out into different disciplines, latest/useful open source technologies, and more. If there's anything in particular you'd like to know about what I'm doing, please also let me know as it could be featured in a future episode.
Thanks for reading and all the best,
Oliver
PS; here are some ( not sponsored ) resources which have been really useful in this first week;
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