SMAAART

Today I met with a supposedly top-notch career coach / executive coach.

We went over my resume, my linkedIN, my online presence, my experience, education, work....

In a nutshell I am an executive, in operations, with a long career in high-tech/Life Sciences.

I am very technical, a lot more technical than my peers. Besides the standard operations skills, I had deep knowledge and experience in "systems", and then, in the past decade or so, in data science/data analysis; and more recently AI/AI tools.

I have an online portfolio with tools that I built, papers I wrote, best practices, etc....

My present job search is not going well, kind of crickets so to speak.

So, the outcome of my session with my career coach was to dumb down my entire resume and collateral:

- downplay my title

- remove all the data skills, tools, and certification

- remove my online portfolio

- change my email from name(at)industry.ai to a generic gmail (he was very adamant about it)

He's probably right. Is he?

In a world where all companies/hiring managers are compaining that there are not qualified/good workers, here I am with a long career (yes I am old), stellar performance, proven and demostrable mastery of systems / data / AI tools (but I am not a SWE) and.... are all those skills too intimidating for a plan vanilla operations job, yet not enough for a real technical job?

What does HN think?

T.I.A.

’m hunting for a new gig, aiming for an Operations role with an AI or AI-driven company in NYC, and the usual “good” advice hasn’t moved the needle.

I am reading Ideaflow by Jeremy Utley, and in it Jeremy reminded me that sometimes the fastest way to good ideas is to start with awful ones.

So I figured I’d ask the HN tribe: what’s the worst job-search advice you can come up with? The sillier, riskier, or more doomed, the better. I’ll sort through the carnage for anything I can twist into something useful.

Hit me with your terrible ideas.

I am pretty savvy when it comes to Personal Finances and Investing, but I am also old, and this week I just realized that I messed up a bit by not taking advantage of the "Back door Roth IRA" stratey and also by keeping my excess cash into a regular money market and not in something like SGOV..... but I diverge.

Two questions:

1) Is there already an AI tool to help me out with my personal finances? More like strategically than tasks or picking investments.

2) Is there/will be a market for it?

3) Is anyone working on it?

Thanks in advance.

I have read about 700 self-help books from happiness to confidence to depression; and the vast majority suck because they are akin to sugar pill: they convince the reader that whatever their problem is it's not their fault, but it's someone else's fault, the system, society whatnot. And the reader eats this left and right, and they are willing to pay 19.99 for what is practically an alibi for life.

Life coaches are a joke.

Most executive coaches are a scam.

But, there are some valid "techniques" that work at getting results, the only problem is that they require a lot of work, hold the individual accountable, and therefore they are not popular.

I have identified a few, and - looking back at my life - certain things have helped me claw my way out of generational poverty and now doing OK financially; getting rid of my depression; managing my anxiety; and - overall - living a very satisfactory life.

Looking around online, most everyone is unhappy, and with many unfulfilled wishes. From a business perspective it's a huge untapped market; untapped because the solutions don't work.

So, my question to this forum is: am I delusional to think that I can put together a program, under the freemium model, whereas my basic "tools" are out there, for free (open source license), for anyone to use; and then have certain "services" under the tiered subscription model.

Individuals who get benefits greater then the cost would gladly participate, everyone else can continue on their own merry life.

I only need 1,000 true friends after all, and I can use the lean startup methodology.

So, be brutal HN, aside from being hard AF, do you find any fault in this thinking?

Any tips besides eventually applying to Y Combinator?

Thank in advance.

I am old enough to have lived through the AOL era, and to remember that at one point AOL bought Time Warner. I lived the dot-com era and loved it all.

I am also a fan of Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma, and connecting the dots I can't help but wonder what's after what comes next.

OpenAI is out there very prominently, but so was AOL; but the long game didn't belong to AOL, it was created by disruptive business models like Amazon/eBay, Yahoo->Google, MySpace->Facebook and others.

At the same time timelines are faster and more compressed in this AI-era than in the internet era.

So, what is around the corner? Who will leverage the second-to-market advantage standing on the shoulders of the early giants?

I just finished re-reading Zero to One, and this time around I liked it even more than the first time.

My all time favorites books for entrepreneurs are:

* The Innovator's Dilemma / The Innovator's solution

* The lean StartUp

* Crossing the Chasm

What other books does HN likes at the dawn of the AI era?

Thank in advance fellow humans.