Resuming after 1 month break

Month-long break, Aimap.today & Techstars San Francisco

I've been absent lately, as some of you noticed. I'd set aside three months for a focused "studying" period, and it was a lot of fun to dive deep into prompt engineering, evals, LLM product lifecycles, agents, and more. However, transitioning from my previous full-time job to 8+ hour study days was challenging. Because I'm usually not great at taking breaks (I think I never took more than 2 weeks off), this time I was determined to stick to my three-month deadline and disconnect. I hit the deadline and went completely offline. I had a blast spending a month road cycling in Spain & Germany and a lot of time with family.

Now, I'm recharged and excited to be back!

Here are some learnings, a new project I shipped this week, and some plans for the next few months:

Aimap.today: An Experiment with Agents & Flows

I recently focused on learning about agent tooling to build an AI company researcher for personal use.

The plan: Create an agent to find funding news, identify AI-related companies, analyze their websites, build a knowledge base, write a long form article about it, and categorize them into three tiers (foundational AI tech, AI-enabled, and AI users).

I explored several agent frameworks: CrewAI, LangGraph (LangChain’s agent take), LlamaIndex's Llama-Agents (a microservice take on agents, where each agent is it’s own service), and AgentOps (very cool instrumentation tool). I also tried building flows with AirOps and n8n. In the process of fetching and enriching the data I also tried Jina Reader/SERP, You.com API, Apollo API, and Clay agent.

Ultimately, for now, I decided to take a stab at coding my own thing. Most existing frameworks focus on LLMs talking to each other, but all I needed was a workflow/pipeline to chain multiple processes together.

My current boilerplate is in Ruby, and I wasn't satisfied with the existing packages for API clients like Claude and OpenAI. So, I coded these from scratch as well. The whole project, including study time, took about two weeks.

👉 The result is: https://aimap.today . Please, check it out and let me know what you think.

I built this for myself and plan to add new companies weekly. There's more I want to do, including a weekly digest for newly researched companies. If you sign-up you’ll be notified when I finish the weekly digest part.

My next step is to explore more out-of-the-box platforms like AirOps and n8n, and try to covert my little workflow to these tools.

Code-wise the pipeline currently looks like this:

Joined Techstars for the First San Francisco class

I'm thrilled to share that I’ll be helping Techstars’ first San Francisco class as an EIR (Entrepreneur in Residence). I've been following my friend and former boss, Neal, as he ran Techstars Chicago and Oakland. When he mentioned the new San Francisco class, I jumped at the chance to participate.

The cohort is impressive, featuring many interesting AI-enabled businesses. I'm excited to work with all the founders. You can view the full cohort here: https://www.techstars.com/newsroom/techstars-announces-inaugural-class-of-san-francisco-accelerator

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It's great to be back. Building aimap.today has been an a cool learning experience, and I'm eager to continue improving and expanding it.

Joining Techstars as an EIR is another exciting opportunity I'm looking forward to.

I also may be joining a team on a new project soon, but I'll save that for future updates.

Going forward, my goal is to resume weekly updates.