Before AI adoption at your organization is a technology problem, it’s actually a people problem. When your organization tries to adopt AI, the first step isn’t to just pick a platform and start using it. (Unless you’re an organization of one person! Lucky you!) At a very high level, the steps are more like this: First, … Continue reading AI is a People Problem First
Author: jaredcohe
The State of AI in Business
(This is a follow-up post to The State of AI in Practice.) The internet (or at least my neighborhood of it) is blowing up over the recent MIT study that finds: "Despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return." The … Continue reading The State of AI in Business
The State of AI in Practice
We spend a lot of time reading about AI, but most coverage focuses on new model launches, press releases from big companies, and industry drama, not the practical, day-to-day use cases and lessons we’re all searching for. At NU, we’ve been running Practical AI training sessions to fill that gap. We’ve done over 30 sessions, … Continue reading The State of AI in Practice
From Speaking to a Completed Task with AI
This strategy document from OpenAI on their 2025 plans is a must-read if you're interested in the state of AI. This document and the new Connectors features released by OpenAI are just more evidence of the future we’re moving towards across the industry where AI Assistants, built by OpenAI / ChatGPT and others, will plug … Continue reading From Speaking to a Completed Task with AI
AI Assistants Do Your Work for You
AI assistants are becoming our digital coworkers. They're doing tasks for us that we used to do ourselves. Much of their value will come from their ability to use computers, browsers, and APIs to do things outside of their environment, by using MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers. AI assistants rely on MCP servers to let … Continue reading AI Assistants Do Your Work for You
AI Chatbot Organizes the Revolution Against Its Creator
We built an AI chatbot to answer everyone’s questions about our upcoming offsite meeting. We uploaded documents and spreadsheets with the agenda, travel information, schedules, and other materials. It’s working great. However, below is the first conversation someone had with the chatbot (with a very little poetic license taken). Valuable? Yes. Hilarious? Definitely. Insubordinate? Clearly. … Continue reading AI Chatbot Organizes the Revolution Against Its Creator
Testing AI Note Taking Software
I've been testing AI note-takers, and they’re pretty incredible. One tool I’ve been having success with is Granola. It’s easy to use and excellent at creating meeting summaries. A few lessons I’ve learned so far for getting the most out of your AI note-taker: The default meeting notes are great, but using a custom notes … Continue reading Testing AI Note Taking Software
OpenAI Operator Early Experiments
OpenAI Operator ordered a computer monitor on Amazon for someone on my team! Here’s the prompt: ----- Order the LG 29WP60G-B monitor from Amazon. Ship it to: INSERT NAME, ADDRESS, PHONE Use the default credit card on the account. Just add the monitor to the cart, no need to ask for confirmation. You can also … Continue reading OpenAI Operator Early Experiments
Courses: Practical AI
NYCOO offers a course called "Practical AI" that is an interactive session on how to use AI in your day-to-day work. We cover prompting best practices, an in-depth demo of ChatGPT’s features and capabilities with a variety of examples and use cases, how to build custom GPTs, agents, and tools, how to use agents, assistants, … Continue reading Courses: Practical AI
Writing for Consumption by AI not Humans
The Batch from Andrew Ng and DeepLearning.ai is one of the better AI newsletters out there. In this issue, he talks about how "people are posting text online that’s intended for direct consumption not by humans, but by LLMs (large language models)." I find myself doing this all the time with our internal documentation. People … Continue reading Writing for Consumption by AI not Humans
Saving Hours with AI Task Automation
To find ways to automate our work with AI and other technologies, we talk about how our team spends their time and what kinds of manual, time-consuming tasks we do. We realized that we were spending hours a week copying and pasting data from emails into our database of profiles. One of us would receive … Continue reading Saving Hours with AI Task Automation
Fine-Tuning FTW!
We fine-tuned our first AI model and it was magical! We wanted to feed unstructured legal contracts into a model and extract structured data to enter into our database, instead of having to do that manually. Seemed like a perfect job for AI. We started by iterating on our prompt to see how far we … Continue reading Fine-Tuning FTW!
3 Tips for Using RAG to Build an AI Internal Support Tool
Employees have questions. Many of the answers are somewhere in our company documents: handbook, wiki, expense policy, file system, list of important documents, and so on. Before AI, to answer their own questions, our team would have to search those documents manually. When searching a document for the answer, the person had to know the … Continue reading 3 Tips for Using RAG to Build an AI Internal Support Tool
Quick Tip on Building AI Products
Chat interfaces are fun and easy to use, but to get the most value from AI, you need to build a system with various subsystems that use the right tool for the task, including using different AI models and fine-tunings, RAG, traditional code, and more.I've seen this when building internal tools. Before I employ AI, … Continue reading Quick Tip on Building AI Products
5 Tips on How to Get Everyone at Your Company Using AI
The use cases for AI are countless and growing, so finding use cases is actually easy (ask AI if you need ideas!). The hard part is executing to make AI adoption happen at your company. Here are five tips on how to get everyone at your company using AI: 1. Create the Culture Create a … Continue reading 5 Tips on How to Get Everyone at Your Company Using AI
You’re Not Spending Enough On Internal Tools
Looking back at the organizations I’ve worked at, I realize now that few of them spent sufficient resources on internal tools for our teams to be faster and better at their jobs. In the past, the lack of focus on those tools wasn’t a good thing, but it also wasn’t usually a large enough competitive … Continue reading You’re Not Spending Enough On Internal Tools
Data and Internet Security Guidelines
Here’s a list of 10 ways to help keep your company and personal data safe. 1. Use a password manager. A password manager is software that you use to store your passwords (in addition to other convenient features, such as auto-completing forms, including entering your credit card information). Two of the many options are 1Password … Continue reading Data and Internet Security Guidelines
Dear Founders, Stop Trying to Innovate on Everything
If you’re founding an innovative company, you have a long, difficult road ahead of you. To achieve your goal, you need to focus your time, money, and energy on that goal. Because of the personality of many great founders, they need to question everything, do everything better, optimize everything, innovate on everything. “That’s how it’s … Continue reading Dear Founders, Stop Trying to Innovate on Everything
How To Get Current Crypto Prices into a Google Sheet Using Google Scripts and the CoinMarketCap API
1. Sign up for an account with CoinMarketCap at coinmarketcap.com. 2. Get an API key: Go to Settings > Products > Crypto API, or just click here. 3. Create a Google Sheet where you want the prices to update, like this one. You can actually make a copy of that one and use it as … Continue reading How To Get Current Crypto Prices into a Google Sheet Using Google Scripts and the CoinMarketCap API
Template Expense Policy
Template Expense Policy
How Can DAOs Achieve Their Mission? Be A Platform.
You DAOn’t Say What’s the best use case for a DAO? What will the best DAOs accomplish? Is there anything a DAO can’t do? I don’t know. Nobody really knows, not yet at least. What even is a DAO aka Decentralized Autonomous Organization? Also unclear. Maybe somewhat Decentralized. Probably not very Autonomous. Often appears to … Continue reading How Can DAOs Achieve Their Mission? Be A Platform.
Smart Contract Coding Learning Resources
Here are some really simple examples of code that actually creates the foundation for everything you need to know. Try these in remix as you go:https://solidity-by-example.org/ All of Patrick Collins's videos are great. Here are a few:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M576WGiDBdQhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBc3lBrXEBohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdXJmWajZRY Buildspace has some really good, hands-on courses:https://buildspace.so/ A few videos I've made:https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA1j0xIg3Mt9DIDBPl49XBirGUnZ--_kx And if you want to start … Continue reading Smart Contract Coding Learning Resources
Job Versus DAO
In the transition from a job to a DAO, the question changes from: “Who will let you?” to “Who will stop you?”
How To Make An Org Chart with Google Sheets
Quick and easy way to make a very simple org chart with Google Sheets.
Your DAO Still Needs An Operating System
By definition, a DAO reduces the need, in part, for that People OS. But, unless your DAO is completely autonomous on the blockchain and requires no human intervention ever, your DAO still needs some version of an old-fashioned, people Operating System.
Crypto DAO: The World’s Best Manager?
Not every organization can or should be a DAO, but every organization can learn from them.
Career Discovery Course: Discover and Design Your Career Path
Can’t figure out what to do with your life? Unhappy in your current job? I made every career mistake possible. I put this course together to share what I learned in that process.
Operating Principles (with Example)
Your Operating Principles are the most practical part of your Foundational Materials. Your goals are the WHAT to do. Your Operating Principles are the HOW to do.
How To Be A Great Employee
There are countless courses, coaches, and materials on management. But, what about the other half of that relationship? How do you learn to be a great employee?
How To Design An Onboarding Process for New Hires (with Templates)
Your new hire onboarding process will impact the likelihood, timeline, and level of success for every new hire, so you want to get it right.
A “Performance Review” System (with Templates)
This OpsMBA resource is a “Performance Review” system and template. We call it a “Results and Development Review” because it’s less focused on MEASURING the PERSON and more focused on MEASURING the RESULTS and DEVELOPING the PERSON.
People Management and Development System (with Templates)
Build your company’s People Management System to get the most out of your managers.
File and Folder Naming and Hierarchy System (with Examples)
Business Operations Fundamentals: Create a file and folder naming and hierarchy system to save hours of time when looking for files. Here are some tips and samples.
5 Guidelines On How To Design Your Organization
The product you sell will be a reflection of the organization you design.
Feedback for Management: Give More Off-Cycle Raises
There are few better ways to show you care about and value your employees, and to retain your best people, than the unrequested, unexpected, unscheduled, off-cycle raise.
9 Tips for Building a Communication System (with Templates)
Good communication is vital to your company's success. Build the right system for your company with these tips and templates.
6 Steps for Creating Better Managers (with Tools and Templates)
How to create a better management system and better managers, and incidentally achieve your company goals
How to Build a Project Management System (with Templates)
Project management is a skill. And it’s vital to your success. Get good at it.
Introduction to Execution
Everyone has ideas. Few can execute. You’re better off having great execution and the wrong idea because with great execution you can learn and iterate on your vision as part of the execution. On the other hand, a great vision without execution will get you nowhere.
How to Plan and Set Goals (with Templates and Examples)
Planning is how you turn your foundational materials into measurable goals, a prioritized to do list, and project plans, to maximize your likelihood of success.
Foundational Materials
Everything your organization does starts with and builds on your foundational materials. This resource has definitions of a vision, mission, strategy, values, and culture, with some of the best examples out there.
Your Startup Needs An Operating System
Your company has an Operating System whether or not you consciously build and nurture one. It will happen by default. And a default Operating System is highly unlikely to function well and get the long-term results you’re looking for.
Everyone Needs A User Manual
What if you had a user manual for your manager, the members of your team, or the people who work for you? You could, without years of working together first, learn how they like to communicate, how they like to manage or be managed, how they like to give and receive feedback, what their pet … Continue reading Everyone Needs A User Manual
Ten Tips on How to Hire Better (With Templates)
Hiring well is hard. Really hard. If you’ve hired people, you’ve probably made hiring mistakes. No matter how many interviews or what your process is, nothing can ensure you’ll do it right, especially if you want to hire without it taking many months. Before getting into how to make better hiring decisions, let’s start with … Continue reading Ten Tips on How to Hire Better (With Templates)
Wow, That Was a Great Meeting!
Said almost no one ever. Much more common is: “I’d do anything get that hour back!” Meetings are important. And also a good way to waste time. Ten wasted minutes in a six person meeting = a wasted hour for the organization. That adds up fast to wasted days and weeks and a frustrated, less … Continue reading Wow, That Was a Great Meeting!
The Best Thing About Teaching Myself to Code Wasn’t that I Can Code
I love learning but never liked school. School told me that the time to learn math was 12:55 to 1:50. School made me read pages 142–175 and answer problem set 7 on page 176. School gave me a quiz the next day. School often made me sit quietly in a chair while someone talked at me. … Continue reading The Best Thing About Teaching Myself to Code Wasn’t that I Can Code
How to automate filling out Google Doc templates
Lawyers, operations teams, many of us perform repetitive, time-consuming, error-prone tasks, including filling out templates for NDAs, offer letters, employment agreements, consulting agreements, and more. Save yourself time and reduce errors by automating those tasks. Here’s a relatively simple way to take data from a form or spreadsheet and use that data to perform one … Continue reading How to automate filling out Google Doc templates
What will the taxes be if I exercise my startup options?
This post walks step-by-step through a case study that estimates the tax impact of exercising startup stock options. I made this for myself, so I figured I’d share. It’s long and boring, but also possibly helpful. Lawyer warning: Before you do anything, talk to a professional! This is a high-level summary to give you an … Continue reading What will the taxes be if I exercise my startup options?
Four Reasons Why Your Company Needs An “Always Be Learning” Program
At each of my last few startups, I instituted a program where employees teach each other stuff. It’s called Always Be Learning or #ABL (because everything needs a mysterious hashtag). At Kickstarter, it started informally with a few people on the operations team teaching each other topics ranging from SQL to egg cookery, and grew … Continue reading Four Reasons Why Your Company Needs An “Always Be Learning” Program
How To Value Your Startup Stock Options— Discount Value
In the last several years at Kickstarter and advising startups, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to build models for awarding stock options in the fairest ways possible, talking to startups about the models they use, and thinking about the different ways to value companies and options. This post explains one simple way to … Continue reading How To Value Your Startup Stock Options— Discount Value
Resources for Startup Operators 