#088: Ultimate Robotics Resource, Last Moat is Attention, Nivi Notes on Marketing

Hi All!

We are pleased to welcome you to this week's edition of Undiscovered, a newsletter with exclusive resources and insights expanding from the material found on our main site - becketu.com.

This week, we will take a look at one of the most comprehensive resources for learning robotics, discuss the last 'moat' most founders have, one of the most practical ways for 10+ year goal setting, and more.

Let's dive in:

Ultimate Robotics Resource

The entire field of robotics has been fascinating to me lately, starting with my introduction to the incredible low-cost dextrous hand made by 808 Robots. I was extremely happy to find another comprehensive guide to robotics shared by Marco Mascorro, who is a partner at the venture capital firm A16Z.

The site includes robotics software/simulation, recent AI papers, robot foundation models, robot datasets, robotics hardware, and more. Commenters to his original tweet were quick to point out two open-source additions that needed to be made: LeRobot and Pollen Robotics.

LeRobot is an open-source platform from Hugging Face that provides AI models, datasets, and tools to make real-world robotics development more accessible, focusing on machine learning techniques like imitation and reinforcement learning.

Pollen Robotics is a team known for building open-source robots and hardware and was acquired by Hugging Face to further the goal of making robotics open, affordable, and widely available.

And in somewhat related news, ByteDance and Carnegie Mellon formed an unusual partnership to produce a tool called PartCrafter. It's essentially an AI that is able to take a photo and turn the subjects in it into fully editable 3D parts. This could be a gamechanger along with Adam CAD for 3D printing designs and possibly even more parts that can be used in robotics.

The Last Moat is Attention

With software products becoming extremely easy to create today, the final big advantage a founder can have is the ability to command attention. These are the words spoken from the indie hacking, slow traveling legend Pieter Levels.

Recently, Cluely CEO Roy Lee has been making headlines for his engagement farming tactics on Twitter. To paraphrase the legendary bowler Pete Weber, "Love him or hate him, we watched". Anyone with an ounce of algorithmically crafted tech news would have seen his antics, and he has proven his ability to capture the eyes of millions of people.

Attention is not too dissimilar than apps when it comes to measuring quality. Just as AI has made it easy to create apps, media is becoming increasingly competitive by being easier to make. Droves of AI slop are now flooding social media platforms, and it's becoming harder than ever to stand out.

My secret desire is that AI continues to overwhelm these platforms, so much so, that when we see real and authentic content online, it immediately stands out and rises to the surface. Which leads us to point #1 in our next section . . .

Nivi Notes on Marketing

17 notes of marketing from Babak Nivi, co-founder of AngelList:

1. Not being real is the one and only cardinal sin in marketing.

2. Show the product, use the product—skip the grandeur.

3. Marketing with a business goal is always junk.

4. If you can’t win on the truth, you don’t deserve to win.

5. Tell the customer what you would want to know if you were in their shoes.

6. Be truthful and positive at the same time.

7. Marketing is the task of creating new knowledge and sharing it.

8. If you’re not creating new knowledge every day, you have bigger problems than marketing.

9. Marketing is a kind of leadership and should be treated as such.

10. If your marketing would work for any company, it’s no good.

11. Corporate marketing is intrinsically evasive and avoids responsibility.

12. Being first to market gets you so much free marketing.

13. You will never be able to market to people better than you.

14. Marketing is recruiting.

15. Don’t dumb it down.

16. Have an enemy.

17. Create knowledge, speak the truth, build great product, don’t be defensive, and put the customer over the company.

YouTube Insights From 1B+ View Consultant

Paddy Galloway is one of the most trusted voices in the YouTube consulting space, studying YouTube his whole life but achieving widespread breakout success in late 2019. He sometimes posts open-ended 'Ask Me Anything' threads, and the latest did not disappoint.

Here are a few of my favorite questions and answers he tackled:

Ryan Peterman: What % importance is each of these in your opinion?

1. Packaging - thumbnail, title, hook

2. Production quality - raw video, audio quality, lighting, etc

3. Content design - what is the actual video about and script writing

Paddy Galloway: 50% - Packaging 40% - Content design 10% - Production quality

These questions don’t really have a proper answer though as so dependent on channel and what stage of YouTube you are at.

For example if your audio is awful production quality becomes essential haha

Oleksii Rublychan: How do you do research thumbnails and decided what thumbnail to use? That’s my weakest point so far
Paddy Galloway: Outlier studying is a great place to start, in multiple niches, some of my best ever thumbnails were a combo of influences from 2-4 viral videos

Team Edge: How often do you think I should focus on emulating 1/10's from other channels vs totally original content?
Paddy Galloway: I quite like my split: - 1/3 Internal: what’s working for us - 1/3 External - 1/3 Innovating original ideas If you’re coming up with 30ish ideas in each of those buckets you have a good split!

Ivar: If you had only one piece of advice to give, what would it be?
Paddy Galloway: Spend 2 hours a day studying ideas and thumbnails for 365 days in a row and you will be better at ideation and thumbnails than 99% of creators.

Be sure to check out the full thread to see more of his recommendations when it comes to how to balance short form and long form videos, how to approach podcasts on YouTube, and more!

Set Goals Without Losing Your Mind

Love the following approach from Jay Alto on Twitter, who lays out the blueprint for how to set goals without losing your mind:

> pick one area of my life (i.e career)

> describe what perfect looks like in 10 years

> what can i do this year to get there?

> what can i do this month? week?

> break that down into tasks

> complete one today

> repeat tomorrow

P.S Can you please respond to this email and bring it into your 'primary' inbox? You can say 'Hi!', tell us the last book you read recently, or what your favorite resource was from above.

It would also help if you add us as a contact on your mailing list, with a visual tutorial below:

We appreciate any feedback you are able to provide here. What do you want more or less of? Other suggestions? Feel free to reach out to us on Instagram and give us a follow there, tag your friends on our posts, and please forward this newsletter along to anyone else who would enjoy it.

Disclaimer: Becket U is an Amazon Associate and purchases through Amazon links may earn a small affiliate commission, but the price is the same for you. We only recommend books we love and think you would love, too.

Always wishing you the best,

J.B.

Becket U

Undiscovered #088: Ultimate Robotics Resource, Last Moat is Attention, Nivi Notes on Marketing

#088: Ultimate Robotics Resource, Last Moat is Attention, Nivi Notes on Marketing

Ultimate Robotics Resource

The Last Moat is Attention

Nivi Notes on Marketing

YouTube Insights From 1B+ View Consultant

Set Goals Without Losing Your Mind

Undiscovered #087: The Blueberry Billionaire, Creating Magic for Consumers, Craft of Masonry

Undiscovered #086: First Mary Meeker Report in 6 Years, Links to Get Ahead in Life, TikTok is Cooked

Undiscovered #085: Latest On Nuclear Energy, GEO Taking Over from SEO, Compound Early in the Morning