The 7th Iteration of My Book “The Entrepreneur’s Essentials” — An AI-Powered Podcast
Among our most ancient technologies for recording, preserving, and transmitting knowledge, books have been subject to periodic transformations throughout history. Now, however, it’s not just a transition from parchment, to paper, to pixels. What we’ve done with my book is part of the transformation of information into a new and varied dimension that will change our relationship with knowledge itself.
Just as technology has transformed everyday objects into multitasking marvels — phones that are cameras and now AI-powered digital assistants, watches that track fitness and monitor health, or countless other examples — the book is not standing still.
I’m happy to announce as we contemplate entering the new year that The Entrepreneur’s Essentials, now in its seventh iteration, is a free, AI-driven podcast. Each chapter is read by an AI-powered version of my voice that will allow me to publish it for free in the major languages of the world. And the chapter-by-chapter narration from two AI personas, female and male, is so new an innovation that I’ve not yet decided what to call this immersive experience — an edition, an iteration, a customization?
By any description, however, this new iteration of The Entrepreneur’s Essentials shares its ideas and insights with reflection, and even humor, that makes the content accessible to new audiences — or to its existing audience in a new and vivid new way.
For example, here’s how the AI co-hosts begin to unpack the Introduction of my book:
“It’s a look at what it really takes to build a business, a successful business” says the AI’s cheerful male co-host persona. “We’re not just talking about profits, we’re talking about something much deeper — the idea that meaning and purpose are at the heart of any really thriving venture, any company.”
“Yeah, that’s what really jumped out at me,” responds the equally upbeat female co-host. “The way the author sort of redefines entrepreneurship. It’s not just about launching companies. It really is a journey of finding meaning, both for the entrepreneurs themselves, but also for the team that they build around them.”
This AI duo continues, reacting to the book’s opening ideas just as two human book critics might:
“Yeah, I love that. That’s really cool. It’s not just about building a product or a service, but it’s the ‘why’ behind it. And the author uses a really interesting analogy to illustrate this, comparing entrepreneurs to Sir Isaac Newton,” says the male co-host, who then asks: “How does that work?”
His female co-host has a quick response. “Well, it’s brilliant actually. Just as Newton used a prism to break light into its spectrum of colors, entrepreneurs take existing ideas, technologies, sometimes whole industries, and they combine them in new ways to create something entirely new.”
From there, this artificial yet convincingly realistic duo walks you through most of my chapters (not all as it failed too hard on a few of them). These are now recast as episodes, to recount all my essential entrepreneurial lessons in a very accessible way (just like you would listen to a casual podcast while working out). These lessons range from such broad topics as the search for meaning that is the essence of entrepreneurship, to practical guidance on ideation, fundraising, launch, and inspiring your team, to the ethics and obligations of entrepreneurs — all drawn from founding and running the six companies I’ve founded and the well over one hundred others that I have invested in. You can jump in to all of it on Apple Podcasts here, Spotify here, and Libsyn, the podcast publishing platform I used, here (note that Libsyn automatically sorts from the most recent to least, so it makes for a more awkward browsing experience).
Creating this series of AI-moderated podcasts from my book’s pages was enabled by NotebookLM, technology unveiled earlier this year from Google Labs. With a click, NotebookLM allows you to convert complex information, from text, video or even slide decks, into a contextualized conversation that makes it all more accessible, understandable, and fun, as this YouTube video walks you through. The capability of NotebookLM is head-spinning. But it’s important to keep in mind that this is just Act I in a drama yet to dramatically unfold in many stages as AI becomes ubiquitous in our lives. Note that I had to work quite a bit with NotebookLM to redo many chapters over and over, so it isn’t perfect but you’ll be able to judge yourself in my podcast now (again, a few of the chapters I could never get it to do right and therefore didn’t include them.)
“AI is democratizing creativity,” says LinkedIn co-founder and CEO Reid Hoffman, in a conversation with his own AI-created “digital twin” avatar that summarizes the AI Summer Summit by Digital Hollywood. “Whether it’s music, content, or fashion, it’s opening all kinds of new doors for creators.”
Hoffman is among the leaders in exploring uses of AI, creating not just a digital twin of himself from his recorded decades of writing and speaking. He also wrote a book with AI as his co-author, OpenAI’s GPT-4, Impromptu — Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI (a shout-out to Hoffman for making Impromptu free online, like I did for my own book.) Hoffman’s work has also inspired my son, Levi, to create my own AI avatar, which isn’t nearly as fancy as Reid AI but nonetheless functional (and at a budget of less than $200).
In microcosm, my ongoing endeavor with The Entrepreneur’s Essentials, especially over the last five years, exemplifies both the recursive nature of product evolution in the digital age and its accelerating pace. My mission to articulate and disseminate the lessons of my entrepreneurial journey has, in fact, gone through seven phases — an appropriate number, given that it all began with my personal blog, Lucky7, which I launched in December of 2012.
1. Lucky7: The name Lucky7 was inspired by my late mother, Brenda, who was all love and had passed away the year before I launched my blog. My mom had fostered my passion to change the world through technology since age seven. It was the perfect time for my blog to launch. I had just retired from my role as CEO of my fifth company, Bazaarvoice, after taking it public, while continuing to serve on our Board of Directors. I wanted to create a medium to give back to the entrepreneurial community that had given me so much and to write about both success and failure in a very personal way. It was also an incredible way for me to cement my own learnings — to attempt to teach is to learn yourself.
2. The free online book on Medium (the first edition of The Entrepreneur’s Essentials): The idea of giving back to other entrepreneurs continued to evolve as I began Hurt Family Investments and compounded my learnings, so in August of 2019, I consolidated and edited the best-of work from Lucky7, along with some original new content, into the first edition of The Entrepreneur’s Essentials as a free online book on Medium, published in Capital Factory’s Austin Startups whose co-founder and CEO, Josh Baer, and I have long been friends and collaborators. Josh and I recently shared the stage at Capital Factory during Austin Tech Week and recorded this podcast together about Austin’s past, current, and future, which was great fun.
3. An audio version, as read on YouTube (video) and SoundCloud (audio only): That same year, I was honored to be asked to create an audio version of the first edition of my book for the Technion — the Israel Institute of Technology, Israel’s oldest university (often called “the MIT of Israel”), where I’ve proudly lectured several times. To make it very accessible to students and fish in the medium they lived in, I recorded the book’s chapters myself and published them on YouTube, where they are now used as part of the curriculum at the school. I also made them available on SoundCloud for people that preferred the audio only — here’s part one and part two in that medium.
4. The second edition of The Entrepreneur’s Essentials — a proper print book: I was eager to expand the project with a more conventional, or semi-conventional, format. By this point I had begun collaborating on a number of things with my friend David Judson, an intellectual co-conspirator across a broad spectrum, who has become my writing partner. Over 13 months, we spent every weekend broadening and deepening the content. We made sure to include how the original book’s lessons had played out in my sixth startup, data.world, and we reflected on how well these lessons had worked at the many companies my wife, Debra, and I had invested in by then.
5. The Digital Companion: Before we published, however, we hit upon another innovation as a way to share all the sources and resources we had relied upon, ranging from the classic work of Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, to that of Sebastian Mallaby, whose seminal The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Art of Disruption, came out a few months before my book. In what we were to dub the Digital Companion, we included links not just to the books that have informed and inspired me, but also links to dozens of podcasts, webinars, TED Talks, and other videos. It’s a unique interactive bibliography that I wished other authors would emulate.
On Mother’s Day in 2022, I published The Entrepreneur’s Essentials as both an analog book on Amazon as well as a free digital version, which includes the Digital Companion. In the further spirit of giving back to the community, I decided to dedicate all profits from the book’s sales on Amazon to the initiative of another entrepreneur and friend, Kendra Scott. She created the Kendra Scott Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Institute at the University of Texas Austin, which has focused on lifting up female entrepreneurs with a range of valuable resources, including experienced mentors and speakers.
6. The Entrepreneur’s Essentials GPT: The biggest miss of publishing my book in May of 2022? What happened on November 30, 2022? Oh, yeah, ChatGPT launched! And less than a year later, custom GPTs were born. I quickly updated the Digital Companion to include a link to my own custom GPT for The Entrepreneur’s Essentials. It may have been the first book you could chat with online! The first AI-driven experience of my book was born.
7. Now, the podcast: The Entrepreneur’s Essentials is now available in AI-driven podcast form, as I mentioned above. Right now only season one is live, which is English-only (note that currently Google’s NotebookLM is English-only too.) In 2025, I’ll also publish it in other languages as future seasons. As I write this right now from India, where we just attended a three-day Indian wedding, I’ll certainly be publishing it in Hindi as just one of the languages that my new AI voice will read, along with Spanish, French, Mandarin, German, Italian, Japanese, and a few others. Enabled by AI, all languages will be nonetheless rendered in my voice. When I’ve tested this and sent to native-language speaking friends in these languages, it really freaks them out — my Indian friends have said, “Brett, you are speaking academically-perfect Hindi, but it’s in your voice!” For each language using today’s technologies, this costs me around $60 per language, not counting the time I spend using the tools to do it. This cost will certainly fall — we are using the worst versions of these models that will ever exist. And the AI-generated podcast hosts version has certainly also excited to friends I’ve sent it to as I refined it. Again, you can jump in to all of it on Apple Podcasts here, Spotify here, and Libsyn here — all for free.
What’s next? Well, this summer my son, Levi, created Brett Hurt GPT, which is a collection of all of my writings, speeches, and podcast interviews to date, outside of my book. The Austin Business Journal even tested it out, unbeknownst to me, and then interviewed Levi and me about its accuracy (it was around 90% accurate.) This foreshadows what’s to come in the age of AI agents, which will clearly be a dominant trend in 2025. Imagine a Brett Hurt investing agent that entrepreneurs could pitch on their startups (or their AI agents could pitch) that would save both of us a lot of time before we book a meeting with each other in real-time. In the article I wrote last month about ChatGPT’s second anniversary, the interviewees, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, nailed this AI agent prediction. And Sequoia Capital predicted it’s going to be a $10 trillion opportunity.
2025 is certainly going to be exciting, are you ready? In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the seventh iteration of my book in this new podcast form over the rest of your holiday break.
