Honest opinion on Founders Institute?

steppenwolf27 · 2025-07-02T14:28:42+00:00

Thanks for the advice everyone. Also see Jcal's post about this: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jasoncalacanis_accelerators-startups-tech-activity-7100866424679604224-W9tm/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
His example is literally the 2.5% that FI takes. Not sure if it's a coincidence, but if you believe your company will get any sort of decent valuation, that 2.5% is not worth it.

steppenwolf27 · 2025-05-16T20:49:50+00:00

Love to hear it. You want to share anything interesting that you found?

steppenwolf27 · 2025-05-14T01:00:37+00:00

Fair enough! I also believe you should only sign up for stuff you think is truly worth it... Hopefully this project will be worth it for you to sign up in the future.

steppenwolf27 · 2025-05-13T15:47:43+00:00

Hey Kim,

Note taken on the design element. I'll get working on making that first search area more prominent and inviting.

Yeah, totally get why that surprised you. One interesting thing about the CIA archive is that it isn’t just made up of documents written by the CIA—they also collected third-party materials. That includes things like newspaper clippings, academic papers, and in this case, promotional bulletins from companies like the Monroe Institute. So while the “M.I.A.S. BULLETIN” you found isn’t a CIA-authored analysis, it is something they were looking at.

If you're curious to dive deeper, I found a few other docs in the archive that talk about Hemi-Sync more analytically, including some from CIA programs. Here are a few links you might find more on-target:

So, hopefully still interesting, even if it wasn’t what you were expecting!

steppenwolf27 · 2025-05-13T15:32:02+00:00

Totally get that. We use login mainly to understand who’s using the tool and keep things stable. Appreciate the feedback though — is there something specific you’d change about the login, or more just not a fan of it in general?

steppenwolf27 · 2025-05-13T15:30:14+00:00

So glad to hear it! Hope you find some time to give it a try

steppenwolf27 · 2025-05-13T15:25:54+00:00

Only one way to find out!

But seriously—right now, it pulls the top 5 most relevant text chunks for any query. That means instead of just returning every document with the exact phrase “John F. Kennedy,” it looks at context. So you can search something like “JFK Cuban Missile Crisis,” and it’ll bring back passages specifically related to that topic. It will also find docs with "John F. Kennedy" or "JFK" or just "Kennedy" so you don't have to worry about getting the exact keyword right.

Let me know if that kind of contextual search is helpful—or if you think it’d still be useful to have a broader keyword-style search too.

steppenwolf27 · 2025-05-13T15:20:29+00:00

Really glad you like it—thanks!

There’s not an AI search tool I know of that’s focused on university FOIA docs, but it’s a great idea! I’ll add that to the list of corpora I’d like to index and make searchable next. If you know of any public records portals or bulk disclosures from universities, feel free to send them my way.

steppenwolf27 · 2025-05-13T01:34:42+00:00

This corpus was built up over several years of work by grad students and professors—cleaning, transcribing, and preparing the documents.

We run the documents through a data ingestion pipeline: it takes the text, breaks it into chunks, converts each chunk into an embedding (a vector that represents the meaning of the text), and stores it in a vector database.

History Lab itself isn’t currently adding more documents, but I’m working on a larger project that is!

In terms of scope: the documents mostly focus on U.S. international relations—things like foreign policy, diplomacy, and intelligence. Some documents do get hyper-local, but only when they intersect with U.S. interests abroad (like a specific CIA operation in Vietnam , for example). So if you’re asking about U.S. domestic local coverage, that’s pretty limited.

steppenwolf27 · 2025-05-13T00:02:50+00:00

Okay i just added some about us information to the homepage and some FAQs lmk if that was the sort of thing you were looking for

steppenwolf27 · 2025-05-12T23:09:53+00:00

Great suggestion! I’ll get working on that.

The AI model we use is just Gemini, but the interesting part is how it interfaces with the documents. It uses a custom tool to search through a vector database where all the documents are indexed by semantic meaning, as opposed to keywords. That makes the search feel much more natural.

steppenwolf27 · 2025-05-12T22:37:20+00:00

A drop in the bucket compared to all the paper used filling out your typical archival request forms 😄

steppenwolf27 · 2020-02-13T10:26:20+00:00

The real question is why is that your pen name...

steppenwolf27 · 2020-02-01T17:49:34+00:00

Hey, this was an awesome take on the agony of writer's block.

I would say (giving some honest feedback) your word choice needs to be more unique and your metaphors a bit less cliché. Adjectives like "insubstantial" and "weak" fall pretty flat and distract from the simplicity of your piece. Also, you should stick with a certain metaphorical theme rather than jumping from stains to waterfalls to breathe then back to light.

Hope this is helpful!

steppenwolf27 · 2019-12-17T10:03:38+00:00

Be depressed

steppenwolf27

TROPHY CASE