December 2023

The year winds down and I hustle to get one last newsletter out. I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and are looking forward to 2024. I’ll be starting the year at JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, then a quick trip to Vegas for CES. Let me know if you’ll be at either, it would be great to connect in person.

I’m a big proponent of the Peter Thiel “Zero to One” philosophy, a key tenet of which is that competition is not all it’s cracked up to be, and it’s best to pick a market you can dominate and avoid head to head competition. So I always scratch my head when companies choose to compete in crowded markets when there are market leaders adjacent to them that they could just partner with. When done well, partnerships can be a much more cost effective way to grow revenue and enhance your brand. But when money is easy, as it was during years of ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy), it lowers the hurdle rate for new investments an spurs a lot of wasteful competition. So it’s no surprise that the last 3-5 years have seen some silly competition in the connected fitness market, which has been white hot and flooded with cash. With the party now over, reality is setting in. Peloton recently accepted that Lululemon is better at clothing, and Lululemon realized they aren’t great at digital fitness content. Elsewhere Wahoo is shutting down their indoor cycling app to partner with Zwift. For their part Zwift is reducing their hardware line to co-market with Wahoo. It’s OK to be good at one thing and stick to it. It’s actually a really good idea to do what you’re great at and leave the rest to others.

An application I’m working on is TeenTrainer, which is designed to help parents of busy teen athletes with tips and advice so they can better monitor training, sleep, and nutrition. I’m still in the building phase but it should be available for beta by late January. Sign up to be a beta tester at the site.

If you don’t sleep in a totally dark room, a sleep mask is really useful. I just ordered this one, it looks like a slight upgrade on the one I’ve been using the last 4+ years. On a related sleep note, my ChiliPad Ooler recently died, and frankly neither the new Dock Pro nor the 8Sleep looked like a great deal based on some of the reviews I’ve read (ChiliPad got acquired and it’s hard to tell where the company is headed). So I rolled the dice on a much lower cost, lower tech option called the AquaBed. I’ll share my results next month.

I’ve been spending a lot of time working with the OpenAI API and new Assistants tool and integrating them into Python. I’ve been using both OpenAI calls and Langchain and I’m starting to get my head around the framework for interacting with AI agents. It feels like 1999 in the internet, massive opportunity in every direction you look.

Here’s another article we wrote at Calorify talking about doubly labeled water, have a look if you are curious about it.

If you need running shoes and love Saucony as I do, this is a killer clearance deal on the Endorphin Shift 3 - $80!

After a week off from training, I’m back at it and trying to get on the trail at least once a week. I’m running 5 days a week, with doubles on one day once my weekly mileage gets back above 30 miles a week in mid-January. St. Joe’s has become my regular on Sundays.