Captain's Log
Frequently Asked Questions

A mobile version of Captain's Log may be available in the future.

• Captain's Log is an essential tool in the entrepreneur's toolbox for knowledge-based ventures.   First and foremost, it belongs in their command center.

• Entrepreneurs of knowledge-based ventures spend an enormous amount of time in front of a keyboard and screen - reading, processing and creating knowledge.   That computing environment IS their command center.  

• If you were meeting a startup advisor who has a lot of important, useful advice that could reduce time, effort and risk to fit, you wouldn't engage casually with them... on the move .... while on a train, or while buying groceries.

In the short-term, Captain's Log is not for casual, journaling about your venture.

Time invested in initial setup brings returns in every log written in the future.

The one-time, initial setup of Captain's Log consists of 2 major steps with multiple parts to establish:

(1) where the entrepreneur is coming from, and 

(2) where their venture is going. 

Users can come back any time after initial setup to adjust their CV (from Settings) and their venture info (from Edit Log Book).

It does not matter that the current venture might be in a completely different space from the entrepreneur's background.  Captain's Log takes a holistic approach to build its assumptions.

Also, the gaps help to identify business functions that are the entrepreneur's strengths vs. areas of growth.

Everything in the human experience is connected.  One super power of machine intelligence is to bubble up seemingly unrelated connections which fall off our peripheral vision.

The entrepreneur is a great witness to the important events of their venture.  A conversational interface would "lead the witness".  It would be an engaging experience, but it defeats adding actual value - to elevate the initial condition of ventures (see home page).

Conversational experiments may come in the future.

- Standard on-device, OS-provided dictation is available.  

- A mobile version of Captain's Log is planned.

OS dictation has been available for many computing tasks for a long time.  In practice, user simply do not dictate.  Unless there are accessibility reasons to do so.

• Write the log as if you were informing a new, trusted, external advisor who  has deeply reviewed your CV and venture details provided in setup.

• Set aside 5-10 minutes daily, or 15-20 minutes every 2-3 days.   Compare that to the time commitment of meeting the most useful, human advisor on earth for your venture.  Entrepreneurship is such a rich and stimulating engagement that there is always something to tell a trusted advisor.  Like parents gushing about their kids. 

• Log editor has optional sections and suggestive questions for each section to help unblock thoughts. 

• You can write as little as one sentence to see AI insights.

• Do not write to drive the AI insights.  Write to self-reflect.  Unload your thoughts.  Then, let the AI 'strategist' come back with insights.

• Currently, each log and related AI insights are held independently.  In the future, cross-log analysis and awareness of growth are planned.

• Entrepreneurs do not accept any advice on face value.  They cross-check when time permits and trust their gut.

• The AI insights prompt the human to think cross-functionally about the whole business.  Setting direction is the primary responsibility of entrepreneurs.

• First of all, write each log without the AI insights in mind.  Just self-reflect.

• AI Hindsights are action-oriented.  Pick actions that your gut says could be useful for your venture and also look unusual.

• The action plan is not a to do list.  Use it to prioritize actions for whole business reflection.  Then get as much foresight as time permits.

• AI Foresight per action will draw you in.   This is content dedicated to you and your venture.  Foresight increases preparedness, even if you decide not to execute that action.  

• Scan, read, and then, scan some more.   Absorbing foresight improves your partnership with cross-functions.  For cross-functional areas of growth, you may be surprised what it takes to execute even simple task in that function. 

We continuously invest in making Captain's Log more secure.   

Securing the device is the responsibility of the user.

We transmit data in transit securely via HTTPS, and have minimum data retention (as described in the Privacy policy and T&C).   We have license verification, yet we have no user accounts.  

Data at rest is solely available to the user, except for identity-free, clicks and navigation for our product improvement.  The user experience is account-less.  After purchase, we hold your email id in our secure databases from the payment provider.

Any entrepreneur in knowledge-based enterprises.  

Besides tech entrepreneurs, online merchants, lawyers starting legal firms, doctors starting private clinics, accountants in new accounting are also examples of entrepreneurs who need to think cross-functionally about their venture's initiatives.

• Software eats the world.  Even a baker uses a keyboard and screen. Yet, that is unlikely to be their command center.   A mobile or voice-based approach would fit better.

• Entrepreneurs who do not want to learn about cross-functional business areas.  Entrepreneurs who do not want to learn new things, nor want to engage outside their comfort zone.

• Entrepreneurs who would complain about user interfaces that have a "wall of text".  Entrepreneurs of knowledge-based enterprises are voracious readers of content that is highly relevant to them.

No.

• Regardless of team and co-founders, every entrepreneur needs to have a sense of the whole. Every entrepreneur brings some functional expertise from their past career, and needs to think of cross-functional needs of the venture.  How does the entrepreneur's thought process connect to other aspects of the business that are more likely to be in their blind spots?
  
  Parallels of entrepreneurship have been drawn with parenting.  "I'll take care sleeping time, and you take care of nutrition.   Oh, the baby hasn't eaten.  Well, that's not my problem. "   This doesn't work.

• When investing in startups, how well the founders gel, is a key decision maker.   How each leader's work connects with their partners' work - is where the gel forms.  And Captain's Log can help.
  
  

•  For users, customers and investors, the venture should come across as one entity.

No.

Any entrepreneurs of knowledge-based ventures who expects to spend a significant portion of their work days in front of a keyboard, is likely to gain significant ROI.

Maybe.  There are hobbyists that are dreaming about business, and there are aspirants who commit weekly effort towards their entrepreneurial ambitions.

• Hobbyists may want a break from their desk job and enjoy different multi-modal, mobile moments to dream.  Captain's Log may present too much work for them.

• Committed aspirants are often getting ready to walk away from the security of a paycheck.  For them, the investment of effort in Captain's Log  will prepare them to take firmer steps from a better vantage point and offer a greater sense of security in the countless decisions to come.

Not yet.
Even if an employee is incentivized to think like  an entrepreneur in their organization, AI strategy consulting for a larger corporation probably requires semantic enterprise search to create meaning.  

If motorboats are just wrappers around an internal combustion engine, then yes.

Captain's Log is purpose-built and specialized for entrepreneurs in ways that no chatbot and no prompt-based bot can match.

Some examples:

• There is a lot of analysis of resume, venture details,  and logs to produce action items, blind spots and a prioritised action plan.

• Each foresight is based on a lengthy and highly personalised 'source prompt' that most people will find daunting and too arduous to write from scratch.

• That prompt itself comes from weaving just the relevant details from tons of context.

• Importantly, do not lead the leader.  Chat bots will do that.

• The user experience lends itself to a single place for the entrepreneur's reflections.

Chat experiences may be introduced in the future that do not lead the leader, and lean towards information retrieval rather than conversation.

As of writing this FAQ, there is no human advisor, nor any tool that will give as much attention to the entrepreneur's tactical and strategic concerns as Captain's Log.  For any serious entrepreneur, the opportunity cost of missing out on cross-functional decisions has to outweigh the cost of Captain's Log.

It cannot be free and it cannot be donation based.  At minimum, we are limited by ongoing costs of using state-of-art AI and generous daily limits.

At launch, we start with some idealism that a level plain field for all entrepreneurs would lead to the greatest good. Prices may be revised in the future.

AI presents many opportunities by lowering the bar for entrepreneurship.  It also presents a threat to employment and will grow the ranks of entrepreneurs, perhaps by necessity.  

Even with strong co-founders, strong expertise, serial success, a strong support network, and valuable human advisors, every entrepreneur (like most leaders) is on their own to determine direction of their ship and make the countless decisions to success.   Those decisions affect the cross-functional team members.

We wanted to build a tool that is dedicated to being an entrepreneur's ally; one that passes no judgements while dispensing advice, and brings the best in machine intelligence for strategy consulting to the learning entrepreneur.

Finally, we can have a knowledgeable intelligence that knows us really well, that has our back, and no other agenda.

• A reductive response would miss the big picture.   Each aspect orients itself to the goal uniquely.
  
  

• Virtuously, Captain's Log is a paid product.  Once paid, it is aligned with the users' interests.   Defai's business model commits itself to strongly differentiated privacy and confidentiality.
  
  

• Visionarily and experientially, Captain's Log wraps itself around the entrepreneur's current thoughts and lets the leader pick direction.
  
  

• Technically, Captain's Log drives large language models with linear algebra in mind.  It projects various sources of text into a known, well-understood, user-approved vector space of business functions.  Hidden representation in AI finds common ground with human understanding of business functions to drive AI through the needle of an entrepreneurial, whole business framework.