Direction Without Traction | Generated by AI
Reading that as: your friend said something like “that’s very practical/realistic, [but] you don’t know what you want to do” — and you’re asking if they’re right.
Honestly? No, not really — at least not based on what you’ve laid out. You have a clearer thesis than most people who’ve “launched”: Tinker-level training expertise as a moat, Phase 1 services funding Phase 2 products, target market defined (Greater Bay Area, HK, high-end clients), even a written execution playbook. That’s not directionless.
But I’d guess the friend isn’t wrong about something — just maybe mislabeling it. What might actually look like “not knowing what you want” from the outside:
- Too many parallel threads at once — nanochat, DeepSeek v4 MoE, GPT-2 from scratch, client consulting, blog, notes, CLI agents (ww/iclaw/zz). Each one is legitimate, but someone watching from outside sees no single thing shipping to completion, and reads that as scatter rather than depth.
- Revenue vs research tension isn’t resolved yet. Your playbook says “services fund research,” but if the actual client pipeline is thin right now, from the outside that looks like “training GPT-2 on MI300X” is the visible activity and “consulting for high-end clients” is aspirational — which does look like avoidance dressed up as strategy.
- No single forcing function. A friend who wants concrete proof usually means: what’s shipped, what’s the first paying client, what’s the first product artifact. If those are still TBD, “I have a 12-month phased plan” sounds like a plan, not traction yet.
So the honest split: you know what you want directionally (agentic world, deep AI expertise, own company). You may not yet have proven what you want first — i.e., which single thread gets finished before starting the next. That’s a real gap, and it’s the kind of gap that reads as “doesn’t know what he wants” even when the person actually has a map.
What would shut the friend’s comment down fastest isn’t more clarity in words — it’s one finished, visible thing: first paying client invoiced, or nanochat fully reproduced and blogged, or one CLI tool someone else actually uses. Numbers/artifacts, like you already wrote in your own playbook (#6). You already know the answer to this — you wrote it.