Hi Reader, What happens when a leadership development consultant who's never written code decides to automate her entire PhD? Nathalie Salles spent her career in human development at Facebook and Google, coaching leaders and scaling talent programs. Now she's doing a PhD on AI, workplace, and gender. And somewhere along the way, she became a builder. What we covered: How she taught herself n8n with zero coding experience and built a pipeline that processes over 1,500 research papers...
10 days ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, What happens when a 20-year product leader walks away from the corporate track and bets on herself? Elena Luneva spent her career leading product at Nextdoor, OpenTable, BrainTrust, and BlackRock. Then she went independent. Not because she was pushed out, but because she already knew how to do the old job. She wanted to learn something new. What we covered: Why constraints ("no more hiring") forced her team to get creative with AI, and how that changed how she thinks about what's...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, Last week I facilitated a workshop for grad students, and one of them wasn't sure her restaurant job counted as "real experience." It hit me: this isn't just a student problem. I hear the same thing from mid-career professionals every week. "I don't have the right AI skills." "My background isn't technical enough." "There's so much to catch up on." What I'm Noticing Everyone's chasing the same playbook right now. Prompting courses. Context engineering. AI certifications. Tool after...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, This month's idea comes from an Arthur Brooks talk I heard. One line stuck with me: never make the mistake of meeting a complex need with a complicated tool. In AI terms: it's very easy to start using a powerful tool to solve problems that aren't actually tool problems. What I'm Noticing When things feel uncertain (a hard decision, messy collaboration, fear of getting it wrong), we tend to reach for AI the same way people reach for their phone: as a way to calm the discomfort....
2 months ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, This month marks 4 years since I started Chill Labs and went fractional. What I’m Noticing It wasn’t because I wanted less work. It was because I wanted better, more interesting work. Work with people I choose. Going fractional was my first act of “automating myself” as an entrepreneur. Not with AI, but by redesigning how I work. Now, I use them in tandem: I work with a portfolio of clients, and I automate the parts of work that don’t need me. That’s the Automate Yourself...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, You don’t learn this stuff by reading more. You learn it by doing. And doing it with other people. What I’m Noticing AI is moving fast, and a lot of people are trying to keep up all on their own. Solo learning looks productive. New tools, new prompts, new threads. But it often turns into parallel play: everyone is experimenting separately, and nobody is getting meaningfully better together. I see this in teams all the time. Five people “trying AI”. Each person learning different...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, This month on Automate Yourself, I sat down with Yves Junqueira, a former Google SRE and founder of Pipeboard. We explored how automation is transforming what's possible for solopreneurs and small teams, and Yves shared insights from his journey building AI tools that help businesses do more with less. What we covered: - The automation mindset from Google: How Yves's SRE background shaped his approach to building systems that scale without constant human intervention - Empowering...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Issue #4 Why Most Automation Fails (Lessons Learned from Google SRE) A framework for understanding processes before you automate them The Two-Month "Simple" Task "Just move the cluster to the new datacenter. How hard could it be?" That was my thinking when I started what seemed like a straightforward automation project at Google. We needed to move SmartAds' click-through rate prediction system, a critical ML pipeline that helps decide which ads to show users. The manual process existed,...
5 months ago • 4 min read
Issue #3 How One CEO Multiplied His Impact with 40+ AI Agents Ever wonder what happens when someone actually runs an entire marketing department with AI agents? My guest this week, Jacob Bank, is doing exactly that. I'm thrilled to share the second podcast episode of the “Automate Yourself” podcast, featuring Jacob Bank, CEO of Relay.app and former Google Product Management director. Jacob’s journey from academia to leading AI-driven innovations across multiple startups and Big Tech shares a...
7 months ago • 3 min read
