Allie K. Miller’s Post

I’ve been keeping a secret from you, but no longer. I recorded a LinkedIn Learning course on how to use generative AI. Coming out in a few weeks. Follow Allie K. Miller and hit the 🔔 on my profile to get notified when it’s out. You won’t want to miss this.

Exactly two years ago, I quit a high-paying (and awesome!) job at Amazon to start a company. Maybe some of you are thinking about a similar leap and will benefit from this reflection. Or maybe it's just for future me to read back on this and be like "yeah, you did the damn thing, stop doubting yourself” 💪 ↓ ↓ ↓ ⭐️ PROS ⭐️ - still working insane hours but more in control of my time and can set aside space to think and plan - less bureaucracy (not Amazon-specific, any bigger company will feel that way) - crazy fast iteration speed, pivots, builds, tool adoption, testing, launching; we can test a tool in the morning, buy it, and change our entire workflow, all in the same day - made a lot less money for honestly 6 months spinning things up, now make more (I made a full financial plan before leaving, def recommend) - very high agency, can say yes/no to any client, freaking love my clients and team - more flexibility, can meet fellow Al leaders and multipreneurs, can work from home/road/plane/walk, big shoutout to Ethan, Cassie, Sinead, Rachel, Conor, Alexander for being some of my closest collaborators - team can get in lightning-focused deep work mode and pull off magic, very little distraction - obsessed with running an Al-first team and feel like we're literally reinventing work every day - a lot of days are scary, I’m pushing myself outside my comfort zone often and loving it 😶 CONS 😶 - holy heck, way more legal, financial, and admin work than I was expecting (accounting, contracts, banks, quickbooks, legal reviews, NDAs, taxes); partially solved by Al, tools, and having an amazing agent, accountant, lawyer, and exec assistant - less access to enterprise-grade research/data (AWS is filled with thousands of brilliant people and some Slack threads are just streams of intelligence + free enterprise seats to stuff like CB Insights); partially solved by consulting partnerships - miss the AWS team; already hired one of them and still collab/hang with many - been dealing with scarcity mindset and provider mode; I'm working with my amazing exec coach Deborah on this, have done a lot of work on it in the last two years, looking fwd to more - it takes consistent bravery to run your own business; it can be exhausting - way more travel than expected - feels like we're just getting started One of my bigger realizations is that the entrepreneur life is not better or worse than big tech, it's just different. If you're a business owner, give a shout in the comments. I've been in your shoes only two years and have the utmost respect for you, your passion, and your conviction. Seriously.

I’m still holding Amazon stock, and it’s because of moves like this. Adept AI, one of the top agentic AI startups, is going through a big shift, as its founders and some employees are headed to Amazon. David Luan, the CEO of Adept and former VPE at OpenAI and Director at Google AI, is joining Amazon as a VP to oversee Amazon’s “AGI Autonomy” division as well as the automations team. *note for my followers: the AGI team is hiring ~200 folks across mostly USA and India

In the next 3 minutes, you can download an app, hum a tune, and make an entire song. Here’s mine ⬇️

One of my favorite ChatGPT / Claude hacks: Don’t just give good examples. Give both good and bad examples. Optional: explain why the bad is bad. My outputs have massively improved.

I’m hiring for an AI Business Operations role on my team 🎉 If you enjoy managing KPIs, supporting clients, creating automations, researching, mega organizing, and driving continuous improvement, I'd love to hear from you. We are an AI-first team—if you only use ChatGPT once a month, this is not the role for you. 📝 Apply here: https://lnkd.in/eBSRZ2eD ♻ Know someone who fits the bill? Share this post. You might just help a friend land their dream job (and earn some serious good karma points)

WALL-E’s scrappy cousin is here, and it’s surprisingly chatty. Axel Peytavin, a Research Engineer at Stanford University, and his team created a mini WALL-E for just $200. With just one prompt, it uses a camera to “see”, GPT-4o to “think”, custom code to take actions. Rinse and repeat. It can also pick up trash, shake hands, have an adorable robot conversation with you. (Fun fact: they’re building a bigger one right now 🤓)

I’ve hired so many people off of social media. Examples of real pipelines that led to me hiring someone, some of these multiple times: 1) posted a Google form link on IG, TT, and LI, got 150 apps, hired someone that came from IG 2) tweeted something extremely niche on X, looked at who liked it, pinged one of the people based on their bio, hired him a few months later for my Amazon team 3) got a LI DM, the person was incredible but a better fit for a parallel team at Amazon, referred her, she was hired by that team 4) posted a job on IG story, someone shared it, I hired one of their friends 5) had a very niche job opening at Amazon, scrolled through LinkedIn bios, DMd/interviewed dozens, hired one Great hires can come from ANYWHERE—referrals, formal job postings, cold inbound resumes, headhunters/recruiters, niche boards, and yes, even your own inbox. Only using formal hiring channels is a dead strategy. It’s a great start, but it’s time to widen the scope.

This. THIS is my favorite Claude use case. Take an ungodly amount of data and preferences, shove it into Claude, ask for an interactive decision-making bot, ask for scoring and reward mechanism, personalize as necessary. Brands will now calibrate for human+AI decisions.