Personal Update: Buffett Book, SpaceX, and Mashgin at 10 years

Updates on "Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders", my new SpaceX book, and being at Mashgin for 10 years.

It’s been a while, so I want to give a quick update on some of the projects I’ve been working on.

Berkshire Hathaway book

In 2012 I worked with Warren Buffett to publish the first edition of “Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders”, a compilation of all of his letters.

The last edition was released 10 years ago for the 50th anniversary of Buffett’s takeover, and I’ve been selling it ever since. The Kindle version is updated annually with every new letter.

It’s now been 60 years since Buffett took over Berkshire Hathaway, and last month he announced his unfortunate retirement from the CEO position.

Time for a new edition!

Since February, I’ve been finishing up the 60th anniversary edition of Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders. It adds the last 10 years of letters (duh), plus a few more intra-year letters and a new (short) forward by me.

The final publication date is unknown, but it should be in the next few months (Q3 2025).

Berkshire Memorex

A few years ago I built a few projects to experiment with the new GPT-class language and embedding models that had just been released. The first was BuffettBot (already woefully outdated compared to the latest LLMs), the second was Memorex.

For Memorex, the idea was to create an interface allowing you read and explore a collection of related documents. Search them semantically (by meaning), find related passages, and overlay a chat UI on top to ask questions.

The Berkshire Memorex was the first collection released but I’ve experimented with others like Paul Graham’s essays.

Last week the Berkshire archive was updated with the latest letter and annual meetings. Check them out if you get the chance.

I had planned on adding a bunch of new features but haven’t gotten around to it yet. Since the first release, Google came out with NotebookLM which has a similar premise. I’d say the intent of Memorex is more to create publicly-accessible collections rather than being a pure notebook where the only goal is dumping content in and learning from it. I’d still like to add a few features though, like:

1. A chat UI where you can ask questions to the collection.

2. “Explain this” button for highlights that does a deeper dive on the topic, along with other related content.

3. Auto-generated topic index. Scan through this index rather than searching.

4. Generated audio / podcasts. Instead of the NotebookLM “hosted” podcast (which is really cool), this would be a literal reading of the documents, like an audiobook. The latest TTS audio models from OpenAI and ElevenLabs are crazy good and I think this would be something I would personally use a lot.

SpaceX Foundation

“SpaceX Foundation” is a book that documents the first 10 years of SpaceX’s history through first-hand sources.

After SpaceX was founded in 2002, Elon (and later others in the company) published regular updates to their mailing list describing in detail what the company was working on and how they made progress. From 2003 to 2013 there were 100+ updates released that make an astounding case study and “real-time” history of early SpaceX and the technical and operational challenges they overcame.

I’ve been working on this book to some degree for 3 years now, though seriously for only the last year. It’s currently in draft state while I focus on other priorities, including getting the Berkshire book out the door.

Aside from my own limited time, the biggest issue right now is getting full buy-in from SpaceX. Most of the content is findable via public archives, but there’s a lot of implicitly-copyrighted photos, etc. in the content. Plus I can’t use SpaceX in the title without explicit permission, otherwise I risk legal action. I’ve shown it to a few people at SpaceX who really liked it, but needless to say they have more important things to focus on. Like making humanity multi-planetary :)

Request for connections: If you know anyone who works at SpaceX, I’d love to talk with them about the book. I’ve already shown it to a handful of people and executives but always looking for more feedback. Reach out to me on X if so.

Mashgin

It’s now been 10 years since I joined Mashgin as the founding employee.

Since raising our Series B three years ago, Mashgin has expanded quickly into convenience stores, universities, and major event venues globally. Check out our photo gallery to see them in their “natural habitats” around the world.

Earlier this year, Amazon significantly scaled back their “Just Walk Out” (Amazon Go) initiative, publicly stating cumulative items sold of 18 million. For context, Mashgin now processes roughly that same volume in less than 1 week. We handle over a million transactions daily across more than 4,000 deployed locations, recently surpassing one billion transactions.

Given how slowly our target industries typically adapt, this growth highlights Mashgin’s unique speed and effectiveness. We’ve also been profitable since 2022, another rarity in startup-land.

As always, progress hasn’t been smooth. It’s been a crazy ride with multiple near-death experiences and mini pivots. But it’s been an amazing 10 years being involved in everything from product and engineering to sales, strategy, and operations.

Our next S-curve is now upon us, and I’m excited to see where we’ll go next.

If you’re interested in joining us we have a bunch of open roles (local in the Bay Area or remote): jobs.lever.co/mashgin