I've decided to start a personal blog/website to start collecting my thoughts on building companies, fostering amazing teams and finding good product fit. I'm hoping it can be a good repository for things I'm seeing in my day-to-day as a CEO.

I've been thinking a lot about lately is the absolute explosion of vector data AI is creating and the mass transformation of ephemeral data (e.g. phone calls) into permanent AI transcripts. I think we see earth changing litigation on this soon.

And I welcome suggestions for topics to cover.

Whether it be produce or recyclable materials, far more of the steps are manual or low-res due to incompatible systems, bad data or on-Prem solutions

You can’t use AI to effectively reduce spoilage of perishable products if you don’t have clean digitization and inventory management for those product.

I predict one of the non-obvious byproducts of AI will be a push into much deeper investment into vertical SaaS - especially on industries with nuanced supply chains.

Excited to come aboard as an advisor to @JasonVego and his team at Bevz as they build out their SaaS and e-commerce solution for convenience and liquor stores.

And the discounting in the value advertisers ascribe to the ROAS on Twitter ads doesn’t bode well for Twitters revenue.

So bottom line - most large marketing departments would pay a premium on ads to not work with an advertiser they dislike or perceive potential PR risk in associating with.

This may explain why you are seeing so many bargain-hunting advertisers like the Church of Scientology ramping their Twitter ad spend but seeing a pullback in the historic advertisers.

So with the turmoil at Twitter - they are going to have to effectively deliver a meaningfully better ROAS than other digital channels like Facebook, etc. this is a massive disadvantage and one that grows over time. Delivering the same ad value as other channels won’t cut it.

But the X factor is that marketing teams will effectively discount the ROAS if they sense risk or hassle with the ad partner or simply don’t like the company (i.e. they report a low sentiment on the company).

Ad revenue is based on factors like the size of the audience, the desirability of the audience and the cost/return (so cost per click/impression and Return on Ad Spend ).

But maybe most importantly - there is an unspoken X factor to digital ad sales which is how likeable/unlikeable the ad company is and what the perceived risk is with the channel.

A lot of those large clients also had marketing teams that had a relationship with their rep in Twitter ad sales. Most of those people are gone. Along with it went the relationship and the voice in the ear of the client marketing team.

While a good amount of Twitter ad sales were self service with their ad engine - a lot of large client spends went through a sales team with paired help for those large clients to optimize those ad spends (think Proctor and Gamble or Disney).

A small 🧵 : Most of the takes on Twitter seem to focus on change to technical org or him cutting fat. But #Twitter is overwhelmingly ad revenue based and there’s been little talk of how well (or likely poorly) Twitter is selling ads (and thus making revenue).

There are compliant ways for cannabis companies to do payments (see @aeropay_ as an example). They are just a bit more complicated than putting a phantom ATM in your point of sale.

Seeing the chatter about Cashless ATM shutdowns. There seems to still be confusion on this - in short - cashless ATM is often illegal (depends on how done) and definitely in violation of MC/Visa rules. Weird amount of risk for people to be so nonchalant.

Just a quick side note for those thinking this will lead to uplifting of MSO’s and an influx of new investors. It’s not clear this impacts NASDAQ and NYSE decision and listing exchange is not the main reason institutions aren’t investing in MSO’s.