Ryan Delk
@delk
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@Primer CEO. On the side of the builders and the kids.
Joined June 2009
Something new: the Primer Fellowship. If you've dreamed of launching a microschool, we built this for you. We're opening up the Primer platform — our software, ops engine, academic program, etc. — and giving it to you. Let's launch some schools.
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Discovered today that the 6yo has been using his allowance to pay the 3yo to do things for him. Apparently has been going on for months.
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My Uber driver today:. Drove 90 hours/week for last 8 years. Lives in his car. Moving back to Georgia in 2 years (country, not state). He's used his Uber earnings to buy 8 rental properties + develop 16 condos back home. When he moves back, he'll have his extended family's.
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Wild to me that Amazon's order confirmations intentionally hide the two most important things:. - What you ordered.- Where it's being shipped. Completely nuking their customer UX in order to keep Google from getting their commerce data.
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I’m not sure an interview has ever altered my (uninformed) opinion of another human so profoundly.
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A bunch of Redditors have started identifying stocks with high levels of short interest and manufacturing short squeezes via their Robinhood accounts, making themselves millionaires in the process. Today’s target is $GME. The craziest thing I’ve seen in a while.
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13 months of progress fueled by Zuck’s unstoppable desire to prove the haters wrong.
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My wife: “What are you doing?”. Me: “Defending Capitalism on Twitter.”. Her: “Capitalism doesn’t need you.”. Me: “It does.”. Her: “If its the best idea, it will win in the market.”. Meta mic drop.
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Life is a lot more fun if you just root for the builders, creators, and doers.
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In January 2020, prominent Twitter / Youtube / FB accounts were suspended for suggesting that COVID-19 may have escaped from a Wuhan Lab. Today it looks increasingly likely that may be the case. What happens when the censors get it wrong?.
Three Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a U.S. intelligence report that could add to calls for a fuller probe of whether the Covid-19 virus may have escaped from the lab
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Someone will eventually build a ‘Business in a Box’ startup, and they will make a lot of money. Abstract away all the administrative work of starting a business (incorporation, taxes, first 409a, etc.), and let founders focus on product & hiring. Stripe Atlas on steroids.
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Something you may not know about San Francisco:. There are ~6 people who oppose nearly every new development in SF (residential & commercial), successfully using various loopholes and review processes to delay them by months or years. 6 people holding back an entire city.
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An uncomfortable truth: . A student's 3rd grade reading level is basically ~perfectly predictive of their 8th grade & 12th grade reading levels in the traditional education system.
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The EU celebrates new regulation like the US celebrates IPOs.
Historic!. The EU becomes the very first continent to set clear rules for the use of AI 🇪🇺. The #AIAct is much more than a rulebook — it's a launchpad for EU startups and researchers to lead the global AI race. The best is yet to come! 👍
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If founders attended even half of the events VC’s invited them to, every startup would fail.
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On my 16th birthday, my dad gave me a red bandanna. He told me the story of a man named Welles Crowther who was on the 76th floor of the World Trade Center when the planes hit on 9/11. Rather than running down, he ran up.
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This graph should be a five-alarm fire for every education policymaker in the US.
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Nothing radicalizes your views on skilled immigration in the US more quickly than being a startup founder recruiting engineers.
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I'm fascinated by how bad we humans are at processing new risk relative to baseline risk. Example: Say self-driving cars avoided 10,000 accident deaths/yr, but occasionally exploded leading to 4,000 deaths/yr. We "should" all switch to them & save 6,000 lives, but no one would.
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Ages on July 4, 1776:. James Monroe: 18.Marquis de Lafayette: 18.Alexander Hamilton: 21.Betsy Ross: 24.James Madison: 25.Thomas Jefferson: 33.John Adams: 40.George Washington: 44. Two generations worked together (including some very young savants) to get the job done.
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We’ve villainized hard work, having kids, and religion — and are left with a crisis of meaning.
"There is a subject nowadays which is taboo in the way that sexuality was once taboo, which is to talk about life as if it had any meaning." -- Nicholas Mosley.
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"Slowly, then all at once.". The President just signed an Executive Order paving the way for School Choice across all 50 states. Every family in America will soon have access to a scholarship to attend the school of their choice. Much work to do! . 🇺🇸
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SF Supervisor @HillaryRonen in January: asks billionaires for donations to help fund SF schools. 74 days later: Billionaire donates $25m to help fund SF schools — she drags them and delays the rollout because she disagrees with their political views.
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A tell-tale sign of a startup “struggling” is the ability to raise $260m on an uncapped note.
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@shaunmmaguire I had no real opinion on him previously, mostly passive awareness of the mainstream narrative. After watching, seems like he may be one of the most competent people to serve in the White House in recent history.
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The hardest part about running a startup isn’t finding product / market fit, it’s figuring out how to successfully pay local & state payroll taxes.
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Who’s building co-working w/ childcare for working moms / dads?. Massive market. Offer multiple subscription tiers (5 hrs/mo — 160 hrs/mo), easy access to children during day for breastfeeding, floating desks or reserved offices depending on tier. If you’re building this, DM me.
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It's possible that this is the most important graph in the world.
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My borderline obsession with key moments in US History led me down a rabbit hole recently that ended with winning this at auction (for surprisingly cheap).
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We’ve raised a $3.7m seed round for @withprimer led by @rabois at Founders Fund + @naval, @scottbelsky, @juliadewahl, @patio11, @cyantist & others. More importantly: we’re sharing a bit about our first product, and will be rolling out invites in August:
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It’s fascinating how much energy is spent debating increasing government revenue (taxes) and how little is spent on increasing government efficiency. For context: make the government 6% more efficient & you generate more cash than Warren’s Wealth Tax to invest however you like.
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@kevinakwok He walked me through it in detail, he approaches it like a business — he's thought through opex, capex, margin, etc. Experimented with a bunch of living situations but none of them made sense relative to what those dollars could do for him in Georgia.
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It turns out you can just email your local farmer and buy 1/4 of a grass fed & finished cow.
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We'll do whatever it takes to fix K-12 education — including changing state laws. There are now 50,000+ new locations where microschools can open across Florida. If we’re going to fix our K-12 education system, we need to launch 1,000’s of new schools. Let's get to work.
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We should send 5 of San Francisco's Gov leaders to Tokyo for a 6 week program to work with / shadow their local leaders on transit, housing, and infrastructure. Tokyo is everything SF could be if we had the political and social will to be a world-class city open to everyone.
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This is becoming oddly contrarian, but a reminder that it's possible to build a company where you:.- Work extremely hard.- Invest in the team's growth as humans.- Build a diverse team.- Generate significant profits.- Are feared by competitors.- Make a positive impact on the world.
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The optimal startup culture model is not a "family" — it's a pro sports team.
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A member of the SF School Board is up for recall. Today, she published a defense of their work — highlighting their three biggest accomplishments over the last four years:
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It’s hard to overstate how important Talent Magnets are for building great teams. Hiring people who draw top talent in to work with them is a super power, especially early for startups.
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@natfriedman Ingest all relevant inputs (slack, email, whatsapp, etc.), pop in Airpods each morning, get ~10 min audio digest of what's important, take (small) actions conversationally during digest, start each day knowing where to dive in.
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Building a company that attracts undiscovered talent is both much harder and much more valuable than you’d think.
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A friend’s startup went from $0 —> $1m in ARR growing 30% mo/mo + profitable. Investor reaches out, then tells him no fund would invest, you aren’t ready to raise next round, etc.…. …and proceeded to try convince him to take $$ from him at a low valuation. Don’t do this.
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I'd like to hire some PhD students (math & sciences only) to hang out with my kids. My kids will prepare questions from books they've read, you'll create a mental treadmill for them to dig as deep as they'd like. Local in SF, 1x - 3x/week, ~2 hours per session. DM's open.
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We’re working on a series of long-form interviews with folks who were homeschooled and now doing interesting work as adults. The first one is with @LauraDeming, and drops this week.
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The last 10 minutes of this talk from David Weiden at the KV CEO Summit was the best 10 mins on startup finance / fundraising I've seen. Redacted (but still worth it) version:
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An underrated thing to do: spend time ensuring your team will get extremely rich if your startup succeeds. There are (relatively) small things you can do like allowing + normalizing early exercising, educating on QSBS (RIP), etc. that can materially impact their outcomes.
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Most people tend to join companies that would succeed with or without them, but it’s much more interesting to join companies that might fail without you.
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What's the best theory on why all the new car safety tech is having ~no impact on car fatality rates?. I (wrongfully) assumed that blind spot + lane departure detection etc. made us safer — but car fatality rates are flat / up over the last decade.
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One of the most interesting things about startups is that you win by hiring undiscovered talent. Equally difficult and fulfilling.
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@gbrl_dick Starting in ~2005 my dad explained to us that the economics of recycling would soon be fundamentally broken when China stopped buying our plastic, and (only semi-jokingly) said it would be much better to throw it all in the trash to increase EV of future landfill mining.
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2yo: “Are animals devices?”. Me: “No, devices usually means something that has electricity.”. 2yo: “Oh, so an Electric Eel is a device.”. Me: “. ”.
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If you visit the 9/11 memorial, there's always a red bandanna at Welles name. Every time I'm in NYC, I stop by and think about his story — about the type of human who runs up when everyone else is running down.
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@DeanPreston It’s a bit disingenuous to spend years keeping the market from building homes in SF, then blame the market for not building homes. Social housing is important. Market housing is important. Let’s build 5x more of all of it in SF and get to work changing laws to make both possible!.
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@kevinakwok Also makes me wish we could somehow compel every public figure to do at least one mostly-unedited long-form interview. I suspect we have many other severe collective misperceptions.
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Underrated: how legendarily @rippling handled the whole SVB mess:. - Covered payrolls for their customers off their company balance sheet when funds were stranded at SVB.- Emailing 3x/day with updates + action items.- Realtime support via chat even during peak insanity. 💪.
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The first time I watched ‘Dear Basketball’, I teared up. My wife and I watched it tonight through a lot more tears. Kobe was transcendent.
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A well-curated Twitter feed is 100x better than any TV network tonight.
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Legends were made this weekend. @sama, @lachygroom, @vkhosla, @SamirKaul1 + many others were writing personal loans to founders during max uncertainty. An entire generation of founders will remember this.
Venture backed companies had a chance to see which VCs stood by ready to assist with payroll and other short term cash needs with zero interest loans and which hemmed and hawed or claimed their GPs didn’t have capital like that guy from a multi- billion quant shop.
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In the six decades that the Bay Area was center of the world for technology, we made very few credible efforts to engage, run for office, or build bridges with local politics. This strikes me as a profound failure, and one we’re now paying the price for.
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A friend is starting a podcast. He spends 15-20 hours learning about his guest before each episode. So far every guest has commented that it was the best podcast interview they’ve ever done. There’s still enormous alpha in doing simple things better than anyone else.
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Also on my mind today:. No one (yet) knows whether this theory is correct, but how would it have changed the last year of geopolitical COVID response if these then-fringe views would have been explored seriously vs. being banned?. Every decision to censor has repercussions.
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It seems there is quite a large opportunity to build a finance software product for startups that acts as a lightweight CFO — who is building this?. Automatically pull in realtime data from our bank, CC, payroll, Stripe + allow forecasting on hiring / fundraising, etc.
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Counterintuitively, the “busiest” people are usually the most responsive.
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52% of parents have a *more* positive view of homeschooling after COVID-19. We’re in the middle of a huge shift in the perception of homeschooling, and August will be the largest yr/yr increase in (intentional) homeschooling in history. [Source: new @MorningConsult poll]
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Today we’re announcing something fun:. You can now cash out your @Omni rentals earnings into crypto, starting with XRP via Ripple’s @Interledger protocol. More from @tmcleod3:
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An interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed:. Industry-specific investors (EdTech, FinTech, etc.) often end up missing the biggest winners in ‘their’ industry. I think this is because the best founders think orthogonally, and often don’t seek industry insiders for funding / advice.
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I tried to buy a handheld shower head to more easily bathe my kids, but apparently some unelected California bureaucrats have decided it’s illegal (?).
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Thrilled to see the San Francisco Board of Supervisors finally found something worth calling the police about.
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My favorite question from a candidate so far:. “What book most influenced your vision for the company?”.
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One of the most important things I want to help my son develop is a long attention span. I didn’t fully grasp what an uphill battle that is to instill in a new human in our culture until recently. Equally difficult and important.
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This would be a smart evolution of pro golf in addition to PGA events: one day matches head to head, big stakes, televised, trash talk, and give players Twitter access during the round.
Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson are in negotiations to play a winner-take-all match for $10-million, according to a report by @GOLF_com.
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We share every Investor Update with our entire team at Primer. Highly recommend.
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A product I’d love:. Show me 5 amazing hotel / Airbnb options within driving distance for a weekend overnight. Perhaps with options of beach, city, or mountains. It’s so time intensive to try to sift through options to find this, I’d pay a lot to save the time of searching.
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