Sheel Mohnot
@pitdesi
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Posting stuff I find interesting. Work: @btv_vc, leading pre/seed rounds of fintech cos. Always up for adventure.
Joined May 2007
This video of Kathleen Ledecky balancing chocolate milk on her head while swimming is more impressive to me than her seven Olympic gold medals.
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It still blows my mind every time I randomly look at the price of a TV nowadays.
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Founders building web3 solutions for problems that don’t exist
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Italy raided factories & found that Armani and Dior bags are made by illegal Chinese workers in Italy who sleep in the workshop and make €2-3/hr. Both companies have been placed under Italian court administration. Dior paid a supplier $57 to assemble* a handbag that sells for
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Zuck on the Apple Vision Pro. He's still got fire in him, love to see it
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The Millennial anthem . every word rings true (except I'm in my 40s)
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I think about this scene all the time. The Simpsons, 1994
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The show Silicon Valley was not fiction
Google is allegedly paying some AI staff to do nothing for a year rather than join rivals
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LOLOL.Chamath claims to "control" one of the largest rare earth mineral supplies outside of China. I comment with proof that CCP owns more of the company than he does (proof below). Chamath HIDES my comment.
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Indian home beauty startup YesMadam sent a survey to their employees about stress and then fired the employees that said they were under significant stress 🤦🏽♂️
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Thanks Jeff Lawson for buying the Onion so we could get this great zoom in on electoral coverage. No other news source has gone to this level of detail.
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CEO of a 400+ employee business says WFH is working well, he may not renew his SF lease to save $10m a year (office + lunches etc) and instead do a couple of all-hands offsites a year (much cheaper). Lots of others must be thinking similarly- CRE could be permanently altered.
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I love this idea & am planning one:. A night where all of your friends make a presentation on what they do at work and answer questions. I don't know much about what many of my friends do for a living.
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People in Texas really love bragging about their low GPAs on their sports cars
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X keeps serving me this video so I succumbed. The premise is that Mr Beast and crew are helicoptered into an abandoned city and have to survive for 7 days, seems like a fun concept…. but I recognized the “abandoned city” as Kupari Croatia, which is neither abandoned nor a city,
I attempted to survive 7 days in an abandoned city. can't believe places like this exist
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Freaking Incredible: Agassi knew where Boris Becker was going to serve based on his tongue movements, but didn’t want to use it all the time because then Becker would find out.
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Fun TikTok dating fad in Spain:. Singles go to grocery store chain Mercadona bw 7-8pm and use their cart to hint what they're looking for. Mercadona has had to hire police and even pulled pineapples from the shelves (but people just used canned fruit instead)
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Cocktail bars in Tokyo are insane, a real art form. Never seen anything like it anywhere else. There are bars like the Aviary which are masterful in their own way but the artistry of a Japanese bartender in a small bar in a 4th floor walk up is unmatched .
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Tic Tacs are 94% sugar and yet claim to be sugar free…. The FDA says anything can be labeled sugar free if it has <0.5g of sugar, so each tic tac is 0.49g and they can claim they have 0 sugar on the label
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2016
When was the last time there was a Presidential election with such an overwhelming favorite with almost 4 months until the vote?.
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The American mind cannot comprehend this. The longest train ride in India:.- takes 74.5 hours.- covers 2,600mi (~distance from Wash. DC - LA).- is considered "Super Fast Express" though it averages ~35mph.- sleeper (bed) ticket costs $14.27
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lol we came to a tasting menu restaurant and my dad knew he would be hungry and not like the food so he brought his own pizza and got in trouble
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Some people have kids and stop living their life, others bring their kids along for the ride
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Drones raining from the sky in Zhengzhou 😬 . Word on the street is that a rival drone company that lost the bid interfered to overwhelm the drones nav system!.
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an 8-year old girl in Ohio drove herself 25 minutes to Target, spent $400 and was drinking a Frappuccino when she got caught. She's probably grounded for a while but as soon as she's free, I'm investing in whatever she does next
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The Golden Gate Bridge construction was finished in 4 years in 1937, under budget at $35M (~$600M today). A suicide prevention net (cost: $400M) on that bridge started construction 4 years ago and is half-complete. We can’t build anything anymore.
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Love Buffett’s response to “when did you know you were rich?” . Particularly the highlighted part.
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This dude slapped a new label (& name: Le Château Colombier) on a shitty $2.50 supermarket wine and won gold medal at the Gilbert et Gaillard wine competition in France. They described it as "suave, edgy and rich palate with clean, young aromas that promise a lovely complexity"
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Apple is a real bully. Apple + Maximo met for partnership/acquisition talks but Apple had a secret plan (Project Everest) to steal the tech without paying. They even recruited 20 of Masimo’s team, doubling their salaries…. Apple paid their CTO $4M to come over, and in his 1st 2.
In an unprecedented development, Apple will halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 sales in the US after an ITC ruling about Apple violating Masimo blood oxygen patents was not reversed.
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Wild: When the BYD Zhengzhou factory is fully complete it will be larger than San Francisco (but smaller than the Denver airport!). ~10x larger than the Gigafactory Nevada. Not apples to apples because it's effectively a city - employees live there in dorms.
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The new CEO of Costco Ron Vachris started out as a forklift driver, has worked his way up at Costco for the past 40+ years. Outgoing CEO Craig Jelinek started out as a food stocker at Costco predecessor FedMart & worked his way up for 43 yrs before becoming CEO. Incredible.
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TIL you can own your own private rail car & attach it to an Amtrak train. only ~100 private cars in operation in the US, they are extremely expensive (~$300k+) + Amtrak charges ~$5/mile. But there are 100 rich train lovers out there!.
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Heartwarming immigrant banking story: The State Bank of Texas is owned and mostly run by Patels. Poor Indian immigrant Chan Patel comes to Stanford for grad school, becomes a successful hotel entrepreneur. He finds that lenders are unfairly discriminating against Indians &
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The longest-serving Apple employee, Chris Espinosa has been there since he was 14 years old in 1976 (but didn't get his badge printed til 1977. When he joined, it was still housed in Steve Jobs's parents garage. 48 years ago.
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Wowwwww.Everyone in fintech has been saying that the Bilt credit card ($3.1B valuation) is too good to be true; How can you get cash back on rent payments?. Turns out they have an unsustainable deal with Wells that is losing the bank hundreds of $millions. Wells made a number of
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Incentives work!. Dad had a heart attack 3 yrs ago, been trying to get him to change his diet & behavior- no dice. Noticed yday that dad was walking laps around the house, asked why: his health insurance gives him $𝟏𝟎/mo if he walks 7.5k steps every day!. $10!.
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Colossal Biosciences raised $200M at a $10.2B post to bring back animals from extinction. They're on track for a Woolly Mammoth calf in 2028, and are also working on the dodo and Tasmanian tiger. This is super cool but beyond my pay grade. what is the business opportunity?
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for context, here's an ad from 1994. A 46" TV was an inflation-adjusted $3100. Today, a 65" TV is $228!
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Last week, a 55 year old, 200 lb grandmother was the 1st to swim from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Farallon islands, a -30 mile journey. She swam in 43° water & it took ~17 hours. She was stung by jellyfish 20 times. It’s considered the toughest marathon swim in the world.
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German discount grocer Lidl built their own cloud infrastructure because of German data laws, and now has a ~$2B revenue business selling it to others (a la AWS). They spent $700M acquiring an Israeli cyber security company (XM cyber).
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TIL - 0.8% of the US budget is spent on Kidney dialysis
@tmoll_ @d_feldman Dialysis is nearly 1% of the federal budget, 3x NASA.
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Ever wonder why sedans disappeared and every car is huge now? . "Thanks, Obama!". His administration changed fuel economy standards in a way that had the perverse impact of making cars even bigger. Here are all the vehicles for sale by the 3 largest US automakers. 62 vehicles,
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Fun fact: Microsoft Flight Simulator is Microsoft's longest-running software product, predating Windows by 3 years. The series dates back to 1982 and FlightSim 2024 is the 16th of the series.
Microsoft has never made a good product. Windows is absolutely dogshit - its only use case is to play video games but even then just get a playstation. Github is kinda cool but they didn't make that. HoloLens sucked. At one point, Microsoft did sponsor me and sent me their best.
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For the first time in recent history, San Francisco recorded more traffic fatalities than homicides in 2024, a stunning turn of events.
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Somehow I only just now learned. Chip is a nickname for a guy named after his dad ("Chip off the old block"). Skip is for a guy named after their granddad ("skipped" a generation). Trip(p) is for a third in line with the same name as his dad and granddad ("triple").
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The Golden Gate Bridge construction was finished in 4 years in 1937, under budget at $35M (~$600M today). A suicide prevention net was recently added to the bridge. It took 6 years & $224M.
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Oh no. what have we done? . 2 years ago, Mexico City ranked as the 76th most expensive city in the Economist's worldwide cost of living survey. This year, it ranked 16th! More expensive than Milan, Munich and DC.
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TIL Thomas and George Kurian are identical twins. They both grew up in India, came to the US to study at Princeton, did Stanford GSB, McKinsey, Oracle. Thomas is the CEO of Google Cloud . George is the CEO of NetApp ($21B market cap). impressive af!
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random thought:. Jobs made more from Disney than from Apple. Clooney made more $ selling Tequila than acting. Bechtolsheim made more $ investing in Google than founding Sun. Foreman made more $ selling grills than boxing. Dre made more $ from Beats (headphones) than making music.
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Salesforce park is the prettiest park in a business district I can think of. Also if I saw this and didn’t know better I would’ve guessed it was in Singapore.
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Quick background in case you missed this era:. Zenefits was among the highest flying companies- raised $500M in '15 (back when that was a huge deal 😂). They missed some revenue targets and had compliance issues along the way (that got blown out of proportion). Sacks was COO,.
Let me tell you, coups are this man’s specialty.
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I’ve noticed a TON of overt racism against Indians on this site recently. I get racist DMs/replies (over the randomest things!) and see viral stuff like this every day. Never happened before, now it’s almost daily.
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I think about this scene from @SiliconHBO all the time when founders are raising:. "If you show revenue, people will ask how much and it'll never be enough".-Russ Hanneman
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There is a "sleep pod community" near me that rented a loft apartment and put these sleeping pods in, currently occupied by 5 women and 9 men paying $675 each.
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So incredibly sad- Susan Wojcicki’s 19 year old son died from a drug overdose at Cal after taking a drug that was potentially laced with fentanyl. 2mg of fentanyl (~10-15 grains of salt worth) is a lethal dose.
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Duolingo runs a taqueria outside their HQ in Pittsburgh. You get a discount for speaking Spanish. Many reviews say it’s the best Mexican food they’ve ever had! I will def go next time I’m in town.
Not relevant, but Duolingo's taco shop does almost $700k in revenue lol
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TIL Costco sells a pallet of freeze-dried food. Preppers can buy 5,400 servings of food with a 25 year shelf life for $2,500. Lots of pasta and rice dishes, some soups, oatmeals & milk. Just add water!. 910,080 calories, 364 calories/$.
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The website for the band "Portugal, The Man" is a Google Sheets document
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I am often surprised by polling but this one scares the shit out of me. 1 out of 5 people 18-29 believe the holocaust is a myth. How did it get to be this way?
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~20 years ago @BarackObama was a relative nobody, a local state senator. Kerry gave him the chance to address the DNC; the major networks didn't even bother covering the speech. Then he gave this speech which led to him becoming president and history was altered. Great stuff.
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New Italian train route “La Dolce Vita” is a real beauty, starts at $2k per person per day
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@silmarilya It’s for people like me. I don’t want to pay $4k for a toy I’ll use occasionally but now am contemplating paying $600 for one to have around and use on planes .I bet quest sales are very good right now.
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Undergrads with family income < $200k (80% of US households) will pay no tuition. < $100k (50% of households) pay nothing at all (housing, dining, fees, books included). MIT earmarked $170M from endowment for this year
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I feel like an old man saying this, but—$27M sure doesn't go as far as it used to.
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Did a double-take at our neighbors new SUV. Looks a bit like an OG LR Defender but obviously isn't. It's an Ineos Grenadier. Fun story:.Ineos is the 4th largest chemical co in the world, >$20B revs. So why did they start making a car?. The CEO Jim Ratcliffe (recently famous
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I normally don’t think much of these pictures showing people on smartphones but this video from last night in Paris is pretty wild.
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Klarna was one of the first to go all-in on AI, replacing 700 customer service staff last year. Now CEO @klarnaseb says they focused too much on cost and hurt quality, so they’re investing in humans again and will let customers talk to real people.
Klarna’s CEO says his pursuit of cost-cutting, fueled by advancements in artificial intelligence, has gone too far
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How Chipotle sells $15 burritos, profitably
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Help me understand Spotify - it just crossed $100B in market cap and I'm not an investor. I had the chance to invest while it was private and I got a fundamental assumption wrong, and I'm still not exactly sure what I missed. My assumption: I thought the artists and record
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My parents are at the Maha Kumbh Mela, the largest human gathering ever—~450M people over 6 weeks!. It happens every 144 yrs, based on planetary alignment. Hindus believe a dip in the sacred river purifies the soul. They say it's incredibly well-run; quite the spectacle.
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People think SF has lost its weird but I just passed hundreds of people protesting that birds aren’t real 🤷🏾♂️
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Students with last names later in the alphabet receive lower grades than those in the beginning. Teachers give higher grades when they start and lower when they are tired of grading. Teachers that grade Z-A give higher grades to late last names. Delta is 0.6/100
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Blake is 100% correct, and the commenters are wrong. The A380 was a bad idea from the start. Airbus spent $25B developing it forecasting 1,200 sales, needing 500 to break-even. They sold 248. When at BCG I worked on a project on this topic (for GE), we concluded that it was.
A380 was a bad idea. A bet on the hub-and-spoke model. But passengers don’t want to change planes. They want to fly direct. Smaller airplanes like 787 (and Overture) enable more point to point flying.
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An HK-based employee of a multinational firm wired out $25M after attending a video call where all employees were deepfaked, including the CFO. He first got an email which was suspicious but then was reassured on the video call with his “coworkers.”
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David Gottesman invested in Berkshire Hathaway in 1968 and held on. His wife now has $11.7B of the stock; the stock is up ~30,000x in these 56 years. His wife is donating $1B to the Einstein College of Medicine to make tuition free.
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The drone shows at Burning Man took it up a notch this year; people were playing space invaders with 250 drones so everyone could see
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Microsoft is planning to use ChatGPT to power Bing, and plans to launch it in a couple of months. The turnaround under Satya Nadella is incredible.
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Jensen looks like a 28 year old that dyed his hair grey. He is 61.
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Strange to blame Indians for her son not getting into a good college; it’s MUCH more difficult for an Indian person with a 1450 SAT (what her son got) to get into a good college than it is for a white person… we just went through this 🤦🏽♂️
My high IQ, high SAT son is, I suspect, about to be denied admission to some of the most middle-tier engineering undergrad majors in the country. And this is perhaps why I am chimping today. Do not tell us our eyes do not see what they see.
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absolutely nothing will keep a British dude from getting a pint
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