Suleman "Suli" Ali
@sulemanali
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I tweet about Startups & Investing. Startup Founder. Investor in Real Estate, PE, Startups: @deel @superhuman @PostscriptIO @Plangrid & 50+. Let's win win!
San Francisco
Joined April 2008
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I accidentally helped a friend make $500k/year working 4 hours a month.
He retired at 31.
His business made $559,000 last year.
Here's his story!
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One VC Fund I invested in has a 689x bagger. They invested $200k and turned it into $137,800,000. 🤯🤯🤯
This single investment will 3x the entire fund.
VC at its best.
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The story of
@relativityspace
and their CEO Tim Ellis is insane:
- Guy works at Blue Origin , discovers 3D metal printing. tries convincing the company for 9 months to 3D print rockets. Everyone says no
- Starts Blue Origin's 3D printing division after getting a meeting with…
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My first ever angel investment just exited! Here's how I turned $100,000 into $2,005,741.65. 👇
(All the credit to
@sfannan
&
@marialegre
& team, thank you for letting me ride your coattails!).
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Everyone I know has a VC Fund. Miss the days when everyone I knew had a startup.
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Two big misses by Google/Apple/Facebook/Microsoft:
1. Each should have $100b venture funds.
2. One of them should buy Y Combinator for $25b or $50b or $100b.
They've infinite cash, are technology companies, should be aggressively investing in innovation outside their org.
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One thing that surprises me over the last 20 years:
The 6% commission to sell a house has not been disrupted by the internet. And I don't know why.
Why do you think?
Zillow, Redfin have had no effect.
My favorite part about Opendoor:
1. You can go in and look at an Opendoor…
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Startup that blew me away this week: Pipedream.
Building a network of underground tubes for delivery of stuff to homes and businesses. Stuff could travel at 200mph inside the tubes - a tube from Palo Alto to SF could deliver goods in 10 minutes.
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"Now is best time ever to take All Birds private." That was my first thought when I saw it's market cap was $140m, now I'm not so sure.
For context, AllBirds was worth $4b at IPO in November 2021.
My first thought:
In 2023, Allbirds did ~$240m in revenue and lost ~$125m.…
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My phone calls with my parents are board meetings. They ask me how each investment/business I'm involved with is doing. Growth is never fast enough. Lots of disappointed looks, requests for more metrics.
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Last year, I helped a dentist friend sell her dental practice for $$$$$. A lot more than what I thought dental practices were worth. To a PE backed roll-up. Now she's rich and living the dream.
Now when I go to a dentist, I'm examining their business while they examine my…
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The power law dynamic in Venture is hard to comprehend. Here's an example:
A VC fund I'm in has invested in 57 startups. 1 startup is going to return more than the other 56 combined.
Without this 1 startup, the fund is a 3x fund. With it, it's a 7x fund.
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Met entrepreneur on twitter last year.
He texted me last week that he needed some cash for a week.
Wired him $200k (no docs, no phone call, no dd, all via text).
Wasn't sure what would happen.
He wired me $200k back + $10k for doing it today.
What should I do with the $10k?
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The highest value lowest cost software in the world is Canva. Am i wrong?
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Heard a classic "only in silicon valley" story yesterday:
1. Dude worked at a startup for 5 years, fully vested his equity.
2. Company goes public...everyone is celebrating. Our protagonist is beaming with pride.
3. Stock soars.
4. Lockup expires, time to sell your stock and…
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First time entrepreneurs don’t realize: when you raise money, you’ve created an obligation, not an accomplishment.
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@nxthompson
@chrisamccoy
I'm definitely aging worse & have seen/done a lot less. I'd say these 8 years have done him well.
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One of the VC Funds I've invested in has returned a 7.8x multiple on invested capital/MOIC. That blows me away!
Was thinking about doing an analysis of all the VC funds/vintages I've invested in and sharing aggregate info. Would that be interesting?
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Starting a new company from scratch is a hard. That's why I've been looking into acquiring a public company & making myself CEO. What's a public company you'd like to buy?
Here's an example: Presto Automation ($PRST).
1. Product looks amazing - uses Voice AI at fast food drive…
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"At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since."
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I've a new startup investing strategy. And it's fucking brilliant.
@shaanvp
invests in a company. He tells me about it 2 weeks or 2 months later. I then invest in the same company at 10x the valuation as Shaan.
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Request for startup: Glassdoor for real estate agents.
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Working on a real estate tech startup! Looking for a cofounder with software or real estate experience!
Please RT for reach! DM if interested.
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I've invested in 35-40 different venture funds. The single best fund, by far, has returned 7.89x.
For every $100,000 invested, they returned $789,000. And they aren't done yet.
Sub $100m fund, tons of QSBS, couple unicorns, 4+ IPOs.
When venture works, it really works.
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1 thing I believe that isn't obvious yet:
People are really bad at recognizing opportunity.
I've pitched people to invest/join startups that are crushing it, meet new people, try new things. Consistently stunned by how often people say no, almost reflexively.
Do you agree?
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If I'm Warren Buffett, I'm buying First Republic Bank for $4b today. And declaring that I stand behind this bank.
1. "I'm moving our deposits to First Republic Bank."
2. "I'm also considering renaming this to First Republic Bank by Warren Buffett."
Stop the FRC slow motion…
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One thing I thought was total bullshit that I now realize is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING: Interior design.
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Hi there! I'm a tech entrepreneur who does some real estate investing (own $30m of SFRs directly, have invested $10m in funds/syndicate deals).
I'm in market for these things!
1. Investing in a hard money lending fund.
2. Looking to find someone to partner with for us to buy…
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I haven't had a job in 15 years.
Been an entrepreneur for 15 years.
Today - decided to look to see if Twitter was hiring. Cuz I love twitter and love inflection points.
@elonmusk
can I come work at Twitter?
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I bought my first company last year.
Here's how it's going!
👇👇👇
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A startup I've wanted to start for a while:
Instagram for billionaires, models, nobel prize winners, NBA stars, and US Presidents.
Only the most powerful/famous 10,000 people in the world allowed on.
Here's what I love about it:
1. If you're Taylor Swift, you can't use…
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Free Startup Idea. If is The Everything Store, build The Best Things store. Sell only the best things, starting with sexy new age D2C brands like Away, Glossier, Quip, Native, etc.
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Someone tell me why this is the stupidest idea ever.
1. Buy this bank (Carver Bank) for $20m -- it's the lowest priced publicly traded bank and close enough to break even.
2. Execute these strategies (and in this order):
2.1. Try to be the best bank for …
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One of the VC funds I invested in has generated $1 billion of carry. WOW!
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All the respect to the people in the arena.
But this is a dumb idea and going nowhere.
Openstore as a whole shows a complete lack of understanding of ecommerce/lack of understanding of what makes Amazon special.
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Every time $META hits a new low, I buy $100k of it.
This is a hill I'll die on/I'm willing to go broke on it.
Facebook is not the new Yahoo.
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The median home price in USA is $418,000. That's unaffordable for many. Is changing the 30 year mortgage to a 40 year mortgage a viable solution? Or a stupid idea?
People living 10 years longer...
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I love startups that take things only rich people have and make them accessible for you and me.
eTrade: sophisticated stock trading but for everyone.
Uber: Private driver but for everyone.
Instacart: Private shopper but for everyone.
What new startups are doing this?
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My mom is really cheap. A couple amazing stories:
She says my dad has never bought her anything, not even a chicken dinner. She's wanted to buy a diamond ring for about 2 decades. I sent her my first paycheck from my first post college job. She cashed it, never bought ring.
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I met
@gabebodhi
at
@REconveneLA
and liked the guy so much I invested $500k in his fund from that 1 meeting.
In his January investor update, he wrote his perspective of the real estate market - it's clear/brilliant/insightful. Is he right?
(Posted with permission)
While we…
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Met a guy who owns real estate. He calls the business ATM Holdings because they print cash.
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My best bud
@ShaanVP
and I did an episode of his podcast
@myfirstmilpod
.
Listen to it here:
If you like it - DM Shaan and tell him!
If you don't like it - DM me & tell me how to make it better! Hell no matter what DM me & tell me how to make it better.
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The clothing industry is f*cked
It blew my mind that:
- 30% of inventory is not sold
- 40% of clothing is returned
- $50B+ of clothing is burned per year
We dump a garbage truck worth of clothes every second.
But why?
Turns out, for multiple reasons:
- We try to predict…
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I would give my left kidney to look at Eight Sleep's P&L.
Is it a $50m brand or a $500m brand?
Is it profitable or does it gush blood?
I think it'd be so fun to be an investment banker and peek inside companies all day. Is the emperor wearing any clothes?
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Today, I bought $30m of US T-Bills at 1/3/6/12 month durations
Ask me anything. Or better yet, tell me what I should have done instead.
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Aaron Levie has been the founder & CEO of Box for 18 years. Since he was 18 or 19.
Will someone please tell him he gets to keep all his stock if he quits now? And works on whatever is
#2
on his bucket list?
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My 2 biggest goals for next year:
1. Have a baby!
2. Find a way to decouple my identity/sense of self worth from my work.
2 is really hard for me! Does anyone have any books/coaches/tips?
Excited for 2024, let's win at life!
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I have all these ideas to make $5,000,000.
And no ideas to make $1,000,000,000.
So frustrating.
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As a society, I think we're bad at allocating talent. I admire things like YC, Hired, Lambda School, LinkedIn (all 4 are talent marketplaces). What are other talent marketplaces you like? What talent marketplaces should exist but don't yet?
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I looked at 100+ apartments for sale before I bought this one. I've developed a deep appreciation for the beauty of NYC architecture. And the importance of floor plans (
@bobbyfijan
). Every apt in NYC is unique & has hair on it. The building I'm buying into was built in 1906!
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You have $50m in cash.
You want to double it asap.
You'd prefer not to lose it.
How do you put it to work to double it?
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Part of me is inspired by FTX/Sam Bankman-Fried.
Most of me is disgusted. Here are the 6 most inspiring & most disgusting facts about FTX/SBF.
(I read Michael Lewis's book about FTX/Sam Bankman-Fried so you don't have to!)
Most Inspiring/Interesting:
1. Donald Trump. SBF…
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Takeaways:
1. The only way to win the rat race is to opt out.
This takeaway is one that I understand intellectually but haven't accepted emotionally.
Frankly, I'm still blown by my friend's act of saying "I have enough."
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Respectfully disagree.
Focus on product market fit & only on product market fit. Until you have it. Then only focus on growth.
Follow this advice, you likely open pandora's box. There are too many other temptations that feel like business building but are blackhole of time.
founders ✨ i highly recommend creating a solid cap table, balance sheet, and p&l even if you're incredibly early on in the process
it'll make it easier to manage things in the future if you set up a solid foundation to build off of
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Love this quote:
“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.”
One of my goals is to get out of my own way & minimized the unlived part of my life. You should too!
Anyone amazing at this?
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Met a guy who works for a famous Youtuber/Entrepreneur. He said "My guy has 6 million followers. 15,000 of them are interesting people we want to know and have a relationship with. My job is to identify those 15,000, meet them, & build & keep a relationship with them."
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Just bought a honda odyssey instead of a Tesla. And I'm very unhappy about it. Ask me anything.
We chose to buy a loaded Subaru Ascent over a Tesla Model Y.
Tesla just wasn’t worth the extra $25k including the $8k we’d have to pay for the promise of vapor ware self-driving “soon”.
Throw in quality problems and poor A/C and decision was pretty easy.
AMA.
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Who lives in NYC, loves Succession, and wants to come over and watch it at my place?
Succession viewing party!
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Number of investments where i've made more than $10m: 6
More than $1m: 22
More than $100k: too lazy to count/I don't remember
What should I do different/better?
What's your investment body count?
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Twitter - i invested in a biz that is doing $5m in operating income this year - what should they do to reduce their taxes?
Ideas welcome - no idea too zany! CPAs, this is your moment.
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I've a dumb relationship with money. And I'm trying to change it.
If you had to blow $250k on yourself, how would you spend it?
👇👇👇
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I've a new Sunday ritual, you should copy it. I do 2 things:
1. Brainstorming "Life changing ideas". As you get older, you stop doing new things, you just repeat your choices for 10,000 days in a row. That's lame, don't do that.
I brainstorm new choices I could make that would…
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Considering YOLO'ing some $ into First Republic Bank today.
Good idea or bad idea?
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$$$ Business Idea: Build a Shopify App for each store to have their own Buy Now Pay Later.
Instead of giving Affirm/Afterpay the margin, this Shopify app does underwriting, lets store owner finance it, keep the margin.
Want to build it? I'll invest, get you first 10 customers
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I think this tweet is stupid. There is no correlation between sending investor updates and success.
Peter Thiel said it best "The next mark zuckerberg will not build a social network".
IMO: "The next mark zuckerberg may or may not sending investor updates."
Calling it out…
I think it was Harry Stebbings from 20VC podcast who said that out of 38 companies he has in his portfolio.
Only 8 do monthly updates, ONLY eight!!
And these 8 are the most successful; and they have the most disciplined founders.
Lesson learned, thanks
@HarryStebbings
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Doing a new thing, how can this be better?
-NYC Sunday Family dinners with 4 best friends.
-Each of us 4 invites 1 new person to each dinner.
-Dinner is at 6PM (early).
-We take polaroid photo and put the date on the back.
-Have a big bowl of all the polaroid photos so we've got…
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Must read Peter Thiel AMA on Reddit. A man with a fundamentally different view of the world than most of us:
http://t.co/nAEjv0myiZ
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San Francisco is baaaaack!
How do I know? The venture capital subsidies are back.
Thanks
@tryramp
for free coffee and donuts this morning!
Boy I miss the days of $5 Uber rides and $19 Homejoy house cleanings.
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7 ways the system is broken.
Which of the 7 drives you bananas?
1. Romantic comedies are poison. They set unrealistic and incorrect expectations about what love is. You spend your 20's looking for love you see in the movies. And your 30's trying to unlearn it.
2. The education…
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Whenever I pay income tax, I now think "I didn't buy enough real estate this year & that's why I have to pay so much in income tax."
H/T to
@Keith_Wasserman
for implanting this thought deep in my brain.
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A 2012 vintage venture fund I invested in has generated 7.59x returns! WOWWWW
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The way I look at my life:
I was born on 3rd base because I was born healthy to amazing parents.
When my parents moved to America when I was 7 years old, I moved to home plate.
Most of the good in my life has come from the above.
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META stock up 75% YTD. What can I say, I'm a genius.
Also, that's my 1 good trade for the year. All the rest of them will lose money. You've been warned.
Every time $META hits a new low, I buy $100k of it.
This is a hill I'll die on/I'm willing to go broke on it.
Facebook is not the new Yahoo.
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Here's a venture fund strategy I've never been pitched. That I think would crush:
1. Pre-seed/seed stage fund
2. Instead of holding for 10+ years for companies to exit, the fund sells all it's equity when the company raises a Series A or Series B.
3. This would yield a 3x+…
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Match buying Hinge for $25m is the dating app equivalent of Google buying Youtube. Best M&A deal in the space!
I would have bought Hinge for $25m.
$MTCH acquiring Hinge for c.$25m in '18 is new info. Terms were undisclosed at the time of acquisition but we know that Hinge did $5.2m total rev in '18 against MTCH FY18 rev of ~$1.7bn. Hinge now on track to do $400m FY23 rev and is a multi-billion $ asset. Pretty good.
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I invested in
@solugen
at a $15m valuation in 2017. Today, they announced they're worth $1.8b.
WOW. How did they do that?
Go
@GaurabC
,
@TungstenSeanide
👇
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I've invested in 2 startups that grew burn so fast they were burning $2m a month. With de minimis revenue. And no flywheel.
CEOs started caring about headcount/perception & forgot about reality.
Until reality slapped them in the face.
Don't be that CEO.
Both going to $0:(
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The US Dollar is being devalued like an Argentinian Peso. If you're holding USD and not hard assets, you're going to get wreckt...
Joe Biden will unveil a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package tonight.
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Met a guy who was previously president of a division of Dell. He sat down & spent 10 minutes talking about flying in the Dell PJ* to meetings + some namedropping.
He then pitched his startup.
I wanted to say "You're so fucked."
Instead: "Good luck."
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I've invested $6,505,042.00 in LA real estate with
@moseskagan
.
I gotta ask him why this toilet is so close to the washer & dryer!
He's the brains,
@moizali
& I are the dumb/don't know how to use a hammer money.
Usually when I invest in projects, I'm keenly aware of the…
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Organizing an entrepreneur meetup in Newport/Orange County!
DM me if you want to join!
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from a wealth manager friend:
"Call all your clients in the morning because nothing bad has happened to them yet."
"Never pitch a good idea on a rainy day. People will say NO only because it's raining."
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Because I'm a contrarian & because AI & because there's no place with the same entrepreneurial energy & values - I'm moving back to SF! Starting 10/1 for 3 months.
Anyone have leads on furnished rentals in the marina or pac heights?
If you want to hang, DM me and let's hang!
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I'm reading the new Elon Musk biography and becoming a Elon fan in the process.
In particular, I'm excited about Tesla Optimus.
1. Tesla Optimus is a general purpose humanoid robot to perform unsafe, repetitive, or boring tasks.
2. Elon says the majority of Tesla's long term…
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I'm surprised that beautiful residential architecture isn't more democratized.
Check out this house
It's stunning. Now that I've seen it, all the other houses look fugly. I'm going to be insulted when you invite me to your house and it doesn't look…
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Important Note - this strategy is not working for me so far.
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I want to do 3 epic trips a year.
Invite my best friends.
Be topless as much of the time as possible.
Adventurous
Anyone have great ideas?
Anyone know a brilliant travel planner?
My 5 best trip ideas
👇👇👇
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I want to write a book that asks 100 incredibly "successful" people in their 70s who've won life:
1. What are the 5 best decisions you made in your life?
2. What are the 5 worse decisions you made in your life?
Explain each in excruciating detail.
Kind of like "Founders at…
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Holy Batman, this is magic.
No sound engineer could do this ⬇️
Now we’re getting more sophisticated tools in descript
AI tooling is going to kick into overdrive this autumn.
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I'm trying something new.
From now I'm going to open source all my startup investments and talk about why I invested!
Here's the first one:
Software is made to manage the physical world
Yet most software in physical industries (aerospace, energy, transportation, etc.) is…
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I've invested something like $10m-$15m of my own money into ~100 startups.
Here are 5 strategies I used and how each has turned out.
👇👇👇
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Anyone I know who is not lazy, is smart, and wants to run their own small business?
Have a turnkey opportunity for you. Includes being your own boss and a clear path to becoming a millionaire. Work remotely but from the US. DMs open!
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I've looked at 5,000+ startup pitch decks. Of all of them, here is my favorite pitch:
1. Walmart has one death per week in their parking lots.
2. This is a HUGE liability.
3. These deaths happen, in part, because the parking lot lights go out.
4. Startup will use space…
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