Zach Tratar
@zachtratar
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Founder @ Embra. Former: Stripe, Jobstart (co-founder, acquired) & UIUC ECE. Entrepreneur & investor. Centrist. No one's 100% wrong.
SF ☀️
Joined April 2009
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Pinned Tweet
We launched two weeks ago as the fastest ChatGPT-like assistant for the mac.
Today, Embra becomes far more intelligent.
You can watch Embra *think*, decide which tools it can access to help you, and use that tool in real-time. It's really fun.
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TikTok is a national security threat. 🚨
80 million Americans now spend 20% of their free time scrolling through an algorithmic content experience owned by the Chinese Government.
This scandal has uncovered lie after lie over the past years.
Here is a quick timeline 👇
1/5
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Why is
@stripe
's API so good?
Teams debate the naming of each field, talk about trade-offs, and attempt to plan ahead for new features that may change the shape of the API.
We *take the time* to get it right, and individual engineers recognize the best design requires teamwork.
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Just got a new M2 Max Macbook Pro.
My `yarn` command, that build my entire app and every single of the subservices used to take my old machine 12 minutes.
It now takes 35 seconds.
Wow.
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Introducing Embra, a fast ChatGPT-like assistant that lives on your Mac desktop & integrates into your apps! Starting with Chrome.
Use it to:
- Access ChatGPT-like conversations instantly
- Query documents or websites (even PDFs!)
- Write context-rich docs, code, and emails
1/3
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Whilst we all root for Sam, it *is* a bit scary that all voices here seem so unified.
To take the steelman position here, what did Ilya see? What are the risks specifically & how real are they?
We can make fun of “doomers”, but we would be unwise to believe in zero risk.
1/3
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China: builds thousands of miles of high speed rail per year.
San Francisco: takes 10 years to open up a bathroom, and holds a press conference about it.
😭 how is this not literally Parks and Rec?
We are ready to open our long-awaited Powell St. Station restroom! Follow us here to watch the press conference live.
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The buried lede is that Brockman also stepped down as President of OpenAI.
Something very big happened.
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Most software engineers have never experienced what I’ll call “full startup speed”.
Yes, it’s possible to fix 15 app bugs, fully dockerize apps, productionize dbs, get deploy scripts running (even kubernetes), add CI, SSL, and send first invites in… under 2 days.
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Being in Europe for 3 months, where it seemed covid barely existed and now coming back to Seattle, where masks are still commonplace, is fucking weird.
As a liberal, I strongly believe we massively underestimate the damage masks cause to the social fabric of society.
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In light of this terrible product design going viral, I have a story to tell.
Back in 2010 I worked as an intern at GE Appliances & Lighting. That's the same org that produced this monstrosity.
1/?
I’m seriously hoping this is a parody.
Because, if it’s not, the GE smart bulb team should be charged with violating the Geneva Convention.
This is torture.
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The world has too many aspiring thought leaders and not enough aspiring execution leaders.
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I've been generally defending
@elonmusk
over the last months.
But his last 2 weeks of behavior have been especially over the top and damaging. He needs to calm himself and focus on leading companies, not culture wars.
Wishing the best for everyone at his companies.
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The Bay Area did not create wealth for the Tech industry.
The Tech industry created wealth for the Bay Area.
Many want to paint the narrative that tech is somehow extractive of local resources, when it’s the exact opposite. Look at the SF annual budget, local spending, etc.
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Fun fact: Crypto inequality is *significantly worse* than traditional wealth inequality!
The top 1% of Americans own 30.4% of total US Wealth.
The top 1% of Crypto users own 80%+ of total Crypto Wealth.
"Crypto makes us all owners" is a narrative being driven by crypto elites.
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The We Company's S-1 is INSANE.
- Adam (founder) has lease agreements with WE where he's earning $250m from properties he owns!
- The company has loaned him $30m+ dollars since 2013 at 0.64% APR, enabling him to re-invest!
- $500m loan using... stock at collateral!
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After 10 years of living in Silicon Valley / SF, it became clear that the
#1
way to become successful is to be surrounded by 1) others who have done it before and 2) ambitious peers.
The environment shapes you towards the right actions and provides resources/network.
1/x
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Ok, hear me out...
- SF has a lot of money.
- Build islands in the Bay.
- Connected w/ little canals like Amsterdam.
- Walkable & bikable; almost no cars.
- NIMBYs can't control it, and the islands are 4 story Europe-style density.
- Norway-quality ferry system.
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So, uh, they just discovered a massive network of ancient cities in the Amazon forest using LIDAR.
1000 years older than other discoveries. Size of cities = urbanism, landscaped garden cities rivaling the Maya, and sized like Giza Plateau.
Super cool.
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Love how these kitchens mix a futuristic feel w/ raw materials.
Goals. 🤩
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One thing I like about
@stripe
: when people in Slack talk about competitors, it's almost always positive.
- "I like <x> feature"
- "I'm curious if they are seeing <y> happen"
Previous companies I was at? I'd hear more language like:
"Let's crush em"
"What a terrible design"
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One time I got an intro to someone who said they wanted to work at Stripe. I wanted to meet them first so we got beers. 4 sips in he says “So what’s Jack Dorsey like?”
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Really eventually want to build a house with these vibes. So dreamy.
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San Francisco is not dead.
- Happy families playing
- Food trucks doing a ton of business
- Well maintained parks
- Eternal sunshine
- People are enjoying life
Don’t take the downfall narrative at face value. There is nuance.
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The sad truth is that most in tech (even engineers) cannot afford to buy a home in the Bay Area.
The running "joke" amongst startup folks is that you must IPO to buy a house -- so you basically have to win a lottery.
Techies hate the cost of living too and want it fixed.
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Google Flights PM: "ok, what do we want users to feel when they visit the page?"
Engineer: How about how dumb/stupid they are for booking this late?
PM: Perfect. And add a graph so they can really visualize the pain.
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Whenever it seems everyone is on one side, I deeply believe in entertaining the counter-position. It is not against Sama whatsoever, but more to instead believe the worries of some very smart people.
Ilya knew this was a huge risk. To say it’s purely politics seems naive.
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If, as mentioned, Sama and others truly believe the public should have board oversight, we deserve the information that caused this severity of contention.
If super intelligence has been achieved, this is a human-kind level tech shift. As inspiring as it is, I refrain from 100%
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It's pretty amazing just how bad the content is on LinkedIn.
People only type like this.
No full sentences.
Then what? They found out a *THING*!
And guess what? It's nonsense!
The most basic nonsense. Ever.
So, just remember.
If you try hard, you could be like them too.
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@Altimor
It's also true though that # of square feet doesn't necessarily mean better life. And often, it's weirdly inversely related if you value community that arises from density.
Which I think a lot of Europeans have, whilst many Americans are far more ~alone in their cars/houses
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Embra was one of the first AI Agents startups. Today, we are renaming AI Agents to AI Commands, and narrowing our focus away from autonomous agents.
While autonomous agents took off in popularity, we found they were often unreliable for work, inefficient, and unsafe.
🧵
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Open source founders are an entirely nother' level, man.
This is wild.
Mistral removed their terms that said you couldn't train other competing AI models using outputs from their model.
So now near-GPT-4 performance can enable everyone else to make smart, small models.
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As wild as the times are, we are not decelerating at Embra.
Introducing the Embra OS overlay for Mac! ✨
- Share screenshots, websites, or text to instantly collab with Embra, your AI coworker.
- Access your pre-built library of commands (aka GPTs)
- Get work done, fast.
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August, 2022: The CCP passed a regulation that forced all Chinese companies (incl. TikTok) to give all data and algorithms to the CCP.
Today: The CCP now has your data, and TikTok US still refuses to stop sending them your data.
And 80 million Americans keep scrolling.
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Twitter should really build a view on people's profiles to see their top tweets of all time.
The best content is essentially buried treasure, lost in time.
It would also make following an easier decision.
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Oct 2019: TikTok promised lawmakers they’d follow data locality guidelines and keep US data local.
Dec 2019: They lied — instead they were caught sending mass data back to Chinese servers.
When caught, they admitted it and entered frivolous "negotiations" [0].
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It's really awesome to follow research on Tardigrades. Apparently when they are exposed to vacuum and lose water, their bodies flood with a newly discovered protein that coats theirs cells in a glass-like coating.
Prevents cell deterioration. Amazing.
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July 2020: TikTok said the data would not be abused in China, and was highly restricted. Data collection continued for years.
June, 2022: They lied, as whistleblowers leaked proof showing many Chinese employees had unfettered access to American data.
[1]
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Questions:
- Why did TikTok keep lying about sending data to China?
- What is China planning on doing? What have they already done?
- How should America respond? Should TikTok and China face consequences?
- Should foreign adversaries be allowed to control American media?
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Introducing… Embra AI Agents! The first-ever GPT AI Agent Hub available via mac app. Businesses and individuals can quickly create their own AI agents and access them anywhere instantly — just type “/” in the app. The Agent Editor does the heavy lifting:
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One vibe shift I'm thankful for in Silicon Valley: 6 years ago if a CEO was boots-on-the-ground, doing IC work, it was often viewed as a red flag.
Now I think most effective CEOs believe it's critical to go into the details, audit work, and connect to ground truth.
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One thing we do well at
@stripe
is write memos to collaborate on problems and potential solutions.
These tend to follow the SCQA format for clarity.
S = Situation
C = Complication
Q = Questions
A = Answers
Start with basics, say what's hard, provoke thought, and then solve!
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Within my first 5 minutes walking in the Mission of San Francisco, I passed a Walgreens and saw this couple stuffing 3 bags full of stolen items (including one large garbage bag).
Then they hobbled over to the bus stop and boarded the public bus as their escape vehicle.
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Plenty of startups don't start because someone else is already building the rough idea.
Peter Thiel may disagree, but the vast majority of successful businesses can not avoid competition.
Example: Stripe would have never started!
This is business. Choose your competition.
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@thehill
I like Bernie but he has no idea what he's talking about on this one. Private industry generates revenue, and thus industry is self-funded by delivering value instead of relying on taxing every citizen.
NASA (which I also like) lights money on fire compared to SpaceX.
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@stripe
We also have a review committee who has the power to block entire ships.
They demand high quality!
~50% of my team-agreed designs have been rejected, and I've had to iterate. 100% of those rejections led to significant improvements in the final design.
Gatekeepers are friends.
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Having a mini hackathon at my place today.
People are building:
- Neural net optimizations
- Billionaire tracking website
- Tesla car tracking & notifications
- Org chart directory
- Airpod daily overview
🔥
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Footnotes:
[0] When negotiating, US lawmakers were able to get TikTok to stop collecting... birthday. And they very stupidly allowed Tiktok to keep sending post/activity data.
[1] Easy for the CCP to copy data if the door is wide open. And lets TikTok deny working w/ the CCP.
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The billionaire class invented going to space at 1/100th the cost of Government, used private resources for public good, and proved to be able to move humanity forward while Government stalled irresponsibly and tragically for 60 years.
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Counterpoint:
@garrytan
only looks like a radical to extremists.
The guy is as reasonable and centrist as they come. If you think advocating against degrowth is a crisis, you're the crisis.
Does YC have a crisis comms firm in place yet? Garry is a walking, talking crisis.
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The company had declined in market share 20% that year from foreign competition. We knew the numbers.
Most of the good people there who I knew left within a year.
Done.
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I don't know why it feels weirdly controversial to say this...
If you're rooting for the downfall of the dollar -- even if you believe in benevolent crypto -- you're advocating for the weakening of the American economy.
You can't be pro-America and anti-Dollar.
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The more I talk to people, the more it appears ChatGPT had passed the Turing Test.
And if it doesn't in your opinion, from what I've heard, GPT4 will blow it out of the water.
Oddly, I always imagined there would be more hysterics and fanfare when we hit this milestone.
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What's a book that really shaped your vision/prediction of the future?
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The CTO's face turned to shock. Everyone turned to shock.
Honestly I don't know how Sam had the balls to give this presentation so smoothly, but he rocked it.
Bam, next slide.
A PIVOT TABLE! 🤩
"As you can see Reddit is an outlier. GE has spent about $2k there."
15/?
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Some professional news. ✨
Last Friday was my last day at Stripe. It's bittersweet, as I leave a wonderfully supportive team and wildly successful Banking-as-a-service product.
I'll now be experimenting with ideas, traveling, meeting ppl, and keeping it casual for a bit.
🧵1/n
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@frankcdale
I was in a taxi the other day where a Chinese driver was using Chinese TikTok.
He was swiping while driving, which was kinda scary, but I was also AMAZED at the content.
75% of the content was full Government media. Pro-vaccination, pro-lockdown, be a good citizen, etc. Scary.
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To be in the top 1% of income you need to make about $350k per year.
To be in the top 1% of wealth you need $10,500,000 in assets.
At $350k per year, it would take you 60 years to earn that income — without spending anything and extra investments!
🤯!
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Remember that graph I highlighted two days ago about the coronavirus?
This is it now. In 2 just days we went from 8,000 cases to 24,000 and 180 deaths to 490.
We are off the chart -- SARS was nothing compared to the coronavirus.
For all those claiming the coronavirus isn't serious: look at the numbers.
Be smart. Be safe. Protect yourself.
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Unfortunately hearing this from multiple founders.
The ChatGPT API is amazing… if you’re only trying to build a narrow chat layer without any superpowers.
Instruction and steerability are very poor compared to davinci-003 — you cede total control to OpenAI.
After 24 hours of gpt-turbo experimentation I been through the following emotional arc: 🧵
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The Lærdal tunnel (left) in Norway is the longest tunnel in the world, at 24km. It cost $164 million in today's dollars. I drove it yesterday.
The State Route 99 tunnel (right) in Seattle, where I normally live, is 3km long. It cost $3.5 billion.
Both were completed in 5 years.
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After traveling for months, here are 10 things underrated about America.
A thread:
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I'm sorry, but billionaires *should* exist!
We must lower inequality while at the same time embracing innovation created by markets & private wealth.
Bill Gates: sanitation, nuclear, & malaria.
Elon: electric cars, batteries,
& space.
All things Governments weren't solving.
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I'm still confused. Why do employees trashing their leader, either publicly on Twitter or publicly to their company, expect NOT to get fired?
It's very easy to advocate for ideas internally without risk. And it's also easy, if you "must", to trash talk privately in zoom/RL.
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@spakhm
There's being against toxic woke culture & then there's just being a dick to an entire class of people.
Do better, Slava. You owe it to yourself. Even if you want to rattle the cage sometimes for fun, there is no winner in this scenario, and trading hurt for fun is not ok.
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This is not true & such an incredibly toxic message.
- 50% of unicorn entrepreneurs are immigrants.
- Most intergenerational wealth is lost within 1-2 generations. Slope = down.
- Most paths to success look exactly like the first graph. True for most successful person I know.
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I'll say it: there are too many investors and not enough founders/operators.
I'm glad there are now numerous smart investors and abundant capital. But we are in an operator drought, and we'd be better off if more investors got back into the game.
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Honestly, I don't understand property taxes.
If you buy a house for $2mm, why the heck do you need to pay the Government $30,000 per year just to stay in a house you *own*. Does that not essentially mean you don't own it in the first place?
Convince me otherwise?
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The number of people who truly prioritize communicating truth over narrative is astonishingly low.
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Is it just me or have flights gone up ~50% in price across the board?
Is this some form of supply chain shock, or purely tracking inflation? I'm a bit confused how they can increase so dramatically.
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Your competitors aren't the "enemy." You're not in a war.
You're all trying to build great products that help businesses and real people.
When you treat competition w/ respect, it's easier to stay focused on your customers and keep culture healthy.
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Honestly I have no f'ing clue how all the calls are still stable.
Their infra engineers all deserve crazy praise. I don't know if any single product has ever scaled this cleanly, and Zoom is a far more complicated product to scale than many others.
HOLY f'ng WOW.
(on the ZM security webinar update )
$ZM was
10M daily users end 2019
200M daily users 4/1 2020
Growth to 300M as of today.
Nice!
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I wonder how they’re doing with — growth, usage, etc.
Feels like a failed launch. Everyone I know who tried it has stopped. But I don’t have all the info.
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I have been back in SF for about a month now. Some highlights:
- The city is healing, though SOMA is slower to recover. Divisadero, Hayes, etc are fully healed and vibrant.
- Even in SOMA way more workers are out and about than 1 month ago.
- Tenderloin is about as bad as I’ve
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Being politically centrist is SUPER weird.
- Right-leaning friends hate it when I surprise them with a leftist position.
- Left-leaning friends don't like my right-leaning opinions.
- Right-leaning strangers claim I'm a leftist.
- Left-leaning strangers claim I'm on the right.
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Hey
@RBReich
when are you gonna tweet that Elon lost $17B today and balance has been restored to the force?
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I think a lot of people despise "workaholics" because they've never experienced a job they've enjoyed.
And so they assume work is purely transactional, and that workaholics must be victims of some nefarious capitalistic culture.
Most aren't victims -- they're winners.
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Reading about what life was back in 1910 and pretty crazy to hear how Sears had prefabricated housing materials, shipped them, and it only took 350 hours for a carpenter to put the whole house together.
At $1 per square foot.
How & why did we... lose that?
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Wearing a headset during your kid's birthday so you can capture it for later -- blocking their view of your face, and taking you out of the moment -- feels like major dystopia.
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The current price of housing is so ridiculous it could very well become the
#1
national security issue within 5 years.
When enough people cannot afford the basic means of shelter (a core source of dignity), they will eventually revolt.
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@shaunmmaguire
I’ve watched hours of both, and they are both terrible people.
Tate is a literal human trafficker. He has admitted to romance scams on video, which are both illegal and deeply unethical.
I have nothing against his messaging on masculinity being a good thing. Makes sense.
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I explained that it was done. He looked confused. I showed him. He said "huh ok we will have to find you something then."
That project was supposed to take my entire 12 weeks. I think they expected me to go through it manually line by line?!
4/?
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Good time to buy. Square at $55B is an absolute steal. It's hard to imagine a future where they don't go back to $120B+.
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The density of talent in SF is completely unrivaled.
It’s such an odd contrast to the quality of life provided by the city.
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After Sam gave his presentation, no one clapped, and no one said a word. The CTO thanked him for the presentation -- that's it -- and called up the next intern.
Sam didn't get a return offer. 😂
The company tried convincing interns to come full time, but why would we?
16/?
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I can't overstate how important it is to be friends -- real friends -- with people you disagree with.
And this doesn't mean "democrat vs republican battles" -- it means being able to engage in good faith, respectful debates where both parties are interested in the other opinion.
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Sam said: "After my first project I was told to wait for my next one. Nothing ever came, so instead I decided to do an analysis ok how much money GE wasted by hiring me, and how I wasted that money."
14/?
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Sama is literally vibe-shifting his way back into CEO.
Incredible.
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Why is everyone claiming that cutting this team is disastrous?
- I have never had algorithmic transparency as a user.
- I have never had algorithmic choice as a user.
- What were the results of the studies? What changed?
- Are ppl claiming curation teams did a good job now?!
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Unpopular opinion: The single best time to be alive is today, and we should all be radically grateful for the existing systems holding the world together. The world functions surprisingly well, especially given the amount of difficulty humans have cooperating with each other.
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But again, the common factor? They were shaped by the culture of trying things. Not being afraid to fail, since failure is temporary. Seeing people around them “doing it” so they figured they could do it themselves.
And then years in people will bet on you.
4/x
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Stripe Treasury should launch a feature to spread assets across FDIC banks.
Charge for the liquidity management.
Automate the cash movement.
Not easy, but most of the infrastructure is already built.
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Ok this is getting very funny.
@BarrysBootcamp
needs to get a big shout out for help w the migration. At least two big founders have mentioned to me how critical it is in their decision to move.
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Main person I'm watching right now is Jamie Dimon (and therefore JP Morgan Chase).
Remember he is the king of navigating downturns and stable balance sheets. He also leveraged the last two downturns to massively leapfrog other banks. Example: Bear sterns for $2 a share.
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