Ben Taft

@seanfrank Shaun neff is the goat.

sometimes you see a linkedin like this and it makes you want to try harder

@HarryStebbings Keep a printer and a clipboard in your office instead

Considering getting an iPad air for reading articles, ebooks, watching videos. Just feels more convenient solution than Mac. Thoughts and feedback from people who have done it?

@mrexits Clear endorsement opportunity for @andrenickatina

Things are about to get absolutely nuts in America

@Mr_Voorakkara @willob @UlyssesInc_ This hardware doesn’t happen to swim underwater autonomously does it

Building beautiful hardware @UlyssesInc_

@justindross Taking it to the logical extreme: even Apple for iMessage… remember when they didn’t open the back door for the FBI during the San Bernardo shooter investigation?

Under what legal theory could France arrest the telegram founder but not Mark Z or Elon?

@andrew__reed Touché

hmm

@wolfejosh Deep agree. Much better for humanoids to start purpose built for particular tasks / use cases. Optimizing for human parity is simply over-engineering.

I personally don't get the humanoid attempts. Bipedal or handlike dexterity doesn't make sense to me. Even for navigating stairs, door handles and human built world. Why? Engineering beats evolution. Robots will reign but will not look or move like us Best bet is on AI + OS

@TaliaGold This is deeply important and yet somehow rfk gets written off as a nut. It’s a huge shame.

No matter what you think of RFK, his fight against ultra processed foods, toxins, and chronic disease is one of the most important of our lifetime. Must read excerpts below from his speech: Today we spend more on healthcare than any country on Earth, twice what they pay in Europe. And yet we have the worst health outcomes of any nation in the world. We’re about 79th in health outcomes, behind Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Mongolia and other countries….We have the highest chronic disease rate on earth... Two-thirds of American adults and children suffer from chronic health issues. Fifty years ago that number was less than 1%. So we’ve gone from 1% to 66%. In America, 74% of Americans are now overweight or obese, including 50% of our children. One-hundred and twenty years ago, when somebody was obese, they were sent to the circus... half of Americans have prediabetes or type two diabetes… And it’s costing this country more than our military budget every year. There’s been an explosion of neurological illnesses... What is happening to our country, and why isn’t this in the headlines every single day? There’s nobody else in the world who is experiencing it. This is only happening in America. So what’s causing this suffering? First and the worst is ultra processed foods. 70% of American children’s diet is ultra-processed, which means industrially manufactured in a factory.  These foods consist primarily of processed sugar, ultra-processed grains and seed oils. Laboratory scientists, many of whom formerly worked for the cigarette industry, which purchased all the big food companies in the 1970s and ‘80s. They deployed thousands of scientists to invent new chemicals to make the food more addictive. And these ingredients didn’t exist a hundred years ago, humans aren’t biologically adapted to eat them. Hundreds of these chemicals are now banned in Europe. But they are ubiquitous in American processed foods.  The second culprit is toxic chemicals in our food, our medicine and our environment. Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs and toxic waste permeate every cell of our bodies. When my uncle was president, our country spent $0 on chronic disease. Today, government health care spending is almost all for chronic disease. It’s double the military budget. It is the fastest growing budget item in the federal budget. Chronic disease costs more to the economy as a whole costs at least 4 trillion dollars, five times our military budget… a 20% drag on everything we do... Poor and minority communities suffer disproportionately. America can get healthy again. To do that, we need to do three things: first we need need to root out the corruption in our health agencies. Second, we need to change the incentives in our health care system. And third, we need to inspire Americans to get healthy again. 80% of NIH grants go to people who have conflicts of interest. These are the people… who are from the processed food companies. They’re deciding what Americans hear is healthy: the recommendations on the food pyramid, what goes to our school lunch programs, which goes to the food stamp programs, they’re all corrupted and conflicted. The FDA, the USDA, CDC, all are controlled by giant for-profit corporations. 75% of FDA funding doesn’t come from taxpayer. It comes from pharma. 74% of Americans are obese. The cost if all of them are put on prescription is $3 trillion a year. This is a drug that has made Novo Nordisk the biggest company in Europe – it’s a Danish company. The Danish government does not recommend it. Instead, it recommends a change in diet to treat obesity, and exercise. In our country the recommendation is for the drug for children as young as 6. Novo Nordisk… its entire value is based upon projections of the Ozempic it’s going to sell to America. This is going to bankrupt our country. For a fraction of that we could buy organic food for every American family, three meals a day and eliminate diabetes altogether.

Knowing @Starlink exists while breathing through the straw that is airplane wifi on a long haul flight is a terrible phenomenon

@eade_bengard Playing Cypress is way more of a flex than shooting 81, if we’re talking about the same one

@thogge @lpolovets @pitdesi @dhaber @jakestorm_ dm me re: this

for people i know who work in vc: does your firm require you to have a separate phone for work vs personal for compliance reasons? is this actually a thing at most firms? cc @lpolovets @pitdesi @dhaber @jakestorm_

@braveben The consultant —> CSM pipeline is strong

One of my favorite ways for founders to de-risk the transition from founder led sales to early scale: Hire a former management consultant or investment banker not a ‘seller’. They shadow you and handle all non-customer facing aspects of the sale so the founder can just stack meetings.

December 1991: I land in SFO with my family as refugees, fleeing persecution in the USSR. August 2024: @Webflow, the company I co-founded, is featured all over the same airport and many other parts of San Francisco. Feeling very grateful to be part of the American Dream! 🥰🇺🇸

@shahedkhan Use this tweet as the ‘I was ready for a thread’ button

We paid $150k for loom.com after closing our Series A. How we acquired that domain is still one of the company’s wildest stories.

@braveben @Austen I cannot +1 this tweet hard enough

@Austen You could easily do day 0 to 500 on Airtable or Apollo now

Alright, real talk, which CRM is the best for boring B2B SaaS companies in this day and age? Is it still just Salesforce vs. Hubspot?

@gokulr @joshuabrowder

PRIVATE COMPANY DIVIDENDS This is one of my favorite annual emails, from a private software company that is CF positive and issues a yearly shareholder dividend. At this point, I've recovered a nice multiple of my original investment, all through these dividends over the past few years. Investors (multiple VCs on the board) are happy and there is no pressure on the management team to do unnatural things. Continue growing sustainably, invest some % of the incremental FCF into the business while returning some back to shareholders. The amount of the dividend changes year to year (it was $0.23 per share last year, for example) based on various factors. Growth CEOs and Investors: this is absolutely an viable path for private companies. Get to FCF positive and start issuing shareholder dividends.

Lots of buzzing around AI <> Services Businesses - the 4 flavors of this we’ve observed so far: • Software-only providers who sell to services businesses directly
 • Software-only providers who sell to those executing service business roll up plays (e.g. PE Firms rolling up medical clinics) 
 • AI/Tech-enabled roll up strategies that are entirely vertically integrated
 • Horizontal platforms to design agents for various workflows across all industries

@Hadley @ericbahn Thought exercise: why not earlier? Like the A? Or even a priced seed?

@ericbahn I agree it has become quite common but find it’s still not broadly known. I’d say the majority of founders I talk to about this are surprised to hear I’d encourage it at the B

Relatively uncommon POV: I encourage founders to take some money off the table early. It's good for them and their families and better aligns them with me and our LPs. By being more comfortable financially, they’ll be less likely to sell early and can focus on going big.

@artlevy Who do you see as the typical buyer(s) for this type of acq?

Reason #3 →It’s Time For Liquidity💰 No shame in this! It’s a personal decision. Overall though, returning liquidity to your team and/or early investors is validating. And 60%+ of closed M&A happens under $50M. So raising a little and selling is a viable model! If that excites you, consider an acquisition.

Most Founders have no clue if or when is a good time to sell their startup. This thread will change that. After helping to evalue and acquire companies for 10+ years, I can honestly say there are only four key reasons a Founder should consider an acquisition: