Ad Agency Finance Guy

.@NYCSanitation I'd like to report a sweep

@Kidfears99 Do you use a pump? Some argue the pressurization of airplanes messes with delivery. However… the effect would be an over-delivery of basal insulin on takeoff of .5u and similar under-delivery on landing so it’d balance out. And garbage food.

Is there a scientific reason I can’t get my blood sugar down EVER while on an airplane but the second we land it’s normal again?

Not at all how litigation works. Also, in the short term the proliferation of AI legal tools will ensure a LOT of work for human contract attorneys.

@cabassog @SR_eth @realEstateTrent Brooklyn heights.

@AdAgencyCFO @SR_eth @realEstateTrent Cobble Hill I guess? Lovely neighborhood/used to live there. Would recommend checking out Confidant if you haven't been there

Been living in New York City for around five years now. Yes, it’s expensive, taxes are high, and there are some interesting characters walking around. Those are some of the costs. Here’s what we get: Access to the best restaurants in America, no matter what type of food you’re in the mood for. Everything our family needs is just a short walk away. You constantly get to see friends in person, as they’re always passing through. Some of the best public and private schools in America. The network you build here, just by going about your day-to-day life, is incredible. You run into some of the most interesting people doing the most amazing things at the highest level. Access to the best doctors in the world. The career opportunities here are immense, no matter what you do. Central Park – my go-to spot – never gets old. If you’re a shopper, there’s nowhere better in America. If you’re an entrepreneur, this city forces you to think bigger on a daily basis. Broadway, sports, concerts, comedy – the highest level of entertainment, right in your backyard. The subway. Yes, the subway – and yes, millions of normal people take it every day – gets you around this place like a time machine. It’s a wonderful place to raise kids. Every kids' activity you can think of is just blocks away. Our son loves the Natural History Museum, and endless playdates are available either in our building or within a three-minute walk. Maybe all those folks who can afford to live anywhere in the world but choose to raise their families here aren’t so crazy after all.

I walk my kids 3 blocks to school each day. Next year my oldest will go to a different school across street from my apt. We moved to neighborhood because I was 4 block walk to work. World class dining. Brooklyn bridge park few blocks away, have 5 subway lines within 5 minute walk. Ferries. Everything.

@realEstateTrent "Everything our family needs is just a short walk away." This is a stupid urbanist lie and we need to stop pretending it isn't.

How do you see this comparing to other professional services? (May not be your area of expertise, but I’m curious). I see vastly different thoughts among my peers and leaders even at my own company. I think we’ll be forced to explore different models and different levels of transparency around savings, but I doubt customers will pay for a “full time equivalent” and I bet it’ll land somewhere between time and cost/plus for tokens.

The billable hour isn’t going anywhere. If anything, AI will make it even more prevalent. Firms have experimented with alternative fee arrangements for decades: flat fees, contingency fees, you name it. Most lawyers would love to switch. Give me a 1.5% contingency fee and I’ll handle basically any M&A deal you want. (Well, if I think it’s a good deal that is. See why the alternative fee arrangement gets tricky?) The reason law firms usually don’t switch is because alternative arrangements don’t actually align incentives. Especially for transactional work. But wait… wouldn’t contingency or flat fee give the lawyer the same skin in the game as the client? Yes. And that’s precisely the problem. You’re not hiring your lawyer to make sure the deal closes. You’re hiring them as an insurance policy. That means detail and diligence. Leave no stone unturned. Don’t cut corners. The moment you pay your lawyer on anything other than time, you’ve automatically incentivized them to do as little work as possible to maximize profit. That directly conflicts with the job you hired them for. AI is making legal work better. It may make some of it faster, which could reduce fees (though I don’t think the time savings are there yet in most cases). But it’s not going to kill the billable hour.

@draparente I’ve been looking at doing something like this. Can’t wait to check the repo.

Earlier this year I was getting frustrated with Claude's charts, fed this book to claude and had it generate a Tufte skill. Instantly got simpler/more beautiful visualizations. gist.github.com/aparente/e48c3…

@ProfFinntastic @jappleby I find the semi anonymity freeing. I use this same avatar in other parts of my life and if you really wanted you could unmask me, but not having these statements directly tied to my googlable real world identity is better for business.

This is just a good twitter rule in general.

@paulsperry_ ProPublica has his financial disclosure forms. He’s got $13-36M in declared investments. Not crazy to think he could swing a $5M house.

DEVELOPING: Beltway rumors circulating that 71-year-old Chief Justice John Roberts last month "upsized" to a massive new home -- with almost 7,000 square feet and an elevator -- valued at more than $5 million in a tony neighborhood of Chevy Chase, Md. ... developing ...

@ItsMattsLaw Someone did a find->replace on “Client” today and suddenly the company name was showing up in an appendix instead of “client references” it said their name references.

hey man I snuck a “you’re the best” into that 42 page MSA you didn’t read

@SullyBusiness Rather than making slide decks to teach concepts to my junior employees I’ve been having it make a self-contained microsite that explains concepts, has activities, and even has glossary with key terms and sample prompts for follow-up.

Learning to ask Claude for HTML outputs instead of PDFs or excel files will change your life.

Managing culture of organizational decision-making based on changing health/ stage of a business. i. e. Many companies build ops processes during hyper-growth that don’t work upon maturation or a company that got really good at controlling costs during downturn waits too long to open the taps which hampers growth when market comes back. We’ve got a ton of metrics we track closely for our board and top 3 stay same, but importance of others ebb and flow with macroeconomic and company health.

Planning out Playbooks topics for the rest of the year in the newsletter. What do you want a Playbook on the most?

@businessbarista AI-native

I want to start an AI community for executives. This will be a space for people to share killer use cases, agentic workflows/agents, post-AI org structure, AI governance, AI training/enablement, change management, and more. Comment “AI-native” if you want to join.

Feeling safe from the hantavirus due to my longstanding policy of never interacting with anyone who would go on a cruise.

@europemaxxed Man about to steal my Declaration of Independence….

Me after liking a bunch of posts about Kazakhstan

@realEstateTrent Those attorneys exist in all businesses. I find them most often as outside counsel used by start-ups or by large global companies supporting non-core departments. Usually trying to “prove their worth” by redlining 99 meaningless edits in or attempting to steamroll every clause.

The single most annoying thing that happens in real estate: You send the other side a lease form you’ve been using for years. It has been well received countless times by both national and local tenants, and legal comments are usually limited. And then some lawyer decides they need to be a hero. They send it back riddled with hundreds of comments throughout the entire document. They push back on things nobody has ever pushed back on before, and they turn a straightforward deal into a full blown legal negotiation. They put the deal in jeopardy, put their client in an awkward spot, and expect my side to spend thousands of extra dollars on legal fees while the whole process gets delayed by weeks or months. There are plenty of great lawyers out there. But the big shot lawyers are the ones who decide it’s their way or the highway, often have no actual business experience themselves, and completely miss the bigger picture. Sometimes the hardest part of getting a lease signed is not the tenant. It’s the lawyer who decides they need to be the main character. How do you make deals with them? You don’t.

Haven’t met anyone working less after adopting the AI.

oh to write about a city the way E.B White writes about New York "There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was bom here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day. and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was bom somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last — The city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s highstrung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal resdessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion."

@SecretCFO @HighyieldHarry I’d guess smart, great interviewer, but can’t trust him. When people work at all the right places but keep moving more frequently than every two years for more than 4 jobs I pass on them because it’s not worth the disruption to the team to have tourists popping in.

@HighyieldHarry That’s a pretty stellar set of names …. How the hell?!

8 firms in 12 years is crazy work in finance.