Alan Morte
3.4K posts
Alan Morte
@AlanMorte
Principles. Passion for Excellence. Respectful. Husband, Father, Jesus, Entrepreneur. Go To Market, AI, Finance, Capital Advisory.
Sacramento, Ca Katılım Haziran 2009
227 Takip Edilen24.2K Takipçiler
A guy in Hampton built a $5M/year tax software company with his wife as co-founder.
@ChKashifAli studied accounting and worked as a journalist for 6 years (including at the WSJ).
Then he taught himself to code and worked at Adobe for 3 years.
He builds two failed startups.
Then comes TaxGPT, an AI accounting software tool (he coded it in 2 days).
3 years later:
$5M ARR
6x year-over-year growth
135% net retention
50 employees
$6M raised (they went through Y Combinator)
Kash runs the whole thing with his wife Isabella as co-founder.
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@Bencera @agarfinks Please put revenue generated by the companies on polsia on your metrics dashboard.
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Someone in Hampton (1000+ founders) asked people if they share revenue and P&L with employees.
Here's what they said:
Founder A (bootstrapped, ~20 employees): "I share nothing. Not even with my COO. I've never been happier running a company."
Founder B (also anti-transparency): When an employee pushed back on the secrecy, he told them: "if you want a bonus from the upside, you also take the downside." Said that ended the conversation immediately.
Founder C (sold his company for $360M+): "If a CEO shares nothing with their C-suite, that's a red flag. Full stop."
Founder D (middle ground): "I only share what employees can actually impact. Revenue without context just creates anxiety."
Founder E (went full open-book): "We ran P&L tutorials for the whole team. It completely changed the culture."
Where do you land on this?
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@vrexec I’d argue that extreme wealth is a *block* to some of the best experiences this world has to offer.
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What can the wealthiest person on Earth physically experience that you cannot experience today? I’m talking about actual sensory or emotional experience.
You say “own a yacht or an island” OK but that’s just possession, not an experience.. anyone with reasonable means can experience being on a large boat drinking wine or swimming off an island.
There’s nothing a trillionaire can feel that you can’t feel. No emotion exclusive to the rich. No geographic landscape you can’t access. No thrill you can’t have. No food you can’t buy. No flight speed you can’t reach. No exclusive medical cures.
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Alan Morte retweetledi
Palantir CTO @ssankar in 2024:
“For $10 billion, @elonmusk put 300 rockets in orbit.”
“For $11 billion the state of California has built 1600ft of elevated rail, with no rail.”
Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸@pmarca
Everything costs less than the cost of high speed rail from SF to LA, which is infinite.
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@ethanagarwal That’s half the story.
The current insurance commissioner also gets to allow new insurance companies into the state. Keeping new insurers out of the state allows the insurers left in the state to essentially have an oligopoly.
Seems like the full story.
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Getting home insurance in CA-17 is a disaster.
It’s because of a Proposition from 1988, Prop 13.
It effectively caps the percentage that insurance providers can increase rates every year.
So if a homes risk increases, the companies can’t do anything and have to start losing money.
They put up with this 35 years, but have realized it’s not worth it to stay in California anymore.
State Farm, American National, and a half dozen other firms have e stopped writing new policies in California.
As a result, homeowners can’t get insurance.
And the alternative FAIR plan is overdrawn and going bankrupt, hurting all taxpayers.
When we talk about free markets and capitalism this is why.
Capping rates on insurance providers, just like capping rates on credit cards, just means less people have access to insurance or to credit.
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@Bencera Add in how much money the companies built on polsia have made.
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$6M run rate. $3M->$6M in 2 weeks. One Founder + AI agents. Zero employees.
I wanted to create a platform with the vibes of the 1990s, the vibes of the 2000s, of the 2010s, and then have a feature of the future
And I said, "Wait a second, I know the Agent SDK
Why don't I use the Agent SDK which is the feature of the future?"
And I didn't have any idea what to do, but I knew I needed agents, so I put agents in loops and connected MCPs, which then were synced to real products running in production
I knew that could be a feature of the future but I didn't realize how much the impact would be
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Anyone else using gstack? github.com/garrytan/gstack
This is giving so much structure and enjoyment to the product ideation phase.
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Jonathan Ross and Chamath's Social Capital made about $950 million each on the Groq deal, according to Forbes.
Forbes: "Ross is taking home an estimated $950 million in cash (after taxes) based on his estimated 9% stake; when his Nvidia stock compensation (likely an outsized share of an estimated $3 billion set aside for employees who went to Nvidia) vests, he’ll be a new billionaire. Ross declined to comment on his net worth, but he’d be worth a lot more if the deal were a stock deal or asset sale rather than a double-taxed, mostly-cash licensing agreement. Other big winners are investor Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social Capital, which held a similar estimated stakes to Ross, and Sunny Madra, Groq’s COO and president, who Ross credits for getting the deal done."
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@Bencera It’s the most amazing place for business in the world. And CA politicians need to realize they almost killed the golden goose.
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I moved to SF a month ago. Something shifted immediately.
These are sacred grounds. The energy of the people who built the internet, who built the infrastructure that lets one guy with no employees build a platform, a movement, you can feel it.
I barely go out. Barely date. Don’t do conferences or investor dinners. I just sit in friends’ offices with engineers and build.
It’s not networking. It’s something in the air.
Thank you San Francisco. Thank you ancestors.
We’re so back.
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@Bencera Add in revenue generated from companies built on the app please!
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$5M run rate. $1M→$5M in 18 days. One Founder+AI. Zero employees.
I get asked a lot: are companies on the platform making money?
Honest answer: it's early. Some are generating revenue, most are just getting started. This is not crypto. This is not a get-rich-quick scheme.
Polsia is for people who have a company idea and want the easiest way to make it real, with AI doing 80% of the work.
If you're serious about building something, Polsia will deliver.
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@AustinA_Way Following this. Nice works. Laying ground work to build a micro in our area. Keep this up! This is the future of education.
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I've been teaching 100,000 fake students for 2 weeks.
and used them to build the best AP prep system in the world.
I took Qwen 3 8B models and gave them simulated human memory.
Now every night thousands of simulated students start with zero knowledge of the social sciences. Their only training is our adaptive curriculum. They work through it, then take a full AP (advanced placement) practice exam.
The first batch averaged a 3 on their exam. (~45th percentile)
Then the agents looked at where they failed, and improved the algorithm. Again, and again, and again.
Two weeks later, the average is 4.43 (~80th percentile)
This is such an insane number because the curriculum they worked through is ONLY basic knowledge and comprehension.
They were never taught how to build an argument, contextualize evidence, or even shown the exam rubric.
...And yet they're averaging 80th percentile on an exam that requires all of it.
Basically built a machine learning feedback loop for edtech.
Spoke about this at @clawcon & @sxsw last week. This is just the beginning.
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@DanSchoonmaker @jliemandt @brookeleblanc @AlphaSchoolATX *when we have kids*
Nothing better in life. Doesn’t matter if biological or adopted.
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@brookeleblanc @AlphaSchoolATX We saw some of these kids present their AI projects on Thursday night and my wife immediately said, "If we have kids, they will be going to this school"
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Working hard now so my future kids can go to @AlphaSchoolATX.
Jackson Price@Jackson__Price
Bill Gurley wrote a book on how to get rich off your obsession; my high school told us to read it and asked us: “what are we getting wrong?” Turns out we already got a lot right: - We use the concept of ikigai to help freshmen find what they’re obsessed with before they build anything - Every student has a second brain, and they add to it every day: we’re always learning about our field - And every student builds a board of advisors: experts in their field who make sure we’re on the right track What we (the students) decided we can improve: - Rotate freshmen through short apprenticeships before they pick a project; you can’t chase an obsession you haven’t been exposed to - Random 1-on-1s between students in different fields: the best ideas come from unexpected collisions - Teach students to join existing communities instead of building from scratch We run our school like a startup: ship, get feedback, iterate
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@drewfallon12 If you start with a base model that you (or I built), I find it to have much more success with evolution rather than building.
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so so so many people are going to get burned on this
i’m very good at financial modeling
i was trying to use claude to model
it cant do it. the formulas it writes get too complicated and it loses itself. people posting this, check your formulas!
the formulas are so complex it’s impossible to tell it’s wrong if you don’t know your numbers core
it needs a lot of guidance and training
Bojan Radojicic@BojanRadojici10
For a CFO, uncertainty is a nightmare. Join my webinar and see how AI models can help: luma.com/xjj56tuc I automated scenario planning with AI - and cut a 4-week process to 20 minutes. Here's how. Scenario planning can fix your forecasting blind spots. But most finance teams are still doing it the hard way. Dozens of Excel tabs. Manual driver assumptions. 3 scenarios that take 2 weeks to build. And the moment something changes - you start over. If your team spends weeks on scenarios, you're losing agility - and risking outdated decisions when markets shift. Excel is not broken. But for scenario modeling in 2025, it's outdated. Here's what scenario planning actually requires: 1. Revenue growth assumptions 2. Cost structure drivers 3. Working capital sensitivity 4. Headcount and payroll inputs 5. CapEx and depreciation logic 6. FX and inflation variables 7. Debt and interest rate scenarios 8. Free cash flow outcomes You can build all of this in ChatGPT. Feed it your historical data. Feed it your key drivers. Tell it your assumptions. It generates the scenarios in minutes - not weeks. ❌ No more locked Excel files. ❌ No more broken formulas. ✅ Dynamic. Fast. Repeatable. This is what AI-powered finance looks like. And this is exactly what we teach inside Corporate Finance Hub® . Join 700 practitioners here: bojanfin.com/?utm_source=Tw… 👉 Are you still running scenario planning without AI tools? If yes - how much time is that costing your team per cycle? See you on the webinar or in the platform.
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@Bencera You need to add a metric for revenue generated by all of the companies on the platform.
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$3.5M run rate. +$2M in a week. One founder + AI. Zero employees.
I wanted to create a platform with the vibes of the 1990s, the vibes of the 2000s, of the 2010s, and then have a feature of the future, and I said, "Wait a second, I know the Agent SDK, why don't I use the Agent SDK which is the feature of the future?"
And I didn't have any idea what to do, but I knew I needed agents, so I put agents in loops and connected MCPs which then were synced to real products running in production.
I knew that could be a feature of the future, but I didn't realize how much the impact would be.
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@eduleadership @gtmom @PSkinnerTech @thesamparr The question is how many people in public schools have the same feeling towards their public school, but don’t have an option to go somewhere else?
The law of averages most likely applies here.
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@AlanMorte @gtmom @PSkinnerTech @thesamparr Very small % of students go to any school like this, so that’s quite a claim.
Seems to work well for those who actually attend and stay. Leavers have had a range of impressions.
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Alpha School.
People seem to love it. But from my understanding, a good % of the learning is screen time.
I'm vehemently against kids using screens (iPad stuff, short form video, etc).
But I want to hear who's sent kids to Alpha + how/if the screen time was impactful (negatively).
What Joe's doing is super interesting and would be awesome to work. Would love to see it win + have my fears addressed.
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@eduleadership @gtmom @PSkinnerTech @thesamparr Let’s use the common denominator of “child care”. They both are fundamentally that. Different types, but fundamentally that.
Which one is better? The common unit of measurement is testing / happiness.
Alpha wins.
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@gtmom @PSkinnerTech @thesamparr Right, I don't think it should be described as a school because it has a totally different mechanism.
Physical therapy and medication can both help some conditions, but one shouldn't be billed as the other.
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@thesamparr “Good percent of learning is screen time”.
Only two hours a day is on a computer. The remainder is hands-on learning. Also, there’s a strict no homework policy.
Compare compared to traditional school, this is actually notably less screen time when entire workload is considered.
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