JoelGG ☀️

@BlakeMycoskie Man, TOMS were some of my favorite shoes.

I built TOMS, sold it, had the money, the success, the family, and I still felt completely empty. Here are four things I learned about not feeling enough:

Why would someone post daily and then long content? It just feels very unnatural. I miss the human tweets.

@thesamparr Love this! Revenue per employee at $5m!

My father owns a produce brokerage company. He sells +$10m a year in onions a year with a phone, fax machine, and file cabinet. TLDR: - he calls farmers and will buy two or three truckloads of onions - then organizes a truck for pick up - sells the onions to Walmart or some other chain like that. I made a video about it when I was at his office, and on Instagram it got like 3 million views in a week. He was so pumped. And no, he doesn't make $10m/year. The margins are tiny. But its just him + 1 person in office. Put me through college debt free and has always driven a fat Mercedes! Originally, he worked in a grocery store in the produce section. Then had fruit stand on the side of the road. Then did the white collar move and started a brokerage. I was in 4th grade. It was funny because he started the business in summertime, and the AC of the office was expensive, so he used to work barefooted without a shirt and his Docker shorts. It's been like 25 years now, and he's sold over a quarter of a billion dollars' worth of onions. His CRM is a binder. He has two phones, a file cabinet, and everything is done with checks. There's a computer on his desk, but to be honest, it's for when he uses Facebook, YouTube and visiting The Chive. And there's a baby playpen in the office so his co-worker, who he has hired, can bring her baby to work. The video was only 60 seconds long and people loved it because they were shocked that you can build a really good lifestyle with simplicity.

@jordan_ross_8F Calls

@PabloMotoa Clone

After generating over 5 million views with AI clones, a lot of people have asked me how to create their own. Here’s a fast way to do it!

@BillAckman @X The truth must prevail.

I am reaching out to the @X community for advice with the likely risk of sharing TMI. I have been sufficiently upset about the whole matter that I have lost sleep thinking about it and I am hoping that this post will enable me to get this matter off my chest. By way of background, I started a family office called TABLE about 15 years ago and hired a friend who had previously managed a family office, and years earlier, had been my personal accountant. She is someone that I trusted implicitly and consider to be a good person. The office started small, but over the last decade, the number of personnel and the cost of the office grew massively. The growth was entirely on the operational side as the investment team has remained tiny. While my investment portfolio grew substantially, the investments I had made were almost entirely passive and TABLE simply needed to account for them and meet capital calls as they came in. While TABLE purchased additional software and other systems that were supposed to improve productivity, the team kept increasing in size at a rapid rate, and the expenses continued to grow even faster. While I would periodically question the growing expenses and high staff turnover, I stayed uninvolved with the office other than a once-a-year meeting when I briefly reviewed the operations and the financials and determined bonus compensation for the President and the CFO. I spent no time with any of the other employees or the operations. The whole idea behind TABLE was that it would handle everything other than my day job so that I would have more time for my job and my family. Over the last six years, expenses ballooned even further, employee turnover accelerated, and I became concerned that all was not well at TABLE. It was time for me to take a look at what was going on. Nearly four years ago, I recruited my nephew who had recently graduated from Harvard and put him to work at Bremont, a British watchmaker, one of my only active personal investments to figure out the issues at the company and ultimately assist in executing a turnaround. He did a superb job. When he returned from the UK late last year after a few years at Bremont, I asked him to help me figure out what was going on with TABLE. When I explained to TABLE’s president what he would be doing, she became incredibly defensive, which naturally made me more concerned. My nephew went to work by first meeting with each employee to understand their roles at the company and to learn from them what ideas they had on how things could be improved. He got an earful. Our first step in helping to turn around TABLE was a reduction in force including the president and about a third of the team, retaining excellent talent that had been desperate for new leadership. Now here is where I need your advice. All but one of the employees who were terminated acted professionally and were gracious on the way out (excluding the president who had a notice period in her contract, is currently still being paid, and with whom I have not yet had a discussion). The highest compensated terminated employee other than the president, an in-house lawyer (let’s call her Ronda), told us that three months of severance was not enough and demanded two years’ severance despite having worked at the company for only two and one half years. When I learned of Ronda's request for severance, I offered to speak with her to understand what she was thinking, but she refused to do so. A few days ago, we received a threatening letter from a Silicon Valley law firm. In the letter, Ronda’s counsel suggests that her termination is part of longstanding issues of ‘harassment and gender discrimination’ – an interesting claim in light of the fact that Ronda was in charge of workplace compliance – and that her termination was due to: “unlawful, retaliatory, and harmful conduct directed towards her. Both [Ronda] and I [Ronda’s lawyer] have spoken with you about [Ronda’s] view of what a reasonable resolution would include given the circumstances. Thus far, TABLE has refused to provide any substantive response. This letter provides the last opportunity to reach a satisfactory agreement. If we cannot do so, [Ronda] will seek all appropriate relief in a court of competent jurisdiction.” The letter goes on to explain the basis for the “unsafe work environment” claim at TABLE: “In early 2026, Pershing Square’s founder Bill Ackman installed his nephew in an unidentified role at TABLE, Ackman’s family office. [His nephew]—whose only work experience had been for TABLE where he was seconded abroad for the last four years to a UK watch company held by Ackman—began appearing at TABLE’s offices and conducting interviews of employees without a clear explanation of his role or the purposes of these interviews. During this period, he made a series of inappropriate and genderbased [sic] comments to multiple employees that created an unsafe work environment. Among other things, [his nephew] made remarks about female employees’ ages (“Tell me you are nowhere near 40”), physical appearance (“Your body does not look like you have kids”), as well as intrusive questions about family planning and sexual orientation (“Who carried your son? Who will carry your next child?”). These incidents were reported to senior leadership at TABLE and Pershing Square. Rather than being addressed appropriately, the response from senior management reflected, at best, willful blindness to the inappropriateness of [his nephew]’s remarks and, at worst, tacit endorsement.” The above allegations about my nephew had previously been brought to my attention by TABLE’s president when they occurred. When I learned of them, I told the president that I would speak to him directly and encouraged her to arrange for him to get workplace sensitivity training. The president assured me that she would do so. When I spoke to my nephew, he explained what he actually had said and how his actual remarks had been received, not at all as alleged in the legal letter from Ronda’s counsel. I have also spoken to others at the lunch table who confirmed his description of the facts. In any case, he meant no harm, was simply trying to build rapport with other employees, and no one, as far as I understand, was offended. Ironically, Ronda claims in her legal letter that TABLE didn’t take HR compliance seriously, yet Ronda was in charge of HR compliance at TABLE and the person who gave my nephew his workplace sensitivity training after the alleged incidents. In any case, Ronda, as head of compliance, should have kept a record or raised an alarm if indeed there was pervasive harassment or other such problems at the company, and there is no evidence whatsoever that this is true. So why does Ronda believe she can get me to pay her nearly $2 million, i.e., two years of severance, nearly one year of severance for each of her years at the company? Well, here is where some more background would be helpful. Over the last two months, I have been consumed with a major family medical issue – one of my older daughters had a massive brain hemorrhage on February 5th and has since been making progress on her recovery – and I am in the midst of a major transaction for my company which I am executing from a hospital room office next to her . While the latter business matter is publicly known, the details of my daughter’s situation are only known to Ronda because of her role at our family office. Now, let’s get back to the subject at hand. Unfortunately, while New York and many other states have employment-at-will, there has emerged an industry of lawyers who make a living from bringing fake gender, race, LGBTQ and other discrimination employment claims in order to extract larger severance payments for terminated employees, and it needs to stop. The fake claim system succeeds because it costs little to have a lawyer send a threatening letter and nearly all of the lawyers in this field work on contingency so there is no or minimal cash cost to bring a claim. And inevitably, nearly 100% of these claims are settled because the public relations and legal costs of defending them exceed the dollar cost of the settlement. The claims are nearly always settled with a confidentiality agreement where the employee who asserts the fake claims remains anonymous and as a result, there is no reputational cost to bringing false claims. The consequences of this sleazy system (let’s call it ‘the System’) are the increased costs of doing business which is a tax on the economy and society. There are other more serious problems due to the System. Unfortunately, the existence of an industry of plaintiff firms and terminated employees willing to make these claims makes it riskier for companies to hire employees from a protected class, i.e., LGBTQ, seniors, women, people of color etc. because it is that much more reputationally damaging and expensive to be accused of racism, sexism, and/or intolerance for sexual diversity than for firing a white male as juries generally have less sympathy for white males. The System therefore increases the risk of discrimination rather than reducing it, and the people bringing these fake claims are thereby causing enormous harm to the other members of these protected classes. So what happened here? Ronda was vastly overpaid and overqualified for the job that she did at TABLE. She was paid $1.05 million plus benefits last year for her work which was largely comprised of filling out subscription agreements and overseeing an outside law firm on closing passive investments in funds and in private and venture stage companies, some compliance work, and managing the office move from one office to another. She had a very good gig as she was highly paid, only had to go into the office three days a week, and could work from anywhere during the summer. Once my nephew showed up and started to investigate what was going on, she likely concluded that there was a reasonable possibility she would be terminated, as her job was in the too-easy-and-to-good-to-be-true category. The problem was that she was not in a protected class due to her race, age or sexual identity so she had to construct the basis for a claim. While she is female and could in theory bring a gender-based discrimination claim, she reported to the president who is female and to whom she is very close, which makes it difficult for her to bring a harassment claim against her former boss. When my nephew complimented a TABLE employee at lunch about how young she looked – in response to saying she was going to her 40-year-old sister’s birthday party, he said ‘she must be your older sister’ – Ronda immediately reported it to our external HR lawyer. She thereby began building her case. The other problem for Ronda bringing a claim is that she was terminated alongside 30% of other TABLE employees as part of a restructuring so it is very difficult for her to say that she was targeted in her termination or was retaliated against. TABLE is now hiring an external fractional general counsel as that is all the company needs to process the relatively limited amount of legal work we do internally. In short, Ronda was eminently qualified and capable and did her job. She was just too much horsepower for what is largely an administrative legal role so she had to come up with something else to bring a claim. Now Ronda knew I was a good target and it was a good time to bring a claim against me. She also knew that I was under a lot of pressure because on March 4th when Ronda was terminated, my daughter had not yet emerged from consciousness, she was not yet breathing on her own, and my daughter and we were fighting for her life. I was and remain deeply engaged in her recovery while at the same time I was working on finishing the closing for the private placement round for my upcoming IPO. Ronda also knew that publicity about supposed gender discrimination and a “hostile and unsafe work environment” are not things that a CEO of a company about to go public wants to have released into the media. And she may have thought that the nearly $2 million she was asking for would be considered small in the context of the reputational damage a lawsuit could cause, regardless of the fact that two years of severance was an absurd amount for an employee who had only worked at TABLE for 30 months. She also likely considered that I wouldn’t want to embarrass my nephew by dragging him into the klieg lights when her claims emerged publicly. So, in summary, game theory would say that I would certainly settle this case, for why would I risk negative publicity at a time when I was preparing our company to go public and also risk embarrassing my nephew. Notably, she hired a Silicon Valley law firm, rather than a typical NY employment firm. This struck me as interesting as her husband works for one of the most prominent Silicon Valley venture firms whose CEO, I am sure, has no tolerance for these kinds of fake claims that sadly many venture-backed companies also have to deal with. I mention this as I suspect her husband likely has been working with her on the strategy for squeezing me as, in addition to being a computer scientist, he is a game theorist. My only advice for him is to understand more about your opponent before you launch your first move. All of the above said, gender, race, LGBTQ and other such discrimination is a real thing. Many people have been harmed and deserve compensation for this discrimination, and these companies and individuals should be punished for engaging in such behavior. Which brings me to the advice I am seeking from the X community. I am not planning to follow the typical path and settle this ‘claim.’ Rather, I am going to fight this nonsense to the end of the earth in the hope that it inspires other CEOs to do the same so we shut down this despicable behavior that is a large tax on society, employment, and the economy and contributes to workplace discrimination rather than reducing it. Do you agree or disagree that this is the right approach?

@yanndine Gtm

A two-person GTM team at a Series B SaaS company closed $2.4M in pipeline in one quarter. No SDRs. No demand gen agency. No paid ads. Signal-based outreach. Intent scoring. AI-sequenced follow-up. Automated reporting. Two GTM engineers running the whole motion - for one quarter. I pulled it apart. Compared it to every system we've built across the GTM teams we've worked with. Then asked myself one question: If I had to reverse engineer this from scratch - what would it actually look like? Turns out the architecture isn't that complicated. I mapped the whole thing into a step-by-step playbook you can upload directly to any LLM. It walks you through building your own version from GTM strategy to fully AI-powered execution. Comment "GTM" and I'll send it over.

@Bencera Same. Recently downloaded antigravity. Same feeling. Only as a text editor.

Downloaded Cursor on my new mac just to create a .env file. That's literally it. Used to live in it, now it's a text editor to me. Great brand though. Anyone still using it?

@ShaanVP Send it

I'm secretly launching a 2nd youtube channel reply "send it" and I'll dm it to you

@jspeiser Use trigger.dev

im bleeding tokens with perplexity computer. Turns out "simple" routines like slack me 5 mins before each meeting, requires tons of agent activity. I've tried claude, base44, PC, and openclaw, all struggle with such a simple task. Its doable but with $30/day in tokens. arghh.

@dan__rosenthal ABM

I’ve NEVER seen a B2B company fail to scale with ABM when they build signal infrastructure that automatically scores, routes, and alerts. That said… I just built this ABM playbook for you to steal. 8 steps from ICP model to realtime CRM updates with intent signals and dedicated Slack channels for warm leads. I recorded a full video breaking down the entire workflow. It covers: • The 8-step framework from ICP to activation • How we track 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party signals • The awareness scoring model (5 stages) • CRM automation structure • How Slack channels keep reps focused on warm leads And a WHOLE lot more. Comment "ABM" and I'll DM you the guid3. PS - This is the same playbook we deploy for clients with $60K+ ACV deals.

@sweatystartup I think people that hate on remote work don’t know how to structure compensation.

Remote work gets a lot of hate. People working less, taking breaks, being lazy, etc. That hasn't been the case in my experience. My best people are throwing down 60 hour weeks and our companies are growing. If you create a culture where you reward high performers it actually accelerates the work. What has worked for me: 1. awesome variable comp plans - the more you produce and the better the company does, the more you get paid. 2. more and more responsibilities for the good people - show me you can hit numbers and make good decisions and I will shovel money and opportunity at you. 3. relentlessly removing low performers from the organization. If you don't hit numbers, you are gone. This takes a ton of work and hiring. 4. clear goals and KPIs. If you don't hit your numbers everyone knows it. If you do it is celebrated in public. If you can run a remote organization two big things happen: 1. You don't need an office that you personally are tied to. This is a massive savings. 2. You can hire executives and leaders in South Africa and Latam. COOs for $8k per month. Killer sales people for $4k. Basically 50-75% less than hiring in the USA. And these people have built massive companies before. I just hired a COO in South Africa for RE Cost Seg. He's a total stud and the company is growing 100% year over year. I can run my real estate PE company on $1.5 million a year and we have 50 employees. My competitors are spending $5 million +. The risks: 1. If you aren't a great manager, this weakness is exposed. It is possible to micromanage in an office. You can't do that overseas. 2. If you aren't good at performance management or getting rid of mediocre performers you will get crushed. 3. If you don't have good data on performance, conversions, revenue then you are toast. It isn't right for most companies, but if you can do it, it can be your superpower and a massive competitive advantage. I'm surprised more PE groups don't do this when they acquire a company.

@MJTruthUltra @grok is this true?

OH. MY. GOD. There it is… from his mouth 🚨 Netanyahu Funded Hamas $35M a Month via Qatar, using U.S. Tax Dollars, and tells Investigators: “This is confidential and can’t be leaked, okay? We have neighbors here, sworn enemies. I’m constantly passing them messages. I confuse them, mislead them, lie to them, and then HIT them over their heads.” • Netanyahu worked to keep GAZA under the control of HAMAS. And keep the West Bank under the control of the Fatah with the goal of preventing them from ever being united. • Netanyahu arranged for Hamas to receive $35 Million Dollars every month from Qatar —— suitcases of $35M in American currency, every single month. “Because the Qatar knew him, they made him put the request in writing because they knew he was going to lie in the future.” 🤯 The result? $1+ BILLION went into the hands of Hamas… fast forward — October 7. Clip rumble.com/v77q23w-netany… The Bibi Files tuckercarlson.com/the-bibi-files…

@levelsio I could not reply

Okay and who of you couldn't reply to this? Please please only if you couldn't okay?

Everybody wants to be an entrepreneur until they find out they get paid last.

@TheMattBerman @openclaw @dataforseo Rank

I built an @openclaw agent that ranks you on Google for $50/month 😱 here’s the system that runs every week on autopilot: step 1: find your strike zone → connects to Google search console + @dataforseo → finds keywords where you're positions 5–20. one good article can push to page 1 → monitors what’s climbing and dropping weekly → feeds winners back in. every cycle is smarter than the last step 2: write content only you could write → interviews you first. 8 questions about your brand, voice, and experience → follow-up interviews every week. “what are customers asking? what shipped?” → content compounds because context compounds → google AI overview can’t summarize your real experience step 3: build backlinks automatically → mines competitor backlinks → finds sites mentioning you without linking → discovers broken links you can replace with yours → last week it found 23 unlinked brand mentions across 4 competitor sites step 4: catch technical problems before rankings drop → core web vitals, bad links, redirect chains, missing meta → flags before Google step 5: future‑proof your SEO → schema, llms.txt, topical authority mapping → the stuff agencies charge $3K+ to audit once input: your site + your niche output: an AI that discovers, writes, builds links, and tracks your rankings the old way: semrush + ahrefs + surfer + seo writers = $5,500/mo this way: @DataForSEO ($50/mo) + everything else free 5 skills. 14 scripts. gets better every cycle. open sourcing the whole system. comment RANK + like + follow (must follow so I can DM)

@jamesonhaslam Have you filed a lien on his property? Do you have lien rights in that location?

Got absolutely jestermogged by the whims of capitalism so far this year: -ghosted by a client (with a criminal record btw) on $40k final payment -dispute w another client on who is responsible for ~$60k in cost overruns on another project -mispriced c/o requests on a $35k project leading to zero profit -setbacks on engineering/design in plan review on 2 large projects (who knows when permits will be issued) -sold $250k in Feb but they are complex projects that will be in permitting for a while (no cash collected) -one of my suppliers took me snowboarding to banff (fun!) but Delta lost my bag (not fun! but also - first world problems) -other stuff but that’s enough whining for now The good? -ops team getting better and better and majorly leveling up -field team quality and effort off the charts -hair hasn’t fallen out (yet) -I get less funny when life is easy -baby chick szn (new coop is almost done) -spring planting season (raised beds 🔜) -Randy Vasquez looks like a killer Lessons learned? -life has taught me that there’s a fair bit of randomness/luck and would be pretty prideful to suggest that I could avoid bad luck completely w operator skill -don’t be a pushover: being nice can be very unkind - sales sales sales: never let up on sales energy (new revenue smooths out bumps) En fin Probably my best professional “skill” is enthusiasm and energy (combined with an unhealthy capacity for suffering): it’s annoying when stuff wears on you and you aren’t as chipper as normal I need to figure that out Anyways WAGMI all gas no brakes WCD to the moon 🚀

@toddsaunders Agree! Even an open sourced Service Titan or Service Trade replica. We’ve built that

I truly believe that every blue collar business doing $10M+ should have bespoke software. Not something off the shelf.

@GrammarHippy Vercel

Say Claude builds a website code for you. Where would be the best place to host it? Minimal technical expertise and being able to connect it with payment providers etc?

@tferriss This is beatiful.

NEW blog post is up! The Self-Help Trap: What 20+ Years of “Optimizing” Has Taught Me The older I get, the more I think that self-help can be a trap. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. I say this after ~20 years of writing self-help and a lifetime of consuming it. Spend enough time in the world of “improvement,” and you’ll notice something strange: The people most obsessed with self-help are often the least helped by it. Behind the smiles and motivational quotes, behind closed doors and after a drink or two, the truth is that they’re not able to outsmart their worries. On one hand, perhaps this unhappiness is precisely what lands one in self-development in the first place, right? I long assumed this about myself, and it’s partially true. On the other hand, what if self-help itself is actually creating or amplifying unhappiness? Modern self-help contains an in-built flaw: To continually improve yourself, you must continually locate the ways you are broken. Fortunately, there are a few perspective shifts that make all the difference. It took me embarrassingly long to figure them out. To get started, let’s take a fresh look at an old concept. See the link below to the full blog post 👇