Kevin Halter

@Ricburton really?? no!!!! Crown Jewel of SF (lived next to Presidio for 15-years and started 1st co in office space there). Miss living next to Presidio every day

Trump just fired the board of the Presidio Trust We all know what that means

@nikunj MFG, Built World, and physical industries, these are typically located outside the coasts and main hubs of SF/NYC/Boston. You want to be closer to your customers, their projects and end-users to build trusted relationships and product feedback. $5-->$100M+ in 4-years (pre-AI)

@nikunj @nikunj this is how we scaled PlanGrid (construction). We built teams in major markets, esp. outside SF/NYC and in the middle of country, to be closer to our customers and where they are building; hire faster and more sr. talent, and be face of brand.

I'm as SF-pilled as they come.. but more people should adopt the "Doordash" strategy for building companies. Doordash famously won the race against Uber Eats because they focused on suburban markets right outside cities. While the main players were all focused on the main cities, Doordash started with suburbs and then ate into the main markets. Similarly, I think we'll see more companies started by people that are wildly ambitious, that are close to large cities but are tired of doing the 20-30 minute commute every day (Palo Alto is a good example). You can argue that @Waymo makes commuting not an issue, but people still don't want to sit in cars. When I was at @meter, I saw a lot plans of coworking spots that were starting in suburbs to fulfill this demand and I think that'll continue to happen vs. competing in hyper competitive cities. This will skew to more experienced people than the 19 year old who wants to live in SF/NY/LA and that's perfectly fine. There will be markets for both. If folks have tried this already, I'd love to learn how it's going!

@geoffintech Easily the best blog post to attract talent to Ramp. Learn and grow is priceless

@rsarver Package it up and share

@BillAckman @X Sending your daughter and family my thoughts and prayers

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?

@DallasAptGP Austin is a great example. Was there this past week and trails have been transformed and upgraded. People running, walking, biking for sport and to work. @GregAbbott_TX and his mayorial team doing a great job investing in infrastructure across the state.

Trails predict where land will reprice. Years before the cranes show up. New York saw it. Chicago saw it. Atlanta saw it. Dallas is next. And it's running the largest version of this experiment any American city has ever attempted. Here's the pattern: Every major American city is fighting the same battle. The suburbs keep growing. The urban core fights to hold its tax base. People say they want walkability and community. Then they leave for places that feel safer and easier to navigate. Cities have big ambitions. Dallas. Chicago. Atlanta. They want to attract people, businesses, and jobs. That takes money. Aging infrastructure needs replacing. New amenities need building. The tax base isn't shrinking. But it's not growing fast enough to fund those ambitions without raising rates. And raising rates pushes more people out. There's another approach. Build infrastructure that makes land more valuable. Not highways. Not stadiums. Trails. It sounds too simple. When you build a connected trail network, you create the walkability people crave. Neighborhoods that were cut off become accessible. Land values rise. Tax revenue grows without raising anyone's rate. The evidence is hard to argue with. New York built the High Line. Property values jumped 35%. Chicago built The 606. Home prices spiked 48%. Atlanta built the BeltLine. Developers have poured more than $9 billion into land along it. The pattern holds whether the city runs red, blue, or purple. Build the connection. Land reprices. Dallas is now running this experiment at the largest scale any American city has attempted. The Loop Dallas is a 50-mile trail circuit. It connects the Katy Trail, White Rock Lake, the Trinity Forest, Fair Park, the Design District, and Pleasant Grove. Every quadrant of the city. The Design District already proves the thesis. The city built a short connector to plug the area into the Uptown trail network. Before, it was an isolated pocket of warehouses. After, it became part of the Uptown ecosystem. Taxable value climbed 383%. Developers flipped their blueprints. Buildings now face the trail, not the street. South Dallas is next. A 1,200-foot bridge is opening the Trinity Forest Spine Trail. Neighborhoods cut off for decades by the river, the railroad, and the highways are about to become connected. Every city that built a loop trail system saw the same result. Remove the barriers. Capital follows. Trails aren't expenses. They're leading indicators. They tell you where land is about to reprice, years before the cranes arrive. If you want to understand where Dallas is heading, don't watch the skyline. Follow the trail.

@Austen austin life. amazing

It’s that time of year again

@Jason @ckaiwu Brooklyn has the pool and rooftop. Even nicer. @1Hotels is my favorite boutique chain. They are coming to Austin too

@ckaiwu love the one in manhattan... fun scene downstairs. hows the brooklyn outpost?

Best hip hotels in Brooklyn downtown nyc for 2026 Is there no way to rent a loft/brownstone for a week or two now with the Airbnb ban?!

@Jason @MichaelDell @elonmusk @davidsacks47 @JoshuaBaer @JTLonsdale @travisk @williampbarnes @amandabradford @fordhsmith @JacqKD @Lons @twistartups @tedcruz @GregAbbott_TX Raising for a portfolio co right now in Austin. Don’t forget about @S3ventures

Let’s go Team Austin! @MichaelDell @elonmusk @davidsacks47 @JoshuaBaer @JTLonsdale @travisk @williampbarnes @amandabradford @fordhsmith @JacqKD @lons @twistartups @tedcruz @GregAbbott_TX 🐎

@DavidGeorge83 Founders need to have courage to make team and organizational changes. Few do

@kevinrose @chisaehawng @garrytan The biggest value from YC is distribution, branding signal to attract financing + talent, and mentorship. Distribution is the #1 IMO. Shipping product is the least challenge of a great technologist. Garry is great at distribution and promotion

@chisaehawng @garrytan yep, this is key, if you need vc (I'd argue most don't), then work with those actually shipping and in the trenches, not MBAs that have never touched a line of code

possibly the sharpest VC marketing move I've seen... @garrytan ships 15 claude code skills, the repo hits 37k stars and 4.6k forks, then -- only after delivering real value - drops the pitch, bravo 👏:

@travisk Impressive! You learn in Austin or CA delta? I’ll be in Austin this week with founders building in the physical world. It would be great to meet. 15+ years in physical world @ryangraves was one of my 1st calls when I left my construction marketplace startup.

Lake Austin. SuperAir Nautique slalom… 🤠😳😱… who’s on the water this weekend?!

@toddsaunders @garrytan @EquipmentShare @ycombinator @PlanGrid Ex: selling to blue-collar skilled workers is a very different GTM, partner ecosystem, and acquirers.

@toddsaunders @garrytan @EquipmentShare @ycombinator backed @PlanGrid which was early ConTech (PG alum) and many more recently. YC co’s selling to other YC is a flywheel. I do think there is an opportunity for @garrytan and team to invest in industry specialists to drive similar flywheels and ecosystems

YC’s model works for a specific founder. Technical, Bay Area adjacent founders who want to play a zero sum game. But there’s a massive founder group being ignored. The operator who built a $5M-$50M services business and knows exactly what software their industry needs. They know the pain and workflows better than anyone else. And that founder has an industry following / friends to sell the product to. Claude Code just gave them all the power. And I’m going to surround them with the best people I know to help turn their domain expertise into a giant software company.

@Codie_Sanchez GTM investing in ABM, field sales and in-person events and experiences. Works

If you want to make more money, the ROI on “unscalable” work is about to go through the roof. Magic Moments: - Handwritten thank-you notes - Sending flowers (to clients and friends alike) - Calling (not texting) when you need something - Showing up in person when an email would've been fine Costs almost nothing. In a world where every interaction is getting sanded down into a frictionless automated nothing... humanity hits like a defibrillator.

@JaredSleeper Land-and-expand bottoms-up growth to ENT deal. We did this at PlanGrid from $5–>$120M and yes we took credit cards! B2B SaaS selling to contractors

And FWIW this is a huge issue for SaaS companies. Their GTM is built around selling to institutions. But AI value add is so obvious/immediate that users are adopting first. SaaS companies are not set up to let an individual user swipe a corporate card to access intelligence.

@jasonlk @HarryStebbings @rodriscoll Harry get @blockitAI for your EA

"We're rather have an AI Agent do it. Than recruit, find, hire, manage, fire, at human. If you can really, truly deliver that product -- customers will line up at your door." with @HarryStebbings + @rodriscoll

@jrichlive Sales has not stopped hiring. More intense

We will look at 2022 as the year employment growth at tech companies peaked. The '22/'23 "get fit" trend dovetailed right into '23 - '25 AI adoption, driving a massive increase in productivity. Upside: more profitable tech cos. Downside: less obvious + easy employment growth.

@ABC7 Awesome!

Costco is launching a new program that aims to make IVF treatment more affordable for couples hoping to start a family. Medications typically can cost thousands of dollars out of pocket, but Costco says the program could help cut the price by up to 80%. spr.ly/6010B6KImg