Matt Heiman

@NikMilanovic @mercury @immad @twifintech Sign up here - centralhq.com/demo

Big congrats to the @Mercury team! Payroll is an incredibly difficult product to build, and integrating it into a broader business suite of solutions makes perfect sense. Great job @Immad and team (also - where do I sign up?) More thoughts this weekend in @twifintech.

and welcome to the team @jbwyme @nilaymod and @prankash !

we acquired @CentralHQX. AI-native payroll/HRIS is quickly overtaking incumbents. Available to all @mercury customers, starting today.

What do startup founders use for payroll? We ran some numbers and found that: 1️⃣ @Rippling and @GustoHQ are still the top choice for startups 2️⃣ Newer providers like @CentralHQX and @warpdotco have grown to a combined 32% of startups in just two years Let me know if you want to see data on another part of the tech stack!

@davemcclure PA, MS, AL (and previously NJ), don't have QSBS because they don't conform to federal definition of income. CA is the ONLY state that intentionally carved it out. BTW, MS is eliminating income tax altogether, so it will be down to three.

hey California: why are we 1 of only 4 states that doesn't honor #QSBS tax exemptions? (PA, MS, AL are the others... note NY just decided to keep it, and NJ also recently agreed to honor QSBS)

@nihalmehta @EniacVC @TechNYC Whether or not one agrees with QSBS in general, this doesn't make a ton of sense for NY since founders can simply move their apartment across the river to Hoboken and NY loses it all. Should just conform to federal definitions.

New York is about to make a massive mistake. The NY State Senate is advancing a proposal to decouple from federal QSBS (Section 1202) — the tax provision that lets startup founders exclude gains on qualifying exits. If this passes, founders would owe 10-13% in combined state and city tax on exits that are tax-free at the federal level and in nearly every other major tech state. Even worse: it's retroactive to January 1, 2025. This comes right as the federal government just expanded QSBS benefits and New Jersey moved to full conformity. New York wants to go in the opposite direction. As a seed investor in NYC who has backed hundreds of companies, I can tell you: founders are mobile. If New York becomes one of the most punitive states for startup exits, the best founders will simply build somewhere else — and the jobs, tax revenue, and innovation will follow. NYC has built something special over the last two decades. This proposal puts it all at risk for a short-sighted revenue grab. If you're a founder, investor, or anyone who cares about the NYC tech ecosystem — please sign the TechNYC open letter before Monday below 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾 Keep building, NYC 🗽

@SethGRosenberg I'm going down with the ship

Last helicopter out of Saigon

@claudeai When will it be on Windows ARM?

Cowork is now available on Windows. We’re bringing full feature parity with MacOS: file access, multi-step task execution, plugins, and MCP connectors.

@pitdesi @packyM Isn't a PME benchmark, like from Cambridge, the agreed upon way to look at this? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Ma…

On comparing venture returns against QQQ: After @packyM's recent piece on A16Z, I saw a bunch of people wrongly dunk on their (impressive) performance: "Fund 1 only returned 6x, you would have been better off investing in QQQ for 15x." Absolute bullshit and I can't believe how many people believe it to be true. I modeled out returns on their fund in the attached google sheet so you can see it, if you invested in AH 1, your effective return against QQQ is 31x (and you still hold Stripe). They didn't underperform QQQ by 2x, they outperformed it by 2x. Note: AH 1 was a particularly good fund, making it a great illustration of these dynamics, but the principle applies broadly. But to model this out, let's say you committed $10M to AH 1, you don't wire $10M on day one and get it back 15 years later: 1) Capital gets called gradually over 3-4 years as the fund finds investments 2) Distributions flow back early when companies exit 3) Most of your money is not locked up, it's earning market returns elsewhere. For ease of comparison against QQQ I assume that when your money isn't in the fund it's in QQQ. Capital calls approximated for the $10M commitment to AH 1 2009: $3M called → $7M stays in QQQ 2010: $3M called, → $4M in QQQ $3M called in 2011, $1M in 2012. Early Distributions (2011-2017) Then the exits start hitting. Skype (2011): Fund makes $200M. You get $6.7M back after just 2 years. Instagram (2012): Fund makes $78M. Another $2.6M to you. By end of 2012, you got back almost your full investment. After you get your money back, distributions split 80/20 (LPs/GPs). Okta (2017): Fund makes $300M. After carry, you get ~$8M. 2017-2024: Slack, Apptio, Asana, others... The Math The fund shows 6x DPI ($60M distributed) + 0.9x still in fund = 6.9x TVPI. But this ignores: -Your uncalled $7M earning QQQ returns for 3+ years -$9.3M returned in 2011-2012 with 13-14 years to compound in QQQ -$8M from Okta in 2017 with 8 years to compound -You never actually had $10M locked up, most was working elsewhere So when you account for actual cash flows, you've got a ~31x return, and you still have $9M unrealized in Stripe. The point isn't that you should invest in VC, you probably shouldn't! Liquidity is an issue, performance variance is huge, etc... most individuals should stick to investing in public markets. The point is that the popular comparisons to QQQ are structurally wrong and make venture look far worse than it actually is! #gid=2092653710" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…

@RoKhanna This is why states should just be allowed to have IRS collect a state surcharge % to federal tax rather than coming up with 50 unique tax codes

Peter Thiel is leaving California if we pass a 1% tax on billionaires for 5 years to pay for healthcare for the working class facing steep Medicaid cuts. I echo what FDR said with sarcasm of economic royalists when they threatened to leave, "I will miss them very much."

Stripe offered to acquire us for $1.2 billion when we had $2M in revenue. Today, we've raised $330M at an $8B valuation and reached $1B ARR. We could've died three times during this journey. This is the story I've never told anyone before:

@RobinhoodApp Love Merch!

You deserve a treat. Comment below and we may send you some merch.

@raagulanpathy $COIN surpassed its peak price from its direct listing day

Tomorrow, Circle employees and ex-employees finish lockup. The stock has gone from $31 to ~$300 and back to $85 since the June IPO. To me, this is an exemplary study in successful IPO vs not. The stakeholders are: - The company - Employees (and former ones) - Long Term Investors & VCs - IPO investors - Bankers - Post-IPO retail The stunning winners: Clearly the IPO investors, and the bankers who gate access. Not only would the bankers have taken home probably $50-100M in fees, they also fuel future business via AUM fees for private clients by giving access to a banger 10X in months. Neutral: The employees (or former ones like yours truly), I would say are net-neutral, as by the time lockup finishes the price is back to its natural level. Banger IPO with constrained supply or not, when lockup finishes, it’s probably the price it should be. The same for long-term investors. The losers: The company, which could have taken in a lot more capital. The price is a high one to pay for planting the name in the minds of retail. Retail also probably mostly lost. Whenever you have such volatility, most retail comes in late to bid up, and the smart money dumps on them. —- What next? The chances of Circle ever reaching previous highs are thin (as much as I love them). The history of banger IPOs are not good, here is a quick list of companies which went to huge highs in the months after IPO and never reached those highs ever again. - Airbnb - Coinbase - Rivian - Lyft - Bumble - UiPath - Snowflake - Cisco - Intel - many more… Even RobinHood only recently retook highs. So what happens to Circle’s stock price? Honestly, by pure earnings, it should fall. Falling interest rates are worse short term, than the USDC growth they fuel. But the company, being the issuer of the second largest stablecoin, and the third one being ~90% smaller, has a special valuation for M&A appeal. Thus, my bet is the stock goes up in 2026. But… The chances of Circle ending 2026 independent, might be 50/50. Coinbase, RobinHood, a bank with scale like JPM, or Visa/Mastercard (which have 20x the scale by Market Cap) are all likely suitors. The big tech companies could also come for them. Get the 🍿 ready.

It's been a good year so far at @mercury. @immad shared an update on where we're headed with @FortuneMagazine Term sheet. Link to full article in thread.

Excited for @mercury to be working as a design partner with @matthuang, @paradigm , and @stripe!

@Matt_Schulman1 How many?

Stripe has a slack channel called #matts for people named Matt. Whenever a new Matt joins the company, all the old Matts welcome the new Matt

@nearcyan @grok is this accurate?

robinhood intentionally let everyone buy just a single $FIG at $33 to give retail a taste of what it might be like if they weren't the permanent underclass

@nicochristie Invite code please 🙏🏻

Introducing Shortcut — the first superhuman Excel agent. Shortcut one-shots most knowledge work tasks on Excel. It even scores >80% on Excel World Championship Cases in ~10 minutes. That's 10x faster than humans. Our early preview is live. Just comment for an invite code.

@immad default on Android already

I am sick of spam calls! Has anyone built an AI for non-contact list callers. AI would: 1. Talk to caller 2. I can tell the AI if I am expecting a delivery or some call to pass through 3. AI would decide if spam or not and if not spam it would text me a summary