Matt Talbot

In 2015, I marched for Bernie and donated to his campaign. In 2019, after years of being a miserable democratic socialist who blamed everyone else for my sadness, I decided that I couldn’t stand being a miserable fuck anymore, and needed to start taking risks and aggressively started doing stuff to change my life. I started working multiple jobs. I had 3 I was juggling at one point. I funded my life with one of them, and with the additional jobs, I invested all of my dollars in Palantir. It was honestly fun. Yeah, I worked 70 hours a week usually and sometimes would go 60 days without a day off, but it was exhilarating. I was making changes and doing things. It was way better than being miserable and angry and making my entire identity about politics and my disdain for “the rich.” Those were hopeless times and I was glad to be doing something for myself. I was able to grow a portfolio of 4,000 Palantir shares at an 8 dollar cost basis between 2021-2023. 32,000 dollars from hardcore grinding. Between 2023-2025, that 32 grand grew to over 400 grand. In May 2024 I started rotating some of the profits into TSLA, along with purchasing with new income. I’ve learned so much about capitalism since 2019, how wealth is created, and the difference between makers and takers. I’ve been inspired by so many amazing builders and entrepreneurs on this platform. I’ve even interacted with many of them. Totally surreal. Today, I cheered in my car as it drove me home when I heard that Elon’s pay package was approved. I voted my 750 shares on it with a huge grin on my face. If Elon gets paid 1 trillion dollars, I will be a multimillionaire. After all I’ve been through and after everything I’ve done for myself over the last 10 years, I look at this post by Bernie and know I would’ve cheered it on in 2015, but today, I see it for what it actually is. Manipulative, depressing rhetoric intended to depress a base of voters and make them feel hopelessly dependent on him and his colleagues. None of them build anything or create value or give working class people like me the opportunity to peg my labor against their genius. They did nothing but make me miserable. I hope even one person can read this get pumped to start doing shit. There are ups and downs, but it’s yours. Nobody can take your grind away from you. Kick ass and build over years of time and watch what happens along the way. Don’t listen to sad miserable people like Bernie.

I don’t say this lightly: Zohran Mamdani’s proposal for New York City to drive down food prices by having the city run its own grocery stores is the most economically delusional thing I’ve seen in a long time. What planet do these people live on?

I unapologetically stand for free speech, peaceful demonstrations, and immigration—but this is not that. This is anarchy and true chaos. My party loses the moral high ground when we refuse to condemn setting cars on fire, destroying buildings, and assaulting law enforcement.

No matter how I try to imagine the future it’s clear that we’re going to need armies of people who are experts at orchestrating and monitoring AI as it performs tasks in their area of expertise

AI without context of your life, designs, code, documents, history, transcripts, medical diagnosis, goals, schedule, applicants, etc will always be a much less intelligent AI. For that reason, there will be a tremendous number of companies that spawn.

I am the 3rd person in the world to receive the @Neuralink brain implant. 1st with ALS. 1st Nonverbal. I am typing this with my brain. It is my primary communication. Ask me anything! I will answer at least all verified users! Thank you @elonmusk!

If you remove all of your insane EDS and turn off your rabid, psycho energy for a minute to evaluate the exact impact Tesla has and will have on the world, here is what you will discover: 1) Tesla single-handedly forced the entire auto industry to begin figuring out EVs. I know of no greater forcing function for a clean energy future in all of American, or even world history. 2) Tesla has stood up domestic supply chains that employ a 6 figure number of employees in USA directly & indirectly, and probably 7 figure number globally. They make the most American vehicle on earth, and have delivered prosperity to their tens of thousands of employees and millions of loyal, working-class shareholders. 3) They have some of the safest vehicles on the road, which have already saved the lives of many Americans, both those driving the vehicles themselves, and those driving around them. 4) The software that helps make their vehicles so safe will soon become autonomous, which will undoubtedly lead to countless savings of human lives in America and globally. 5) Their energy storage business provides a clean way of bolstering our grid to help solve our energy demand crisis, which will lead to better outcomes for many. The list goes on and on. These are the actual, material things that Tesla outputs. Tesla has never outputted hate or harm or negativity. For you to cheer for their demise is to cheer for the demise of the 5 above items, and many more that aim to quite literally bring about the future that your party, the party I used to love, made me believe they were interested in. Because of people like you, I no longer believe that democratic leadership wants any of the outcomes they claim to want. I don’t know what your party believes in anymore. It must’ve all been lies to receive votes, because this hatred for Tesla makes little sense. To hate Elon so much that you’d cheer on the failure of all of these things only benchmarks your IQ, and shows us that it isn’t actual outcomes that you care about most. Your hatred for Elon is empty and won’t be remembered by your supporters, but your championing the failure of a great American company is something I won’t ever forget, and neither will the literal millions of Americans who support them. Great job buddy

This is just bizarre and sad

This is why Kamala and Tim lost. Openly rooting against American companies and hostile towards American innovation. Embarrassing

Driven by AI, we are entering a new era of enterprise software, ushering in systems of intelligence.  In the mid 1980s, driven by the growth of the client/server architecture, we saw the dramatic rise of systems of record. These are the back office software applications that helped enterprises run their ERP, HR, CRM, and core IT workflows. These technologies were relatively specialized, and helped automate any of the most critical tasks in the enterprise. They were defined by structured data, back office automation, and leveraged by only by select users in an enterprise. With the rise of cloud and mobile in the mid 2000s, we saw a new era of systems of engagement, as coined by Geoffrey Moore. In a world of much more dynamic and ad-hoc work in the enterprise, systems of engagement were tools for collaboration, communication, video, work and project management, social and intranets, and more. These tools dealt with all the messy, unstructured data in an enterprise - the conversations, collaborative docs, and media that began to drive a shift in how the entire enterprise worked.  Now, in the mid 2020s, we are firmly entering a new era of enterprise software, which gives rise to systems of intelligence. Systems of intelligence combine enterprise data, workflows, and AI, to deliver insights and automation to an organization. Importantly, because of the ability for AI to process unlimited unstructured data - like documents, video, or communications - we also get the same benefit from this messy data as we did our structured data. We can query, synthesize, calculate, and automate all the work around thus unstructured data just as easily as we could query a database before. Unlike systems of engagement that generally broke down the more information that goes into them, we see the reverse now with AI, where software can become more powerful and useful the more data it has access to. And with AI Agents being a native property of systems of intelligence, these systems aren’t only leveraged by every employee, they dramatically expand the output of the workforce. Systems of record are where people work by largely themselves. Systems of engagement let users work collaboratively with other people. Now systems of intelligence let us work seamlessly with people and AI.  These systems will also talk to each other in completely new ways. Instead of deterministic APIs and clear handshakes, with Agentic AI, these systems will communicate with each other much like a humans do. A user will make a request in one system, and it will fan out the ask to a variety of other similar systems relevant for the desired information. And if it didn’t get what it wanted, it will simply request again in a different way, just as a person would. We’re going to see systems of intelligence in every domain of work - across every line of business and every vertical. Some of these technologies will be incumbents that evolve, and many offerings will be brand new startups that fill a new gap between existing systems. Wild times ahead.

Progress requires innovation, innovation requires experimentation, experiments sometimes fail. Seeing this is as a slam dunk against Bryan is misunderstanding how progress works.

I believe that it’s appropriate and the responsibility of a U.S. Senator to have a conversation with President-elect Trump's nominees. That’s why I met with Elise Stefanik and Pete Hegseth, just wrapped with Tulsi Gabbard, and look forward to my meetings with others soon. My votes will come from an open-mind and an informed opinion after having a conversation with them. That’s not controversial, it's my job.

We are spending time looking at a law firm, an insurance carrier, an outpatient clinic — not just the SaaS enablement layer. The Service as a Software era is about industry.

@davidcohen Awesome!

Sharing some news today techstars.com/newsroom/david…

Such a decent man. You can agree or disagree on policy. But his character is top notch. No contest.

Heard a founder saying he doesn’t like to get on sales calls because it might make his company look small… That company is not going to make it The best CEOs find the time to constantly talk to prospects and customers

This dude is based! @pbarbieri @nfergus

The Guide to Competitor Intelligence and Research from @patticus has been insanely valuable. You can find it here: patticus.com/2023/12/16/com…

One last kick-in-the-arse tweet for the year: Don’t Be a Quitter Let me explain, as this is one of the most disappointing changes in my opinion in “tech” and startups over the last 12-18 months. Two things together have done many a disservice: the combination of a tougher year for many >>and<< the constant celebration of … quitting. It’s all over LinkedIn and TikTok. I Quit! There are times when it makes sense to quit. If literally, you’ve given it 100% and have zero traction. If your boss is terrible. Or, on the flip side, if you are presented with such an amazing opportunity, you just have to take it. And look, no one needs to stay in a soulless entry level job longer than necessary. Those are the times to quit. But now, people seem to quit far, far earlier: * Founders with millions in revenue quitting just because it’s harder * Founders with any happy customers quitting because they’ve “given it a shot” * Founders phoning it in because it’s harder, rather than doubling down and figuring it out * VPs quitting because the job was harder than they thought * Top ICs quitting because their job was a lot harder than last year The common theme here? Very talented folks quitting when the going got tough — and they felt fine about it. All across social media, we see stories of telling folks to quit these days. To take care of yourself, to focus on work-life balance, to just push on if things aren’t easy. Maybe that’s good advice — for the medicore. But not for you. Every startup I’ve joined or startup has almost failed. Heck, SaaStr itself has almost failed. We lost $10,000,000 in March 2020, and half the team then quit. Not fun. You can quit. The good news now, is many folks will tell you that was the right call. It seems to be part of the culture now. You won’t suffer any stigma for losing all your investors’ money, or dropping your customers, or abandoning the vision, or having the VP stint just not work out. No one will judge you these days. But don’t. Don’t quit if you have even a handful of truly happy customers. Don’t quit if you can build something great. Don’t quit if you have a great boss. Don’t quit just because it’s harder. As tough as it may seem, that moment of relief you may get for a week or month by quitting … probably won’t be worth it. If you left something real. You’ll look back and see you that was rarer than you’d realized. And why we all do it, really.