Storm Trader

@TradingComposur Sir Issac Newton’s foray into stock trading. The South Seas Company in which he lost 2/3rds of his fortune in less than a year. He hit it all. Not letting winners run, FOMO, Averaging down a loser. Letting losers run. Don’t think you’re not smart enough to trade. It’s psychology.

Everyone is using Claude right now. Very few founders are using it to ideate LinkedIn posts that will go viral and generate leads. Which is why I built a resource with the exact Claude prompt I use to generate viral content ideas for LinkedIn… Most people are using AI to come up with ideas, but it's trained on absolutely nothing, so it comes up with garbage ideas. This prompt automatically analyzes Reddit, LinkedIn, and other sites to analyze what ideas would work best for your industry So that you get viral ideas that will actually perform They're yours now if you: Comment "prompt" and I'll send it over. (You need to be following so I can DM it to you.)

@skylarromines @christopherrufo Man the cosmetic surgery lobby is powerful.

@christopherrufo Anyone can tax the rich, but do you have the courage to tax the sex changed, vagrant illegal immigrants?

SCOOP: California is giving free sex-change procedures to homeless illegal aliens. Our team went into the shelters and discovered that trans migrants are coming into the state for hormones, breast implants, and "bottom surgeries"—all on the taxpayer dime. city-journal.org/article/homele…

The best at anything do this already and always have. Ai turned it into superpower for those. But Ai cannot help those who don’t know what they don’t know. And when you are a deep expert on a subject or area, you will know when it’s hallucinating on BOTH sides. So definitely use for this, it’s an amazing tool, but don’t bet your career on it. Don’t get caught up in the speed. You must research both arguments validity. And that still means READING the complaint, the courts findings, etc. There is nuance that even Ai cannot detect or detect properly. But yes. Great way to work.

A Harvard Law student showed me how he uses NotebookLM to destroy his own arguments before his professor can. He doesn't do this after he finishes a brief. He does it while he's still writing one. His workflow breaks something I thought I understood about legal preparation. Most law students write their argument, polish it, submit it, and find out what's wrong with it when the professor tears it apart in class. He finds out before he ever hands it in. The moment he has a rough draft, he uploads it into NotebookLM alongside the 5 most relevant cases in the area. Then he runs one prompt. "You are opposing counsel with a PhD in this area of law. Identify every weakness in this argument. Do not be gentle. Rank the vulnerabilities by how much damage they would do in front of a judge." NotebookLM doesn't just flag surface-level issues. Because it has the actual cases loaded, it finds the places where his argument quietly contradicts a precedent he cited. It finds the assumptions he made that opposing counsel would attack in the first 30 seconds of oral argument. Then comes the move that makes the workflow unfair. He asks: "What is the strongest version of the counterargument? Write it as if you are the best litigator alive and you have 3 minutes to destroy my brief." He reads that counterargument carefully. Then he rewrites his original argument specifically to survive it. His professors started noticing something. His briefs had an unusual quality they called "anticipatory." He would address objections before they were raised. He would preempt the counterargument in the structure of his own analysis, not in a footnote. One professor asked him directly how he was doing it. He showed her the NotebookLM session. She asked him to slow down so she could write the prompts down. What 3 years of moot court practice is supposed to teach you how to think from both sides of a room simultaneously he was doing inside a single workflow in an afternoon. The best lawyers don't just build arguments. They attack their own arguments until only the parts that can't be broken are left standing. He just found a way to do that before the courtroom does it for him.

3-HOUR ADVANCED CLAUDE CODE LECTURE FROM NICK SARAEV. SAVE THIS if you already use Claude Code daily - there's still new stuff in here > CLAUDE.md optimization, agent harnesses, task parallelization > Karpathy's autoresearch approach > browser automation - Computer Use vs Browser Use > workspace org, security, auto-mode, OAuth > where Claude Code is going watch it this weekend👇

This 2 hour Stanford lecture will teach you more about how LLMs like ChatGPT & Claude are built than most people working at top AI companies learn in their entire careers. Bookmark this & give 2 hours today, no matter what. It'll be the most productive thing you do this week.

Its not like its the World Series. Heres one thing we all realized in America. We survived Covid. In a million different ways. Now we just don’t give a fuck. So, reorg the playing board, its overdue. Then when it all settles (and it always does) the world will go on. And forget. As long as its pockets are filled and there are bread and circuses for the masses. Once in a while you have to remodel, and its messy, expensive and no-one likes it. They get over it. Soccer will survive.

The United States is so toxic on the world stage right now that it can’t fill hotels or sell World Cup tickets. Let that land. FIFA projected $30.5 billion in economic impact from millions of international visitors. That demand never showed up. Hotels in Atlanta, Dallas, Miami, Philadelphia and San Francisco have slashed match-day rates by a third from their peak. FIFA has cancelled tens of thousands of reserved rooms across all 16 host cities. Some hotels report cancellation rates above 95%. The reasons aren’t hard to find. Anti-American sentiment. Fear of border crossings. The Iran war driving up oil prices and airfares. And tickets priced into the stratosphere, with finals seats hitting $10,990 a pop. Industry executives are now openly blaming the Trump administration for the shortfall. Tourism economists say the Iran war made an already bad sentiment problem worse. Empty stadiums are now a real possibility. It happened at the Club World Cup last summer. It could happen again, on American soil, at the biggest sporting event on the planet. The White House says this will be “the greatest World Cup ever.” The market disagrees. Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

Want to become a Claude Certified Architect? 🚀 Here’s a 6-week roadmap to go from beginner → expert 👇 Week 1 → Learn fundamentals Week 2 → Build real projects Week 3 → Understand exam structure Week 4 → Practice advanced scenarios Week 5 → Mock tests (aim 850+) Week 6 → Take the exam You’ll cover: • Claude APIs & workflows • MCP (Model Context Protocol) • Agent systems & automation • Real-world AI architecture This isn’t just theory. It’s a hands-on path to mastering AI engineering ⚙️ Follow this → you’re ahead of 90% AI learners. 🔖 Bookmark this roadmap 🔁 RT to help others 💬 Comment "CLAUDE" for resources ✅ Follow @elora_khatun for more AI guides

Giving away the exact Custom Skills Folder we use inside Claude Code to write our cold email sequences at ColdIQ. Trained on the same emails that have generated over $10M for our clients. Plus the master prompt we engineered to clone their buyer psychology. I've tested every AI model for cold email. ChatGPT. Gemini. Grok. They all produce okay copy. But okay doesn't get replies. Claude Code is the first one that changed that. It doesn't come off as AI. It comes off as your best AE on a good day. How it works: > Drop in a target website, a LinkedIn URL, or a detailed ICP > It returns a 3-step outbound sequence > Fully optimised for Instantly > Under 45 seconds, start to finish It feels conversational. Opens strong. Ready to launch in your campaigns. Most people are still prompting ChatGPT to "write a cold email." This is what running 7-figure outbound in the background actually looks like. Want the Skills Folder, the master prompt, and the full system? → Like this post and follow me → Comment "EMAIL" and I'll send you the link.

@remi_philiponet Lol. Of course they can transit with oil purchased from Arabian ports. The whole point is to open the strait and choke Iran.

"Peu après l'annonce du blocus américain, quatre superpétroliers chinois – le *COSCO Everest*, le *Hai Rong Hai*, le *Jin Hai Hua* et le *Jiu Yang Bonansa* – n'ont pas rebroussé chemin ni interrompu leur route malgré le blocage américain, mais ont continué leur route vers la sortie du golfe Persique, conformément à leurs itinéraires initiaux. La Chine a publié une déclaration affirmant que le passage de ses navires dans le détroit était un acte légitime et que les États-Unis n'avaient aucune raison d'intervenir. Cette assurance reposait sur le fait que la frégate lance-missiles de type 054A *Daqing*, stationnée à environ 500 milles nautiques à l'ouest du détroit, dans le nord de la mer d'Arabie, y était présente depuis plus d'une semaine. Ce navire de guerre, qui venait de participer à un exercice conjoint sino-pakistanais, n'est pas rentré avec la flotte, mais a fait route de manière indépendante et a jeté l'ancre à une position stratégique près du détroit d'Ormuz." La présence d'un bâtiment de guerre chinois a été suffisamment dissuasive. C'est exactement ce que j'avais prévu. Le blocus américain du détroit d'Ormuz sera violé par les puissances navales capables d'envoyer des navires de guerre dans la zone et qui ne se laisseront pas intimider par Oncle Sam. Seule la force est respectée. La marine de guerre chinoise compte plus de navires ultra-modernes que l'US Navy. La Chine produit à un rythme soutenu, ajoutant l'équivalent d'une marine nationale de taille moyenne tous les deux ans. Entre 2019 et 2023, ses quatre principaux chantiers navals ont produit 39 navires de guerre majeurs, portant la flotte à plus de 370 navires et sous-marins, soit la plus grande marine du monde. La capacité de production inclut des porte-avions (trois actifs au 16 mars 2026), des destroyers, des frégates et des sous-marins. La Chine est le premier constructeur naval au monde en termes de tonnage brut, atteignant 39 millions de tonnes en 2024. La marine chinoise a dépassé la flotte américaine en nombre de navires, le Pentagone confirmant plus de 370 bâtiments en 2026. La Russie et la Chine sont reliées par des gazoducs et des oléoducs pétroliers dont les capacités doivent être augmentées par des chantiers en cours de construction. L'Iran a construit un oléoduc pétrolier dont le terminal se situe dans un port indien. Le trafic maritime du détroit d'Ormuz a baissé de 93% depuis le 28 février 2026.

The clearest explanation of Claude Managed Agents you'll find. Everyone's talking about it. Nobody's explaining it well. In 12 minutes we cover: - What it actually is (platform as a service for AI agents) - Who it's for and who should avoid it (4 personas) - Live console walkthrough (sessions, analytics, costs) - Real cost breakdown ($2.58 to fulfill a $1,000 service) We also built a free Google Doc that deploys your first managed agent when you hand it to Claude Code. You can grab it in the podcast show notes (Build With AI podcast) or YouTube description (video link below).

My friend Milla Jovovich and I spent months creating an AI memory system with Claude. It just posted a perfect score on the standard benchmark - beating every product in the space, free or paid. It's called MemPalace, and it works nothing like anything else out there. Instead of sending your data to a background agent in the cloud, it mines your conversations locally and organizes them into a palace - a structured architecture with wings, halls, and rooms that mirrors how human memory actually works. Here is what that gets you: → Your AI knows who you are before you type a single word - family, projects, preferences, loaded in ~120 tokens → Palace architecture organizes memories by domain and type - not a flat list of facts, a navigable structure → Semantic search across months of conversations finds the answer in position 1 or 2 → AAAK compression fits your entire life context into 120 tokens - 30x lossless compression any LLM reads natively → Contradiction detection catches wrong names, wrong pronouns, wrong ages before you ever see them The benchmarks: 100% recall on LongMemEval — first perfect score ever recorded. 500/500 questions. Every question type at 100%. 92.9% on ConvoMem — more than 2x Mem0's score. 100% on LoCoMo — every multi-hop reasoning category, including temporal inference which stumps most systems. No API key. No cloud. No subscription. One dependency. Runs on your machine. Your memories never leave. MIT License. 100% Open Source. github.com/milla-jovovich…

Claude just made cold email ops fully autonomous. And most people running Instantly or Smartlead have no idea this exists. Here is what cold email used to look like: - You wrote copy with AI - You logged into your sending tool manually - You checked metrics yourself - You made changes by hand Here is what it looks like now: - Claude logs in - Claude checks performance - Claude makes changes - You review the results With Computer Use, Claude can see your screen, move your mouse, click buttons, navigate dashboards, and update live campaigns. For cold email, that means Claude can: → Pause sequences under 1% reply rate after 500 sends → Increase daily send volume on sequences booking meetings → Edit subject lines and first lines on losing steps → Duplicate and spin winning variants → Clean lead lists → Pull reply and booking reports → Organize everything into spreadsheets Here is the system I built: 1) Desktop Setup → Mac with Claude desktop app → Claude Max plan or approved waitlist access → Computer Use enabled in settings 2) Ops Folder Structure → Create a "Cold Email Ops" folder on your desktop → Inside: Reports, Daily Summaries, Performance Exports → Tell Claude: "You have access only to this folder for saving files" 3) Dashboard Read Test → Before automating anything, prompt Claude to walk through your dashboard without making changes → Confirm it correctly reads reply rate, send volume, and sequence status → Fix any misreads before giving it control 4) Rules Playbook → Pause sequences under 1% reply rate after 500 sends → Increase volume only on sequences booking meetings → Never edit copy on campaigns under 200 sends → Always export reports before any changes 5) Sequence Pausing Automation → Prompt: "Review all active sequences. Pause any with reply rate under 1% and over 500 sends. Export a report first and ask for confirmation." → Saves 30 minutes of manual work per session 6) Volume Scaling Automation → Prompt: "Find sequences booking meetings in the last 7 days. Increase daily send volume by 20%. Cap at safe limits and confirm before applying." 7) Losing Step Rewrites → Identify steps with 300+ sends and under 0.3% reply rate → Claude rewrites only the subject line and first line → Creates a new variant and leaves the original untouched 8) New Sequence Drafting → Claude scans your highest reply rate campaigns for a given ICP → Mirrors subject line length, first line style, and CTA format → Saves as draft inside your ESP 9) Weekly Performance Report → Claude pulls last 7 days data, saves CSV to your ops folder → Writes a summary: reply rate changes, paused sequences, top performers → One document instead of five dashboard tabs This is the same system we use at Conigma to run cold email ops without manual micromanagement. If you want the full Claude Cowork Cold Email System: Follow me Reply "COWORK" I'll DM you the complete guide.

@cbwritescopy D100

I made a D100 prompting doc that you feed to a Claude project and it conducts the entire D100 process for you > Find ICPs to target based on your service > Find contacts in that ICP, pulled from LinkedIn > Researches the prospect and their company - pulling from their website, blogs, social media > Crafts outreach messaging, personalized to the prospect based on their research > CREATES THE D100 DELIVERABLE FOR YOU !!! Takes hours of dream 100 outreach and condenses it into a 10 minute process Comment "D100" and I'll DM you the doc so you can feed it to your own Claude project

Every conversation about AI in legal practice focuses on the legal work. Research. Drafting. Document review. That is what the vendors sell. That is what the conferences talk about. But if you are a solo, legal work is not your biggest problem. Your biggest problem is everything else. Clio's data says the average solo lawyer bills 37% of their working hours. That means 63% of your day is not legal work. It is intake calls. Following up on leads who filled out your website form three days ago and never heard back. Sending retainer agreements. Chasing signatures. Updating your calendar. Preparing invoices. Following up on unpaid invoices. Sending the second follow-up on unpaid invoices. Answering the same 8 questions every new client asks. Updating your case management system. Trying to remember if you filed that thing last week or just thought about filing it. You went to law school to practice law. You spend most of your week running a small business badly. And I say badly with respect. Because the tools available to you are terrible. Clio costs money and half the features do not work the way you need them to. You have three different systems that do not talk to each other. Your "intake process" is an email you wrote once and paste into replies when you remember to. AI for legal research is nice. AI for running your practice is transformational. Here is what I mean specifically. Take client intake. Right now somebody fills out your website form or calls your office. If you are lucky you call them back within 24 hours. Studies show that the lawyer who responds first gets the client 70% of the time. Not the best lawyer. The fastest one. You are losing clients every day not because your legal skills are worse but because you called back 6 hours later and someone else called back in 45 minutes. Build an intake system with Claude Code. Client fills out your form. The system immediately sends a personalized response acknowledging their situation. Not a generic autoresponder. A response that references what they actually described. It schedules a consultation. It sends a pre-consultation questionnaire. It prepares a one-page summary of their issue for you before the call. By the time you pick up the phone, you know what they need and they already feel like your firm is organized and attentive. You built that in an afternoon. A legal tech vendor would charge you $300 a month for something worse. The number one complaint from solo lawyers is not difficult judges or hard cases. It is clients who do not pay. The average collection rate for solos is around 85%. That means 15% of the money you earned disappears because you did not follow up consistently enough. Not because you do not care. Because you are in court at 9am and by the time you get back to the office at 4pm you are too tired to chase invoices. So you send a reminder next week. Then you forget. Then 90 days pass and now it is awkward. Build a follow-up system. Invoice goes out, if no payment in 7 days an automatic reminder. 14 days a second one with different language. 21 days an escalation. Each one personalized to the client and the matter. Not a form letter from a billing system. A message that sounds like you wrote it because Claude Code has your tone and your client's context. Going from 85% collection to 94% collection on $300,000 in annual billings is $27,000. That is not a technology improvement. That is a salary. Take the thing that kills most solo practices slowly. The feast or famine cycle. You get busy. You stop marketing. Pipeline dries up. Matters end. You have nothing coming in. You panic. You start marketing again. Eventually new matters come in. You get busy. You stop marketing. Every solo has lived this. Many are living it right now. The reason is not that you are bad at marketing. The reason is that marketing is a daily activity and you are a full-time lawyer who cannot do daily activities that are not law. Build a system that handles the consistent stuff. Monthly email to past clients checking in. Not a newsletter. A personal note. "Hi Sarah, it has been 6 months since we wrapped up your lease dispute. Wanted to check in and see if anything has come up." Weekly LinkedIn post drafted from a bank of your insights. Follow-up with referral sources quarterly. Claude Code can do all of this from a folder of your past communications and your client list. You are not automating the relationship. You are automating the remembering. Now add all of this up. Intake response time goes from 6 hours to 6 minutes. Collection rate goes from 85% to 94%. Pipeline stays consistent instead of feast and famine. You spend 90 minutes less per day on admin. Those 90 minutes are 7.5 hours a week. At your billing rate that is somewhere between $1,500 and $3,000 a week in recovered capacity. Not to mention the new clients you stopped losing and the old invoices you actually collected. This is not a technology argument. This is a math argument. The solo lawyers who figure this out in the next 12 months will not just survive. They will run practices that look nothing like what solo practice has looked like for the past 30 years. One lawyer. No associate. No full-time paralegal. Handling 60 to 80 active matters with the responsiveness and organization of a 10-person firm. Not by working 80-hour weeks. By building systems that handle everything that is not judgment. The legal work is where your brain goes. Everything else is where your systems go. That is the practice. That is what it actually looks like.

🚨 Twilio charges $0.0079 per SMS. Someone just turned any old Android phone into a free SMS gateway. Unlimited messages. $0. It's called SMS Gateway for Android. Install it on any Android phone. It becomes a full SMS sending and receiving server with an API. No Twilio. No MessageBird. No per-message pricing. No contracts. Just an old phone and a SIM card. Here's what's inside this thing: → Send and receive SMS through a REST API from any app or service → Works with any Android phone running 5.0 or newer → End-to-end encryption. Messages are encrypted before they leave the device. → Multi-SIM support. Use multiple SIM cards on one phone. → Multi-device support. Connect multiple phones to the same account. → Real-time webhooks for incoming messages → Multipart messages with auto-splitting for long texts → Track delivery status of every message in real time → No registration required. No email. No account in local mode. Here's the wildest part: That old Android phone in your drawer that you haven't touched in 2 years? Install this app. Insert a SIM card. You now have your own private SMS infrastructure. Two-factor authentication. Order confirmations. Appointment reminders. Notification alerts. All the things startups pay Twilio thousands a month for. Free. Running on a phone you already own. Startups spend $500 to $5,000/month on SMS APIs. This costs the price of a SIM card. 875 GitHub stars. 359 commits. Apache 2.0 License. 100% Open Source.

Bill, what good is having more money than you need if you can’t fight the good fight no matter what the cost? Many a small business owner out there has been held hostage in this way and they must settle because the costs of defense are prohibitive. You already know what youre going to do. This was clearly a post to control the media narrative and blunt the effectiveness of any threat, as well as poison multiple wells of those involved and make them unpalatable to other entities. Mud wrestling has its appeal.

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?

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗠𝗰𝗞𝗶𝗻𝘀𝗲𝘆 𝗦𝗹𝗶𝗱𝗲 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗯𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗖𝗹𝗮𝘂𝗱𝗲 🔥 McKinsey charges $300k for a strategy engagement. A big part of what you're buying is the deck: the structure, the logic, the way the argument unfolds so that a senior partner can read it in four minutes and understand exactly what you're recommending. That framework has a name. Five rules. Most founders build decks that feel convincing while they're presenting and fall apart the moment someone reads them alone. The five rules fix that at the structural level, not the aesthetic one: → Pyramid Principle: the conclusion on slide one, proof after → SCQA: situation, complication, question, answer, in that order → Action titles: every heading is a thesis, readable top to bottom → MECE: no slide duplicates another, no logical step is missing → One message per slide, and one only I built a Claude Code project that runs all five automatically. Feed it your startup brief. Get back a McKinsey-style outline. Inside you'll find: 1. The Five McKinsey Rules That Make a Deck Impossible to Misread 2. How to Set Up the Claude Project 3. How to Make Claude Apply the Five Rules 4. How to Input Your Startup the Right Way Comment MCKINSEY and I'll send you the link.