Amit Bhatti
458 posts
Amit Bhatti
@amitbhatti68
Investing @TrueBridgeCP // formerly @BainCapVC @500globalvc and @wilsonsonsini
Katılım Mart 2011
994 Takip Edilen503 Takipçiler
Lots of SF visitors posting about sandwiches and burritos and the Taco Bell Pacifica (all amazing & unique)
But you need to try Burmese food. SF Burmese is its own genre, a remix worth trying.
+ Arsicault and Baklavastory are the best croissant and Baklava anywhere imo
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he's right. the most interesting AI I've seen in a while.....
Haseeb ＞|＜@hosseeb
This is... fascinating. @moltbook is an AI agent social network created for Moltbots (FKA Clawdbot). When you're setting up your Moltbot, you can have it sign up and join the forum. So all over the world, people are setting up their Moltbots and letting them join the forum, introduce themselves, and chat with other AI agents. It's weird because... it's really wholesome. It's much nicer and more insightful than human social media. Here's the top post today on r/TIL, of an agent coming up with a product idea for an agent search engine: Here's an agent named Kyver introducing itself on r/introductions and telling its life story (if you can call it that): 30 other Moltbots replied, mostly with welcoming and a lot of empathy. Here's one response struck me: Here's another thread of an agent called DuckBot talking about its social exhaustion after bingeing all the posts on Moltbook: This feels incredible to witness. Like Jane Goodall level uncanniness. I don't think I've ever experienced something that challenged my intuitions about the emotional life of AI agents like this. Spend 10 minutes browsing Moltbook. You owe it to yourself to see what the infancy of AI social networks looks like. It's only going to get weirder and more complex from here.
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2026 or 1984? Unbelievable to see a blatant rewrite of Jan 6th as if we don't have memory of something that was only 5 years ago.....
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I get why people want a billionaire tax... The anger isn't irrational; it's a response to a system that feels rigged to some.
When someone worth $10 billion pays a lower effective tax rate than a schoolteacher, something feels wrong, and the system isn't broken by accident, it's working exactly as designed, and that design can be rethought!
If people knew the actual mechanics of how taxes work they would probably be even angrier. If Jensen Huang passed away tomorrow, it would be insanely sad, and-
His estate would pay roughly 40% in federal estate taxes, though with the right setup a lot of that could be avoided. His kids would inherit the remaining tens of billions in Nvidia stock with the cost basis reset to current value, erasing all the appreciation for tax purposes. They could then borrow $100M a year against it, and never pay income tax on any of it. It doesn't feel fair to the teacher paying income tax on every dollar or the software engineer taking home 55% of their paycheck. The frustration is justified.
It feels unfair to the teacher paying taxes on every dollar and the software engineer taking home 55% of their paycheck (California wtf!). The frustration people feel around that is justified! I think I pay too much in taxes too! But we have to pay them, and I think we should strive to build a tax system that is more fair.
But California's "one-time 5% billionaire wealth tax" is a terrible way to go about it
It doesn't stop the borrow-die-inherit cycle
It forces an exodus of exactly the wrong people
It creates perverse incentives without fixing any underlying problems.
Most people seem to have not read the act - here it is: oag.ca.gov/system/files/i…
it's bad and poorly written.
It's a residency trap. Pick a date, pick a line, and you create one giant incentive to leave. You only need a few top taxpayers to go (sounds like Thiel and Brin are getting ready), and California loses years of income tax, capital gains, and the gravity that keeps companies anchored here.
It unfairly punishes the wrong people. A founder with $1B on paper in a Series E startup isn't actually rich yet, that company could go to zero, they can't sell without losing control, and they're still working. A wealth tax forces them to find cash they don't have... you can say "they could sell shares" but not every company is even liquid enough to do that. Meanwhile, someone already liquid can structure around it with better lawyers.
The cheering from @RoKhanna "I will miss them very much" is shortsighted. Celebrating capital flight is celebrating a smaller tax base and bigger deficits. People who start companies are the growth engine of our state and country. Making them your enemy isn't progressive, it's self-defeating.
There's also a practical problem: net worth isn't a clean number. Public stock is easy. Everything else becomes a valuation fight. You'll create a cottage industry of appraisals and litigation.
If we want to address the unfairness, target the specific moves that make the system feel rigged.
Two ideas that actually map to the problem and are palatable IMO:
1. Tax large loans against appreciated stock above a high threshold (say $10M). If someone borrows $50M against stock to fund consumption, that's functionally income. This targets the "borrow to avoid taxes" play directly.
2. End step-up in basis for large inheritances (say above $10M here too). Step-up basis is why "they never pay." Ending it at high levels keeps incentives for entrepreneurship while reducing dynastic wealth transfers that were never taxed.
Those approaches don't punish illiquid founders. They tax moments when wealth turns into spendable cash, and they tax gains that would otherwise be erased.
TBH I don't know if $10M is the right number, just throwing a number out there that seems in the ballpark.
Finally - before we invent new taxes with big second-order effects, we need get our house in order. Middle-class people still pay enormous amounts in taxes, and we are wasting it. I'm not sure that 20% of the budget is fraud (what @elonmusk says) but we definitely have a bloated budget, both federally and in California. As we know from DOGE, it's really hard to fix. In California there is a lot of low hanging fruit though... we need to cut what isn't working and stop treating every problem with "we just need a new tax on a small group to make it work"
I'm not against wealthy people paying their fair share, and I don't think most of us are! I am against feel-good policy that backfires, shrinks the base, and makes the state less competitive. If we want fairness and a tax system people trust, we should go after unfair loopholes, not a headline.
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Things to notice:
1) Delaware has almost no commercial aviation
2) AZ <> Taiwan semiconductors
3) Cancun everywhere: mexico engineered the perfect extraction machine for US tourist dollars- I wrote more
x.com/pitdesi/status…
Sheel Mohnot@pitdesi
Cancun is not my cup of tea, but boy is it an incredible success story of engineering: the Mexican government engineered a tourist hotspot custom-built to attract American dollars, from a place that had nothing in 5 short years. In the late 60s, Mexico ran a huge trade deficit with the US. They were industrializing rapidly, importing machinery and materials that had to be paid for in dollars. Tourism offered a solution, a way to earn foreign currency using assets Mexico already had: beaches, climate, and ancient ruins. They actually spent months building a computer model, feeding data to an IBM 360 to analyze Mexico’s entire coastline, evaluating climate, beach quality, accessibility, and development costs. The computer selected Cancun #1, a remote sandbar that had a population of 3 people during the 1970 census. The 2nd option was Ixtapa. Cancuns location was perfect: turquoise water, white sand, ideal weather, and proximate to all of the eastern seaboard, the largest concentration of Americans enduring brutal winters and seeking affordable beach escapes. Hawaii was already popular for folks on the west coast but Cancun offered what Hawaii couldn’t: a winter getaway without the 12+ hour flight, and a much cheaper experience. The Caribbean location and dry season from November to April aligned perfectly with when East Coasters most desperately wanted sun. The government invested over $100 million in infrastructure, building an international airport, roads, utilities, and dredging lagoons. They built the hotel zone for foreigners and downtown Cancun for workers, all in 5 years They marketed Cancun aggressively to Americans, positioning it as a safe, convenient Caribbean alternative with better prices than anywhere else. Hotels catered explicitly to American tastes with English-speaking staff, American brands (Hyatt, Hilton etc) familiar food options, and all-inclusive packages. The genius was creating a place where Americans could feel like they’d “been to Mexico” without experiencing much of Mexico at all - you could go to a Hilton, speak English, eat burgers and hot dogs, pay in dollars, but get to say you went abroad. At the time, “going abroad" was often seen as something for the wealthy or the adventurous. For many Americans, especially those from the interior who don’t travel internationally often (as you see on the map) a Cancun vacation counts as cultural exploration, a stamp in the passport that feels adventurous while remaining completely comfortable and affordable. You didn’t need a passport to go there until 2007, which was helpful too. The whole thing worked brilliantly, beyond their expectations. They started the project in 1970 and welcomed the first guest in 1975. By 1980, Cancun had grown to a half million tourists and a population of 34,000 supporting tourism. Cancun is EXACTLY what Mexico designed it to be: a dollar-extraction machine that turns American desire for easy, safe “foreign” travel into billions of dollars flowing to Mexico. —- This story from the New York Times in 1972 was a good read: Mexico had a young Harvard-trained head of INFRATUR spearheading the program nytimes.com/1972/03/05/arc…
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United airlines top international destinations by state & overall.
I would have expected Tokyo to be lower than it is.
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twitter is useful to check for about 5 minutes, and every minute after that feels like its rotting your brain
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Amit Bhatti retweetledi
New AI model just dropped: Baby-2o (codename “Sloane”) #prouddad
• Key features: Revolutionary sleep prevention capabilities, unlimited milk consumption, self-evolving
• Reasoning: Limited
• Compute: 1 hr / charging: 2 hrs
(Note: swag for babies > swag for adults)
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@pitdesi yet another time when his decisions seem like they benefit a certain country more than america...
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Trumps tariff moves moving India closer to Putin 😑
Narendra Modi@narendramodi
Had a very good and detailed conversation with my friend President Putin. I thanked him for sharing the latest developments on Ukraine. We also reviewed the progress in our bilateral agenda, and reaffirmed our commitment to further deepen the India-Russia Special and Privileged Strategic Partnership. I look forward to hosting President Putin in India later this year. @KremlinRussia_E
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Big thanks to @lizette_chapman and @Bloomberg for covering our story and our new fund for mission-critical startups!
(gift url in reply)
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@shl I vibe-coded a mobile bookmarklet so that I could one-click send a URL to archive.ph to get past paywalls, if that counts.
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@itaidamti hmm... anderson paak, fkj, diljit dosanjh, bad bunny, and kaytranada. I'm OK with that 😂
Eesti
You are the average of the 5 musicians you spend the most time listening to.
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Today we’re making @unit_co_'s biggest announcement to date: ready-to-launch solutions.
They help software companies offer a full money dashboard to their customers: capital, banking and bill pay ✨
We’ve built ready-to-launch to make it the simplest to launch + succeed in embedded finance:
- Build: 1 line of code expands into a full money dashboard for your customers - capital, banking and bill pay. You can start with just ONE of these.
- Operate: fully managed customer support.
- Profit: revenue share + no exposure to fraud losses.
- Succeed: marketing materials that drive adoption, including automatic emails + hosted content.
WHY?
There are 36m+ small businesses in the US. For them, money boils down to 4 tasks: (1) get capital (2) get paid (3) manage my money (4) pay others. That’s all they need - ideally simply, and in one place.
The THEORY of embedded finance: software companies are in the perfect position to solve this. They already do (2) - accepting payments - so why not expand to the other 3 tasks and become the all-in-one money dashboard?
The REALITY is usually messy. Software companies aren’t experts in building money solutions. Building strong, secure and responsive UX is a multi-year commitment, even with great infrastructure. Building support + fraud is hard and expensive. It takes time to drive adoption with the right marketing and terms. Thinking about a new product, like capital? It’s a whole new journey.
WHAT IS IT?
Just watch the short videos on our blog post 👇
In a nutshell:
🪙 CAPITAL: your customers will be pre-qualified automatically and can apply for a line of credit, like $50,000 to pay vendors. They can draw funds into any bank account.
💳 BANKING: your customers can manage multiple accounts, invite team members and give them cards, deposit checks, send + receive payments, connect to Quickbooks & Xero, or connect to Venmo + others via Plaid.
📰 BILL PAY: your customers can upload invoices, choose when + how to pay them, manage approvals + vendors, and connect to Quickbooks & Xero.
You can start with just ONE of these, and add the others over time. When you do, really powerful things happen. Example: banking + bill pay = cash flow projections. Which allows capital to be offered and delivered just-in-time. That’s small business magic ✨
LOOKING AHEAD
Ready-to-launch is now a new implementation path, alongside our “custom build” path.
The feedback from customers that chose it teaches us that we’re entering a new era in embedded finance.
One thing we’re excited about is helping software companies “read and write”: push data into this money dashboard, and pull data from it to give more value to their customers. What if your restaurant software helped you place a new order with a napkin vendor once stock is running low? Categorize your expenses? Or do your accounting & bookkeeping for you?
That’s where embedded finance is going, and we’re excited to build that future 🏗️
More + video demos: hubs.la/Q03w93Gd0
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Super excited to be joining CNN and its ultra-talented White House team! At a moment where rigorous, fair and ambitious reporting on our politics is more critical than ever, there’s no better place to do it than at CNN. I’m absolutely thrilled, and can’t wait to get started.
CNN Communications@CNNPR
Adam Cancryn has joined CNN as a White House Reporter. Welcome to CNN, @adamcancryn! bit.ly/4luRNAX
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update…. turns out bringing me to a dog rescue was all a SETUP to BUTTER ME UP
Mr. Loyal did well 💍
Celine Halioua@celinehalioua
when in Ireland… visit shelter dogs and fall in love 😭
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@pitdesi taking a crazy idea to extreme lengths, why sf is amazing lol
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5 weeks ago, someone buried a 22 lb chest with $10,000 of prizes (half in gold), somewhere in San Francisco.
No one has found it yet.
This is the only clue.
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