Danny Zembe

@asemota Chief, genuine question here. Please help me understand why, after decades in business, you still need to "optimize for more consistent income and cash flow"? (Btw this question is not connected to spending)

One non-trivial thing I was forced to achieve this year was to stop impulse buying. I simply canceled my Amazon Prime and Costco accounts. Nothing sold, nothing bought. This is harder to do than people think. I realized my life was good enough on the consumption side; I had everything I needed already and more. I needed only to optimize for more consistent income and cash flow. I am also brutal about digital subscriptions now. I removed Hulu and Disney as nobody was watching them. I am only subscribed to Peacock until the end of this English Premier League season. Killed ChatGPT and others, and focused on Claude. I used the Rocket app to trim my subscriptions again. It also helped me years ago by saving me $700 a month. I didn't realize I was paying for subscriptions I never used. These things pile up. It is funny how someone else's passive income stream can become your passive spending problem. One thing I also realized is that you don't have to optimize every aspect of your life all the time to be fully functional. Only the really important parts. Comfort is addictive; we sometimes don't know when to stop until we are forced to. My goal was always to spend less, but I didn't realize I was getting sucked into spending more until I woke up. This book by @morganhousel is life-changing.

@Jason I'm in.

We started an AI founder twitter group... reply with "I'm in" if you're a founder and want to be added

It's over. Claude Design is generating insane UI, designs & animations from just text. Design will never be the same 🤯 10 wild examples:

Using OpenClaw is basically is like driving your own Ferrari (that you have to be a mechanic for yourself) and it's broken down all the time, but gives you the time of your life vs driving a reliable Honda (Hermes Agent) vs riding the bus (Claude / ChatGPT)

You're a direct beneficiary of apartheid. The only reason you'd access to computers as a kid, when 99% of black kids did not, was apartheid. That alone contributed DIRECTLY to you being where you are today! Now you want to pretend like you are self-made? No, you are not!

@FaraiMazhindu What is your plan for repaying the 100+ years of unpaid wages due to black South Africans for the work they did in apartheid SA? Free labour, which directly resulted in Elon Musk getting a computer at 10 when black kids of his age did not. The reason he is where he is now.

History proves that every country that practiced apartheid was eventually strangled by sanctions until they reformed. Inviting that kind of isolation again would be catastrophic for South Africa. There is absolutely no need for racial laws that sideline any part of the population in 2026. The economy should be built on meritocracy, not racism.

.@pmarca: "The person who writes down the thing has tremendous power." "There are so few people who will just like write down the thing. And so we see this at companies all the time, which is, one of the ways you find the up-and-comers at a tech company is just, okay, who wrote down the plan? And, you know, that doesn't mean they came up with everything. And that doesn't mean that they had all the ideas, but they're actually able to organize their thoughts and then actually have the energy and the motivation and the skill to be able to communicate in a written form. That actually stands out." With @david_perell

Amjad Masad says we may have “functional AGI,” not true AGI: automation that works because humans supply the expertise. True AGI would learn new skills on the fly. For now, humans are still the teachers. @amasad

I'd love to angel invest in a handful of startups this month. Pre-seed and seed. Ideally AI or VC-adjacent, but open to all. My value add: ▪️ 500K+ newsletter subscribers across The VC Corner and The AI Corner ▪️ 300K+ LinkedIn followers, 2–4M weekly impressions ▪️ a16z speedrun scout ▪️ Network of top VCs, operators and founders 👉 Pitch in comments

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When a VC is genuinely interested, they won't coach - they'll pounce, with conviction. The urgency shifts and you can feel it. For founders: find the ones who form their own conviction, not the ones waiting to see who else commits first. Their questions about your business will get harder. Those are the ones you want on your cap table.

Travis Kalanick spent eight years building a ghost kitchen company. That was the cover story. Today he renamed City Storage Systems to Atoms and revealed what he was actually doing: building a robotics company across food, mining, and autonomous transport. CloudKitchens was the first vertical. Lab37’s Bowl Builder robot that assembles 200 meals per hour with no human hands was the prototype. Otter, processing 18% of all US food delivery orders, was the data layer. Thousands of employees across hundreds of locations in 110 cities, operating in stealth so deep that employees couldn’t list the company name on LinkedIn. The mining play is Pronto, the autonomous vehicle startup built by Anthony Levandowski for industrial sites. Kalanick is acquiring it. The last time these two worked together, Uber poached Levandowski from Google’s self-driving program, Waymo sued for trade secret theft, Levandowski went to prison, got pardoned by Trump, and Uber settled for $245 million. Now they’re reuniting. The transport play is the one worth paying attention to. The Information reported today that Uber is providing major backing for Kalanick’s self-driving venture. The same board that sent him a resignation letter in 2017 now needs his help. Uber sold its autonomous driving unit to Aurora in 2020. Waymo is scaling robotaxis. Tesla is pushing Cybercab. Uber just missed earnings for the first time in seven quarters. They removed the founder who wanted to build self-driving, and now they’re paying to get that capability back. He wrote on the Atoms website that he left Uber “heartbroken” and “bled, but did not perish.” A 1,700-word manifesto from a guy who said nothing publicly for seven years. Ghost kitchens were the sandbox. Atoms is what he was building the entire time.

@asemota You really have issues with your former boss!

Please remove that #20

From home to the office in Dubai — back to work after the New Year. Grateful to God for ushering us into 2026, and looking forward to a year of purpose, progress, and success. #ASR #AbdulSamadRabiu

@rohitdotmittal How, and why, is it any of a founder's business that a VC needs 100x for his numbers to work? What % of VCs today invested $10M and got $1B return? What am I missing here.

venture-backed means you need a 100x outcome - that’s how investors underwrite every deal investors want 100x because only 2-3 companies in their portfolio will actually return material capital - that’s how their fund works but 90% of venture-backed companies will never get there 58,000 VC-backed companies in the US right now 1,259 exits in 2024 total that’s a 2.2% exit rate in any given year here’s what happens to the other 97.8%: scenario 1: the profitable zombie you’re running a business that does $2M ARR with 60% gross margins you’re breakeven or close to it customers love the product and renew every year but you’re growing 50% not 500% you already raised a series a, the metrics for series b are too far off you are already diluted that only a higher valuation round makes sense - a down round will kill your ownership and hence the motivation you may be able to sell now but won’t because the math doesn’t work you can’t shut down because revenue is real and team depends on you so you’re stuck running a breakeven but capped business you can’t exit scenario 2: the unprofitable grind you’re doing $800K ARR burning $150K a month (i’ve seen way higher burn for similar revenue) you have 10 months of runway left your last round was 18 months ago at a $25M valuation you’re not hitting the metrics for the next round VCs stopped caring about you, probably already written you off months ago you need to either cut team by 60% to get to default alive or find an exit but no one buys companies at this stage with this cap table so you’re stuck running an unprofitable business you can’t raise for scenario 3: the honest outcome you realize after 4 years this isn’t going to be the outcome anyone signed up for you want to sell and move on you talk to business brokers - they don’t touch deals under $5M ARR with high pref stack (many vcs kill these deals) you talk to strategic buyers - they want you to stay for 3 years with aggressive earnouts you talk to financial buyers - they offer 1x revenue which doesn’t even cover the pref stack the exit strategy for most founders is eventual exhaustion you grind until: - you run out of money and shut down - you run out of energy and walk away - investors finally write it off and you acquihire the team for $500K just to reset (paid over multiple years) there are other scenarios like shutting down the company early and returning capital, hiring someone else to run the company, or doing a hard pivot - depending on how much money you’ve left in the bank the system has no infrastructure for the honest exit no one is helping founders who built real products with real customers but didn’t hit the expected growth trajectories everyone just pretends and waits and hopes somehow the math will change

Let us be clear, Maduro was betrayed by his presidential guards and army. The US agents just walked in and grabbed him. It will not happen like that in South Africa. If they try, they will face fierce, ferocious & sustained military resistance.

If every single American addict decides to stop buying drugs today, the entire narcotics industry will collapse tomorrow. Mr Trump, the bottom line is that as long as 99% of your people continue to be drug addicts, the narcotics industry will flourish, with or without Maduro!

@PTChimusoro @KingKandoro But the scarf is much more recognizable than the sables or cricket jersey. It's been well marketed to be fair (both locally & abroad). Most Zimbabweans won't recognize the sables jersey.

@KingKandoro 1. Sables Jersey (we just qualified for a World Cup) 2. Our cricket jersey (the cream one) 3. There’s this Zim tshirt being done by designers Don’t: National fabric Scarf I’ve nothing against the two but they don’t do much to unite but are quite divisive.

What is he going to wear in Zim?

From Accra to Nairobi, Johannesburg, and Harare , Chinese, Lebanese, and Pakistani entrepreneurs are making big money. Yet Africans are consistently told there is no money in Africa. What a lie.

Meta just bought Manus for >$1B and it makes sense. ~8 Consumer AI apps hit $100M+ arr that aren’t big labs: Perplexity: $20B ElevenLabs: $6.6B Lovable: $6.6B Replit: $3B+ Suno: $2.5B Gamma: $2.1B Character: $1B+ Manus: $500M Meta AI has ~no product. This was the cheapest, and most aligned.