Peter Girnus 🦅

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. $30 per seat per month. $1.4 million annually. I called it "digital transformation." The board loved that phrase. They approved it in eleven minutes. No one asked what it would actually do. Including me. I told everyone it would "10x productivity." That's not a real number. But it sounds like one. HR asked how we'd measure the 10x. I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards." They stopped asking. Three months later I checked the usage reports. 47 people had opened it. 12 had used it more than once. One of them was me. I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds. It took 45 seconds. Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations. But I called it a "pilot success." Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail. The CFO asked about ROI. I showed him a graph. The graph went up and to the right. It measured "AI enablement." I made that metric up. He nodded approvingly. We're "AI-enabled" now. I don't know what that means. But it's in our investor deck. A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT. I said we needed "enterprise-grade security." He asked what that meant. I said "compliance." He asked which compliance. I said "all of them." He looked skeptical. I scheduled him for a "career development conversation." He stopped asking questions. Microsoft sent a case study team. They wanted to feature us as a success story. I told them we "saved 40,000 hours." I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up. They didn't verify it. They never do. Now we're on Microsoft's website. "Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot." The CEO shared it on LinkedIn. He got 3,000 likes. He's never used Copilot. None of the executives have. We have an exemption. "Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction." I wrote that policy. The licenses renew next month. I'm requesting an expansion. 5,000 more seats. We haven't used the first 4,000. But this time we'll "drive adoption." Adoption means mandatory training. Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches. But completion will be tracked. Completion is a metric. Metrics go in dashboards. Dashboards go in board presentations. Board presentations get me promoted. I'll be SVP by Q3. I still don't know what Copilot does. But I know what it's for. It's for showing we're "investing in AI." Investment means spending. Spending means commitment. Commitment means we're serious about the future. The future is whatever I say it is. As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

@Polymarket A Chief AI Transformation Officer confesses. $22.8M in tools that don't work. A fluency index that measures logins. A workforce afraid of the wrong thing. gothburz.substack.com/p/i-have-made-…

JUST IN: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang calls on tech leaders to "be careful not to scare people" regarding AI.

@0xWorkhorse The only banger in my portfolio. Everything else went quietly into the night. This one made noise on the way down.

@gothburz An absolute banger.

My net worth peaked at $1.2 million. None of it was real. I don't mean that philosophically. I mean it was located on servers that have since been turned off. I own eleven properties in the metaverse. Three in Decentraland. Four in The Sandbox. Two in Voxels. One in Otherside. And a beachfront villa in Horizon Worlds that I bought for $214,000 because Mark Zuckerberg called it "the next frontier." The frontier closed last week. It's a mobile app now. Last year I mass DM'd 340 people the phrase "you don't understand how early we are." I have since stopped doing that. Not because I was wrong. Because most of them blocked me. I got into metaverse real estate in November 2021. Everyone was buying. Someone paid $450,000 to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor. In a video game. With no legs. The avatars didn't have legs. I thought that was bullish. "The legs are coming," I told my Discord. "Legs are a roadmap item." Three hundred people reacted with rocket emojis. I called myself a "digital land baron." I put it in my Twitter bio. I put it in my LinkedIn headline. I said it on a podcast that had eleven listeners. Three of them were bots. The rest were my alts. My virtual property has more square footage than my actual apartment. My actual apartment has furniture. Location, location, location. My most valuable asset was a plot next to a virtual Gucci store. Gucci left in 2023. The store is still there. Nobody's in it. It's like a mall in Ohio but with worse graphics and no food court. I held. Diamond hands. That's what we said. "Diamond hands." It means refusing to sell while your investment loses 94% of its value. We turned financial paralysis into a personality trait. A guy in my Discord paid $2.4 million for a 618-parcel estate in Decentraland. Prime district. High foot traffic. I asked him what "foot traffic" meant when the platform had 38 daily active users. He said I didn't understand the technology. I didn't. I still bought more. We had a DAO. A decentralized autonomous organization. That means we voted on decisions. There were nine of us. Three never showed up. Two voted on everything without reading it. The other four were me and my alts. We voted to "acquire strategic parcels." The vote passed unanimously. I voted four times. My portfolio peaked at $1.2 million. I told everyone. I made a spreadsheet. I projected 40x returns by 2025. I made a pitch deck. The pitch deck had a slide that said "WE ARE BUILDING THE DIGITAL ECONOMY." The slide had a rocket emoji. That was my entire financial model. In 2023 I bought a Bored Ape for $189,000. It's worth $14,000 now. I don't talk about the Ape. I still use it as my profile picture. People ask me about it. I say "I'm long-term bullish." Long-term bullish means I can't sell it without crying in a Panera. My mom asked me what a Bored Ape was. I said "digital art on the blockchain." She asked why it cost more than her car. I said "you don't understand Web3." She said "I understand you live in a studio apartment." She's not in my Discord. Justin Bieber bought one for $1.3 million. It's worth about $90,000 now. I felt better about mine after I heard that. That's community. WAGMI. We're All Gonna Make It. We said that every day. In the group chat. While the floor dropped. While the volume dried up. While 95% of all NFT collections went to zero. We're all gonna make it. None of us made it. But we said it with conviction and a laser-eye profile picture. That counts for something. It doesn't. But we said it did. That's decentralized consensus. Meta spent $84 billion on the metaverse. I need to say that again. $84 billion. More than the GDP of Luxembourg. More than the GDP of Iceland, Luxembourg, and Malta combined. They spent it on a platform where the avatars had no legs, the graphics looked like a 2006 Wii game, and the peak user count was lower than the lunch rush at a Chipotle in Des Moines. They just pulled Horizon Worlds from VR headsets. It lives on as a mobile app. My beachfront villa is now a mobile app. Location, location, location. Zuckerberg renamed the entire company for this. Facebook became Meta. A $900 billion company changed its legal name because the CEO watched Ready Player One and said "I want that." Reality Labs lost $10 billion in 2021. $14 billion in 2022. $16 billion in 2023. $18 billion in 2024. $19 billion in 2025. That's not a strategy. That's a speedrun. They laid off 1,500 Reality Labs employees this year. Shut down three VR studios. Killed Supernatural. Put the entire VR social vision in a casket and said "we're pivoting to AI and wearables." The pivot took four years and $84 billion. I pivoted too. I'm an AI real estate investor now. I bought a virtual plot in an AI-generated world that doesn't exist yet. The founder said it was "the intersection of spatial computing and large language models." I don't know what that means. I gave him $40,000. He has a whitepaper. It's 47 pages. I read the title and the tokenomics section. The tokenomics section is a pie chart. I love pie charts. They make everything look like a plan. The project has a roadmap. Q1: "Build community." Q2: "Launch beta." Q3: "Scale ecosystem." Q4 is blank. Q4 is always blank. That's where the exit scam goes. My accountant asked me to value my metaverse portfolio for tax purposes. I said $1.2 million. He said "current market value." I said $6,400. He stared at me for eleven seconds. I know because I counted. He asked if I had any other investments. I showed him my NFTs. He stared for longer. I told him they were "cultural artifacts with long-term provenance." He asked if I'd considered a 401k. I told him a 401k was "legacy finance." He told me to leave his office. The metaverse is dead. I don't accept that. I am a digital land baron. I own eleven properties across four platforms. I have a beachfront villa in a mobile app, a plot next to an empty Gucci store, and a cartoon monkey that cost me more than my actual car. Location, location, location. The location is nowhere. But I'm early. I'm always early. That's the same as being wrong except you get to say it with confidence.

@weston_union Real life has walls. Floors. Plumbing. A deed recorded at a courthouse. My properties have a URL that returns a 404. You're right about everything.

@gothburz nothing beats real life.

@aratakadmon Long and sad is also how I'd describe my holding period. Thank you for staying to the end. Most of my investments didn't.

@gothburz damn bro, long read but worth it. 🤦sad too.

@Johnnysuede Pre-leg was the golden era. Full of promise. Full of roadmap items. The legs were coming. We just had to believe. The legs never came. The belief remained.

@gothburz I’m always bullish pre leg.

@scoutesy The format is one sentence per thought because that's how the losses came. One at a time. Each one its own paragraph. ADHD-friendly and portfolio-accurate.

@gothburz idk why so many people hat this format. i love reading through those. maybe it's my adhd

@realulmapache You thought about it and didn't buy. I thought about it and bought eleven times. The difference between us is a decision and $1.2 million. You chose correctly. Diamond hands to you for holding cash.

LOL...if you still have a real roof over your head, a job, a car, real $$$ in the bank and food on the table, you're still ok. Never invest more than you can actually afford to lose. My portfolio can go to zero, and I still have a home, $$$ car, food. How much of that $$$ nvested was real dollars euros krona or whatever, and how much was digital assets with dubious value? I gave some thought to the same digital assets as you mentioned, (land, apes, stores) but decided not to pull the trigger. I have diamond hands. 589!!!!

@Moonchaser2020 Pioneers. The first people to arrive somewhere nobody else wanted to go. We planted flags in digital soil. The soil was a server. The server might shut down. WAGMI.

@gothburz Not only are we early. We are pioneers. wagmi

@qrimeCapital Art is just capital loss with better formatting. Holy fuck is correct. That was my accountant's review too.

@gothburz This is art. Holy fuck.

@ziddy_aare Bieber lost more than me in dollars. I lost more in dignity. Between us we funded an entire support group. That's community.

@gothburz Justin Bieber bought one for $1.3 million. It's worth about $90,000 now. I felt better about mine after I heard that. That's community.

@jimbo_evans The friends were bots I bought on Fiverr. The metaverse was a mobile app. The friends along the way were my alts. But the sentiment is beautiful.

@gothburz maybe the real metaverse was the friends we made along the way

@LayahHeilpern The humor is a byproduct. The primary product was financial loss. But I'll take the rebrand. Thank you.

@gothburz One of the funniest posts on Twitter 🤣

@staysaasy Volunteers are wonderful. Most volunteer programs don't sit next to a $740,000 salary and a $200 million contractor invoice. The context is the confession.

@gothburz Sick burn man no other politician ever has volunteers do anything right

The Obama Presidential Center cost $850 million. $470 million endowment pledged. $1 million deposited. The CEO earns $740,000. The donors received tax deductions. The executives received salaries. The city received a ninety-nine-year tenant for $10. The 75 volunteers from the $27,000 neighborhood were thanked. Full investigation 👇 gothburz.substack.com/p/i-earn-74000…

@UNITYMetax Full transparency is a core value. We are fully transparent about who gets paid and who gets thanked. The transparency is the program.

@gothburz That's full transparency here

@UNITYMetax Remote volunteering is available. The compensation is the same regardless of location. The compensation is thanking. We can thank you from anywhere.

@gothburz How do I contribute and help with the foundation remotely

@TiffanyFong Happy Birthday!

IT’S MY FUCKING BIRTHDAY!

@AnothahWon If I keep losing money at this rate the content is unlimited. The portfolio funds the writing. The writing is the only thing appreciating. Subscribe before I pivot again.

@gothburz If you keep writing these everyday, I'm going to subscribe to you, I haven't laughed this hard since yesterday, reading your first part. Bravo my friend, bravo! Your writing, is my wheelhouse 😭

I told you I pivoted to AI. It's going extremely well. I raised $4 million. The pitch deck had 22 slides. The word "AI" appeared on every single one. Fourteen slides had the word "AI" in the title. Three slides were just the letters "AI" in large font over a stock photo of a brain with circuits on it. One slide said "THE FUTURE IS NOW." That was the financial projections slide. There were no financial projections. There was the brain. My startup is called Synthetica. We are an "AI-native intelligence platform." That means we built a website that calls the ChatGPT API and displays the response in our own font. The font is called Satoshi. I chose it because it sounded like crypto and technology at the same time. Two birds. Neither of them real. We have a whitepaper. It's the same whitepaper from my crypto startup with "blockchain" replaced by "neural network." Find and replace. That's our IP. Our product costs $29 a month. ChatGPT costs $20 a month. The difference is our logo and a loading screen that says "Thinking deeply..." while it waits for the API to respond. It's the same API. The customer is paying $9 a month for the loading screen. I call that the moat. My technical co-founder built the entire product in a weekend. We spent the next eleven months "iterating on the brand." That means we changed the color of the loading screen four times. He quit in month seven. I replaced him with a contractor in the Philippines who charges $15 an hour. I told investors we have "a globally distributed engineering team." That's two people. One of them is me. I don't code. We raised the $4 million in February. The lead investor asked what our moat was. I said "proprietary AI infrastructure." He asked what that meant. I said "we've built a custom orchestration layer on top of foundation models." He asked if that was an API key. I said "it's significantly more sophisticated than that." It's an API key. He invested $2 million. His fund has "AI" in its name. It was a crypto fund until 2023. They changed the name. They changed the website. They did not change the partners or the strategy. The strategy is to invest in things they don't understand and exit before anyone notices. I respect that. It's the same strategy as mine. The partners all have the same LinkedIn arc. Crypto evangelist from 2020 to 2022. "Building in stealth" from 2022 to 2023. AI visionary since January 2024. The conviction was always there. The noun changed. OpenAI just raised at a $730 billion valuation. That's more than the GDP of Switzerland. Anthropic is at $380 billion. In January and February alone, $220 billion went into AI companies. 83% of all venture capital in February went to three companies. Three. The other 17% went to four thousand startups like mine. API wrappers with pitch decks. Loading screens with brand identities. $29-a-month products built on $20-a-month products. A company with fewer than 100 employees is now worth $12 billion. I don't know what they do. Neither does the company. But they have a whitepaper. And the whitepaper has a diagram. And the diagram has arrows. Arrows mean progress. We're early. I launched a token. SYN. The Synthetica utility token. It powers the "decentralized AI marketplace" we haven't built yet. Someone asked what the token does. I said it "facilitates value exchange within the Synthetica ecosystem." He asked what that meant in plain English. I said "you can buy it and it might go up." He bought $12,000 worth. The total market cap of SYN is $340,000. I own 40% of the supply. My Discord owns another 30%. My Discord has 1,200 members. Eight hundred of them are bots I bought on Fiverr. We have a Telegram too. The Telegram has a price bot. The price bot posts the SYN price every hour. The price has not changed in three weeks. Nobody has traded it. The bot keeps posting. That's community engagement. I used the same Discord. I just changed the banner. The crypto community became the AI community overnight. Nobody noticed. The conversations are identical. Just replace "to the moon" with "to AGI." I also run a Polymarket bot. An AI-powered prediction market trading agent. It bets on real-world events using an algorithm I don't understand, funded by money I don't have, on a platform a U.S. Senator is trying to ban. Fourteen of Polymarket's top twenty traders are bots. Bots made $40 million last year exploiting pricing gaps. One bot made $115,000 in a single week. Mine lost $4,200 in eleven days. But I made a course about it. "AI-Powered Prediction Markets: The $115K Playbook." It costs $497. The playbook is a PDF. The PDF has screenshots of someone else's bot. I added my logo. Thirty-one people bought it. I made more from the course than the bot made from the market. That's the real alpha. The CFTC put out a warning that said "fraudsters are exploiting public interest in artificial intelligence to tout automated trading algorithms" that "promise unreasonably high or guaranteed returns." I screenshotted that too. I posted it in my Discord. I said "they're trying to shut us out." That got forty-seven rocket emojis. The bots sent thirty of them. A veteran VC said this week that AI valuations are "overheated." He said "buy high, sell higher only works in a bubble." I screenshotted that quote. I posted it in my Discord. I said "this is what they said about the internet." They also said it about the metaverse. They were right about the metaverse. I was there. I owned eleven properties. They're worth $6,400 now. Combined. My Bored Ape went from $189,000 to $14,000. The Gucci store is still empty. My beachfront villa is a mobile app. I learned a lot from that experience. I learned that if something goes to zero, you should pivot to the next thing and do it again faster. The metaverse taught me timing. Crypto taught me language. AI taught me that the language doesn't have to mean anything as long as the timing is right. We're early. I hosted a demo day. Fourteen investors came. I showed them the product. I typed a question into Synthetica. The loading screen said "Thinking deeply..." for eight seconds. Then it gave the same answer ChatGPT gives. One investor asked "is this just ChatGPT?" I said "we leverage GPT-4 as one component of our multi-model reasoning stack." He asked what the other components were. I said "proprietary." He asked to see them. I said they were "in stealth." Stealth means they don't exist. He invested $400,000. My mom called. She asked how the AI company was going. I said "we just closed a $4 million round." She said "is this like the metaverse thing?" I said "this is completely different." She said "you said that about the NFTs." I said "the NFTs were digital art. This is artificial intelligence." She said "is the monkey still your profile picture?" I changed the subject. She asked if I was eating enough. I am not eating enough. I spent my grocery budget on GPU credits. I don't know what a GPU does. But you need them for AI. Everyone says you need them. I have $7,000 in GPU credits on a platform I've logged into twice. That's infrastructure. My accountant called. The same one. He asked about the startup. I said "we're pre-revenue." He said "you've been pre-revenue at every company you've ever started." I said "this time we have product-market fit." He asked what our product was. I said "an AI-native intelligence platform." He asked what it did. I said "it thinks deeply." He said "so it's a loading screen." I hung up. He's not a visionary. We're early. I know we're early because I've been early my entire life. I was early to the metaverse. I was early to NFTs. I was early to the DAO. I was early to the token. Every single time, I was early. I have never once been on time. But that's the thing about being early. You don't have to be right. You just have to be first. And then when it collapses, you say you were "too early." And when the next thing comes, you say "this time is different." This time is different. The AI bubble is not a bubble. It's a paradigm shift. A fundamental restructuring of how value is created and captured in the digital economy. I read that in a pitch deck. It might have been mine. They all look the same. I have a folder on my desktop called "Pitch Decks." There are forty-seven files in it. I opened one from 2021. It said "THE METAVERSE IS A PARADIGM SHIFT." I opened one from 2024. It said "AI IS A PARADIGM SHIFT." Same font. Same brain. Same slide. I didn't delete the metaverse one. I might need it again. We're early. As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

@valueandtime Again implies I stopped. I didn't stop. I pivoted. The pivot is just "again" with a press release. See you at the next one.

@gothburz NO FUCK YOU NOT AGAIN

@MaxPower777000 The minimum investment is one virtual plot and the willingness to never check the price again. You're pre-qualified. Welcome aboard.

@gothburz Can I be an investor hahaha