the provider

any cold email demons able to lend your boy an ear?

@courtne Potent

openai and anthropic probably have terrible sales reps they're talented, but they've never actually had to sell anything. ben horowitz said it best in a recent conversation: "right now with openai and anthropic, everybody wants to buy ai. they're already predisposed to buy." that's order-taking, not selling. let's zoom in on this distinction. 1) the order-taker problem cloudflare's CEO admitted in 2023 their product was so good that "many of our sales team succeeded largely by just taking orders." deals were like "fish jumping right in the boat." then the economy shifted and they fired 100 salespeople who'd contributed just 4% of new business. when your product sells itself, mediocre reps look like rockstars. they crush quota, win the president's club, and get promoted into leadership. nobody knows they can't actually sell until the fish stop jumping in the boat. 2) why hard sells matter ben won't shut up about ptc, a 90s cad/cam company. the product "wasn't that great." "the windshield wiper didn't work." but that forced discipline. you had to map accounts systematically, lay traps for competitors, and build airtight technical cases. his favorite hire was ryan gabrisco at databricks, who came from a company selling secure ftp as a public company. think about how good you have to be to make quota selling that. when ben hires sales leaders, he looks for people from companies where the product was hard to sell because that's the only way to test if someone can actually sell. 3) what happens when markets turn every hot market eventually cools. i'll give you a few examples. salesforce in 2001. facebook ads in 2012. aws in 2015. the order-takers got exposed every time. modern AI sales reps don't know how to qualify prospects who aren't already sold or how to systematically lock out competitors or how to build pipeline when inbound dries up. ben's story about hiring at Okta: two candidates, one super enthusiastic, the other said "let me talk to your customers first." ben told the ceo: "you want the guy qualifying YOU. that's what good salespeople do." 4) openai scaled their sales team from 10 to 500 people in under two years. anthropic is scaling fast too. but how would anyone know if they're good? you can't test sales ability when customers are lined up begging to buy. when real competition arrives, the kind where enterprises have three viable options and care about pricing, support, and vendor risk, AI companies will discover which GTM leaders can actually sell and which ones were just processing waitlists. 5) how to hire right if you're building a GTM team right now, think like a value investor. resumes don't matter. look for human capital that the market has significantly underpriced. someone who's had to sell a product that didn't sell itself, someone who's built discipline through necessity, not abundance (no order-takers). find the person who sold enterprise software at a company nobody's heard of. find the person who had to fight for every deal because the competitor was already embedded in the account. the person who figured out how to systematically lock out competition even when they were the underdog. those skills matter. for AI companies, the question is whether they can close deals when the market shifts. because when inbound dries up (it always does), you'll discover who can actually sell.

@kowboybaker @BizzaroPlanet @FreightAlley In fairness, this isn’t really their (current) use case. It’s more last mile stuff

@BizzaroPlanet @FreightAlley I was about to say I didn’t see any when I was in southern Cali last week on 40 . I want to see one run to Bakersfield to flagstaff without making a charge stop

Sigh…

@mert Actual shaving alpha mert: when shaving and the razor gets clogged from hair, simply run it on your side the opposite way and all the hair comes off. 1000x more efficient than rinsing raiser in water stream and method holds up in low water pressure environments

so im here vibecoding my sol price checker site (very nice site btw) and gf texts me all of a sudden: we are going to my parents in 1h, be ready problem my head is not shaved im in that phase of hair growth where the sides are fully grown in but the middle is barren land, like the Nevada desert I look like a disgusting mix of Kevin o leary and Gary gensler I can not go out like this But im at her place and theres no hair trimmer (because she's not bald) — so now I think im fucked However I notice an unopened razor blade This is a big risk. The way head shaving works is that you need to first trim and then hit the razor. You never go full razor first. And I only have 10 mins. But I say fuck it. Im a high agency founder. How can I build a 100b company if I cant bend this razor to my will? So I get to shaving. However it's not really working. The hair is too thick, I need to rinse off the razor everytime I do a single swipe. This is not going to work. But I see a solution. Theres actually a second razor in the washroom. So I rinse it off. And I shit you not within 6 minutes I have a sparkling dome again. (BTW there should be a bald guy head shaving speed contest, think I'd crush here) But anyway, it seems all I had to was increase blades and reduce latency IBRL (true story)

That’s the funny thing about cooking advice. It’s so subjective because the end result is based on what the person eating it prefers. Sure, there are some objectively better ways to cook certain things, but especially with steak, it heavily comes down to preference Eg. once you are able to cook a steak at home to your liking in a repeatable fashion, going to expensive steakhouses is underwhelming because they will rarely cook it exactly how you like it

thoughts about cooking steak. seems in hindsight so many things said about it were wrong? i remember ppl like gordon ramsay would babble stuff like, pinch your hand this firmness means well done. baste the steak that is already soaking in butter. dont touch the steak only put it down to flip once. rub a clove of garlic (as if that does more than an iota). use a ripping hot pan. rest your steak before cutting into it. all ideas that are later proven false via controlled experiment. i think we would all accept this stuff as fact, perhaps argument from authority, when it was actually just talking heads needing something to say, those were the incentives. good lesson, as it applies more than ever nowadays. recently i saw a chris young video on cryoseared steak, he showcased some methods like, put a sear from frozen, then low and slow (eg. airfryer) to finish. 30% juicier from the leidenfrost barrier, and sousvide-like result in terms of grey vs red. kind of amusing no one else figured this out for so long.

@shylockh Very well put. Similar to the epidemic of talking in extremes: “That guy is the fucking worst” - guy the work with who does something mildly inconvenient “Best French fries you’ll ever have” - at McDonald’s “Best day of my life” - got a free beer at the bar Devalues words

While it is an imperfect rule, I think that most people who are trying to describe somebody's mental state would be better off using older synonyms rather than their modern therapy equivalents. They are not narcissistic, they are selfish and thoughtless. 1/

@thatluckyduck @draprints Interesting. Most of the bids I’m familiar with would have a pretty heavy task order/change order process required after the bid was awarded to someone. But, to be fair I’m dealing with utilities, who are probably more heavily regulated than the avg fed contract

stop cold emailing ceos who dont know they need you start scraping companies legally required to give you money usaspending.(gov) shows every federal contract awarded filter for contracts over $750k heres the thing nobody knows any contract over that threshold requires the prime contractor to subcontract a percentage to small businesses they literally have to find vendors or lose the contract search for "staffing" "marketing" "it services" whatever you sell find the primes who just won hit the program manager with "saw you won the [agency] contract - looks like youll need to hit your small business subcontracting goal. we're an sba certified [your service] and can help you stay compliant while actually delivering" they have budget locked in theyre legally required to spend it on companies like yours good news is you dont need certification to be a subcontractor the prime decides who to work with but if you want the real set-aside advantages and youre not in the US find a partner stateside to form the entity and pay your LLC consulting fees on the backend not legal advice just how the game is played while everyone fights over saas founders youre tapping into guaranteed government money

@GumdropCap @curiouscamilo @chamath I don’t think this analogy applies to wins that are ~4 billion USD in size

@curiouscamilo @chamath Broken clock is right twice a day

People criticize @chamath so much. This is a stellar memo. He’s an extremely sharp and talented investor. Like Hummingbird, FF, and others, he proves right again that venture is an asset class of people: “Special person: Yes” “It’s a team bet”

@artsch00lreject Damn this went triple platinum for CT

God grant me the serenity to accept the things that are so over, the courage to say fuck it we ball, and the wisdom to know when we are so fucking back

@houmanasefi @aakashgupta With size

@aakashgupta being early is nice being early and right about the bottleneck is generational

Social Capital put $10M into Groq’s seed round in April 2017 when the company was worth roughly $30M post-money. That single check bought about 33% of the company. Then they doubled down with $52.3M in a 2018 convertible note. Total deployed: $62.3M. Here’s where it gets interesting. Groq raised $300M at $1.1B in 2021, then $640M at $2.8B in 2024, then $750M at $6.9B in September 2025. Each round diluted early investors. But Social Capital had board seats and likely maintained some pro-rata through the convertible. Conservative math: They own somewhere between 15-20% of Groq today. At $20B, that’s $3B to $4B in value. $62M in. $3-4B out. That’s a 50-65x return in 8 years. For context, this single investment is worth more than Social Capital’s entire fund size in 2015 ($1.1B). One bet. Eight years. 50x. The timing is the wildest part. Chamath invested in custom AI chips in 2017, years before ChatGPT made inference compute a thing. He sat on the board until 2021, then stepped back right as the company was entering its growth phase. Now Nvidia is paying $20B in cash because they need Groq’s LPU architecture for inference at scale. Jensen is essentially writing Chamath a check for being early on the inference bottleneck. Say what you want about his SPACs. This one makes up for a lot of Clover Health bags.

@Jason______A @Bricktop_NAFO Simply can’t reason with these retards brother

Imagine not realizing Elon doesn’t have access to 700 billion dollars in liquid assets to be able to pay tax with. What would you like him to do? Sell all his shares in his companies which would crater the companies and leave tens of thousands without jobs + anyone with a Tesla would have their cars devalued to about zero + any investors of his companies would lose all their money causing a massive negative ripple effect in the economy ….. and then once that’s done Elon gives 40% of his networth to the government so they can waste it in 90 days or less on nonsense. Please give me your plan on how Elon could pay 280 billion dollars to the government in tax.

“I’m the largest individual tax payer in history. I pay over $10 billion in tax.” - Elon Musk Well that’s great Elon, but what percentage of your earnings was it that you paid? If he’s worth 700 billion and paid 10 billion, that’s only 1.43%. This is the fucking problem with bloodsucking billionaire vampires. They think because the tax they pay is a big number, that they don’t have to pay 15%-40% like the majority of the world. The rich can avoid tax legally. Billionaires shouldn’t have to pay more tax than we do, they should pay the same percentage…… they should pay what’s fair.

@Options4Trading Settle down lil ah boy

@mistertransit dude, you should be focusing more on football, not basketball. At least with following the 49ers you won't be so depressed. But maybe you just like to punish yourself.

This alone, as an anecdotal piece of evidence, makes me want to buy property In Sacramento Packing out your local, winning averse, culture heavy (light the beam), team is a clear sign of a vivacious, youthful, involved community. We Believe warriors type beat

@thedealdirector @stripepress FWIW free YouTube lets you download videos and watch with your screen locked now as well

The tech sales buying guide for Christmas! While you should always focus on family first, there is value in acquiring long term items that SPARK JOY. 1. @stripepress print of "Poor Charlie’s Almanack". All of Stripe Press's books are a hard recommendation, but this edition, which is focused on Charlie Munger, is probably the one with the highest long term leverage. The core message is around the use of mental models as a way to approach life. Every topic can be approached from different points of view, and Charlie was a voracious reader who strove to understand how the sharpest individuals thought within their own mental models. AI has given every single one of you the ability to do the same. 2. GaN chargers and solid-state powerbanks. Being on the road today is no longer an excuse to "go offline." Work continues, and the expectation is that you remain plugged in and active. Light laptops and smartphones with large screens have made it easier, but things can still go wrong, leaving you stranded without power. Two recent innovations have led to much better products in this context: GaN chargers and solid-state batteries. GaN chargers basically allow you to carry a small brick and charge your devices much faster, while solid-state batteries are a lot less likely to catch fire, which is important for an item that will bounce around in your luggage on a weekly basis. 3. Creatine gummies/tabs. This is a more general category, and you can expand it into other supplements or cognitive nootropics, but the primary point is to make it easy for you to take beneficial supplements while on the road. The highest return on investment comes from cognitive-related enhancers because of the mental fatigue that lower-quality sleep and traveling can lead to. Creatine in higher doses (10g–20g) has shown cognitive improvements, and in an easy to take format it is especially helpful during events when you are working the floor the whole day. The version I use is tabs with dextrose, which work well as mints, as a sugar bump, as creatine delivery, and even as a conversation starter. 4. @YouTube premium. While we like to see X as the "place where the most important conversations happen," the reality is that YouTube in recent years has evolved to be probably the best knowledge hub available to you today. The impact it has had is fundamental, as podcasts have essentially moved into a video first format, and often the only way to hear in-depth about the insights and opinions of folks that matter is on YouTube. If the first recommendation on this list was to start applying different mental models, one of the best ways to discover those is through YouTube. Premium has no ads, allows you to download episodes (or listen to them with the screen off), and even includes a music subscription. While for many it's faster to digest information by reading it, listening to or watching videos better fits the variable conditions when traveling, and it still allows you to close your eyes and tune out the world around you. 5. @Revolut Metal. As Revolut gears up for a blockbuster IPO, one of the best ways they have distinguished themselves in a crowded neobank market is by offering perks with their cards that are actually useful. The metal cards come with access to Perplexity, Financial Times, ClassPass, NordVPN, WeWork, Chess dot com, MasterClass, and even Tinder Gold. This is probably one of the cheapest and most useful bundles of subscriptions for the tech sales traveler, and that's before using the actual financial products. Merry Christmas to your and your family, fellow tech sales traveler.

@AzFlin @0xErod @d_all_in_ RSUs are taxed as basic income. The cap gains part is only after sale Also you do not pay 48% on the whole $1m. That’s the point of tax brackets

@0xErod @d_all_in_ Grok said the rsu stocks can be taxed at 20% capital gains if you hold for 1 year, is this true. If that’s the case, that’s a LOT better

if you make $1M salary in california, you only take home 522k a whopping 48% tax rate half your income rugged and people are just.. okay with this?

@PaikCapital $intc china wants unlimited supply of taiwans shao bings, which will just so happen to bottleneck $tsmc

shill me your best ticker and a one sentence thesis for 2026. best one gets a holiday gift from me :)

@rickasaurus Say more

Good time to build a basement rack

@inerati It’s because they don’t use TSA I am convinced

@insane_analyst If you were itching to have some long dated calls as leveraged exposure to intel - what do you think is a reasonable date for their bull thesis to really play out

2026 Irrational Ideas open.substack.com/pub/irrational…