mzeegeek🧣🫡

i am excited to see what will happen with tokenmaxxing startups, both for how they work internally and the products they can build. openai offered to invest $2M in tokens into every startup in the current yc batch. happy building!

Am back!😂

I am not going to motivate you because if you need motivation from a stranger on a plane the answer is stay but I will give you the game theory your corporate M&A gig is a repeated game with diminishing marginal returns. year 1 you learn everything. year 2 you refine it. year 3 you are executing pattern recognition. year 4+ you are being paid more to do the same thing with slightly larger numbers. the learning curve flattens but the golden handcuffs tighten because every year the comp goes up and the opportunity cost of leaving gets more painful on paper this is a classic status quo bias trap. the payoff of staying is known and comfortable. the payoff of leaving is uncertain and scary. so you stay not because staying is optimal but because the asymmetry of regret is lopsided. you can imagine regretting the leap. you cannot as easily imagine regretting the years you stayed too long because that regret builds slowly and never hits you in one moment here is where game theory actually helps: in your M&A seat you are playing someone else's game. the firm sets the rules, the deal flow, the comp structure, the promotion timeline. you optimize within their framework. you are a very well-compensated player in a game you did not design. your upside is capped by whatever the partnership or MD economics look like. your downside is protected by a salary. that is the trade owning a local business flips the entire payoff matrix. you design the game. you set the rules. the downside is real and unprotected but the upside is uncapped and compounds in ways a salary never does because you own the equity. a $2M EBITDA business bought at 4x and grown to $3M EBITDA over 3 years is worth $12-15M on exit. no M&A salary trajectory produces that kind of wealth creation in that timeframe unless you are a founding partner the Nash equilibrium of your current situation: you and every other M&A professional are competing for the same promotions, same deal credit, same bonus pool. the competition is fierce because the players are identical. same schools, same skills, same hours. you are in a crowded equilibrium where everyone works 80 hours to stay in the same relative position local business ownership is a different game with different players. the competition is a 62-year-old owner who stopped innovating in 2014 and a 35-year-old who inherited the business and does not want to be there. you walk in with financial sophistication, deal structuring experience, and the ability to read a balance sheet faster than anyone in the room. you are overqualified for the game which is exactly where you want to be. the best strategy in game theory is to play games where your existing skill set gives you an asymmetric advantage over the other players the timing question is about optionality. every year you stay in M&A your financial optionality goes up slightly because you save more. but your operational optionality goes down because you get further from the reality of running anything. the M&A guy who leaves at 28 adapts to operations in 6 months. the one who leaves at 38 has a decade of habits built around delegating to analysts and reviewing decks, and managing a P&L feels foreign in a way it would not have 10 years earlier but again. if you need me to motivate you, stay. the people who actually do this do not need motivation. they need a spreadsheet that shows the math works and then they cannot NOT do it. if you have the spreadsheet and you are still asking strangers for motivation the spreadsheet is not the problem

@AviFelman repeat Blacklist

Consolidated thoughts on Venezuela: Venezuela matters to the oil market, but not because “big reserves = easy barrels” Venezuela is not Saudi Arabia. You don’t stick a toothpick in the ground and get 1m bpd Much of Venezuela’s crude is ultra-heavy and extremely viscous, requiring diluent and complex processing just to move Extracting it (Maracaibo especially) is technically brutal and environmentally disastrous Oil under the ground is irrelevant. Only oil that reaches a refinery matters Today Venezuela pumps ~1m bpd and exports most of it because the domestic economy is broken Historically, Venezuela produced over 3m bpd, with exports peaking in that range decades ago Even in the most extreme bearish fantasy - Venezuela fully opened, perfectly run, “51st state” scenario - this is slow It would still take 3-4 years just to restore fields enough to pump 3-4m bpd A functioning economy of that size would also consume ~2m bpd domestically So exports go from ~1m today (1 pumped - ~0 consumed) To maybe ~2m in the future (4 pumped - 2 consumed) Net change: exports increase by ~1m bpd Global oil demand is ~105m bpd So even in the most aggressive case, this is <1% of global consumption Yes, oil demand growth is slowing, so +1m bpd is marginally bearish It knocks a couple dollars off flat price - not a collapse And none of this happens quickly Big oil projects are long-cycle: engineering, remediation, contractors, housing, schools, logistics These things take years, not months (look at Guyana) This is not “another million barrels tomorrow” It’s maybe +1m, max +2m, in ~3 years Which means this isn’t really about future supply at all This is about the existing ~1m bpd Venezuela already produces today Right now, a lot of those barrels flow to China at steep discounts Venezuela also cut strategic deals with Russia and Iran - weapons, influence, Western Hemisphere presence Removing sanctions changes that dynamic China loses access to heavily discounted Venezuelan crude Venezuela can sell on the open market at market prices Chinese oil gets more expensive More importantly: if China invades Taiwan, it loses a guaranteed Venezuelan supply backstop Those barrels would have to be replaced on the open market And under US sanctions, they won’t reach China Russia doesn’t benefit on the crude side - it’s already maxed out on buyers If anything, China becomes more dependent on Russian oil, improving Russia’s pricing power What Russia does lose is refining arbitrage Venezuela’s refining system collapsed under Maduro Crude was sent abroad, refined, and shipped back as gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel Those flows unwind Russian refiners lose a customer Product flows reroute modestly Net-net: marginal oil impact, meaningful geopolitical leverage The real objective is leverage over China And denying Russia and China the ability to embed military systems on America’s doorstep

Community alert: Ledger had another data breach via payment processor Global-e leaking the personal data of customers (name & other contact information). Earlier today customers received the email below.

Have a Happy New year folks!

@LomahCrypto 🤣🤣

The Plasma team will be hearing from me tonight

the first private collaborative multisig wallet

Not our keys. Not our business. By implementing Chain Code Delegation, Bitkey becomes the first private collaborative multisig wallet — what you do with your keys is your business, simplifying self-custody is ours.

@cmsholdings Sir is this chart inverted🤣?.. just wondering on the direction since you first posted it🤣🤣

@HsakaTrades 🫡

slurped a little

@Binance_intern 3,3,3🤣...SBF is dumping us on Joe coin.

tell me without telling me you’ve been here since 2021.

@cobie @whosknave @inversebrah

@whosknave sorry who are you?

.@cobie while i appreciate the offer to appear on up only, i'm going to have to pass. focusing on my own podcast + the wife and kids. hope you understand 🙏

@cobie GG Legend..🫡

when i started building echo 2 years ago, i knew it had 95% chance of failing. to be honest, i couldnt really imagine any other outcome, but i thought at least it may be a noble failure worth attempting. i certainly didn't think echo would be sold to coinbase, but, here we are: today coinbase bought echo for ~$375m. echo will remain a standalone platform under its current brand for now, but we will integrate sonar's public sale product into coinbase, and likely introduce new ways for founders to access investors, and for investors to access opportunities into coinbase itself. over the years i have chatted to brian a handful of times, and mostly to complain at him honestly. i have always respected how brian would listen to an outsider chat shit at him on the phone and take the feedback seriously. now, instead of complaining, i will have the opportunity try to do the work to make things better. crypto itself has moved on a long way since we started working on echo. i guess partially this is because of the election result. but, i feel energised by a lot of the cool things being built in crypto again: hyperliquid, zcash, stablecoin supercyle, and so on. feels like a good time to be on the field instead of an idiot with a twitter account yapping nonsense. well, i guess i still will be that. anyway, job's not finished. onwards. oh fuck yeah, before i go, the final season of up only (now "unc only" due to our severe old age) will commence when we figure out who the guests should be lol cobber

@ledgerstatus @cobie @brian_armstrong @UpOnlyTV 🤣🤣

@cobie @brian_armstrong @UpOnlyTV Send half to ledgerstatus.eth I will also burn it

Just burnt the NFT. Your move @UpOnlyTV @Cobie @ledgerstatus.

@cobie @AzFlin @z0r0zzz Great advise hidden here..

When ppl claim this I always wonder how they think it happens, or have unrealistic expectations on how much $1bn actually is. I joined crypto with $200. If I held my initial bitcoin since then and never traded, I would have ~$300k. If, instead, from that moment I sold the top and bought the bottom of every crypto cycle on Bitcoin, and never paid any taxes, I would have ~$6m USD. If I put my entire net worth into the Ethereum ICO and never touched it, today I would have ~$150m pre-tax. While it was definitely possible to have made >$1bn with the opportunities in the market, these versions of reality would also require me to make no mistakes, and have no need to spend $ in real life, or take excessive risk via leverage. In reality, I grew up in a working class family. I didn’t have a trust fund and I had to pay off my student loan myself. I had a job at Tescos while at high school. After university, I needed to pay rent and fund cost of living and eventually buy a place to live. I worked at startups for relatively little $ salary, and while a couple have done okay, they still are illiquid and worth nothing until some exit. Perhaps if I erase a couple of dumb mistakes and drawdowns, or if I had a lil more grind, then my answer would be different today. But it is easy to say this with perfect hindsight vision. It’s easy to see where you could have optimised better, and decisions you made look dumb when the past makes things so obvious. The truth is I have always optimised for enjoying my life and not going to 0. I never felt like I had a safety net, so it was never possible for me to do anything in any other way. I would probably have less money if I had tried to add more risk or chased $ harder, because being all-in with your entire livelihood is a mental battle and I feel I only win that battle when the stakes are lower. In writing this, maybe I do understand why CT folks believe this, because modern CT sees crypto as a late-stage lottery ticket farm, where the optimal strategy is to 5x leverage up your portfolio in a hope of catching a good 20% move and then leaving. Or, literally going all-in on the next coin they heard Ansem is buying. So perhaps to them, looking back at the charts, of course that’s what successful folks did. In reality, I use leverage close to never (and typically to reduce risk rather than add risk — have used it to add risk maybe 3 times in the last 5 years, and maybe 15 times ever). I never go all-in on anything, have only ever done that on BTC and ETH before in the last decade. When I buy other things, I limit risk to tiny amounts, because I treat it as a 0 until proven otherwise (so, always <1% liquid portfolio). Liquid portfolio is also a smaller % of overall portfolio to future-proof against my own fuckups. Obviously I made a lot of money, I have been here 12 years! CT doesn’t want to hear about “getting rich in a decade” though. I am happy with where I am and have never really cared or optimised for maximising $ earnings, but instead having a nice life that lets me enjoy the game we play together.

this is a very common and powerful tactic - underplay yourself even if you are giga rich, pretend you're middle class. Places less of a target on your back and makes you more relatable/likeable CT doesn't like rich people b/c there's natural envy