old school degen

@Byron_Wan @denisewu I’m also now used to government scholars here joking about how if China invades, “of course we will surrender immediately” - which isn’t exactly what those enculturated by the military and political elite and who did NS would be expected to say most places

@Byron_Wan @denisewu CCP, as well as China’s economic and military might, it’s still odd because the opinion shift isn’t practical, in SG’s national interest or based on any obvious changes in circumstances. It mostly seems like an increase in ethno-nationalism, which gives local leaders pause

I just noticed that this pro-Beijing person Angelica Oung (翁華志), an American originally from Taiwan, has been pushing CCP narratives and propaganda from inside Taiwan lately. She has recently posted on her YouTube channel a number of videos of her chatting with US-based pro-CCP Internet personality Carl Zha (查科嘉) and Shanghai-based pro-CCP Frenchman Arnaud Bertrand, among others. I came across some of her news articles on The Telegraph reporting on Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong a few years ago so I’m surprised that she’s turned pro-Beijing now. I suspect that she had been approached and recruited by CCP proxies or operatives in Taiwan over the past two or three years, in view of reports of Beijing stepping up its infiltration and influence operations targeting Taiwan from within and without. This has happened many times in Hong Kong before. In short she’s now singing the praises of China and pushing the “China is winning” narrative — telling China’s stories well to a western audience. @YiXia90314 youtu.be/q6I1gvHno4Q?si…

When you know the government can’t maintain control unless prices go up, you eventually get headlines like this. Rollover Miami in 2007. You nothing on this! 🤦🏻‍♂️

@KyleSamani @Picolas_Caged We both know the answer to that @KyleSamani: make the prices of FORD, Solana and Drift go up, any way you can, and ideally so much that anyone who lost money is recompensed and your options/promote all vests in the money 🤝 @PicAsssHole what can you do to help him do that?

@Picolas_Caged Hi how can I help?

Kyle salarmi gets Solana DAT's to buy the pico top - all funds massively underwater Kyle salarmi leaves crypto forever Few months later $250M+ is stolen from Drift Circle are over 3 hours late freezing funds Drift are hours late even noticing funds are missing Drift blames North Korea Retail left out of pocket Where's my tinfoil hat?

@kirbyongeo What did this money go to?

TIL Drift was budgeted to spend 580K+ on infrastructure and 100k on security MONTHLY Is crypto as an industry absolutely cooked if projects are spending this amount of money on infra and security and still getting hacked? Source: driftgov.discourse.group/t/dip-9-suppor…

Gonna pound the desk on this one: the fraud, flex, grifting and self dealing in Silicon Valley now look more like India than NYC. Brave new world and everybody is doing it. Total EM/third world stuff. And significantly worse than what you see in East Asia (China)

@ichiisan @ctjlewis 100% This is the massively dominant approach of winning firms for the last 5-10 years Also very common in certain parts of Asia.

The lesson for zoomers: It’s not a scam if you don’t get caught. If caught, it’s not a big deal if you can control the narrative. If you lose the narrative, gaslight that you’re actually the victim. If nothing works, lay low and then run it back. Never take responsibility.

This is emblematic of the greater moral sickness in SV. Who cares about the fact record or that Delve is, was, and still is a total slop scam factory. All that matters is spin, controlling the narrative, not letting your “enemies” win. Even framing it as a crisis vs self-own!

@lulumeservey @zGuz But many who were straight up criminal have followed this advice for years. The way it’s usually framed is “If you don’t have a business, there’s no point worrying about regulation. And if you cheat to win, the law never destroys your business. It destroys your competitors”

@zGuz Very true! If you’re a straight up criminal, it’s a whole other thing

When crisis hits, your lawyers will tell you to stay quiet until the investigation is complete And it is VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOU DON’T LISTEN TO THEM Investigations take forever and by the time they’re done your company could be DOA Lawyers are doing their job in minimizing legal risk, but losing in the court of public opinion matters too Letting trust bleed out is way worse than potentially sharing too much I don’t know the facts in the Delve case, but my read from afar is that unhelpful advice has made a bad situation worse

Hard to grasp. Hard to adjust to. But if you don’t bullshit, bulldoze, cheat and then airbrush - things have gotten much harder in the Bay Area

One thing older people like me who have spent a while outside of the U.S. really struggle with is how normalized hype, fraud, flexing and grifting have become in Silicon Valley (and perhaps also government and academia) Maybe the closest pattern match for us in Asia is India?

@based16z @AmeliaBarty Serious question: what’s his value add to founders or anyone else? Is he scouting good deals ahead of other people? Is he enabling founders? Or is this an access play to small LPs!

@AmeliaBarty Only early sf fund I invested in. Real hustler

This guy’s entire personality is that he managed to network with a couple rich people Most would silently pat themselves on the back Sudarshan, on the other hand, finds it fit to brag about on twitter every other day

Americans just don’t seem to get that the combination of tribalism + paying the best people to join your tribe - and then building them up - works Which is strange Because this is roughly what the U.S. did post WWII

@helloparalegal Be Need looking at this. Please DM

Every conversation about AI in legal practice focuses on the legal work. Research. Drafting. Document review. That is what the vendors sell. That is what the conferences talk about. But if you are a solo, legal work is not your biggest problem. Your biggest problem is everything else. Clio's data says the average solo lawyer bills 37% of their working hours. That means 63% of your day is not legal work. It is intake calls. Following up on leads who filled out your website form three days ago and never heard back. Sending retainer agreements. Chasing signatures. Updating your calendar. Preparing invoices. Following up on unpaid invoices. Sending the second follow-up on unpaid invoices. Answering the same 8 questions every new client asks. Updating your case management system. Trying to remember if you filed that thing last week or just thought about filing it. You went to law school to practice law. You spend most of your week running a small business badly. And I say badly with respect. Because the tools available to you are terrible. Clio costs money and half the features do not work the way you need them to. You have three different systems that do not talk to each other. Your "intake process" is an email you wrote once and paste into replies when you remember to. AI for legal research is nice. AI for running your practice is transformational. Here is what I mean specifically. Take client intake. Right now somebody fills out your website form or calls your office. If you are lucky you call them back within 24 hours. Studies show that the lawyer who responds first gets the client 70% of the time. Not the best lawyer. The fastest one. You are losing clients every day not because your legal skills are worse but because you called back 6 hours later and someone else called back in 45 minutes. Build an intake system with Claude Code. Client fills out your form. The system immediately sends a personalized response acknowledging their situation. Not a generic autoresponder. A response that references what they actually described. It schedules a consultation. It sends a pre-consultation questionnaire. It prepares a one-page summary of their issue for you before the call. By the time you pick up the phone, you know what they need and they already feel like your firm is organized and attentive. You built that in an afternoon. A legal tech vendor would charge you $300 a month for something worse. The number one complaint from solo lawyers is not difficult judges or hard cases. It is clients who do not pay. The average collection rate for solos is around 85%. That means 15% of the money you earned disappears because you did not follow up consistently enough. Not because you do not care. Because you are in court at 9am and by the time you get back to the office at 4pm you are too tired to chase invoices. So you send a reminder next week. Then you forget. Then 90 days pass and now it is awkward. Build a follow-up system. Invoice goes out, if no payment in 7 days an automatic reminder. 14 days a second one with different language. 21 days an escalation. Each one personalized to the client and the matter. Not a form letter from a billing system. A message that sounds like you wrote it because Claude Code has your tone and your client's context. Going from 85% collection to 94% collection on $300,000 in annual billings is $27,000. That is not a technology improvement. That is a salary. Take the thing that kills most solo practices slowly. The feast or famine cycle. You get busy. You stop marketing. Pipeline dries up. Matters end. You have nothing coming in. You panic. You start marketing again. Eventually new matters come in. You get busy. You stop marketing. Every solo has lived this. Many are living it right now. The reason is not that you are bad at marketing. The reason is that marketing is a daily activity and you are a full-time lawyer who cannot do daily activities that are not law. Build a system that handles the consistent stuff. Monthly email to past clients checking in. Not a newsletter. A personal note. "Hi Sarah, it has been 6 months since we wrapped up your lease dispute. Wanted to check in and see if anything has come up." Weekly LinkedIn post drafted from a bank of your insights. Follow-up with referral sources quarterly. Claude Code can do all of this from a folder of your past communications and your client list. You are not automating the relationship. You are automating the remembering. Now add all of this up. Intake response time goes from 6 hours to 6 minutes. Collection rate goes from 85% to 94%. Pipeline stays consistent instead of feast and famine. You spend 90 minutes less per day on admin. Those 90 minutes are 7.5 hours a week. At your billing rate that is somewhere between $1,500 and $3,000 a week in recovered capacity. Not to mention the new clients you stopped losing and the old invoices you actually collected. This is not a technology argument. This is a math argument. The solo lawyers who figure this out in the next 12 months will not just survive. They will run practices that look nothing like what solo practice has looked like for the past 30 years. One lawyer. No associate. No full-time paralegal. Handling 60 to 80 active matters with the responsiveness and organization of a 10-person firm. Not by working 80-hour weeks. By building systems that handle everything that is not judgment. The legal work is where your brain goes. Everything else is where your systems go. That is the practice. That is what it actually looks like.

@Ray_L1D Investors and code unfortunately can’t correct this problem alone since they simply don’t have the enforcement power to *match* a government They can *improve* the situation. But they can’t *equalize* it. So you get a systematically lower trust/adversely selected market

@Ray_L1D a risk premium - or there is some compelling reason why a team should underinvest in investor protection vs market norms - there’s a problem. You’re not compensated for the extra risk and teams adversely select into tokens because the cost of capital from issuing them is higher

Spot on re: transparency. In addition, investors need to play a more central role. In the absence of formal rights, that means leveling up on structuring, incorporating meaningful guarantees, and holding unethical or incompetent founders accountable. Some funds are actively doing this but not nearly enough. Allocators should hold funds to the same standard: how are you protecting my capital? The era of easy money (and “friendly” VCs) in crypto ended years ago. Time we all level up.

Hard to view this team as any more negligent or bad faith than many others who got hacked or, even worse, rugged their token to zero Maybe the biggest lesson is that the police, regulators and your local government won’t protect you. They will just tax the projects. Lucky you

@kamilkazani Maybe more interesting IMO is how other groups are behaving (Israelis, Emoratis) in which there are surely mixed feelings about the role of the U.S. and Israel in this war - but tribal norms subordinate those doubts

@kamilkazani They won’t take the pain of most wars that could benefit the group, back a group leader…and ultimately this division and co-option means the US can’t get much big done now, ranging from wars to reindustrialization

(Lots of) Americans believe their country is going in a fundamentally wrong direction, and the unprovoked, arbitrary invasion of Iran - which by the way goes against all the promises & previous agenda of the sitting president - is a part of this wrong