Ross Freiman-Mendel

From a few weeks ago but if you're curious what we're working on here at @withpersona, recommend this listen! open.spotify.com/episode/7e11pn…

@MIDAODS @tednotlasso @withpersona @Visa @Mastercard Actually doing that in practice is totally non trivial. We learned that what you describe strictly follows much clearer specification from the card networks.

@rosshfm @tednotlasso @withpersona @Visa @Mastercard The usage gap likely closes when merchants can trust more than the payment rail. For agentic commerce to work, counterparties need to know which agent is acting, what it is authorized to do, and how the transaction can be verified afterward.

i haven't yet met a person who is actually using an agent for commerce and i'd really like to change that. who is live with agentic commerce? what are you purchasing with it? how? why??? i've had many convos about this but feels like lots of talk and not so much walk (yet!)

@a16z Algorithms and data structures, combinatorics, probability and statistics. Some of the most useful classes I took, and I'm not an engineer. Fortunately @BrownUniversity left lots of room for the humanities too.

College CS enrollment is declining Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…

@Polymarket The heuristic to do the opposite of elite catastrophic consensus never fails. Where's the mass extinction event we were promised? The one that we could only avoid via some authoritarian global governance regime.

NEW: Marc Andreessen declares AGI was achieved three months ago.

@withpersona is now FedRAMP Moderate. It's a big deal. If you oppose the surveillance state (I do) then do something about it. Identity and privacy don’t have to be a tradeoff. And we can advocate for this approach at the largest scale. fedramp.gov/marketplace/pr…

@BoringBiz_ It's certainly true that private equity builds and run businesses more efficiently. It's also true that it's fundamentally extractive (e.g. dividend recaps). Don't see why people in finance feel the need to fake a moral lens. Fine to just admit you want to make a lot of money.

A lot can be learned about someone from how they view private equity If you think these firms solely exist to extract value from society and workers, you are absolutely wrong Private equity has generated tremendous value for society, allowed millions to retire, and put an accelerator on innovation for small businesses across the country Before private equity, small business owners would simply walk away and shut down businesses. Workers would lose their jobs and customers would lose the service When private equity walks into a business, they are incentivized to change that and keep valuable services running There are hundreds of cases where a dying business has been turned around through private equity ownership and value creation They just never receive the same lime light and press coverage as the businesses that go wrong

Update - the model is totally wrong but so are first year analysts

Weirdly very satisfying

We too at @withpersona share the alarm about the privacy dystopia @matthew_d_green fears, which is why we launched products like Persona Relay. Too many IDV vendors are enabling surveillance when their products should prevent it.

@bryce Intelligence is overrated

What is something people think is important in business that isn't?

For years, I read jeremiads about how innovation was dead, evidenced by tech spending FCF on stock buybacks. Now big tech spends it all on AI capex, with the similar lamentations. Schizophrenic.

🧵 25–35% of crypto users abandon onboarding when asked to upload an ID and selfie. That's a conversion crisis, and it's fixable. @rosshfm of @withpersona explains how to bring TradFi AML discipline to stablecoins without killing the user experience 👉 buff.ly/zcXj2hI

Public signal, private preferences. This is basically the prisoner's dilemma. This result is not believable.

@julie_mo This logic applies to popular podcasts and newsletters in general (eg All In, etc). Also herd thinking if you just listen to what everyone else does

A distinctly modern skill is the ability to avoid the podcasts and newsletters that only exist thanks to AI and strategic cosplay: the aesthetic of original thinking without the constraint that produced it

“Caress the detail, the divine detail,” - Vladimir Nabokov Nice cupcakes from @AnthropicAI @OpenAI

Your enemy is never as dumb as you hope, and you're not as smart as you think. Insanely valuable advice in all domains of life. Whenever X discourse assumes someone/something is too stupid to realize an obvious truth, try the strongest form of your opponent's steelman.

@moonpay Smart. I like to top tick and sell when everyone's nervous.

buy low sell high not financial advice

First, beyond cool. Notice in the video the agent is assistive. It's collaborating but not acting e2e autonomously. Lots of thorny problems to resolve before agents can transact, including identity questions, i.e. who authorized this transaction and are they real