Ryan Shank

@A_LastingLegacy should be 3x cash flow MAX. Prob more like 2-2.5x.

😞I'll call these guys in 6 months when they've had a cool refreshing glass of reality...

Biggest CEO hack: healthy competition. Put ur ppl on a leaderboard. Gamify everything. Got someone slacking? Pair em with a high performer. Make it a race. Bonuses help. Incentives help. But nothing hits like the raw urge to not lose. U can throw $50K at motivation. Or make ppl want to beat each other for free. Better results. Zero cost. Am I wrong?

Private Equity is going further down market, bidding up prices Lost a <$1m EBITDA HVAC deal to a PE firm willing to pay ~7x all cash at close Another broker sent me a small tuck in HVAC company expecting 4x+ on ~$250k EBITDA Independents are getting daily inquiries from PE firms and the ones that do sell are getting healthy multiples, even small assets Even the micro market (<$500k EBITDA) has seen a lift in multiples due to PE’s intense competition in the space, as noted above A guess a rising tide does in fact lift all boats But it’s making it harder to find a good, small company at a reasonable price

@A_LastingLegacy yewww

Hit our first million for the year yesterday! 1 down, 29 to go! 😉

Best tip I can give first-time founders: Get to $1M liquid outside the business as quickly as you can $1M invested at ~10% = ~$100K/year That’s baseline survival secured so you can keep building forever

am i a boomer if i vibe code with lovable and not claude code in terminal?

PE ran out of big companies to buy. So they're coming for Main Street. This mass consolidation is bad for our country. > Heavy debt risks reputations built over decades. > Local wealth gets shipped to Greenwich. > Customers get worse service at higher prices.

Small-business owners say they’re fending off sometimes multiple inquiries a day from investment bankers and private equity firms bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Now we start everyone Monday team meeting with our AI VP of Marketing "10K" leading the meeting 10K leads the meeting: - Revenue for week - Goals for week - Projects all pipeline - Designs all campaigns and activities for week - Dynamically updates all metrics and goals It's a "1x" app we build on @Replit just for us. But we would have paid $20k+ if it existed off-the-shelf. That's the opportunity, and threat, in SaaS today.

psa to saas founders: convert everything into api / mcp services asap and charge by usage. allow connectors to all agents and make your own agent with pre-built context all ui/ux/dashboards will be vibed and dynamically generated if you don’t have prop data, you’re fucked

Private Equity’s investment thesis in rolling up home services in one chart Top right quadrant in the chart is the ideal position Services in the top right will have the highest valuation Highly critical service with high frequency of demand

Crazy that @Fanatics and @Topps haven’t put the Jack Hughes tooth in a trading card as 1-of-1.. Cc @michaelrubin

@toddsaunders Comparing frozen to fresh feels unfair!!!

While you're all building vertical AI tools with claude code, I'm mapping out vegetable prices YoY to win a debate with a friend. I bet you didn't know that frozen asparagus is the most expensive vegetable, averaging $6.78/lb. Now you know.

Ok the investor updates for February are rolling in. Let me be crystal clear: the ones that have the best AI Agent in their space — for real — have jaw dropping demand and growth. Jaw dropping. Unprecedented. Customers are often being turned away due to not enough FDEs, etc. And the rest aren’t growing all that much. There’s not much in the middle.

If you are a Saas company, this is a must read from @eoghan. We just crossed $400m in ARR. That chart is our growth rate, from Saas to AI. At most, a single handful of companies have completed this transformation. We are one of them, this is our guide on how to do it. p.s. *please share it* with everyone you know working in Saas, it will undoubtedly help them chart their course!

@ViperPrompt I mean usually you get a discount if you agree to a massive multi year deal. So a 50% discount for a $100b deal isn’t crazy (Amazon “invests” $50b and OpenAI spends $100b). No shade but it’s just a discount on a massive deal with maybe some warrants and other contingencies.

Yep. I suspect the SoftBank money will land in OAI's checking account, but the rest of it will never ACTUALLY change hands: it will be traded for hardware and services. I don't see anything wrong with this per se, but the headlines are overstating the deal in the sense that this deal won't extend OAI's runway all that much. I expect that only the two Titans (Google and xAI) will be standing at the end of 2026. Anthropic might leak into 2027 but eventually they won't be able to punch above their weight... leaving just Google and xAI. IMO. Worth what you paid for it, lol.

Does openAI raise like every 3 weeks or am I seeing duplicate funding announcements?

@toddsaunders U got rich and just be doing the most random shit (I say w the utmost jealousy)

My wife makes me throw out so much food in the fridge (that honestly I would still eat). Building this to save our marriage... and keep us healthy :)

As a founder, you can get a lot of things wrong. But if you're unwiling to die, it will eventually work out. Be optimistic, and try to be right. But even if you're not right, don't die.

@danprimack Do you think they do a test transaction before wiring like $50 billion?

One of?

@ViperPrompt Sounds like this is actually a pretty big BD deal with a lot of contingencies. I wouldn’t be surprised if not a lot of cash was exchanged .

@ryanashank Good question. I have had a hard time verifying this supposed raise of 110B today.