Richard Ross

@TylerDurden There was another one called The Big Book of Mischief

@chambleebrandel Why is it a great article? Professional golf is a lesser sport than it could be due to being confined largely to the USA. For us in the rest of the world, a world tour just like F1 or Tennis etc sounds like an incredible idea.

Nice column. Terrific headline.

@TheKouk If you have a business that you are able to sell for $3m, chances are you've paid a fuckton of tax over the journey.

Imagine that over those 10 years, you and your family never drove on a road, saw a doctor, went to hospital, flew in a plane, had their children educated, took prescription medicine, had an aged parent looked after & receiving the pension, relied on the police or fire brigade, worried about Australia's defence, used a well regulated bank, relied on childcare ... to name a few items funded by tax?

@BrendanPorath Play Stableford. You can pick up on a bad home and still submit a score.

Big fan of the last bullet here at Elie… come on home if you’re chopping it up.

@garrett_TFE @cwig8 Terrible for the pro game where? After the wraparound season starved the Australian pro golf season, LIV has been and absolute breath of fresh air.

@cwig8 Not really. I'm mostly sad, a little angry about it. Occasionally amused by the bits of absurdity. I think this whole dumb thing has been terrible for the pro game.

Everyone is forgetting the important question: did we grow the game?

@JaredSleeper I am building a SaaS and the LLM recommended Twilio, Elevenlabs and Resend.

Every day for the next long while, I'm going to tear down a new public software company and highlight the AI risks/opportunities around it- products launched to date, top startups, key quotes from earnings calls, etc. Day seventeen: Twilio Peak share price: $435.29 (Feb 12, 2021) Share price today: $117.65 (-73%) EV today: $16.4bn ARR today: $5.4bn NRR: 109% EV/ARR: 3x GAAP Operating Margin: 4.2% EV/Run-rate GAAP EBIT: 72x Headcount: 6,603 (+3% Y/y) What Twilio does: Twilio is the leading CPaaS (communications platform as a service) that software developers use to communicate with customers using SMS, voice, email, and other channels via an API. In practice, doing this at scale is a very complex problem that requires coordinating regulators, telcos, and managing complex infrastructure, especially for mission-critical workloads like multi-factor authentication, where a failure can have direct economic consequences. Twilio succeeded by becoming the developer default for this use case and is far and away the #1 player today. Notably, in SMS, Twilio pays meaningful fees to carriers, so it is a lower-gross-margin business than a typical SaaS company, earning a 50% NG gross margin last quarter. AI bear case: The biggest bear case for Twilio is that, similar to MongoDB, developer mindshare/familiarity just matters less today than it did five years ago. One of Twilio's strengths was its ecosystem, and the sheer scale of Stack Overflow threads discussing specific challenges developers were having- in an AI world, it isn't clear why that should enable premium pricing for what has long been a commodity-ish service. In particular, if Claude/ChatGPT start to recommend another service, that could quickly chop Twilio's bottoms-up motion off at the knees. AI bull case: On the flip side, Twilio is one of the cleanest AI beneficiaries in public software. More AI communications means more SMS and (especially) more voice gets sent, which is why Twilio has seen strong growth in its voice business. In our work, Twilio is often a critical layer of the stack for voice AI companies alongside the model vendors and ElevenLabs. A similar dynamic likely exists in SMS (though there are fewer SMS-specific businesses). Anyone who has tried to vibecode anything serious knows that interfacing with the non-code world (i.e. telcos) is a problem that can't be vibecoded away- and in most cases, the models recommend Twilio as a default solution. In short, Twilio is an infrastructure that agents will always need if they want to interact with humans on the channels that they use natively. AI traction: Twilio doesn't break out AI revenue (nor does it have an obvious way to) but it did give its strongest Q1 guidance in three years in Y/y growth terms on its Q4 call. Adjacent AI-native startup summary: Twilio has no equal as a CPaaS platform for developers and the competitive set in SMS is largely the same as it has been historically. In email, @resend is quite promising (70 employees, +67% Y/y), and gets some love from LLMs when asked about the best email APIs to use. I don't see startups that pose a clear threat to the enterprise business just yet (after all, it is hard to improve on a commodity service and Twilio has long had to fend off lower cost alternatives), but it would be interesting to see if a startup could innovate at the API-layer to be more friendly to agents in some way (perhaps by providing debug logs programatically, etc.). Management Quotes: "Revenue from our voice channel continues to accelerate, aided in part by voice AI, which we believe is just the beginning as these use cases will evolve to be more conversational and cross-channel, an area where Twilio is uniquely differentiated." "In Q4, we saw particular strength in self-serve as revenue grew 28% year-over-year led by accelerating voice revenue growth. ISVs were also a bright spot, with revenue growing 26% year-over-year." "For example, Sierra, a leading company in the customer experience AI space, signed a new deal to continue leveraging Twilio's voice functionality to power their platform. Additionally, they will use voice software products like conferencing to support additional use cases like multiparty calling or taking payment over the phone." "Ramp, a leading financial operations company, signed a deal to leverage RCS as the branded messaging experience to power account notifications and two-way capabilities, such as adding a purchase reason or sending a receipt." "Our ending share count was 152 million, down slightly year-over-year and down 18% since we initiated our share repurchase efforts in 2023." Commentary: Overall, AI is likely positive for Twilio for at least the next 2-3 years. The tailwind from Voice AI is especially likely to continue, and Twilio remains the blue-chip default there. The challenge is around defensibility in an era where the historic developer-friendliness simply matters less than before. Twilio has other areas of defensibility, to be sure, but I'm not quite sure if it will jump the chasm to being the most agent-friendly CPaaS platform (or indeed, if that will even exist as a meaningful concept). The business should have time to figure that out, during which it will benefit from the broad tailwind, though... will be fascinating to watch.

@zenorocha @resend Claude just suggested it for a SaaS I am working on

we just crossed 2,000,000 users on @resend. just 4 months ago, we were celebrating 1M users. the definition of a "developer" is changing, and it's changing fast.

@patjakubik This. Give it all the read access, none of the write.

This is really cool, but using it in production feels risky right now. Shopify desperately needs better audit logging and git-like version control: full visibility into what changed + easy one-click undo

@danbrettig The thing with Liv is the servicing of starved markets. PGA Tour golfers barely want to leave Florida let alone the US. Look at Adelaide and South Africa, huge crowds. It might not be perfect but at least it’s an opportunity for the rest of the world to see some stars.

I'm starting to think that LIV is what World Series Cricket would've looked like if Kerry Packer had kept it going for too long, rather than doing an advantageous peace deal with the ACB when players were still near their best after two seasons

@PGASplits101 How did Rory match the 'won the masters the year before' last year????

🚨The most comprehensive list of the highest % trends at The Masters for the most predictive course - Augusta National Golf Club. TAKEAWAYS ⛳️Love them or hate them, the trends speak to the bigger picture of what matters at Augusta National. ⛳️Course knowledge and experience is directly correlated to success. ⛳️A longshot winner is improbable. ⛳️Recent winning experience is significant. ⛳️Current form, especially tee-to-green is paramount. ⛳️An elite putter is not required. ⛳️It's a "bombers" paradise - Architect Bobby Jones literally designed the course to give golfers "an unrestricted feeling of being able to swing away amid a wide swath of parkland". He believed that good drives would be rewarded, not by staying out of penalty areas, but by “making the second shot simpler in proportion to the excellence of the first". ⛳️Attacking the par 5s (with aggressiveness) is a necessity. ⛳️Chipping on tight, uneven lies around the green is a predictive skill and brings out the best short-gamers. ✅Three players fit 17 of 19 trends... Ludvig Aberg Xander Schauffele Tommy Fleetwood ✅Six players fit 16 of 19 trends... Scottie Scheffler Rory McIlroy Jon Rahm Bryson DeChambeau Matt Fitzpatrick Min Woo Lee ✅One player fit 15 of 19 trends... Cameron Young ✅Two players fit 14 of 19 trends... Collin Morikawa Hideki Matsuyama ⛳️Last year, Rory McIlroy fit all 19 trends...and won.

@matt_barrie Third owner of a golf course in the one that actually makes money too

New Essay Pay to PrAI: Insert Coin to Try Again Only Silicon Valley could turn software development into degenerate gambling. @matt_11659/pay-per-prai-5c136c3257c1" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">medium.com/@matt_11659/pa…

@LouStagner I think it's only possible if their 2.5 is on a course with killer greens like Oakmont, Royal Melbourne etc

Let's assume a 2.5 index (not a vanity index!). Assuming Augusta has course rating of 78 and slope of 155, the course handicap is 9. Golfers of all skill levels will tend to average ~3 shots above course handicap. This takes our hero to an average of 12 over par. Let's add an additional 10 shots of difficulty kicker on top of that. That puts them at an average of 22 over par per round. They would average 94 strokes each round. 88 over par over 4 rounds. They started at a 100 under par, went 88 over, and end up finishing at 12 under par. 12 under wins 6 of the last 10 events outright, plus one event where 12 under ties for the lead. Is 10 shots enough of a kicker? For some I think it would be. They won't get in too much trouble off the tee, it's the greens that will provide the biggest pucker factor...

@DavidGQuaid Now that ahrefs have an MCP I'd like to use that too but I'm not on a plan with decent API access.

@DavidGQuaid I used AI to build a tool in Next.js / react to pull in data from Google Search Console and Shopify and identify trends on what to work on etc.

Why is nobody using AI to build complex SEO reports?

@MarkDiStef Grok seems to be the leader in AI video generation atm, just like Claude is king of coding. They will all specialise.

Weird I was told we were on an inevitable death march into AI everything.

@matt_barrie How much longer is the 'VC subsidised $5 Ubers' era going to last?

This plus Sora, did the data centres just raise prices or someone pull out of data center funding formally

@LarryTheSir @sekrah Look at F1 the entire ‘tour’ is international. There’s 24 races and I’m resigned to not watching the ones that are on at 3am. That’s international sport.

@sekrah The PGAT needs the money from TV deals, it doesn’t make business sense to have too many international events in overnight time zones. LIV is fortunate it doesn’t have to worry about money, but that’s a rare exception in a sports league. A tourney in SA is expensive.

The PGA Tour's lack of ambition to grow its brand throughout the world is stunning incompetence. These locations were uncontested layups and they'd rather sit on the bench and kick their feet up.

@AndrewKirbyGolf One more big event in a golf starved market to match Adelaide and Sth Africa and LIV is just about proven IMO

Maybe bigger than Adelaide Haters very quiet right now Big ticket sales, big gov funding, corporate sales and sponsorship, merch, F & B = $$$

@rohan_connolly Rebar was my 3rd guess and I thought that word was a bit borderline too.

As a keen Wordle player, I reckon today's is a bit controversial. Abbreviations shouldn't be allowed, surely?🤷‍♂️

@Winterrose @eurofounder please suggest

I would pay $1 per month for life for a browser I could tell my cookie preferences to and never see a f*cking European GDPR popup from ever again. how did these idiots let this happen