Will

@priyaee @cynicpolitic No way will it be for resi real estate, it’ll only be for commercial, but still no bueno

So does my retired grandmother, Tom—which is the ONLY WAY she can keep her home of over 50 years—that she and her husband (my grandfather, who passed away 20 years ago) built, raised their children in, and built their life. This is the case with so many families in California—MILLIONS of seniors will be forced to sell their homes and leave California if we get rid of Prop 13. But elitists like scumbag, Tom Steyer, couldn’t care less.

@TomSteyer Aye Tom, your number on Kalshi are dropping like a rock, please keep it up so I can get paid 🙏🙏

Billionaires like Donald Trump own commercial property in California and pay tax based on its 1970s value. Closing that corporate tax loophole will raise $20 billion a year for schools and health care, at zero cost to you.

@ChrisJBakke Live look from the G Squared GP's kitchen

“Your father led an SPV to buy $1B of Anthropic when FTX was forced to liquidate their position and two years later it was worth $58B”

@BowTiedRedDeer @thedealdirector What co? Your DM are closed

@thedealdirector I work for a large obs company and we are selling 7 figure arr deals in the bay in less than 6 week sales cycles lol

Grafana Labs’ sales strategy actually makes sense. They first created an open-source tool that became the standard for observability (basically, monitoring apps and systems). Then they built paid cloud and enterprise features on top of it. That order (create the category first, then monetize) is the right way to do it. The problem is that their “we invented this category” edge is disappearing way faster than their sales team can turn it into actual paying customers. Competitors are copying the idea and eating into their advantage almost overnight. If Grafana were being totally honest, what they really sell is faster recovery when something breaks, not prevention or full control before problems happen. Their pitch decks usually skip that and just talk about the “unlimited total addressable market” instead. Their old growth playbook was this: get people hooked on the free open-source dashboards, then eventually pull them into the paid cloud version. That worked great when the main buyers were older engineers who had a real emotional connection to the open-source project. They felt like it was theirs. That playbook is breaking now with developers under 30. These younger devs never grew up loving the open-source tool. They query logs with AI, set up auto-alerting, and expect the system to automatically flag anomalies instead of a human staring at a dashboard all day. In the observability world, the real money comes from the biggest workloads. Those are the ones generating massive amounts of telemetry data. That makes AI-native companies the most exciting new customer segment right now (a greenfield opportunity). The bad news for Grafana Labs? Most of their current revenue is coming from just stealing customers away from other paid monitoring tools (displacement plays). If they keep positioning themselves only as the “more efficient or better-value” option in observability, that strategy is going to feel a lot weaker in two years. The market is shifting fast, and they risk becoming just another competitor instead of the category leader. infraplay.ai/p/infra-play-1…

@ThinkAppraiser Help with the down payment?

Thought it was interesting today young couple is buying a condo in San Diego $1.5 million condo He is a financial advisor and she does sales That seems to be how people are able to afford things in California especially San Diego. Both he and her have to work and he and her have to bring in low six figures each at the bare minimum In this situation, she said he makes between 200 and 250 and she makes around 150k

@courtne Btw - sellers at OAI and Anthro have team goals, so that kinda says it all

openai and anthropic probably have terrible sales reps they're talented, but they've never actually had to sell anything. ben horowitz said it best in a recent conversation: "right now with openai and anthropic, everybody wants to buy ai. they're already predisposed to buy." that's order-taking, not selling. let's zoom in on this distinction. 1) the order-taker problem cloudflare's CEO admitted in 2023 their product was so good that "many of our sales team succeeded largely by just taking orders." deals were like "fish jumping right in the boat." then the economy shifted and they fired 100 salespeople who'd contributed just 4% of new business. when your product sells itself, mediocre reps look like rockstars. they crush quota, win the president's club, and get promoted into leadership. nobody knows they can't actually sell until the fish stop jumping in the boat. 2) why hard sells matter ben won't shut up about ptc, a 90s cad/cam company. the product "wasn't that great." "the windshield wiper didn't work." but that forced discipline. you had to map accounts systematically, lay traps for competitors, and build airtight technical cases. his favorite hire was ryan gabrisco at databricks, who came from a company selling secure ftp as a public company. think about how good you have to be to make quota selling that. when ben hires sales leaders, he looks for people from companies where the product was hard to sell because that's the only way to test if someone can actually sell. 3) what happens when markets turn every hot market eventually cools. i'll give you a few examples. salesforce in 2001. facebook ads in 2012. aws in 2015. the order-takers got exposed every time. modern AI sales reps don't know how to qualify prospects who aren't already sold or how to systematically lock out competitors or how to build pipeline when inbound dries up. ben's story about hiring at Okta: two candidates, one super enthusiastic, the other said "let me talk to your customers first." ben told the ceo: "you want the guy qualifying YOU. that's what good salespeople do." 4) openai scaled their sales team from 10 to 500 people in under two years. anthropic is scaling fast too. but how would anyone know if they're good? you can't test sales ability when customers are lined up begging to buy. when real competition arrives, the kind where enterprises have three viable options and care about pricing, support, and vendor risk, AI companies will discover which GTM leaders can actually sell and which ones were just processing waitlists. 5) how to hire right if you're building a GTM team right now, think like a value investor. resumes don't matter. look for human capital that the market has significantly underpriced. someone who's had to sell a product that didn't sell itself, someone who's built discipline through necessity, not abundance (no order-takers). find the person who sold enterprise software at a company nobody's heard of. find the person who had to fight for every deal because the competitor was already embedded in the account. the person who figured out how to systematically lock out competition even when they were the underdog. those skills matter. for AI companies, the question is whether they can close deals when the market shifts. because when inbound dries up (it always does), you'll discover who can actually sell.

@HarryStebbings this is just a "rules for thee, not for me" rule. Founder can jump and do multiple things, but it's looked down upon with the employee class

Single biggest red flag when hiring: Jumpers. Year here. Year there. When it happens 3 times or more for less than two years, I am out.

@blueprintsmb22 @lawyer4SMBs On point #2, it makes me wonder if they would have been better off trying to start a business while keeping their W2?

As someone that bought a biz fortunate to have a large enough personal balance sheet that if things could go south, I cld pay off all the debt personally and walk away. 1) 90 pct of pple shld stay in a W2. Find a better job if u can but bi weekly paychecks w healthcare isn’t bad at all. Personally guaranteed debt is serious and having it is more mentally taxing than I think pple understand. I know many high earning former finance W2s that have studied bankruptcy outcomes within 18 months post close. Not because they were bored but because they were seriously worried about losing the home they live in because of a key employee threatening to leave or a big customer shutting down 2) Sourcing and closing a deal is hard. I have several friends with 7 figures of liquidity that have been looking for 18 months and can’t find anything that’s reasonable. They’ve burned the boats. Doing this full time and they r frustrated - very frustrated. They want to do this very badly and have big balance sheets yet aren’t close to anything. One friend is in year 3 of search….just burning cash while he looks

"Buying a business is risky." Everyone says it. But you can get RIF’d tomorrow ("AI efficiencies" they'll say). Your W2 income can hit zero overnight. And after 15 years, you own exactly nothing. A $2M acquisition with SBA financing? You own something real. It compounds. It’s hard to fire yourself. The people calling it risky have never run the numbers.

@PaneerCap @BucknSF Always, then it’s “we want quota crushing hunters” lmaooo

@BucknSF it's always funny because 3-6 months down the road they run around asking for SDR/AE intros

every engineer ever

@Cernovich Yeah. I would imagine they change the laws at some point. Odd that you don’t have to be a broker dealer

There will be a lot of lawsuits when people realize the SPV they invested in was a sham.

@alexdanilowicz If you don’t want to hide when you hear the word DDQ, you don’t know enterprise sales

If you don't know what Coupa is, you don't do enterprise sales.

@clkbsfth @luke_metro I’m sure it’s worse with the acquisitions they made + the debt rounds, but it seems like pre 2019 investor did well. From memory, a good number of the late stage guys also started investing at the A

@will_growth @luke_metro funny to me that series A investors are getting 48x (and founders and SAFE holders way more) and yet the mood on twitter makes it sound like a terrible deal.

has anyone run the numbers on the preference stack for the Brex sale

@moseskagan attio.com - even better if you don’t archive emails

Recently, I can't escape feeling like I'm allowing unbelievable amounts of value go to waste, bc I don't do a good job of keeping in touch with people in my network. Is there a piece of software that: - I give it access to my email - It scans all of my messages and creates a CRM w the names of everyone with whom I've ever interacted, their contact info, a bit about them (both from email context and LinkedIn / web search), when we last emailed and what we emailed about?

@OpenAI The classic startup journey… hire a ex SFDC employee as CRO 😭

Denise Dresser is joining OpenAI as Chief Revenue Officer. Previously CEO of Slack, she brings deep enterprise and customer experience as she leads our global revenue strategy and support for customers at scale. openai.com/index/openai-a…

@jasonlk Co sign everything but the side hustles. I get it, but when founders openly brag about secondaries and start cos on a whim, you can’t blame the rank and file

Most SaaS AE interviews today, they're still looking for: - $300k OTE - Work from home - No travel - 100% in-bound - Side hustles fine - Strong SE support on product - Sell their way - Limited need to learn AI for real - No prep required for interview or job The world has changed

@moseskagan Yeah, absolutely. I hate to say it, but you would think at minimum they’d google your name / read your blog and see the forest from the trees. Oh well!

@will_growth That's why I wrote the original post... I keep reading articles about all the young men, in particular, who don't have jobs, and I'm like "this is it... this is the job that starts your career!"

Of ~5 interviews we had set up yesterday for our entry-level, no-experience-required property management position paying $50k / yr, 4 no-showed. You'll forgive me if I'm skeptical the blame for lots of young people not being in education or work rests w "capitalism".

@moseskagan In one breathe you hear that the hiring market is horrible, and then in the other, you wonder how much easier you can get than this…. Just show up to a zoom call

A few clarifications: 1. The job does not require a college degree 2. You can rent somewhere find to live in LA for like $800-900 if you're ok w roommates (including in some of our apartment!) 3. THESE WERE VIDEO INTERVIEWS... THEY DIDN'T EVEN HAVE TO PUT ON PANTS

@Jason______A 100p - but if they really are going to lower fed funds next year, idk why you would just get an ARM

I’d imagine the banks are doing happy backflips thinking of ways to get people out of their 3% mortgages and into 10% 50 year mortgages. First year Free 12 months no payments (using your equity) comes to mind. The majority of people will make horrible financial choices to save a few bucks monthly not realizing how much it costs them over a long period of time.

@rdphack @villi Right. I heard they have 100m on the balance sheet, it would be lolz if they just issued themselves a dividend as well

@villi Anything stopping current owning employees from selling Windsurf a second time?

The message inside Windsurf is the mkt is getting more competitive, we are behind, and we are disadvantaged against the model cos. We are out. VCs are out via share repurchase. Employees don’t make anything, but they now own the company so that is their consideration. Give it a go