jrasco.eth

@MiamiHEAT Appreciate all the love @EReidMiamiHeat and @Bam1of1 have shown Rony the last few weeks. Great memories of Rony with Heat first game, win and playoff series. Congrats Bam.

The rebound that broke Rony Seikaly’s franchise double-double record, witnessed by Rony Seikaly himself

@KTmBoyle Public hangings maybe? I’ve been watching the Yellowstone prequels so that’s just one idea that immediately came to mind.

If these fires are arson, how society handles this crime and punishment will have ramifications for decades to come. What’s scary about “new” forms of violence is that the societal narrative shapes whether they repeat or not. It’s called a “cycle of violence” for a reason; copycats valorize the original crime. Crimes come in waves and eras. School shootings are relatively new, whereas the age of the serial killer seems to have faded. We do not want an arson age. Mass school shootings didn’t routinely happen until Columbine, but a 24-hour news cycle and botched coverage turned two weaselly losers into bullied heroes and idols that still inspire horrific crimes today. The culture that shaped the crime didn’t help— books like Carrie were the blueprint for a revenge narrative and catharsis for evil, not for the victims. There’s a reason we can’t stop school shooters now: the crime has entered a memetic loop that only breaks when the culture stops it. Terrorism or arson of this extraordinary scale is a new crime. We know this because it unlocked a new fear, a new crime for evil to mimic. How we destroy this evil— how we shame it, embarrass it, mock it and kill the source —-will determine whether mass arson becomes a pattern in American life. Whatever this is, let’s not valorize this evil with gifts of celebrity. Let’s extinguish it swiftly.

@henrythe9ths AI guide

There's a shocking fact about AI that nobody tells you: You can catch up to the public AI research frontier in just 2 weeks. Yes, really. I've built a $150M annual revenue startup over the last 8 years and If I were to start a company today, I’d drop everything and go all-in on AI. But like many busy software builders, I felt lost—overwhelmed by the noisy, crowded and fast-moving modern AI landscape. And I wasn’t alone. So I spent my entire holiday diving deep into AI research—reading 30+ papers, watching hours of lectures, analyzing trends, and catching up to the research frontier. ✨ Here’s what I learned: - You don’t need months (or years) to catch up. - You don’t need a PhD or decades of ML experience. - You need fewer than 20 papers and 2 weeks to understand the major breakthroughs shaping AI today. It's because the technology is extremely nascent and most techniques that came before are no longer relevant: - ChatGPT is barely 2 years old and Transformers are only 7 years old. - Most game-changing discoveries happened within the last 4 years, driven by a few breakthrough ideas, scaling laws, and efficient matrix multiplication. The biggest secret? Many groundbreaking AI papers with thousands of citations are surprisingly simple and applied, like adding "let's think step by step" to the prompt, or simply asking the LLM over and over again to improve its answer (Self-Refine). I realized there are tons of founders and builders in the same boat—wanting to dive deeper into AI but unsure where to start. I've created an essential AI Guide that helped me catch up, in just 2 weeks, to the frontier of public AI research to figure out where the next opportunities and gaps were: - Curated list of only the most important papers - Simple explanations of key concepts - Clear pathway to understanding the frontier of modern AI It’s perfect for: - Founders expanding into AI - Builders wanting to innovate at the frontier of AI - Investors looking to separate the signal from the noise 👇 Want the full guide? - Like and Share this post - Comment "AI Guide" - I'll send you the complete guide (ps, I’m also teaming up with @VishalVasishth, co-founder of @obviousvc with @ev (focused on large-scale societal impact companies like Twitter, Medium, Beyond Meat), to host a small meetup to discuss what's working and needs to be solved in the AI stack in SF. Message me if you're interested)

@AJA_Cortes Burn

BRO DIET FOR SINGLE DIGIT BODYFAT The Bro Diet is 15 years of experience & fat loss strategies simplified down into 15 actionable pages simply Comment "burn" And I'll DM it to you

@RandPaul @SenMarcoRubio @SenRickScott help explain to Floridians why you voted to redistribute social security benefits from people that paid into SS to public sector workers that didn’t. There has to be something more and you’ve earned the benefit of the doubt, but help us understand.

2/2 Vice President Vance and 24 Republican senators voted for this expansion. 25 GOP Senators joined me to oppose adding instability to an already precarious Social Security Trust fund.  Here’s the list.  Who made the right vote? You decide. govtrack.us/congress/votes…

🧵 1/2 ⬇️ Yesterday the Senate voted to blow a hole in the Social Security Trust fund, expanding benefits by $200 billion without any corresponding reduction in spending thus speeding up the bankruptcy of Social Security.

Depends on what you’re selling. I’ve run most my biz on cash basis bc of your same arguments. It’s not GAAP though. The thing to keep in mind, when selling to a public company, you’re going to get dinged for any deferred revenue, so it becomes part of negotiation. I tell people to keep there accounting in what makes sense for them as managers/owners. If you have debt, or banks or public market partners, much more difficult to do.

Can anyone business owner or accountant explain why this is a bad idea? I think EBITDA is often a stupid metric. I think Cash Ebidta is a better metric and that's how I should run my business. Why: You can have lots of EBITDA but still go out of business because you have no cash flow. So I've been thinking of converting Hampton into using Cash Ebitda. Cash Ebitda = EBITDA minus all non-cash expenses. But also recognizes bookings when cash is collected. This matters mostly for businesses that collect all the money up front for a service that will be delivered over time. Here's an example: Say you're a SaaS co. You charge $1m for an annual subscriptions and the customer pays all $1m up front. With normal EBITDA that means revenue for 1 month is: $83K ($1M ÷ 12 months). With CASH Ebidta, you add $917K in deferred revenue (remaining upfront cash). So your Cash Ebitda is the $1m in payment minus the monthly associated costs. What I'm trying to figure out: Cash Ebitda seems more important to a business than normal ebidta. But most people don't use it. Why? What's wrong with my argument? I'm not an accounting expert - so good easy on me.

@adamjgarfield The TO was dumb mistake, but leaving Terry in at the end was worse.

What are we doingggg spo?!

@DrewAustin ✋ Easy choice. Anyone can get a medical license. Have you been to Colorado in the last few years? After years of legalization, talk to your average young adult on the street… All synapses are not firing.

What kind of dorks live in Florida that voted against legalizing marijuana?!

@DrewAustin There’s a movie there to be written Drew.

What if computers have been thinking all along, just playing the long game. We figured out how to build a world with labor, and are now automating those tasks, basically giving computers the blueprint to build worlds, they have everything to take over. We’re even giving them wallets. In 50 years some being gonna look back and say, “humans gave these computers all their secrets, and control of everything in their world, with nothing more than a trust me bro from the computer that everything is all good.

@HambrickScott Fantastic breakdown. This resonated “Permanence and durability is not rewarded and we ALL pay the price.”I think about this all the time re architecture, new construction, building materials, appliances, etc.

I built and sold a business that allowed me to retire at age 44. It was called Data Storage, Inc., information, knowledge, and records management is my jam. 10 Years ago I gave a speech about the half life of knowledge to a bunch of MBA aspirants at a university business school. This is the Twitter synopsis. The half life of knowledge is the time it takes for new knowledge to either be lost, or obsolete. We know what lost means. For knowledge to be obsolete, it loses its utility because it's irrelevant, applies to defunct systems, is found false, etc. Knowledge of fire escape routes in a long since destroyed building, refining whale oil for lamplight, and how to drive a manual transmission all might be examples of lost knowledge. At the time I gave the speech, we in the data management business estimated the half life of knowledge to be 18 months. 50 years ago it was closer to 18 years. The half life of knowledge is now probably closer to a year, maybe less. The Lindy effect, of course, tells us that the older knowledge is the more likely it is to get older yet. The knowledge about how to cook meat isn't going away anytime soon, but the instructions that came with your Temu junk are already gone. Most of the web that has existed has already disappeared and most of the web that exists will disappear in HALF that time. The costs to maintain a viable web page 500 years approaches infinity. Energy, disk space, indexing it into a growing database, format conversion for compatibility, etc makes this not likely. Archive and wiki are great ideas, but their expenses are infinite and the knowledge they are entrusted with will only last as long as the institutions operating them. What's the half life of institutions? Shorter daily. Our knowledge is going away. I've bemoaned all of this on podcasts for years. The biggest problem is that the half life of knowledge is so short now that human experience is continually made irrelevant. Example, how you dated the kids mom 25 years ago is entirely irrelevant when you try to give dating advice to your 18 year old today. This pace of change is destroying our ability to parent. It's also destroying our ability to run profitable businesses as we must CONTINUALLY TRAIN employees, never cultivating or benefitting from an old head that's "seen it all in the industry" as the whole damned thing is different than it was 10 years ago and the old head needs training on Poonysis, the new ERP. This is yet another reason why wages are flat. It doesn't matter that much if you've been a machinist for 30 years, you'll need almost as much training this year as a 3 year machinist. AND the shop just got new a new CNC machine that you know nothing about, whereas their used to be men who ran a SINGLE LODGE AND SHIPLEY LATHE 40 HOURS PER WEEK FOR 40 YEARS STRAIGHT. That guy knew some hacks and cracks. This is what happens when financialization occurs. Making a product or service that lasts forever is a great way to go out of business as your competitors who can increase lifetime revenue from inferior products can BORROW MORE MONEY THAN YOU, and use that capital to drive their own costs down, market to new customers, etc. Permanence and durability is not rewarded and we ALL pay the price. Wisdom, knowledge test by experience, is dying. Wisdom, being impossible to obtain, makes older people less valuable. Parents seem entirely irrelevant to their children who only view them as resource providers. Grandparents are just a nuisance, like Grandpa Simpson Younger people, who are easier to train, are over valued. Ease of training means they are quicker to buy a new product, which drives companies to develop products that are marketed almost exclusively to youngs. Olds don't want to buy new stuff they have to learn. So, the business world and culture becomes more and more skewed towards the interests of people who haven't fully developed executive function yet. Adult contemporary music doesn't exist as a genre anymore for example. Almost NO ONE makes music for adults. Many such cases. For the 3 of you that has read all of this, what do you think we should do about it? I do have ideas. I'll save them for now.

@moizali Overall agree. I see it as I’m using them too. A local banker or just the S&P could not get me access to the ridiculously cheap mortgage I got a few years ago, without the painful colonoscopy & also the ability to borrow against my account and not sell assets. Otherwise ur right

I've worked with 3 different private wealth managers over the past 5 years, including @GoldmanSachs. To date, I can say that: A. They have provided virtually no value in growing my net worth. They promise access to exclusive investment opportunities, but the investments aren't nearly as good or as exclusive as you'd think. Elliott Management has $71 Billion under management. How exclusive do you think it is? Every wealth manager pitched me "exclusive access" to Elliott. It's the fucking Vanguard of private wealth managers. Forerunner Ventures? They raised $1 billion dollars. Nothing you couldn't get access to if you really wanted/tried. But to funds you can't get access to, they can't either. Sequoia? Not a chance in hell. B. They are structured against success. You know what I want to invest in? The small scrappy guy who bought two properties in SoCal or Idaho or Oklahoma and learned how to work with contractors and flipped them. Now, he wants to buy 10 or a small apartment building and do the same. But Private Wealth Managers are all focused on acquiring and retaining large, rich clients. Why? Because their compensation is based on a percentage of money you have with them. If you have $10M invested with them, they make less than if you have $100M. So they want big fish. As a result, they can't invest in a guy raising $10M to buy real estate in Coral Gables Florida, because he's too small for them. They can only invest in the Elliots of the word. C. The idea that they are going to set you up with unique advisors who will be helpful is malarkey. The people they set you up with are run of the mill attorneys or accountants. They aren't creative. They aren't thoughtful. They aren't amazing. If they were, they'd hang up with their own shingle and make a ton of money. You think the best tax attorney works at Goldman Sachs where he makes $1m a year? He can start his own firm and make 10X that. D. They aren't smarter than you. The Private Wealth Manager I work with today forecasted a soft landing with no meaningful interest rate raises 2.5 years ago. They suggested I invest ~$10M in medium term bonds because there was 3% yield to be had and they didn't think interest rates would go up. I remember sitting in that conference room listening to them and thinking "are you fucking incompetent or insane" I invested in one fund with Colony Capital that was focused on real estate during the pandemic. It LOST money. One of the few funds to break the buck during the pandemic in real estate. And it wasn't focused on office real estate, so don't even say that. Private Wealth Manager's Ph.Ds will say "discounted cash flows" and "regression analysis" to make your head spin, and then jerk off in the dark with your money. E. The worst is Goldman Sachs though. I mean they are the fucking worst. Rather than invest in Elliott, they say "we have our own Elliott where we do the same thing but better". That may be true, but they'd say that no matter what you suggested. If @BillGates agreed to pay me a billion dollars tomorrow if I loaned him $1 today, Goldman would advise against it. Goldman would say "don't lend him the dollar - give it to us to invest instead" because then they'd earn fees on that dollar. A. If you're a PWM, tell me why I'm wrong. How are you different than other managers? Why are you better? B. Are you a client and have had a better experience with Private Wealth Managers than me? If so, please explain why? C. If you're thinking about using a PWM, I'd suggest just investing in the S&P500. What do you think?

@brianbreslin @univmiami @TheLaunchPad @UVA Wow. Congrats Brian! The original OG of Miami Tech. Sad to see you go but I’m sure this is an amazing opportunity. I have a friend at UVA, will have to introduce you.

Today is my last day at @univmiami @TheLaunchPad after 7 years. Have met so many wonderful entrepreneurs. My next stop is my Alma-mater @uva where I’ll be starting a new university wide entrepreneurship center for students & helping grow the startup ecosystem.

@m2jr @mwseibel New episode was fantastic. The PMF discussion was gold. Thanks Nd welcome back. Looking fwd to rest of Justin.tv team episodes.

GO TIME FOR PATTERN BREAKERS PODCAST I had the chance to interview Michael Seibel @mwseibel for the first interview of our new season of the Pattern Breakers podcast last week. Michael has been a powerful force in the startup ecosystem both as a founder (Justin.tv, Socialcam, Twitch) and a managing partner at YCombinator. There were lots of good topics. One that really stood out to me was our exploration of product-market fit. You can get it right and do almost everything else wrong, yet still win big. And conversely, you can seem to do everything right but still fail if you don’t get this one thing right. Product-market fit is the single most important thing. Andy Rachleff, who coined the term product-market fit, poses a pivotal question for those on this quest: "What can we uniquely offer that people are desperate for?" In my experience, a solid answer significantly boosts success chances. A weak answer, however, usually underestimates the vast distance left to travel. In this episode we explore different strategies to increase the odds of success: identifying the right guiding principle, offering a transformative experience, and staying honest with oneself. Here is a link to the interview: Apple: apple.co/4aaUce6 Spotify: spoti.fi/3Uqxrgr Here is a link to the newsletter: bit.ly/3Uttvvy And special thanks to Michael Seibel, who has been a great founder and mentor to startup founders. I feel lucky to have crossed paths with him early on his journey, way back in 2007.

@willweinraub Happy new year Will! All the best to you and your fam!!!

New #RandomThoughtsWhileDriving: Sending you all lots of love for the year ahead. Let’s make 2024 the best year yet. 🙏

@purple_nurple @WynwoodMiami At that basis seems like no loss of appetite. Know who the buyer is yet? Saw that Print Shop sold also at almost $900/ft. Wynwood is still moving.

@willweinraub Love it Will! Fins and Cryptoys leading the way. Let’s go my brother. With you all the way.

Alright…trying something new! Introducing: “Random Thoughts While Driving” 😅 Let me know what you think about this type of content and if I should do more stuff like this 🤙

@bunsen @davidrgoldberg @datarade @tlack Toyota Land cruisers is really our jam David. But one of our Pro’s @ClassicDotCom can help you find one. Let me get the right person to reach out to you.

@davidrgoldberg @datarade @tlack @jrasco

Who knows a lot about refurbished Broncos and/or Defenders? Looking into a purchase and could use an education.

@StepUp4Students Send me a DM please. Let’s get this resolved.

@jrasco Hi there! We are sorry to hear about your frustrations. Please send us a DM so we can research this issue further.

Going into month +3 applying for new FL @StepUp4Students funding. Some of the ridiculous conversations from EMA reps: "there's a glitch in your app. We don't know what it is, but it's a glitch; it doesn't ask for birth certificates, but please fax their birth certificates.

@StepUp4Students Thanks for the quick response. Please follow me for the DM.

cont'd "fax won't arrive for 72 hrs; a supervisor has no more information for you." Now I need to call in favors, see if I know someone, tweet at Pols. It shouldn't be this complicated. Don't roll out a product if you're not ready. @DougTuthill @GovRonDeSantis @ChristinaPushaw