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Met someone who owns a property tax appeal firm in SD and asked what they actually do. Learning about their business blew my mind. Real estate investors leave money on the table and they help them recoup that money. Here is what I learned: ↓ 1) The Problem: County assessors use broad, automated algorithms to value properties. They don’t visit your building. If your property has hidden flaws, high vacancy, or deferred maintenance, the computer still taxes it like it is pristine. 2) The Solution: They help RE investors lower these massive bills. They dig into local comps, rebuild the asset's true valuation model (Income/Cost/Sales approaches), and fight the county bureaucracy to force a fair reassessment. 3) The Business Model: Pure performance alignment. Zero upfront costs or filing retainers. They charge a 30-40% contingency fee ONLY on the actual tax cash they save you. No savings = $0 out of pocket. They eat what they kill. 4) The NOI Supercharger: Taxes are usually a building's highest operating expense. Every $1 saved on taxes directly boosts your Net Operating Income. At an 8% cap rate, a $10k tax reduction instantly adds $125k in forced equity/property value. 5) The Hidden Tax: It’s not just land. Counties levy Business Personal Property (BPP) taxes on equipment, machinery, and furniture. Auditors routinely overcharge here by applying wrong depreciation rates. Appeals fix this. 6) Who uses them? • Commercial Landlords & REITs facing market shifts • RE Developers hit with massive post-build supplemental bills • Business owners with heavy machinery • HNW estate inheritors avoiding tax spikes 7) The Financials: The unit economics of this are insane. This specific boutique firm brings in an estimated $1.5M to $4M in revenue a year. Because it’s high-leverage data consulting with almost no overhead, the profit margins are easily 50-70% 8) The Counter-Cyclical Edge: When the market dips and real estate values crash, county tax assessments stay artificially high. This means these firms save investors the most money right when liquidity is tightest. If you own commercial real estate, letting a firm audit your assessment is an absolute no-brainer win-win strategy to protect cash flow.

@DanielSmidstrup Apple is hardware at its core. Asking them for a standalone AI chatbot is like asking Porsche why it doesn’t make scooters. They engineer the premium machines that make everyone else’s AI shine. Some races simply aren’t theirs.

Why doesn’t Apple have its own AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude?

@HunterBiden reminds me of Kendall from succession if Kendall had actually beaten the demons, gotten therapy, and started shitposting instead of plotting boardroom coups. Less tragic villain, more chaotic good.

@SinaHartung Maybe someone needs to lay down a coffee pipeline to monetize this arbitrage

coffee in boston is $2 cheaper than sf

@signulll Therefore bet on founders and their conviction than the product itself. VCs and Founders know this and are prepared/expect to go through multiple iterations before finding PMF

one of the underrated realities of startups is how much variance there is in building anything genuinely new. a company can spend two years pursuing one vision, throw it away, launch something completely different, & suddenly look like an overnight success. from the outside it feels smooth cuz you don’t know. from the inside it’s often very hectic. when you’re operating at the frontier, the map is wrong, the market is moving, & your understanding compounds faster than your execution. seeing companies founded ~2 years ago pivot & launch entirely new products today is a good reminder that almost nobody knows what they’re building at the start. they discover it along the way.

@control_fiend Sorry guys..a typo. It should be “cheaper tires and free services”

@control_fiend Say you eat 1 rotisserie chicken per week to meet your prtein goals. So 52 chickens. Costco membership puts the cost at $6.30, which is still cheaper than any other place. Add on top the other savings you get - free tires and service, cheaper gas, cheaper items overall. So yes

is a costco membership worth it if all i get are the 4.99 usd rotisserie chickens asking for a friend

@ogstarwars @whohasmilk @cariboueng @Pompetousity @control_fiend Sorry that was a typo. Meant “Tires and free services”

@whohasmilk @cariboueng @Pompetousity @vikonomics101 @control_fiend No. You don't get free tires. Not sure where that comes from. But all the services for the life of your tires are free when you buy from there. No instal charge, 5-year road hazard, free balance, free nitrogen fill, free rotations, free flat repairs, free shipping to center.

@steijnpelle This video is one of the most genuine and compelling stories I’ve come across. Congrats guys!

Today, we're introducing Lassie and $47M in funding led by a16z. We're building AI that runs small businesses, starting with doctors' offices. Lassie is already trusted by 700+ practices across the country, working autonomously to provide them with 30 hours of labor per month. To get here, we first had to leave Robinhood and Superhuman to work in offices ourselves. Here's how that went.

@agazdecki Messed up on the pricing strategy. An important lesson in a founder’s journey.

Startup founders realizing their "power users" are all on the free plan:

Goal of the year as a founder: - Be cringeworthy - Try to fail/get rejected

Big Tech used to be loved for being "asset-light." @Google raising $85B in equity proves AI has officially turned software into a capital-intensive heavy industry. More like oil drilling than coding.

To anyone out there building, I’d strongly recommend taking a trip outside SF to reset. SF is truly its own bubble - the FOMO and that constant feeling of falling behind are real. My trip to SD last weekend, plus staying off my phone and social media, put things in perspective. No one’s talking about building AI agents or the next startup. It’s an SF phenomenon. The density of founders and builders here is just on another level.

@NWischoff It’s pretty impressive how they’ve streamlined the SNAP integration for vendors, but I worry about the regulatory headwinds: stricter eligibility requirements + major funding cuts to the SNAP program. Are they making any business changes to protect themselves?

As someone that grew up on food stamps - this company is near and dear to me. 1 in 8 Americans (40M people) receive SNAP benefits per month. Most are under 18 years old or over 60. It has traditionally been very hard to check EBT balances, know which grocery stores accept SNAP and how to leverage the benefits. Forage brought SNAP online, enables people to buy via Doordash, Gopuff (and more) and launched a free consumer app last year to help struggling Americans manage their benefits easily. Grateful to be an early investor and to watch @OfekLavian build a wonderful business!

@JulieLabs8 Survivorship effect in effect. It’s quite pervasive in entrepreneurship.

@RealProductGirl I’ve realized AI is good at polishing your ideas/writing, but if you don’t have coherent ideas, it can’t help you with that.

Okay so some of my favorite trolls (you know EXACTLY who you are 🤣) tried to pick apart a post that I polished with AI because I sometimes have a hard time expressing in my mind what I want to say. So what are everyone's thoughts on this? Do you leverage AI to make sure your thoughts can be processed or grammar are accurate? And to my trolls... I love you genuinely. You keep me sharp. ❤️

@signulll What do you do with people cold outreaching on venmo

venmo graph is likely the highest signal of actual close friends than any other graph on the internet right now. every other graph is now almost entirely polluted.

@katidahm I think it’s overvalued. Check out Millie’s ice cream in Pittsburgh, PA.

Considering starting a search fund to buy Salt & Straw