🍕Mark William Lewis

@pmarca should start a course on learning how to talk faster. He might be the only podcaster I have to slow down instead of speed up.

@Kalpizzy7 @OpenAI @ChatGPTapp @Shopify I think UCP will actually go somewhere. Google has been facilitating ecommerce for a long time. They understand it enough not to completely botch it like OpenAI.

Only ~12 @Shopify merchants were actually selling through it OpenAi did have a pretty strict vetting process that limited how many brands could onboard. Seems like the trend is platforms just want to avoid being the merchant of record. Handling tax / order management / product catalog management Why do you prefer UCP?

@OpenAI is scaling back @ChatGPTapp checkout. Called it. 🫠 Only ~12 @Shopify merchants were actually selling through it. No sales tax systems set up. And they wanted to charge a 4% fee ON TOP of existing payment processing. Nearly 7% in total fees. Has anyone at OpenAI ever looked at a merchant P&L? 💀 They built a chatbot and assumed commerce would just work if they bolted Stripe onto it. Product feeds, inventory sync, tax compliance, fraud prevention - none of it was ready. 🚩 Much more bullish on @Google 's UCP. Google actually understands the merchant data layer after years in Shopping and Merchant Center. UCP was built by people who've dealt with real product catalogs, not people who think "agentic commerce" is a magic word. 📈 AI product discovery is growing fast. But the website checkout isn't going anywhere. 🤷‍♂️ searchengineland.com/chatgpt-instan…

@kylebigley @kennandavison Anndd its back. I'm curious what @shopify and @amazon Legal thinks about them using the "Shop Pay" And "Buy with Prime" buttons and then it taking you to a stripe checkout. Surely that's a cease and desist letter just waiting to happen....

@mrloo @kennandavison Tier 1 el o el

Icon.com was peak DTC AI VC hype garbage. Good riddance. Brings some doubts to @kennandavison's claim that they're "profitable"... x.com/kennandavison/…

@levelsio Probably because the whole team quit.

So after my last tweet icon.com now became the founder's Tinder profile

@typesfast @kennandavison It sounds insane because it was never real.

@kennandavison $0-5M in 30 days is so insane.

Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund just led a 2nd round into Icon. To celebrate, I'll give you $69,420 if you refer someone I hire. We’ve gone from $0 to $5M+ ARR in 30 days, are extremely profitable, & will beat every company ever on the $1M to $100M ARR record (<12 months). Our team also went from 8 to 16 people. We were founded less than 6 months ago & our 1st launch was a failure. I don't have a trust fund like other founders so failure is unacceptable: we quickly pivoted to being The AI Admaker & this time we didn’t miss. Our 2nd launch got 5000+ inbound demos, 1M+ website visits, 10M+ views across socials, 50K reactions/comments, & Fortune 500 customers. Here’s how we did it: * Only hire top 0.01% engineers with no life. This results in the best product. If your GitHub isn’t a dark green carpet (3000+ commits per year including weekends), it’s a red flag. * 7 day work week. The 4 day work week leads to defeat. 996 also results in defeat (why do 6 when you can do 7). It’s a cope to think working more hours doesn’t help you get more done. * Pay 2-5x above market because someone working this hard deserves it. On a personal note: this has been a journey full of ups & downs & I’m extremely grateful to be here. I grew up in Portland, Oregon & found school extremely boring. I slept through every class because of this. If I’m being real, no one expected me to go anywhere. This all changed when I was 18. I had a big wakeup call & had to start supporting myself. I started skipping class to code 100 hours a week & combined with my hate for school, I dropped out after 1 year to join Pinterest. Pinterest paid very well, but was very boring. After too long of this, I started my 1st company, Skio, & got into YC. I ate shit during the batch & had to pivot. Thankfully, post-pivot Skio is killing it: $15M+ ARR & profitable on seed funding in just a few years. All these up-and-down adventures led to Icon. Icon is the culmination of every lesson I've learned (I made so many stupid mistakes) in these 10 years of grinding. Thank you from the bottom of my heart to our customers, my team, & our investors. Again, I’m extremely grateful to have this opportunity & will work 24/7 to honor your trust in me by becoming a trillionaire. Icon’s $10T+ vision is simple: Part 1 is Cursor for Ads: we’ll set the world record for time from $1M to $100M ARR. Part 2 is Cursor for Marketing: when we pull this off, we’ll be a $10T+ company that creates generational wealth for everyone involved. I know $10T is crazy, but with inflation we got this. If you’re top 0.01%, extremely hungry, & seek generational wealth, I’d love to chat. I'm sure everyone knows 1 person like this. Especially recruiters. If you do, I’ll give you $69,420 for referring someone we hire ($69,420 for Founding Engineers & $30,000 for Marketers / Sales / Ops / CX / Anything Else). Comment “refer” & I’ll send you our referral form.

We’re 3 for 3 @mrloo 🪦Elliot 🪦FAST 🪦Icon

@JordanBanaf 😂😂😂😂 You forgot @OpenStore too. RIP 🪦

@sama No one believes you if the two things you say are prohibited are the same things @AnthropicAI was just banned for.

Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network. In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome. AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement. We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted. We will deploy FDEs to help with our models and to ensure their safety, we will deploy on cloud networks only. We are asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements. We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.

@SecWar I'm sure @OpenAI, who's devoid of principles and morals, will be happy to help the US government murder and spy on people autonomously.

This week, Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon. Our position has never wavered and will never waver: the Department of War must have full, unrestricted access to Anthropic’s models for every LAWFUL purpose in defense of the Republic. Instead, @AnthropicAI and its CEO @DarioAmodei, have chosen duplicity. Cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of “effective altruism,” they have attempted to strong-arm the United States military into submission - a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives. The Terms of Service of Anthropic’s defective altruism will never outweigh the safety, the readiness, or the lives of American troops on the battlefield. Their true objective is unmistakable: to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military. That is unacceptable. As President Trump stated on Truth Social, the Commander-in-Chief and the American people alone will determine the destiny of our armed forces, not unelected tech executives. Anthropic’s stance is fundamentally incompatible with American principles. Their relationship with the United States Armed Forces and the Federal Government has therefore been permanently altered. In conjunction with the President's directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic's technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic. Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service. America’s warfighters will never be held hostage by the ideological whims of Big Tech. This decision is final.

Thanks @Forbes for the feature. It's been a long road from IT work at @HPE and consulting at @NASA to building @netalico into what it is today. Wouldn't trade any of it. Lots more to come! councils.forbes.com/success-storie…

@garrytan Where's Claude?

I don’t think a tech product has ever had a retention curve that inflects upwards. We are so early

Politics aside…. This is a HUGE boon for e-commerce. Our clients are going to be rejoicing in the streets. Wonder how they’ll process all those $170b in refunds they owe American businesses… with interest! And compensate the businesses that went under because of this insanity we all had to go through the past year. usatoday.com/story/news/pol…

Forgot to post this on Twitter, buf you're interested in the recording signup here: go.fabric.inc/protocols-webi…

@pmillegan @Shopify That's pretty sweet. Nice work.

Today at @Shopify we're making sign-in WAY BETTER Introducing the ACCOUNT COMPONENT for Shopify stores 🤩🥹 Rolling out TODAY across all stores with Horizon, AND coming very soon to many more 3P themes !! Detailed walkthru in NEXT TWEEET👇 x.com/ShopifyDevs/st…

@Tjernlund @Jack_Raines @elonmusk Tesla was sued for it so someone was upset... The solarcity acquisition actually made sense for an EV company and it was a fraction of the price.

@mrloo @Jack_Raines @elonmusk idk he did it with tesla when it was public to get solar city and people didnt seem too upset

Original X investors went on a wild ride. $44B purchase ($30b-ish in equity). Valuation tanked. Musk gives X investors allocation in xAI xAI buys X around original value ($45b EV), investors breakeven on X, now have shares in xAI worth ~30% of combined company. SpaceX buys xAI at probably a 2x markup from the X / xAI acqusition (I think X and xAI combined entity was like $120b valuation). So X investors probably doubled their money on their X stake, + got to invest in xAI early and saw big returns there as well.

@aleabitoreddit SNAP is just a family office for Evan masquerading as a tech company. He still has complete control and doesn't actually care about the stock price.

$SNAP is close to all time lows at $6.7, despite growing revenues/profit. Here's why: The financial engineering looks criminal. Snapchat is a $11.5B company that has ~1B MAU with Q3 adjusted EBITDA ~$132M. However: - $SNAP stock comp for the last 12M? $2.5 Billion. Yes $2.5 Billion TTM. The current yearly is closer to $1.06 Billion. - Snap is going into debt to do buy-backs from executive pay. - The CEO issued ~$1B+ in annual stock based compensation annually. This is a non-cash expense that "hides" FCF. - They are paying 6.875% interest on that debt just to make sure the executive pay doesn't tank the stock price. When you couple that with projections even est. $820M – $950M FCF for 2026. Perplexity AI Deal: +$300M - $400M Memory Monetization: +$240M (3% DAU conversion to $1.99 plan) Memory OpEx Cuts: +30M Interest: ($150M - $180M) Baseline: ~$400M This just looks insane. All they need to do is have executives not pay themselves billions and the fundamentals look like a $20B+ company (~21x multiple). This is a growing social media company that has tremendous potential for monetization. I was doing more DD into long positions, but currently, this structure just looks like a transfer of wealth from retail to $SNAP executives with continuous claims of "keeping talent" for $1B+ a year. My eyes are on stock compensation structures for this week's earnings call.

@JesseTinsley There's flat fee agents that will do it for a set fee and then refund you the rest of what their 3% would be.

Real estate hack: In my experience its best to have your lawyer draft a purchase agreement for say ~$2,000. You can ask the sell side agent if they’ll allow the buyer to get the 2-3% buy side fee back. Some will some wont. But more often than not you can increase your offer by the savings amount. On the sell side can do a for sale by owner and save the entire amount 2-3%. also you can pay a few hundred dollars to be listed on the MLS and offer a 1-2% fee for the buy side.