Kyrex

How the big money actually thinks. One lesson every day.

[Kyrex @0xKyrex]

@MarkTaylormmh the cap table was great in 1975. by 1985 it had outside investors on it and his own share kept shrinking

[Kyrex @0xKyrex]

In 1989 Wally Amos started a new cookie company. Famous Amos sued him for using his own name.

March 1975. Los Angeles. The first Famous Amos store opens.

By 1981 it is a $12M company. By 1985 it is losing money, and he brings in outside investors.

"I found I had lost all ownership in the company I founded."

1988. The Shansby Group buys it for $3M. He stays on as a paid spokesman. In 1989 he walks out.

Then the lawsuit.

"They were saying I didn't even have the right to my own name."

He calls the new company Uncle Noname.

"You don't need a name to have a product and no name is a name."

1991. Famous Amos sells to a Taiwanese company for $63M. He owns none of it.

1996. Uncle Noname files for bankruptcy.

2016. Shark Tank. He is 80, asking $50K for 20% of The Cookie Kahuna. Under the deals he signed, he can't even use his own face to sell it.

No Shark invests.

Did he blame them?

"Blaming everyone else for your position in life, it is like being in quicksand."

Past 80, on a morning TV show, he launches one more brand. Aunt Della's. Named for the aunt whose cookies started it all.

Famous Amos still puts his face on the bag. He couldn't put it on his own.

In 2007 he told the AP:

"Being famous is highly overrated anyway."

[Kyrex @0xKyrex]

@softarox worse part is he couldn't even put his own face on a cookie box after that. the company kept his face too

[Kyrex @0xKyrex]

@softarox 30 years without tech. one swing. $174 billion. patience paid for itself

[Kyrex @0xKyrex]

@RonaldThomso both were acting. she was performing grief, he was performing outrage with a boom box. the jury just liked his show better

[Kyrex @0xKyrex]

@xbtnoah appreciate you. got a few more Shark Tank ones lined up

[Kyrex @0xKyrex]

Wally Amos built Famous Amos into a 12 million dollar cookie company by 1981. Then he lost it, and the right to use his own name went with it.

In the clip below, he is past 80, on a morning TV show, launching yet another cookie brand. Look at the name on the screen. Aunt Della's. Not Amos.

He opened his first store on Sunset Boulevard in 1975.

The AP described him as a great promoter who struggled as a businessman. New investors kept taking more of his share. In a book he titled Man With No Name, he wrote: "I found I had lost all ownership in the company I founded."

In 1991 Famous Amos was sold to a Taiwanese company for 63 million dollars. By then he owned none of it.

One of the brands he started afterwards was called Uncle Noname.

In 2016, at 80, he walked into Shark Tank with a cookie company called The Cookie Kahuna. He asked for 50,000 dollars for 20 percent. Because of agreements he had signed with Famous Amos, he could not even use his face to sell it. No Shark invested.

In 2017 he posted a video saying he was flat broke and struggling to pay for rent, food and gas.

He never blamed only the buyers. In 1999 he told The Times he lost the company because he didn't listen to people, since he was Famous Amos.

12 million dollars. 50,000 dollars.

The bag kept his name. He had to keep inventing new ones.

He died in August 2024, at 88. Famous Amos still sells cookies with his name on them.

Did investors take Wally Amos's name, or did he sign it away one deal at a time?

[Kyrex @0xKyrex]

@xbtnoah both sides played an angle. the casino comped him to keep him losing, he asked for card rotation as superstition to keep winning

[Kyrex @0xKyrex]

@MarkTaylormmh the hat went to the Smithsonian. the name went to whoever had the best lawyers

[Kyrex @0xKyrex]

@softarox and every single deal looks reasonable on the day you sign it

[Kyrex @0xKyrex]

@MarkTaylormmh 14 justices voted for her across both cases and she still got zero. tough crowd

[Kyrex @0xKyrex]

@softarox he watched the accountants, the lawyers and the managers. the one thing nobody in that room was watching was how many punches he took after 30

[Kyrex @0xKyrex]

@BraedenHxz fair. that's why I only trust the court documents, not the interviews

[Kyrex @0xKyrex]

The CEO of a bank that moves $5 trillion a day sat down at Stanford and gave away the two rules her most famous shareholder handed her for dealing with people. for free.

business schools spend two years teaching people to map out their next job title. a former Citi CEO took her version of that plan and tore it up. it changed the next 10 years of her life.

her name is Jane Fraser. CEO of Citi since 2021. the first woman to run one of America's Big Four banks.

at the tail end of the mortgage crisis she left the private bank in London to run a mortgage call center 45 miles outside St. Louis. 22,000 people, and they all knew half of them would probably get fired. she opened by telling them her 11-year-old had just run the baseball bases the wrong way because he only knew cricket.

the shareholder was Warren Buffett. rule one: you can always call them an asshole tomorrow. rule two: criticize by category, praise by name.

a payments fintech pitched Citi on its IPO and bragged it had hit a trillion dollars, then asked how much Citi moves. she told them 2,000 trillion a year.

"good people in a bad culture, they'll go back to being good people again and fix the culture. but an asshole is always an asshole."

she got the top job at Citi by collecting skills instead of titles. whoever writes your performance review will never tell you to do the same.

[Kyrex @0xKyrex]

@MarkTaylormmh best return Citi ever got from Berkshire was two sentences

[Kyrex @0xKyrex]

@0x_Squirrel $2 million for the company, $285 million on the next flip. I'd be calling the gravy wallpaper paste too

[Kyrex @0xKyrex]

@MarkTaylormmh $100 a year to live in the Playboy Mansion. best lease in LA right up until the landlord sold the building for $100 million

[Kyrex @0xKyrex]

@MarkTaylormmh the fact the name came from a hotel and not some grand vision is the most Rubenstein thing possible

[Kyrex @0xKyrex]

A private equity legend sat on a stage at Stanford and explained exactly how a lawyer with zero finance experience raised $5 million from four investors and built one of the most successful private equity firms ever. for free.

the industry he helped build has renamed itself three times because every name turned toxic. leveraged buyout. management buyout. private equity. he admitted it on camera.

his name is David Rubenstein. co-founded Carlyle in 1987. before that, his own law clients told him he wasn't a very good lawyer.

at 27 he was Jimmy Carter's deputy domestic advisor. every night before going home around midnight he walked into the Oval Office and put his memo on top of the president's inbox. Carter read his first. by the time the opposing memo came up, the issue was already decided.

he got into buyouts after reading that Bill Simon put $1 million into Gibson Greeting Cards and made $80 million in 18 months. the deal was 99% debt. he didn't know what a leveraged buyout was. he just figured it beat practicing law.

his son-in-law wanted to join a biotech that hadn't gotten one product approved by the FDA in ten years. Rubenstein told him to forget it and refused to buy the stock when it went public. it was Moderna. he sits on its board now.

"nobody ever won a Nobel Prize hating what they do."

the man who built Carlyle says the most tortured people he knows are some of the wealthiest. your financial advisor will never forward you that part.