Benjamin Kemper

[Benjamin Kemper @BenjaminKemper_]

Divide et impera.

[Henry Shevlin @dioscuri]

My students sometimes ask why they should memorise things in the age of Google and LLMs. But internalised facts are your bullshit filters and your raw material for creative association. Facts outside your head are inert.

[SMB Attorney @SMB_Attorney]

You guys clearly don’t get it.

The value of legal is not determined at the time of closing.

It’s valued later when the contract is interpreted and enforced.

The value of a parachute isn’t determined when you pack it. It’s determined when you have to pull the cord.

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

All investing is coming to the eventual realization that the quality of management team is the only thing that ends up mattering

[Charles | PE | Incentives @_PE_Charles]

10 years in IB and PE consulting has taught me that every accelerated promotion is the same move: replace the level above you.

Here's exactly how, at every level - from intern to director.

1. INTERN
Your job is to get a return offer

- listen often

- speak up, you have zero to lose, ask many questions

- Ask for clarity, do a great job, think for yourself

- A good measure of success is the Senior Associate / Manager treats you as the Analyst on the file

2. ANALYST
Your job is to act as the Associate from Day 1, there is little difference except time

- Ask for clarity, but do not ask questions you could reasonably make an assumption on

- Use your judgement. It's your job to start to find solutions
- but I have no experience, how do I find solutions? Google, AI, ask for prior materials, watch excel tutorials, whatever. Nothing is new under the sun

- Do NOT put your pen down just because you are waiting for clarity, keep pushing, solve it yourself

- Be the 'yes' man / woman. (you'll learn when to say no later)

- Related, outwork others. Say yes, say yes often, say you have more time. Because you do. You're the analyst, and you are 22. You have nothing to lose, the downside is a rough week. The upside is compounding knowledge over the next 40 years

- A good indication of success is people want you on files, you often get called before your file is over for the next one, little bench time

3. ASSOCIATE
Your job is to eventually not have managers on your files because you are acting as Manager

- Start to manage analysts and interns when the opportunity comes

- Own your delivery stream end to end
- This is worth repeating again, ownership means YOU actually own it. You are in control, you know it best, you have the answers at your fingertips, you speak to the client, you are the subject matter expert within your perimeter

- Always think of the wider context you play in (Who is my client, both the organization and individual. What is the entirety of the engagement letter? What are my teams objectives? What other work could this lead to?)

- A good measure of success, as mentioned, is there is no Manager on your files, and you are juggling multiple files at once

4. MANAGER / VP
Your job is to make the Senior Manager / VP irrelevant over time, and get noticed by your Partner.

(Notice the consistent theme here?)

- You now own end to end delivery of an entire engagement / file

- Sometimes you own delivery of multiple files at once

- The Senior Manager / Director TRUSTS you (this means you are in control, they don't take control from you)

- Learn to be really good at delegating down and managing up (this is where you start saying no)

- Being detailed and proactive is key. If your reports are waiting for direction, or your boss asks how [x] is going, you aren't proactive enough

- You are not the bottleneck. You also remove bottlenecks

- Create followership. Juniors want to work with you because you add value to their learning and career

- Build internal relationships (you've been doing this all along, only now you have a clear mandate and some pedigree to grow your internal network)

- Become known for something internally (what do others call only you for)

- A good measure of success is a Partner / MD calling you directly instead of routing through a Director

5. DIRECTOR
Your job is to build a business / book (this breaks from the previous pattern, what got you here won't get you to Partner)

- Manage your engagement economics

- Intensely focus on personal relationships, internal and external

- Solicit the help of your colleagues (below and above) to create space for you to build a business to partnership

- If there is no space, change the room you are in

- Fight for your people

- Become a mentor

- Specialize in function and industry (generally, niche down, but make sure the pond is still large enough)

- A good measure of success is when people come to you first to solve a particular problem

[Johannes Hock @HockJohannes]

In light of another WSJ search fund article dropping, here's a hot take. I don't think a 5x EBITDA deal with 25% equity is worth it for the searcher.

It doesn't sound like much, but the difference between 10% and 25% equity almost cuts your economics IN HALF, while your bankruptcy risk barely goes down (more on that below).

In my opinion, self-funded search has always been one thing: you take a ton of risk (lever up with PG) and if you survive, you are set for life on a single deal in about 5 years.

That's what the math works out at 4x EBITDA and 80-90% ownership. It doesn't work out at 5x EBITDA and <50% ownership. The latter is a bad economic trade for the searcher.

You'll hear every investor tell you to overequitize. Yes, that does derisk the deal, but the real winners are the investors here. What good does a deal do you that still has a ton of risk but you don't have homerun upside on the other side. The potential to make $1-2mm over 5-7 years with a ton of risk is not a good trade for the average searcher. Most of you can just keep a $200-400k job with no bankruptcy risk.

For the deals I have seen gone bad, having 75% debt instead of 90% would not have saved them. In small businesses when things go bad, it's often binary. So all that extra equity you raised barely reduces risk and but gives a ton of the upside to investors.

6 months of fixed cost is plenty of cash in the bank. If it takes more than that, the business likely wasn't going to make it anyway. And yes, someone will bring up a scenario where a business was saved by having 7 months. Doesn't matter, when you are going down this path you are playing the average odds. If bankruptcy is an impossible risk for you, then don't get SBA debt. You're better off getting paid carry at that point.

TLDR I don't think signing the PG is worth it if you don't have the chance to be done if your deal works out.

[Chairlift Capital @ChairliftCap]

Your job as an investor is to be a judge, not a lawyer

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

Marc Andreessen on why you should not start a company

Good reminder that many people under appreciate just how painful building a company is

[dnap @dnapway]

Gavin Baker reveals the investing advice he always comes back to: "panic early or double down late"

"If you're losing money, you're wrong. It's not that the market is being stupid. It's not that people are missing something. You're wrong. What decision do you make?"

"Jennifer Urig, who was such a good friend and mentor, she had this phrase that I always think about. Ultimately, as an investor, you either have to panic early or double down late. Essentially no one does both. And know thyself."

"I am not a panic early person. I am a double down late person. And I think knowing that is something that kind of helps me go through a drawdown or a tough period of performance."

[Chris @sutherlandphys]

MathAcademy, Alpha School, Mentava, Recess, and yes I'm throwing PhysicsGraph in there are lighting the world of education on fire and I couldn't be more excited.

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

https://t.co/kJc3ewLW69

[Compounding Quality @QCompounding]

“We mostly just sit around reading, thinking and waiting.” – Stanley Druckenmiller

[sam lessin 🏴‍☠️ @lessin]

THE REAL SPACEX IPO LESSON: WE LIVE IN A CAPITALIST MULTIVERSE OF VALUE

[Austin Federa | 🇺🇸 @Austin_Federa]

Remember, you can’t outsource your understanding to the model.

You can outsource the work. You can outsource the thinking. You can’t outsource the understanding.

[Carlos That Notices Things @QuetzalPhoenix]

The richest guy on Earth SHOULD be the guy making cutting edge cars and rockets instead of dudes who sell purses and perfumes or dudes who run investment firms or dudes who made Facebook.

[10Δ @_10delta_]

Fooled by randomness.

Everyone likes to believe in 5D Chess Masters.

But it mostly ends up being the consequence of 2 cheap illusions.

Hindsight & Survivorship biases.

Once a (grand) outcome is achieved, the mind seeks to retrofit a clean, intentional, path onto what was actually a scramble & the protagonist now looks like a prophet.

& then, by variance alone, we will see a select few “winners” emerge from a crowd of improvisers, we then idolize the winners as “5D Chess Grand Masters”, without ever giving a second thought at those who never made it.

The up shot is that, in life, 5D Chess strategizing isn’t a requirement to achieve success.

You never need to see 10 moves ahead, only to make the next one self-funding & option-widening.

Tactics > Grand Strategy

[Roman Helmet Guy @romanhelmetguy]

I convince you “comparative advantage” is real and that you’re comparatively better at growing wine and I’m better at manufacturing.

Year 1: You produce 10k barrels of wine, I produce a couple cars.

Year 100: You produce 10k barrels of wine, I produce 10M space lasers.

[Martin Shkreli @MartinShkreli]

The best way to look at it is consider what financials are required for $SPCX to be an attractive investment.

This exercise requires you to figure out how many users Starlink would need to generate xB dollars of revenue. Looking at 50-100B in the next 5 years puts the stock at a reasonable price.

This is also somewhat dependent on the AI business, too. Not too many companies dream of operating low margin data centers, but, it’s working right now. The optionality that xAI figures out how to compete more aggressively with their new partner or OpenAI is hard to value.

Most importantly, you have to value management’s ability to turn cash into durable businesses. This is why just modeling cash flow without considering management’s skill is useless. A team that churns cash flow on weak projects is worth far less than a team who deploys intelligently. This is the core of valuation and capitalism.

[Leyla @LeylaKuni]

non-lawyers cannot own law firms in the US, so PE took another route:

they own the MSO, or management services organization (which is separate from legal operations)

The MSO charges the law firm management fees, and provides all the non-legal back-office functions (IT, billing, HR, marketing, admin, etc)

The law firm (technically owned by licensed attorneys) handles legal work.

Where there is a will (to own something), there is a way..

[Fabian S. @fabianschmid_09]

you need to be licensemaxxing. get every fucking license there is. hunting license, motorcycle, skydiving, paragliding, mountaineering, boat, plane, helicopter, there are endless skills to add to your skill-tree. get started with one and add one by one. maxx out everything.

[Patrick @PatrickOjo_]

Law firms are about to discover that AI audit logs are the most dangerous document they’ve ever created.

The clickstream proves supervision. It also proves how long you spent supervising. A 30-second approval of a complex contract review looks like competent oversight in your mind and looks like negligence under oath.

The firms treating AI logging as a compliance checkbox are building the evidentiary record that will define their malpractice exposure for the next decade. The ones that understand this are designing their human-in-the-loop workflows with the deposition transcript in mind, not just the bar’s model rules.

Logging is not optional. But what you log, how long you spend on each step, and what your approval workflow looks like on the record matters as much as whether you logged at all.