Brandon Hopen

Ex-ICONIQ, Google, Open English, and Platform Ventures

Writing 👉

[Brandon Hopen @Brandon_Hopen]

In the US, nearly 92M people use the platform, accounting for over 30% of the population. That would be a CAC of $576, while avg CAC in finance is closer to $700.

Great entry point to build a generational consumer payments business. Stripe's product design, and ai agent infrastructure will supercharge the brand.

PayPal has 439M active user and merchant accounts across more than 200 markets, processing $1.79T in payments.

[The Wall Street Journal @WSJ]

Stripe and buyout firm Advent International made a joint takeover bid for PayPal Holdings in a deal that would value the fintech company at around $53 billion https://t.co/MUPG3G76iu

[Brandon Hopen @Brandon_Hopen]

It will be interesting to see as an isolated experiment the affects of using only phones that call/text, probably one of a handful of places that can pull off enforcement

[Richard Hanania @RichardHanania]

NPR: "The Taliban's higher education minister has called smartphones 'one of the three main enemies of Muslims' and last October restricted their use on university premises to only the most senior administrators."

[Brandon Hopen @Brandon_Hopen]

Very interesting bet to use what LLMs are great at, context and coding, to make sense of enterprise data that uses custom SAP logic

I wonder how many other businesses will be built to understand vertical code context, maybe EPIC for a full picture of a hospital

[Conduct @ConductAI]

Thank you, @ICONIQCapital . We’re proud to partner with you.

SAP systems contain decades of critical business logic, but too much of it is buried in custom code and tribal knowledge. Conduct is helping enterprises make that logic visible, trustworthy, and ready to evolve.

[Brandon Hopen @Brandon_Hopen]

@mreiffy Do you think there will be a harness that connects routes models for different tasks, maybe open source?

[Brandon Hopen @Brandon_Hopen]

@catherinehyeo It's the little daily wins that keep you going, that's a great circle of friends to have

[Brandon Hopen @Brandon_Hopen]

Unique ways I filter for business opportunities

1/ Will I be the first customer?

2/ Do I have a warm network for the first batch?

3/ Am I excited enough to think through the details?

4/ Is there one dimension I can push hard enough on (e.g. lowest price, highest quality) to be exceptional?

5/ If the product fails, can I have more shots on goal?

[Brandon Hopen @Brandon_Hopen]

@haleymbryant I wonder if focus is in short supply these days partly around economics volatilty, it becomes easier to visualize where you want to be if the end state is clearer and variabeles are more consistent

[Brandon Hopen @Brandon_Hopen]

@mamoonha @PoeticHQ congrats @markiewagner needed after seeing my max claude token usage reduced by 50% after setting up fable

Does this work for front end design as well or just backend infrastructure?

[Brandon Hopen @Brandon_Hopen]

@DanielSLoeb1 @patrick_oshag What comes out is how clear Alex’s thinking is and referencing the cannon of investing books, and I love the comparison to combining big picture creativity with fundamental analysis

[Brandon Hopen @Brandon_Hopen]

Very interesting concept

I wonder when we’ll be able to integrate agents that will call restaurants that you can’t book online

One thing I might push back on is if it truly finds cheapest options, or using same travel : Expedia APIs as everyone else?

[Francis Davidson @FDavidsonT]

We raised $6M led by Sequoia to build the future of travel.

Watch me plan a perfect trip to Mexico City in 3 minutes.

Flights, hotels and a full itinerary that matches my preferences. All bookable on the spot.

Available today, free to use.

[Brandon Hopen @Brandon_Hopen]

Took a while for the market to come around!

[Brandon Hopen @Brandon_Hopen]

I wrote about my decision to invest in Oracle ahead of earnings today!

https://t.co/yZDleJRkYI

[Brandon Hopen @Brandon_Hopen]

With Claude Code, any investor can copy the strategies of sophisticated funds. Here are my 10 favorite skills to level up your private equity fund

Add these files using Claude Code. Just review the GitHub link, save to your project folder, and deploy.

1/Pull every new listing off BizBuySell, Sunbelt, MergerTech, and BusinessesForSale. Auto-score each one: green flags (recurring revenue, B2B, owner retiring), red flags (restaurant, franchise, gas station)

2/Get three valuations on a target in one prompt: discounted cash flow, similar-company comps, and sum-of-the-parts. Returns a Bull, Base, and Bear price you can negotiate against.

3/Build a list of similar public companies in seconds. The database has 158K stocks, 36K ETFs, and 57K funds, searchable by industry, country, or exchange.

4/Before a diligence call, score the target's top customers on what people are saying about them online. Pulls from Reddit, X, news, and Polymarket and gives each one a score from negative to positive.

5/Generate a full investment committee packet from one set of inputs: a multi-sheet Excel model, an executive PowerPoint deck, and a formal PDF, all in one chain.

6/When the target's biggest customer is a public company, calculate the actual financial link between the two. Replaces "they're 28% of revenue" with a real number you can defend.

7/Each week, check whether your deal assumptions are getting stronger, weaker, or proven wrong as diligence comes in. Forces you to stay honest about what's changing.

8/Build a one-page cause-and-effect diagram for the lender meeting. Example: lose 20% of customers, margins drop, debt coverage breaks. Outputs a diagram file you can drop into a deck.

9/After you write the equity check, rebuild your personal balance sheet. Model the rest of your portfolio plus your deal equity as one combined book and see the risk you're actually carrying.

10/Each week, auto-generate an industry brief on your target's vertical. Pulls from 10+ news sources plus 90+ data feeds (Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg, Reuters, Substack, arXiv) and writes it as a planned, edited, charted report.

Repos to download
1 - Repo: github sradgowski/deal-evaluator
2 - Repo: github himself65/finance-skills
3 - Repo: github JerBouma/FinanceDatabase
4 - Repo: github RKiding/Awesome-finance-skills + /himself65/finance-skills
5 - Repo: github anthropics/claude-cookbooks
6 - Repo: github LongOnly/Quantitative-Notebooks + github /himself65/finance-skills
7 - Repo: github RKiding/Awesome-finance-skills
8 - Repo: github RKiding/Awesome-finance-skills
9 - Repo: github LongOnly/Quantitative-Notebooks + github /anthropics/claude-cookbooks
10 - Repo: github /RKiding/Awesome-finance-skills + github /himself65/finance-skills