Dominjo

Co-Founder Emeritus of Gaming

[Dominjo @Dominjo7]

The most unfair game, explained by one of the greatest Reckful

[loomdart @loomdart]

Luxury started dying the second consumers realised that with modern production technology the idea of “look it’s luxury it’s quality you can trust no one else can do it like this” is a facade

This trend isn’t gonna stop, more and more luxury houses are gonna capitulate and end up offering cheaper products / more focus on collectibles

It’s a huge net good for consumers

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

In my teens and 20's I would spend way too much time playing Starcraft and Civilization. Harvesting resources, building things, and expanding was super addictive to my brain - to an almost unhealthy degree.

Later I realized that entrepreneurship and business is the ultimate game. It scratches the same itch for me (resources, building, expanding), but you're actually contributing to humanity at the end of the day, which can be much more fulfilling.

Business is also much more positive sum than video games. In Starcraft, the other player has to lose for you to win. In business, there is competition, but in a growing market there can be multiple winners. And gains compound long term (it's a infinite game) instead of starting over each time.

Now days I prefer to watch pros play video games to unwind, instead of playing video games myself. But a quick game can still be fun here and there to unwind. By contrast, the game of business is played over many decades.

[Dominjo @Dominjo7]

WHAT

[moneyfetishist @moneyfetishist]

DAY IN MY LIFE SINCE YALL KEEP ASKING AND I KNOW YALL ARE ASKING

4:17 AM

I wake up. No alarm. I haven't used an alarm since 2019 because an alarm is someone else's opinion about when you should be conscious and I don't take opinions from machines that can't even compound interest

I lay there for about 40 seconds and in that 40 seconds I have an idea for a holding structure that would save a mid market logistics company €3.8M annually in tax liability through a transfer pricing arrangement between a domestic OpCo and an Irish IP HoldCo. License the proprietary routing methodology and customer data to the Irish entity at arm's length rates, OpCo pays licensing fees deductible domestically but taxed in Ireland at 12.5%, the delta across a €4M annual fee is real money. I don't write it down. If the idea is good enough I'll remember it. If I forget it then it wasn't worth €3.8M. Natural selection but for thoughts. Darwin would understand what I'm doing here even if you don't

4:22 AM

Ice bath. 3 degrees. I bought this ice bath from a company that was going bankrupt and I negotiated the price down 60% because I called the founder directly and told him I know you're 90 days from insolvency based on your accounts payable aging which I estimated from your Glassdoor reviews where employees were complaining about late paychecks. He sold it to me at cost. People think networking is going to conferences. Networking is reading Glassdoor reviews of distressed companies and calling the CEO at 7 AM. Pair that with state UCC filings to see what assets they've pledged as collateral and you have a distressed company radar that costs nothing. Nobody does this. Everyone pays for expensive databases. I read employee complaints for free

I sit in the ice bath and I think about the Ottoman Empire. I think about the Ottomans a lot. They ran a multi-entity structure across three continents for 600 years with no email and no ERP system. People can't run a 12 person marketing agency without having a nervous breakdown in a WeWork. The Ottomans had a tax farming system called iltizam where the state auctioned off the right to collect taxes in a region to the highest bidder and the bidder kept everything above what they paid. That was the first leveraged buyout. You pay a fixed price for a cash flowing asset and your return is the spread between cost and production. The LBO was invented in Constantinople in the 1400s. I might write a thread about it. I might not. The Ottomans don't need my help with their brand

4:41 AM

Espresso. I have a machine that cost more than some people's cars and I feel nothing about this because a car depreciates and caffeine generates returns through productivity so on a risk adjusted basis the espresso machine is a better asset than a Honda Civic. I will not be explaining this further

I'm currently reading "The Box" by Marc Levinson about containerized shipping and "The Prize" by Daniel Yergin about oil and Erta Kale Hywet's translation of the Fetha Nagast which is an Ethiopian legal code from the 1200s with genuinely fascinating commercial contract structures that predate English common law by 400 years. I read three books at a time always from completely different fields because the pattern recognition happens in the GAPS between disciplines not within them. If you're reading three business books you're reinforcing one mental model. If you're reading logistics history and energy history and an ancient legal code you're triangulating on principles that transcend any single field. You read things nobody else reads and your brain connects them involuntarily

4:48 AM

I check overnight markets standing up because standing increases blood flow to the brain by 15% and I need that 15% because I am looking at Japanese industrial conglomerates trading below book value on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Corporate governance reforms from 2023 are forcing these companies to unwind cross shareholdings and return capital to shareholders. There are industrial companies in Japan at 0.6x book value with 30% of their market cap in cash and cross shareholdings they are legally pressured to unwind. The basis swap makes the hedge expensive but if you structure through a Singapore entity the withholding tax treatment changes the math entirely

I am thinking about this while simultaneously thinking about whether the Ottoman tax farming model could be applied to modern SaaS distribution where you sell regional exclusivity to operators who keep the spread above a guaranteed minimum. I am basically an incubator for financial structures at this point. I am the womb. The ideas are the babies. I'm not going to sit down while I'm in labor

5:00 AM

I open email. 247 unread. I delete most of them based on font choice alone. If your email is in Calibri you have nothing to say to me. Calibri is the font of people who have never changed a default setting in their life which means they've never questioned anything which means their ideas are as factory preset as their font. I only read emails in Georgia or Helvetica. This eliminates 80% of my inbox automatically and the remaining 20% is where all the money is

There is one email from a broker I respect. Manufacturing company. €14M EBITDA. Owner retiring. The best acquisition targets right now are companies where the founder is 60 plus, has no succession plan, has never professionalized management, and has all the institutional knowledge in their head. These companies are systematically undervalued because the buyer pool is scared of key person risk. They see the owner leaving as the risk. I see the owner leaving as the catalyst to install systems and AI that should have been installed a decade ago. Key person risk is the discount. Eliminating the dependence through automation is the value creation. You are buying the problem and selling the solution to the same business

5:15 AM

I am looking at something that is going to make you feel physically ill about how you spend your time

There are municipalities across Southern Europe right now that are financially distressed. Spain. Portugal. Southern Italy. Greece. Their budgets are destroyed. They can't maintain their own water infrastructure. Pipes are leaking 40 to 60% of treated water before it reaches a household. They are literally losing half the water they process into the ground because the pipes were laid in the 1960s and nobody has replaced them

These municipalities are legally allowed to grant long term concession rights to private operators. 25 to 50 year concessions to operate, maintain, and collect revenue from the water distribution network of an entire region. You are being handed a regulated monopoly on water delivery to every home and business in a geographic area for half a century. In exchange you fix the pipes

I am in the process of acquiring concession rights in a region I will not name where the municipality is losing €11M annually in water that leaks out before it can be billed. The current tariff base generates approximately €38M in annual billings except they're only collecting about €22M because of the leakage and metering that doesn't capture actual usage

Infrastructure rehabilitation costs approximately €45M over 5 years. I am financing this through the European Investment Bank at 1.8% fixed for 20 years because the EIB is desperate to deploy capital into Southern European infrastructure and the terms are so favorable it borders on charity. Rehabilitation reduces leakage from 55% to 12%. This alone recovers approximately €14M in previously unbilled water. Combined with smart metering total billable revenue goes from €22M to approximately €36M annually

The structure is a Luxembourg SCSp holding the concession operating entity. Participation exemption on distributions. Regulated tariff revenue escalating with inflation for 35 years. EIB debt non recourse to anything except the concession assets. Operating margins stabilize at approximately 40% after rehabilitation. Annual free cash flow roughly €14M on a €45M total investment financed almost entirely with 1.8% debt

€14M in annual free cash flow. Inflation protected. From a monopoly concession. For 35 years. Financed at 1.8%

The NPV of this cash flow stream at any reasonable discount rate is €180M to €240M. On €45M invested. Almost none of which is my equity

This is a water concession in a region most people couldn't find on a map that I found by spending six months reading EU municipal budget reports published in languages I don't speak and running them through translation software at 5 AM

The Ottomans called this tax farming. I call it concession acquisition. Same model. Pay a fixed cost for the right to collect revenue in a defined territory. Return is the spread. The LBO was invented in Constantinople 600 years ago

I think about this and I think about some guy named Dave in Florida who retired from a logistics company and took €7.8M in annual fuel optimization knowledge with him in his brain and I think about the PE operating partner who doesn't know what a PropCo is and I realize that institutional knowledge is stored in the wrong places everywhere. In municipal budget offices. In retired employees' heads. In ancient legal structures nobody reads. The information is all there. Nobody is looking at it

5:34 AM

Gym. I only do compound lifts. Isolation exercises are the fitness equivalent of running a single entity C corp with no subsidiaries. You're working one thing at a time. Compound lifts work multiple muscle groups simultaneously which is the physical manifestation of a multi-entity holding structure extracting value through parallel related party transactions. When I deadlift I am my own leveraged buyout. The barbell is the debt. My spine is the equity. My legs are the operating entities. This metaphor is perfect and I will not be taking questions

5:36 AM

A man at the gym asks me what I do. I have given a different answer every single time someone asks. Today I tell him I am a commodities speculator who primarily trades in rare earth minerals and human attention. He nods. Nobody at this gym understands what I do including me sometimes. I am doing things that don't have job titles yet. Kanye invented the celebrity architect shoe designer genre. I am inventing the financial engineering shitposter to pipeline operator genre. We are the same except I have better margins

6:15 AM

Post gym shake. I negotiated a bulk discount with the supplement company by sending them a 9 page pitch deck on why they should give me product at cost in exchange for what I described as "implied brand association with an emerging cultural figure in the alternative finance space." They said no. I bought the supplements at full price. But the pitch deck was excellent and I stand by it

6:30 AM

Shower. 7 minutes. I timed it. I used to take 12 minute showers and one day I calculated the opportunity cost and almost had a medical event. 5 extra minutes per day is 30.4 hours per year. I billed €22,000 per hour last quarter on one specific engagement which means my shower inefficiency was costing me €668,800 annually. Obviously I wasn't billing anyone for shower time but the principle matters. Waste compounds. I see it everywhere now. In showers. In traffic patterns. In the way my neighbor waters his lawn at 2 PM when evaporation rates are 3x what they'd be at 6 AM. My neighbor is running a negative margin irrigation operation and doesn't know it

The most valuable thing you can do at any company is quantify the cost of the current process before proposing a new one. Don't walk in saying AI can improve your routing. Walk in saying your current routing costs €7.8M more annually than optimized routing would and here are the 6 data sources. The specificity creates urgency. Nobody panics about abstract inefficiency. Everyone panics about €7.8M in quantified annual waste. Same problem. Different framing. Completely different reaction from the decision maker. You sell the math not the technology

6:37 AM

I get dressed. All black or navy. I decided this in 2021 and I have not thought about clothing since. Every decision about something that doesn't generate revenue is a decision you didn't make about something that does. Steve Jobs understood this. I understand this. The difference between me and Steve Jobs is that he made consumer electronics and I make money through financial structures. Also he is dead and I am alive which gives me a significant competitive advantage in the current market

6:50 AM

I check Twitter. Someone has posted "Day 47 of building my AI startup in public" and their startup writes Instagram captions. I look at this post for a long time. I zoom in on his face. I'm trying to understand what he sees when he looks at the world. Because he and I are looking at the same world and he saw Instagram captions and I saw a €120M EBITDA improvement opportunity across PE portco operations and I need to understand how two human brains process the same reality and arrive at conclusions that far apart. I think it might be related to the Ottoman tax farming thing but I haven't connected those dots yet. Give me a week

7:00 AM

Call with my attorney. €2,200 an hour. Transfer pricing documentation between my OpCo and my Irish IP HoldCo. Transfer pricing studies have a shelf life. The tax authority expects contemporaneous documentation reflecting current market conditions. Most people use a study from 3 years ago and think they're covered. They are sitting on a time bomb. Updated study costs €40K to €80K. Losing the dispute costs the entire tax benefit plus penalties plus interest which in my case is approximately €11M. I update every 12 months. The documentation is the asset. Not the structure. The documentation of the structure

My attorney says probably we're fine. I say definitely we're updating. The difference between probably and definitely is the difference between aggressive tax strategy and a conversation with the tax authority that you lose. I once argued with a toll booth operator for 6 minutes about whether the senior discount structure constituted an illegal tying arrangement under antitrust law. I was wrong. But I was confident. And in finance confidence that is well documented is functionally indistinguishable from being right

7:48 AM

Second call. successor of an business, inherited from his grandfather. Wants help with his business. €18M EBITDA. 16% margins. Three facilities worth about €22M. I ask him if they've separated the real estate into a PropCo. He asks what a PropCo is

I hang up. I call back 30 seconds later because that was rude

You take the real estate the operating company owns and spin it into a separate legal entity. PropCo buys the real estate at fair market value financed with a non recourse mortgage. OpCo leases the facilities back at market rates. Three things happen simultaneously. Real estate moves off OpCo's balance sheet into a bankruptcy remote entity creditors can't touch. OpCo gets a new annual deduction through lease payments. You can finance the real estate separately at better rates because non recourse real estate debt has better terms than corporate operating debt. On €22M in real estate you're looking at €18M in mortgage proceeds flowing to OpCo plus €1.2M to €1.5M annually in lease deductions

This man earns €1.8M base plus carry. He didn't know what a PropCo was. I think about this and I think about Dave in Florida and I think about the Ottomans and somehow all three of these are the same thing. Institutional knowledge stored in the wrong places

8:30 AM

Breakfast. Four eggs. I crack them with one hand because I taught myself in 2022 and it saves approximately 1.3 seconds per egg which is 31 minutes per year which is not meaningful financially but the discipline of optimizing something that small transfers to optimizing things that are large. The person who optimizes egg cracking is the same person who finds €3.8M in Irish tax structures. Same muscle. Same pathology. I have simply chosen to direct my pathology toward activities that generate eight figure returns instead of activities that generate restraining orders

[Buck @BuckOnTwidder]

there are guys on here who don’t know how to cook themselves eggs trying to trade oil against Citadel

[Dominjo @Dominjo7]

@AlgodTrading Agree

[Dominjo @Dominjo7]

My mind is telling me to make and bring back games like this but for modern generations…I grew up on Mafia Wars and Farmville on facebook

[Blendi @BlendiByl]

One of the most goated games, iykyk

[Const @const_yt]

As an EU citizen and digital business owner who left last year

This is a good step to get people back

Moving to different EU countries will become much easier, meaning tax incentives will work well

The moment croatia or italy or spain introduces tax incentives, thousands of entrepreneurs will move because you don't have to close and open a company, just update the address

EU states will be forced to stay competitive with their tax, else everyone is leaving because of hyper flexibility

We see the same in Switzerland and USA

Not just about taxes

If one EU country fucks up politically, everyone leaves

Just like people move to Texas when their home state fucks up

Remove all exit taxes inside EU, make it easy to move around within EU, maybe introduce EU-wide corporate tax for EU inc. (replacing national corp tax with low rates up to 1M€ annual profit) and only allow each nation to tax the salary and dividend payouts of their residents, not the corp profits, so you can leave the money inside your EU inc. or EU holding without triggering the national income taxes and capital gains taxes

This might even lead to a situation where people never leave for taxes. Personally, if I could pay low corporate tax and compound my wealth inside the company, and only pay national income tax capital gains tax on personal payouts, I would not give a shit about the national tax rate at all

Just pay out 4k a month and compound the rest inside the company

If they do this, they will see billions of dollars and thousands of entrepreneurs coming back home

[Squiggly Hair Shanks @redhairshanks86]

a word of warning

all of these ai tools and polymarket ai bots are LARPs

think about it that way:

- in business, it’s 80-20. 80% of work is done with 20% of the effort, the remaining 20% of work - the optimisation - takes 80% of the effort. mckinsey literally charges millions for this idea

- current ai can at best automate 80%. and it automates the easy 80%, which means you still need to execute the hard 20%, which takes 80% of the effort. in terms of effort, ai saved you 20%

- these tools are made for absolute jeets who have never ran a company and that think you can one shot whole processes with an LLM. anyone who has done real sales or marketing before knows that it won’t work

most ai tools i see still just give you written instructions. they give you a very basic and often outdated blueprint. nigga i know the blue print, i need someone to do excellent execution. that’s like telling a fat person he needs to stop eating shit, work out more and sleep well

chubbynigga knows that. it’s what follows that’s hard

[Dominjo @Dominjo7]

For older generations, it brings Club Penguin nostalgia and for new generations, it brings networking experience that we already had with Club Penguin.

Full circle vibes

[Pudgy Penguins @pudgypenguins]

We’re excited to announce that Pudgy World, our free to play browser-based game, is now live.

Explore 12 unique towns across The Berg, help Pengu find Polly, and play mini-games, all on @PudgyWorld_.

Play now: https://t.co/x7lkMt8Rre

[Squiggly Hair Shanks @redhairshanks86]

even if the dead internet theory wasn't true until TODAY, it will 100% be true within the next few years

95% of content will be mass produced by people who are trying to sell you something or to influence you

i will be one of those people

and then i will log off forever

[Dominjo @Dominjo7]

@cultured @tether Gg

[mert @mert]

you are a new grad, you study comp sci and buy crypto as your ticket out of the permanent underclass

then, crypto goes to zero, AI destroys your career, and the boomers own all the houses

welcome to the new economy bucko

[Dominjo @Dominjo7]

@Odoamne Bloodline champions mvp game

[Dominjo @Dominjo7]

@dupreeh @Ozzny_CS2 🤣

[Dominjo @Dominjo7]

@niklaswauch_ @yovopayments Nice

[Dominjo @Dominjo7]

Top tier industry plant

[Watcher.Guru @WatcherGuru]

JUST IN: World's biggest YouTuber 'MrBeast' to launch financial services platform.

[Dominjo @Dominjo7]

Astralis is about to pick up new casino sponsorship to secure paychecks soon

[Pley.gg @PleyGg]

BREAKING: Astralis head into today’s CS2 Major decider without having paid out December salaries to staff and players. #starladderbudapestmajor https://t.co/7AVZP5vWBf

[Dominjo @Dominjo7]

@beechinour Xd

[Dominjo @Dominjo7]

Alpha version of Minecraft vibes tbh

[Simon @Simon_Hypixel]

When I say Hytale is not good enough, I genuinely mean it. It's not some reverse psychology trick!

Real talk: We are using a 4-year-old game build with over 300 versions (branches) of prototypes that we Frankenstein together in record time into a single branch. None of it was meant to be released this quickly and in this way.
There are barely any game progression mechanics configured, and we have to implement them all in record time to make it somewhat enjoyable.
Of course, I'm confident it's going to be "ok" for release. However, this is the current situation we are dealing with, on top of all the bug fixes, refactors, clean-ups and other ongoing issues that we are facing. We inherited a true hardcore engineering and design challenge, and we are on the clock to deliver early access.

The exploration of the game is fun, don't get me wrong, but man, I wish we had more time to get a few more features or configurations in to enhance that experience, but no, we break the curse of release and fix later. This will come at a significant cost; some people will be permanently convinced the game is doomed to remain in this state, unaware that this is an authentic early access experience. I hope that people who share the game will explain the situation we are in and how we got here. Keep in mind, the gameplay video doesn't show much of the gameloop because, well, there isn't much of it. Combat, game vibe, and exploration are great fun, but there needs to be mechanics to keep it going over time.

One thing I have learned over time is to enjoy the painful feedback. It is the most critical part of making games and improving yourself as a game designer. Of course, you have to be filtering out the ones that want to steer you in their own vision of what the game should be, so it's a balancing act.

When I read negative feedback on the gameplay video, I don't get defensive or hurt. I'm literally like, "Yep, they are not wrong" or "Why do they think like this? How can I solve their problem?" This has taken me years to get to that point. Our community, over the last 14 years on MC, has not been shy about giving us their feedback.

The one thing I can promise is that the game is owned by someone who cares and understands the situation, and I will do my best to empower my team to make a great game, however long it takes. This time, with all of you along for the ride, if you wish to be a part of it.

[Exerpas @ExerpasCS]

Counter-Strike StarLadder Budapest Major 2025

> NOT Kick exclusive
> Rollbit Main sponsor
> Rollbit banned from Twitch & YT
> If you co-stream on Twitch or YT, you are breaking rules (banned from the platforms ?)
> 3min delay from GOTV if you want to do it on Twitch
> multi-caster or production-level broadcast not allowed under community terms

Is this what I am hearing ???