Finance Foundry

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[Finance Foundry @FinanceFoundry_]

@newstart_2024 What a stupid take. He needs to slow down and read the Bible more carefully.

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️“Being realistic” is often just obedience to the ceiling of the room you grew up in.

That image is a brutal reminder that the world is not calibrated around fairness, modesty, or middle-class pacing.

There are people operating in a completely different game: ownership, leverage, capital flows, private networks, access, status loops, timing, risk, and compounding.

Their lives are not built from being “reasonable.”

They are built from controlling assets, narratives, relationships, and bottlenecks.

But the deeper read is not “go chase yachts.”

That is the trap.

The yacht is the artifact.

The real thing is sovereignty over time, capital, and movement.

Most people are trained to be realistic because realism keeps them manageable.

Get the job. Save slowly. Don’t overreach. Don’t embarrass yourself. Don’t think too big. Don’t risk too much. Don’t talk like that. Don’t build something insane. Don’t act like you belong near the top.

Then once a year they see Monaco full of floating palaces and realize some people never accepted that programming.

The sharpest truth: the world rewards asymmetric belief when it is attached to execution.

Delusion without execution becomes cope.

Realism without ambition becomes quiet death.

The winning lane is neither fantasy nor submission. It is structural ambition: pick a game with uncapped upside, build leverage, own distribution, compound trust, take reputational risk, and keep moving long after normal people retreat into “that’s unrealistic.”

That image should not make someone feel poor.

It should make them angry at small thinking.

[Vivek Garipalli @VivekGaripalli]

overheard from a fortune 20 company - ceo asked for $1 billion in AI generated opex savings at the beginning of this year.

the team as a result has spent $200 million on tokens trying to achieve those savings year-to-date, with minimal results other than some modest Cx savings and a bit of savings on engineering due to less hiring driven by coding assistants. now as back-half budgets are being reviewed, it appears that the ceo has ordered token costs to be dramatically slashed as he/she doesn't feel the ROI is there yet (for their company).

gonna be interesting to see if this is a trend amongst the rest of the fortune 500.

[Sir Escanor (𝘏𝘰𝘱𝘪𝘶𝘮 𝘚𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘳) @EscanorReloaded]

CEOs are quietly realizing the AI replacement plan has a problem.
Two problems, actually.

One: the token costs for running AI agents are now exceeding what they were paying the employees they fired.

Two: when the tokens run out, the AI stops. Just stops. No continuity. No workaround. Just a spinning wheel where your workforce used to be.

You fired humans to save money and bought a subscription that bills you into a corner.

The employees you let go knew what to do when things broke.
The AI just invoices you for the outage.

And then there’s the permission problem nobody wants to talk about.

To do its job, the AI agent needs access. Full access. Your systems, your patents, your contracts, your future plans. Everything you spent years building, handed over to a process that has no loyalty, no discretion, and no skin in the game.

You didn’t hire a replacement.
You gave a stranger with no soul the keys to everything you own.

Enjoy.

[Shaun @BonesJacks0n]

@justalexoki they’re usually at peace with themselves and find no reason to bring others down

[Cole Jaczko @colejaczko]

The single best piece of advice I can give

[Finance Foundry @FinanceFoundry_]

@realpeteyb123 I’m right there with you

[Finance Foundry @FinanceFoundry_]

@MattWalshBlog It’s an improvement over the alternative baseline

[Hala Taha @yapwithhala]

Kevin O'Leary reveals why Elon Musk is "very awkward socially" and will walk away from you mid-conversation

Kevin O'Leary: "You don't need friends in business. You need people that respect you. You don't need to make everybody happy because you can't."

"You wanna make your friends and family happy, which is probably no more than 15 to 20 people that matter to you in your life. Everybody else is either noise or signal."

"The only guy that I've seen that's higher ratio than Steve Jobs was is Elon Musk. 100% signal. Will not waste one nanosecond on noise, which makes him very awkward socially."

"He'll walk away from conversation two seconds the minute he knows it's noise. So if you're not contributing towards getting something done, see you later."

[Race @multiplanet1]

Elon Musk's first wife once described what it's like to watch him fail.

She said he doesn't react the way normal people react. When a rocket explodes, most people in the room go silent. Some cry. Some start calculating the financial damage.

Musk pulls out his phone and starts making calls. Not emotional calls. Engineering calls. "What failed. When can we fix it. When's the next launch." His voice doesn't change. His face doesn't change. The rocket that just cost $60 million is already in the past. The next one is all that exists.

She said it was the most unsettling thing she'd ever witnessed. Not because he was cold. Because he genuinely wasn't affected. The failure didn't register as failure. It registered as data. An experiment that produced results. Results that inform the next experiment.

This is why he wins. Not because he doesn't fail. He fails more spectacularly than anyone in history. He wins because failure occupies zero psychological space. It enters as data and exits as action.

Most people lose not because they fail but because they spend weeks processing the failure before acting again. Musk spends zero seconds. The gap between failure and next attempt is a phone call.

[Jeremy Bernier @jeremybernier]

Meta was easily the most toxic company I've worked for. There's a reason the Chinese call it "Squid Game". Others refer to it as "Hunger Games" or "Lord of the Flies". I think they're all accurate.

The company culture is basically every man/woman for themselves. The performance review process (PSC) not only doesn't incentivize helping others, if anything it actually discourages it since everyone is stack ranked against each other. Imagine working on a team where every 6 months, one of you is going to get axed. Of course it's going to become toxic.

"Bottoms up" culture is a complete farce - it's just a way for leadership to offload accountability. The Tech Leads (TLs) have all the power - owning the relationships and tribal knowledge to gatekeep projects to their buddies. Managers are "people managers" with limited technical understanding, who basically aggregate TL feedback and create performance review packets to calibrate with other managers and IC7+. The takeaway is that your destiny is in the hands of the TLs, and TLs unlike managers have no responsibility for your career. There are no repercussions for unethical behavior. I've seen managers and TLs throw others under the bus and get away with it.

The only mission bonding the company together is individual self-preservation. Save your own ass to survive for another stock vesting, and throw someone else under the bus if you need to. That's why layoffs rarely impact directors/VPs or tenured IC7+ despite the fact that they're paid by far the most. Even this recent mass layoff that was supposed to "flatten" managers layers barely affected directors/VPs/IC7+, and fell predominantly on M1s - the lowest rung of the management chain.

The culture is extremely performative and focused on box ticking and optics. Everything is about PSC (the performance review system) and perception. This means tons of meetings, useless AI slop posts, and top-down initiatives that don't benefit anyone but maybe help tick off the impact box of some go-getter at the top. Impact is not enough - it has to have sufficient complexity. So complexity is added for complexity's sake.

The org I was in (Facebook ads) is 90% Chinese, and the entire leadership chain up to the VP level is Chinese. Mandarin is the primary language at the office, except in official meetings with non-speakers. Chinese work culture is very different from American work culture, with 996 (9am-9pm, 6 days/week), top-down nature, emphasis on saving face (eg. don't question your superiors), and toxicity being quite common. Naturally when an org is completely dominated by a single ethnicity that's notorious for not integrating, elements from their work culture seep in. Of the layoffs I witnessed in this org, 3/4 were not Chinese (just to be clear, most Chinese are very kind so don't take this as an attack. But it is a reality that I think most people outside this company are completely unaware of, and I question if leadership is even aware despite the fact that we're talking about the company HQ)

I had the most toxic manager of my life here. I watched him deliberately set up a new hire to fail, driving them to needing to see a psychiatrist for anxiety + depression, and getting them fired. Then he suddenly disappeared for 8 months, before leaving the company.

I could go on and on, but this is already pretty long and I think you get the point.

Yes there are a lot of great, kind people here. I managed to transfer out of my first team into a new team with a great manager where everyone was very smart, supportive, and hardworking.

But the company has its Squid Game reputation for a reason. Company culture comes from the top. It seems leadership is either too removed to notice, or maybe don't really care anymore because I guess they already made their billions and us plebs are expendable these days.

[Finance Foundry @FinanceFoundry_]

@njshoreinvest Heard, but none of your opening argument mentioned anything about spending more time with your family. It was about not wanting to be stressed about performance reviews and avoiding the Sunday scaries.

[Finance Foundry @FinanceFoundry_]

@SinaiLawFirm As much variation as hospital procedures

[Finance Foundry @FinanceFoundry_]

@sciencegirl Where can I get one?

[Finance Foundry @FinanceFoundry_]

@Drewski4201 @benkellyone If working 60 hour weeks has you breaking down, business ownership isn’t for you…

[Finance Foundry @FinanceFoundry_]

@benkellyone Men really are getting soft.

[Finance Foundry @FinanceFoundry_]

@NarutoNolimits “You just don’t fit in” is unnecessarily cruel.

[Finance Foundry @FinanceFoundry_]

@LeftismForU @UHC Does @UHC not do background checks on employees?