adam

Founder; building the Ai-native marketplace for families; DMV native; Girl dad; prev: @Grubhub & @Leafly

[Matteo V. @teovito]

Follow this guy. He’s about to spend an entire year without looking at a screen, while tracking his biomarkers and overall health to see what changes.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Utah sent an undercover agent to place about $115 in sports bets on Kalshi. Now the two people who started Kalshi are charged with 13 felonies, and the top charge alone carries up to 15 years in prison.

The day after the charges came down, investors gave Kalshi $1 billion.

Here's how the sting worked. In September, a special agent with the Utah attorney general's office opened a Kalshi account with a Utah address, a Utah phone number and a Utah debit card. Before his first bet, $10 on the Cowboys against the Giants, the app asked him to confirm his location. He told it he was in Utah, and it took his money. He did that 12 times over 11 days, on games like Utah vs. Utah State and a Real Salt Lake match.

Kalshi's cut on each bet was somewhere between 3 and 78 cents. So the company made less than $10 off the bets Utah is now using to go after its CEO and COO personally. And that top charge comes from Utah's racketeering law, the same kind of statute prosecutors use on organized crime.

The obvious question is why Kalshi didn't just shut off Utah. It clearly knows how. It already blocks Nevada and Washington because a settlement and a court order made it. DraftKings pulled its sports and politics markets out of Utah the same night the charges were filed, FanDuel did it the next day, and Fanatics shut down everything there on November 4.

Kalshi stayed because of how the company is built. DraftKings runs on licenses from gambling regulators in more than 20 states, so when one state comes after you with criminal charges, you get out fast and protect the rest. Kalshi has exactly one license, from a federal agency called the CFTC. Its whole $40 billion valuation depends on the idea that this one federal license overrides state gambling laws, and quietly walking away from Utah would cut against that argument everywhere else.

The federal government is backing Kalshi on this, and pretty aggressively. The CFTC and the Justice Department sued Utah two days before the charges. Their complaint says that if Kalshi turned away Utah residents, it would be breaking a federal "impartial access" rule that requires exchanges to serve everyone.

So the founders are stuck. Utah wants them to stop taking bets from Utahns or face prison, and the federal government is in court saying they aren't allowed to stop.

This goes way past Utah, too. The CFTC has sued 10 states since April. On the other side, 37 states signed a brief backing Utah in its appeal.

Sequoia and Wellington, who co-led the $1 billion round, are betting on one legal question, whether federal commodities law beats state gambling law. If the courts say yes, Utah's criminal case could fall apart along with every state lawsuit against Kalshi. A federal judge in Utah already said no back in August. The 10th Circuit is up next, and this looks like it's headed to the Supreme Court.

Kind of fitting for a company that lets you bet on almost anything that its biggest investors now have $1 billion riding on how a court case turns out.

[Mason Carter @FanBrianCald]

BREAKING: An internal investigation found that the Spurs winning the lottery in 2023 and selecting Victor Wembanyama may have been fixed. Sources say the league wanted to the Spurs to contend to create a rivalry with the Thunder and increase ratings.

A massive scandal is about to emerge.

[adam @HappiKidFounder]

@jonaasw1 Cafe

[adam @HappiKidFounder]

@andruyeung Why do you think that nobody in tech drinks?

[jack mcclelland @jackmcclelland]

more cool parts of the nyc builder / eng community, from the replies:

- @vercinyc of course
- side project saturdays at @ValDotTown office
- https://t.co/jmmsdHQKro
- fractal nyc
- https://t.co/tSnGS3XqGb
- nysrg
- nyc resistor

[adam @HappiKidFounder]

@VoteHub Hal Rogers is 88 years old and reps one of the poorest districts in the US. His votes have slashed billions of dollars from Medicaid, closed rural hospitals, and eliminated funding for KY public broadcasting

[Corey Ganim @coreyganim]

A college student quoted a private equity CEO $25,000/month for AI consulting, hoping the CEO would counter at $10,000.

To his surprise the CEO was genuinely interested in the $25K offer.

James Larson and his 2 co-founders (also both in college) were on that call trying not to smile.

They ended up settling at $15K/month for the first 6 months. They future paced the CEO's expectations by mentioning a maintenance plan of at least $5K/month once the engagement ends.

James is 23 and still a full-time student at BYU.

Here's his exact system you can copy:

THE WAY IN

He asked his network for intros to companies doing $10M+. Then he asked those owners for advice, NOT A SALES CALL. Most CEOs are willing to give ambitious young people advice, and many of those casual conversations turn into sales conversations.

THE ASSESSMENT

They charged for it from day 1. They started at $1,000 then recently closed one at $5,000.

They survey every department head before they do the actual assessment so they begin the assessment already knowing their pain points and software. Then they record a 30-minute call with each one and ask for real examples of their work.

THE MAP

James and his co-founders rank every workflow by ROI, using the numbers their client gave them. This client got 19 workflows and a conservative estimate of $255K to $285K back in year one.

THE DEMO

They build working demos on their clients' real documents and show the whole C-suite on one call. This is what got the room excited.

THE PRICE

They like to quote 3 tiers at prices higher than feels comfortable.

During our interview I advised James to take the price he's comfortable with, double it, and let them negotiate down from there.

The whole sales cycle for this $15K/month deal took about 6 weeks. They have a ton of similar deals in the pipeline and the future is bright for these guys!

James screen shared his entire business model on the Build With AI podcast.

Full video below.

https://t.co/CaRCHjosqg

(Also available on the Build With AI podcast wherever you get your pods)

[adam @HappiKidFounder]

@unusual_whales He’s also a prolific liar so we’ll see

[adam @HappiKidFounder]

@HogfarmerChris @Kyle_Zorn Please bring back the dresses, beards, and noses

[adam @HappiKidFounder]

@TheHogfarmers @ByKimberleyA Love what you guys are doing but would you ever consider bringing back the dresses, wigs, and noses? It helps you guys standout in the crowd and gives everyone a smile

[Nick Abraham @NickAbraham12]

Hunter analyzed 31 million cold emails to find out what gets replies.

Here's what they found:

[Alfred Lin @Alfred_Lin]

https://t.co/lRI7AXhGCW

[adam @HappiKidFounder]

Such an incredible day #Nats

[natsfanatics @natsfanatics_]

7 YEARS AGO TODAY 🏆❤️

19-31. Five elimination games. One unforgettable championship.

October 30, 2019. The Nationals finished the fight.

Where were you? 🥹

[Sam Parr @thesamparr]

Anthropic will make ~1,000 employees worth +$100m at $2 trillion market cap.

There's ~11,000 Americans with $100m in investable assets.

So something like 1 in 12 Americans with $100m (liquid) will be from Anthropic. If you add in Openai, maybe 1 in 7.

[Martin Tobias (Pre-Seed VC) @MartinGTobias]

Surfing is the ultimate lesson in letting go.

You can't control the wave.

You can only position yourself and respond.

Startups are the same.

Stop trying to predict. Start learning to ride.

[adam @HappiKidFounder]

@umichvoter I seem to be the only one to remember the 2016 polls only to be sorely disappointed by those same polls.

[adam @HappiKidFounder]

@mortgagesinDC @SoccerInsider Problem is that DCU fandom is so far down the proverbial list for most DMV residents that calls for new ownership fall on deaf ears

[adam @HappiKidFounder]

@politics_watch1 Are we sure we can trust the polls? They’ve made some major mistakes since 2016

[jam @wespreadjam]

Granola, a $1.5B company, increased monthly new users from AI search by 4,600% in JUST 7 months.

here’s the genius AEO workflow behind it:

1. They started with buyer decisions, not keywords

-> Granola mapped the questions people ask before choosing an AI meeting tool

-> Then they turned those same decisions into both Google keywords and AI prompts so they could measure where the brand actually showed up

2. Every lost prompt got diagnosed before anything was created

-> If Granola wasn’t showing up, they first asked why

-> Was the right page missing?

-> Did the page already exist but fail to answer the question properly?

-> Was there a crawl/indexing problem?

-> Or was AI getting the answer from third-party sources that barely mentioned Granola?

3 They separated “missing page” from “weak page”

-> This sounds obvious, but it changes the entire content strategy

-> If a relevant page already existed, they improved that page instead of publishing another article targeting the same question

-> New pages were only created when there was actually a gap

4. They stopped treating every technical SEO issue like it mattered equally

-> Crawlability, indexing and performance problems were prioritized based on whether they affected pages tied to real buyer demand

-> A technical issue on a page connected to an important buying question came before cleaning up random site-wide warnings

5. They studied the exact third-party sources AI was already trusting

-> For prompts Granola lost, they looked at the Reddit threads, review sites, articles, directories and other pages showing up instead

-> The question wasn’t just “how do we get more backlinks?”

-> It was “which sources are shaping this specific recommendation, and why are competitors represented there better than us?”

6. They used a simple framework for every important source:

-> OWN: pages Granola controls directly

-> CLAIM: profiles and listings they can take ownership of

-> EARN: editorial mentions, reviews and community discussions they have to deserve

-> CONTEST: outdated or incorrect information they need corrected

-> Different source = different action

7. Reddit became part of the search strategy

-> Instead of posting everywhere, they focused on communities much closer to the product and buyer

-> The same buyer questions being tracked in AI search were used to decide which conversations were actually worth joining

8 They measured Google and AI separately

-> A page could rank better on Google and still barely move in ChatGPT

-> AI mentions could rise while organic traffic stayed flat

-> So Granola tracked both systems independently instead of assuming SEO performance meant AEO performance

9. Then they reran the same questions and scaled what actually moved users

-> measure the gap

-> diagnose why it exists

-> make one specific change

-> rerun the prompts

-> track whether visibility and activated users moved

-> double down on what worked

the result:

-> monthly new active users from AI search increased 4,600%

-> non-branded AI citation rate increased 558%

-> non-branded mention rate increased 739%

-> organic sessions increased 134%

Granola didn’t win AI search by JUST publishing more blogs & content like every other company

instead they built a system for figuring out exactly what they were missing, choosing the right fix, and measuring whether it actually brought in users. then after that just iterating and doubling down on what worked

AI search is now one of their biggest acquisition channels.

and it should be one of yours too!

if you want us to run an audit for your company and make you rank #1 in AI search,

reply “audit”