For the last 6 years I’ve been buying well-run small businesses for 5x earnings.
In the first 30 days, I take the websites offline, move the companies to sad office parks with drop ceilings, install fax machines at the front desk, and bringing in 75 year old actors to pose as the CEO.
I then sell the companies to people with MBAs for 10x revenue so that they can feel useful “turning the company around”
@adiix_official My guy…calm down…your headline is as hyperbolic as it gets. This doesn’t even scratch the real estate industry. If anything it helps realtors. It doesn’t mean anything for realtor commissions.
@namcios Anyone who thinks Claude is competing with OpenClaw should be unfollowed. They either don’t understand the basic landscape here and are just shilling for Anthropic.
@jbobbink How do you account for the constant shuffling of organic placement on serps as well as AI overviews continuing to creep more and more into commercial/transactional queries? Zero click continues to grow and sometimes Google just flips a switch and poof, no organics for 15 places.
That level of acceleration could be them doing a big blast campaign to existing customers to get caught up from not doing it. I’d watch and see if it slows down or if the pace continues. Do you know about how many customers they serve in a day? Easy math: 10-15% response rate is considered great for review requests sent from an automated platform. They could be using tap tags though which generally gets a very high review rate.
@KristanHawkins I would argue that it’s actually quite in line with the pro-life ideal: protect life. The vast majority of people on death row were involved in or directly caused the loss of life. How is that inconsistent?
Hey, so generally this is actually part of trafficking. The victims are groomed and put into positions to recruit “or face consequences“ that seem too insurmountable to escape. I’m not saying that is what happened with her but I can tell you it is a large part of trafficking to position victims in a way that they will catch charges if they walk or flip.
@RyanJones If a junior’s first response to that isn’t a story about the results they got from experimenting with side hustles or their own site, I’m immediately turned off. There is literally no excuse to be learning everything about SEO from somebody else.
My only advice to CEOs this year..
Hire tinkerers.
Make it high status.
Find ones that will explore the edges and (ideally) naturally gifted at teaching people.
Empower them to freely roam across the org and fix large problems that can be automated.
All your execs will complain that these tinkerers don’t understand scale or systems (rollout being a favorite word).
Listen, and ignore them. Or even better give them budget to hire a tinkerer to achieve their targets.
Give these tinkerers ambition, purpose and hard targets and watch them fly.
Don’t lose touch with reality. Don’t stop talking to your neighbor. Don’t abate your ability to change your opinions. There is a monster behind all this groaning for more money and it’s insatiable to the point of self destruction.
Civil wars don’t start with gunfire.
They start with moral separation.
When one side believes the other is evil — not wrong, not misguided, but illegitimate — the war has already begun in the mind.
The Left increasingly sees the Right as a threat to democracy itself.
The Right increasingly sees the Left as a threat to the nation’s survival.
That’s the pretext phase.
Institutions stop being trusted.
Elections stop being believed.
Law enforcement is seen as political.
Justice becomes selective.
Speech becomes dangerous.
At that point, it’s no longer Left vs Right —
it’s Us vs Them, and history says that’s the line every civil conflict crosses right before things break.
Civil wars aren’t announced.
They’re justified.
Justified as “safety.”
Justified as “defense.”
Justified as “saving the country.”
And by the time people realize what’s happening, the argument is no longer about policy —
it’s about power.
America isn’t there yet.
But pretending we’re not walking toward the edge is how nations fall off cliffs.
History doesn’t repeat itself.
It watches to see if you were paying attention.
You asked and you received (thanks for attending my TED talk). Unfortunately I’m not sure there is a solution in the current structure of global governance. The same thing that funds/drives all the innovation is, by nature, required to collect as much capital/profit as possible. I don’t believe that changes with Medicare for all or any type of government managed system as that ship has sailed with the selling out of Washington. It’s all the same pockets getting lined either way. The only way I see it changing is total deconstruction/reconstruction. What do you think?