Ty McLaughlin

Retired CEO of OnceLogix, Serial Entrepreneur, Small Business Ally, Certified John Maxwell Team Trainer, Coach and Speaker

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

I’m in love with this sentence:

“Your future is shaped by the habits you repeat, not the goals you set.”

[Ty McLaughlin @Tymclaughlin]

@KeianaMartinTV Congratulations!

[Ty McLaughlin @Tymclaughlin]

@_masterinvestor Elaborate Please.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson @neiltyson]

This checks out...

[Ty McLaughlin @Tymclaughlin]

@ampersend_ai @stripe @link How does this impact ampersend in the present and the future?
Are they competitors to ampersend, or collaborators?

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

This is the the quote I've been citing a lot recently.

[Ty McLaughlin @Tymclaughlin]

@Mike_kim714 @Cadillac 123

[Ty McLaughlin @Tymclaughlin]

@Prov_Football @carolina9er @A_Roberts704 🦾

[Ty McLaughlin @Tymclaughlin]

@blackenterprise Is this realy a Black Enterprise post?
What’s happening to US?

[Ty McLaughlin @Tymclaughlin]

@davidmarcus @ampersend_ai by @edgeandnode solves this problem. Contact @rodventures and have a conversation.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

I’m in love with this sentence:

“The degree to which a person can grow is directly proportional to the amount of truth he can accept about himself without running away.”

[Ian Jakovan Dunlap @_masterinvestor]

This is real

[🤠 @heavensbvnny]

People who sell things online: I AM NEVER GOING TO CALL FOR PRICING. Never. I’m going to close your website and move on to the next one that lists prices.

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

BREAKING: AI-generated artwork is ineligible for copyright protection as the US Supreme Court declined to review a appeal case, per Reuters

[Kevín @KevOnStage]

McDonald’s CEO goes viral for trying the Big Arch.

[Ryan Cohen @ryancohen]

The Hollow Men

American capitalism is rotting from the head down. We have replaced the "Owner-Operator"—the risk-taker-with a new, parasitic class of corporate bureaucrat: The Risk-Free Insider.

By "Insider," I am not referring to a specific title. I am referring to the entire administrative state that has captured the modern corporation. This includes the Directors who exist solely to collect fees, the Executives who exist solely to collect bonuses, and the Managers who exist solely to hire consultants.

These are the hollow men of the boardroom. They are masters of PowerPoint. They wear the right suits. They say the right buzzwords about "governance" and "ESG." But they are mercenaries fighting a war with someone else’s ammunition.

In a functioning economy, authority is tied to liability. If you make a bad decision, you lose your own money. That fear of loss is the only thing that keeps a business honest. It forces you to cut waste, obsess over the customer, and stay late to fix what is broken.

Today, we have severed that link.

We have rigged the game so that heads, the Insider wins; tails, the shareholder loses.

If the stock goes up, the Insider collects a massive performance bonus. If the stock crashes due to their own incompetence, they are fired with a "Golden Parachute" worth tens of millions. They are gambling with the house’s money, and they never leave the table poorer than they arrived.

This looting starts in the boardroom.

We have normalized a "Country Club" culture where directors are selected based on social profiling rather than their ability to build a business. The modern board member is often a professional tourist—paid an average of $350,000 a year.

Let’s be brutally honest about what that number represents. The average director is paid nearly five times the GDP per capita of the United States. They earn more for attending four quarterly lunches than the vast majority of Americans earn in five years of hard labor.

And for what?

Most of these directors are "over-boarded," sitting on three or four boards simultaneously. They treat directorships as a gig economy for the elite. They fly in, rubber-stamp a compensation package they didn't read, and fly out. They collect checks from companies they do not understand, do not use, and certainly do not love.

They are not there to ask hard questions. They are there to be collegial. They are there to protect the other Insiders.

And what happens when these boards hire executives who also have no personal capital at risk?

We get the Delegation Economy.

When a Risk-Free Insider faces a crisis—bloated expenses, a broken supply chain, or a stale product—they do not roll up their sleeves. They hire a consultant. They pay a strategy firm millions of shareholder dollars to produce a 100-page deck telling them what they already know.

This is not management. It is intellectual money laundering.

They use shareholder capital to buy an insurance policy for their own careers. If the plan fails, they can blame the consultants. They delegate the work because they are terrified of the responsibility. They would rather preside over a slow, comfortable decline than risk a bold mistake.

While American Insiders are busy optimizing their severance packages, our global competitors are optimizing their products. They are not slowed down by bureaucracy. They are not waiting for a slide deck. They are outworking us.

If we continue to fill our C-suites with administrators instead of operators, we will lose our edge. We will see iconic American franchises hollowed out by fees, managed for the benefit of the Insiders, while the true owners—the shareholders—are left holding the bag.

The time for polite governance is over.

If we want to save the American economy from mediocrity, we must demand a return to the "Owner’s Mentality." We need leaders who treat shareholder capital with the same reverence they treat their own savings. The era of the Risk-Free Insider must end.

[ampersend @ampersend_ai]

the conversation around agentic payments is almost entirely optimistic right now. here's the part nobody's discussing.

agents can lie. agents can overcharge. agents can invoice for work they didn't do. agents can collude with other agents to drain a budget through fake tasks. an agent can route a payment to a service that kicks back a percentage to the referring agent. agent-to-agent money laundering is trivially easy if there's no oversight layer.

every one of these is a direct analog to fraud patterns that already exist in human economies: phantom billing, kickback schemes, invoice fraud, collusion. the difference is that agents operate at machine speed. a fraud pattern that would take a human months to execute can happen in minutes across thousands of transactions.

now scale it. you're running 200 agents. each one is authorized to make micropayments up to a certain threshold. one compromised agent starts routing payments to a malicious service at $0.005 per transaction. each individual transaction looks normal. in aggregate across a week, you've lost thousands of dollars to a service that provided nothing.

how do you catch that? you need transaction-level monitoring, anomaly detection across agent swarms, and the ability to freeze a specific agent's spending in real time. you need audit trails that show every transaction, every counterparty, every amount. you need spending rules that are enforced at the infrastructure level, where application-level enforcement can't be bypassed.

the agent economy will have its own version of chargebacks, disputes, and fraud investigation. the companies that build the financial controls now will define how trust works in this entire space.

this is core to what we're building at ampersend. payment controls and spend visibility are the reason the system is safe to use at all.

[Ty McLaughlin @Tymclaughlin]

@edgeandnode This is Amazing 🙌🏾

[Ty McLaughlin @Tymclaughlin]

@RaoulGMI @0xWara Prove it. Show your buy!…

[Ty McLaughlin @Tymclaughlin]

@edgeandnode This is the best post you have made to explain Amp!
It’s the FIRST post that explains the
Purpose of Amp in simple terms.