Alec Garza

[junkbondinvestor @junkbondinvest]

Here's how a single basketball player gets funded by insurance premiums.

LeBron sets up an LLC. The LLC issues bonds backed by his non-basketball income (e.g., a lifetime Nike deal, licensing, etc).

Two life insurers, managed by Guggenheim, buy $300 million of the bonds. 2049 maturity. 4.8% coupon. Another $60 million follow-on in 2022.

Life insurers used to hold plain bonds matched to future claims. Now they hold this. Not saying it's bad risk/reward but this is the modern insurance balance sheet.

[Alec Garza @agarz91]

Now do Nanit

[TechCrunch @TechCrunch]

The lawsuit alleges that Oura rings are unable to measure any of the physiological signals needed to assess sleep quality or determine sleep stages.
https://t.co/JiIB1K4npV

[Alec Garza @agarz91]

4 days, 95 hours, 395.5 miles... can't even imagine the mental holes he had to dig out of.

did it all with a positive attitude and insane competitive spirit. absolute dog

[richroll @richroll]

Mark Dowdle. Holy shit. I’m so impressed with this guy. For his insane backyard ultra victories, sure. But honestly more because of how he comports himself. Poised and mature, a natural storyteller using ultras to be useful to other people. Congrats on you Last Souls win my dude Dowdle. Earned and deserved.

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

How to make people care about your startup

https://t.co/pArobmjpJX

[Alec Garza @agarz91]

It’s crazy that a company like @OwnwellOfficial exists basically to arbitrage the government’s inability to accurately assess and defend property valuations. Easily one of the best experiences and highest ROI products I’ve used in a long time.

[J.B. Sauceda @jaybsauceda]

People struggle to understand the remote nature of Big Bend.

In 2015 I flew a plane around the entire border of Texas and photographed it from the air. It took 6 days to complete the trip. Big Bend alone was one full day of flying and photographing.

Both sides of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo, are hundreds of miles of the most inhospitable, yet beautiful desert landscape. The Chihuahuan Desert is unforgiving country. A place with massive rock cliffs and very little terrain you can traverse by foot safely.

The visitor rate in the park is on the lower end compared to more accessible parks like Yosemite and The Great Smoky Mountains, but its popularity among those who have actually visited is astounding.

In fact, this summer I was camped in the Smoky Mountains next to an older couple who travels the country in their RV.

Being from North Carolina they had spent a lot of time there as well as many of the parks in the West.

They saw my ¡Viva Terlingua! sticker and asked if I’d been. I told them that I’d spent about a week in Big Bend for the last 19 years and got out there any time I could.

They said they took the desolate drive along State Highway 90 through Sanderson on their way out. It was on the husband’s bucket list to visit and it was by far his favorite park now that he had.

The untouched, rugged, austere nature of that area is the feature that draws people in and leaves a lasting impression.

If you’re at a loss to understand why there’s such an uproar over construction of a road barrier through Big Bend Ranch State Park and BBNP, then it’s my belief that you’ve likely never been. Because if you had, you’d understand.

[USMNT Only @usmntonly]

THE TELEMUNDO CALL OF THE MALIK TILLMAN FREE KICK IS THE BEST THING YOU'LL EVER HEAR 🇺🇸🦅❤️

[Alec Garza @agarz91]

@Codie_Sanchez SMB

[Alec Garza @agarz91]

@anothercohen Matt’s for vibes
Serranos for food

[ChatGPT @ChatGPT]

A preview for Pro users: a new personal finance experience in ChatGPT.

Pro users in the U.S. can securely connect financial accounts, see where their money is going, and ask questions based on the information they choose to connect.

Your full financial picture, now in ChatGPT.

[Jason Saltzman @saltzman_jason]

The businesses getting the most out of AI right now aren't tech companies.

They’re plumbers, agency owners, dentists, Etsy sellers.

New data from @OpenAI (cc @RonnieChatterji) makes the pattern clear: tech startups account for about 5% of ~active~ U.S. users doing entrepreneurial work with ChatGPT.

The other 95% are spread across services, retail, healthcare, and trades.

AI adoption for entrepreneurship isn’t concentrated in tech. It’s happening inside everyday businesses, folding into routine work that used to be slower or outsourced or entirely overlooked.

[John Bistline @JEBistline]

Texas just passed California in utility-scale solar. And it's not close in wind or energy storage.

[Alec Garza @agarz91]

Agreed. Wrote about it here - https://t.co/MxeKEygjf7

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

Counterintuitive take: AI makes people more important than ever.

While simple work may be automated, judgement and taste are still the sole domains of humans and will be for a long time.

Software Factory allows us to capture what we know into a Knowledge Graph that then helps you to guide and manage your team - of people, agents, AI and everything in between.

The result is a better product and more resilient software.

Try it.

[Alec Garza @agarz91]

Can't wait to get my hands on this one!

[Josh Wolfe @wolfejosh]

1/ I just finished one of the best books I've EVER read.

Comes out next week.

My friend @DavidEpstein (Range, The Sports Gene) has written a masterpiece on the virtue of constraints, of not thinking OUTSIDE the box but "INSIDE the BOX"...

As a few quick excerpts that 🤯...

[Paul Graham @paulg]

The biggest opportunity for would-be startup founders is AI. But the most underpriced opportunity is probably non-AI ideas. So if you have a good non-AI idea, go for it, because everyone else is going to overlook it.

[Alec Garza @agarz91]

@howardlindzon @SocialLeverage Love it. But who actually owns orchestration? Feels like that's the piece most people struggle with.

[Alec Garza @agarz91]

@Cashflow_Cowboy I think two things can be true here. This can be a bad trade on fees + structure. And it can still see be in demand. Unfortunately not all investors optimize for returns. Access sells. I just hope it's sized appropriately.

[Alec Garza @agarz91]

I guess technology wasn’t the answer to the democratization of private markets… I’ll take the over on AUM expectations. This will be a hit

[Naval @naval]

Introducing USVC - a single basket of high-growth venture capital, for everyone.

No accreditation required, SEC-registered, and a very low $500 minimum.

Includes OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Sierra, Crusoe, Legora, and Vercel. As USVC adds more companies, investors will own a piece of that too.

Liquidity typically comes when companies exit, but we’re aiming to let investors redeem up to 5% of the fund every quarter. This isn’t guaranteed, but if we can make it work, you won’t be locked up like in a traditional venture fund.

It runs on AngelList, which already supports $125 billion of investor capital.

And I’ve joined USVC as the Chairman of its Investment Committee.
—

Go back to the 1500s, you set sail for the new world to find tons of gold - that was adventure capital.

Early-stage technology is the modern version. It says we are going to create something new, and it’s risky. It’s daring.

But ordinary people can’t invest until it’s old, until it’s no longer interesting, until everybody has access to it. By the time a stock IPOs, most of the alpha is gone. The adventure is gone. Public market investors are literally last in line.

This problem has become farcical in the last decade. Startups are reaching trillion dollar valuations in the private markets while ordinary investors have their noses up to the glass, wondering when they’ll be let in.

Investing in private markets isn’t easy. You need feet on the ground. You need judgment built over years. Most people don’t have the patience to wait ten or twenty years for an investment to come to fruition.

But there is no more productive, harder-working way to deploy a dollar than in true venture capital.

USVC enables you to invest in venture capital in a broad, accessible, professionally-managed way, through a single basket of innovation, focused on high-growth startups, at all stages.

It is how you bet on the future of tech: the smartest young people in the world, working insane hours, leveraged to the max, with code, hardware, capital, media, and community. Your dollar doesn’t work harder anywhere.

There is an old line - in the future, either you are telling a computer what to do, or a computer is telling you what to do. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of that transaction.

USVC lets you buy the future, but you buy it now. Then you wait, and if you are right, you get paid.

Get access here:

https://t.co/pAj1sqUsG0

[Eric Vishria @ericvishria]

So it turns out I just ran this experiment yesterday, providing the exact same prompt and presentation notes to Gamma, Genspark, HyperAgent, Manus, and Claude for PowerPoint. All on paid plans.

HyperAgent was by far the best. Claude for PowerPoint did a nice job with the text but was horrific on imagery. Genspark and Gamma were fine but the presentations that were spun out were too literal to my text and maybe optimized for visual pow versus great “story”

I also did subsequent iterations with each of them and found Hyper Agent was the easiest and best to iterate on, but Genspark and Gamma allowed fine-tuned presentation changing whereas with Hyper Agent I had it spit out a PowerPoint and made my last tunes in PowerPoint

For what it's worth I also tried Gemini, where I could not figure out how to get it to generate a whole presentation instead of slide-by-slide, and ChatGPT where I could not figure out how to get it to generate a full presentation

[Alec Garza @agarz91]

Never been a better time to start a business. Never been a worse time to start a business.

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

Introducing workspace agents in ChatGPT—shared agents that can handle complex tasks and long-running workflows across tools and teams.