You

You're absolutely right.

[You @bngffrd]

@Trace_Cohen @myfirstmilpod @thesamparr @ShaanVP Ideas were never the hard part amigo

[Mitchell @MitcheIl]

"Honey, why don't you come downstairs and show everyone what you built with Claude Fable 5"

[Henrick Johansson @compliantvc]

A trolley is about to hit 5 people laying on the track

You can redirect the car, but the other track has not yet reached regulatory approval or completed its 1 year environmental testing period, so operating a train car on it is a violation of transit regulations

What do you do?

[You @bngffrd]

@Utkarsh51557661 @DannPetty and yet, pretty visuals win you the attention to communicate those real results.

[Adam Rossi @rossiadam]

There's a romantic narrative online right now: buy a baby boomer's business, apply your digital skills, print money.

The pitch usually goes something like: Old owner, fax machine, terrible website, great book of business, 30-year reputation, he needs to retire.

You look at that and get this big head where you think: I could do better.

Sure, you could build a nicer-looking website. Set up a CRM. Plug in some new software. Run some Google Ads. Automate the invoicing etc.

You could probably do all of that in the first month.

But there are a lot of aspects where that old guy is The Man, and you're not.

And those are the aspects that actually keep the business alive.

Every business is hard and every business is competitive.

And in a lot of these companies there’s been no effort put into making the company transferable to someone else. Every operation is “Ask Jim”. There’s very few systems or documentation, usually just a network of relationships and knowledge that lives inside one person’s head.

By all means, buy the boomer business.

But there's typically not this simple button you can press where you upgrade some of the tech and extra business starts rolling in.

A friend of mine put it simply: if you buy a roofing company, you're going to end up on the roof at some point.

Another friend went from a white collar job to buying an HVAC business from a retiring owner. He said after an employee pulled a gun on him, he knew he was in over his head. Jim knew how to handle this type of employee. My friend didn’t. He was lucky to sell the business and move on.

And the issue is, Jim is old and wants to retire. He is probably unwilling to give you more than a one year transition - max.

I can tell you from personal experience it took me every bit of two years to transition from a Jim. I was lucky that my Jim was willing to put in that time and that we liked working together.

Another humbling aspect from my experience was that a lot of my bright ideas to improve over Jim’s processes took much longer to bear fruit than I anticipated. So we were spending a lot more money and doing about the same as Jim was doing in terms of revenue.

Jim was bemused.

There is a lot of opportunity in the boomer businesses. Stay humble though. Jim knows a thing or two that you don’t. It’s not going to be as easy as you think. You may end up on the roof. You may have a gun pulled on you.

You will definitely end up doing some dirty jobs you never imagined doing.

Have fun!

[You @bngffrd]

@tunguz Yes.

[You @bngffrd]

@alexpotato @Pinboard Like: some people are choosing the wrong lifestyles for their genetic makeup?

[You @bngffrd]

@ErikSnare @alexisgallagher @heliographe_ This is Adobe-level bad.

[You @bngffrd]

@Hieraaetus @jdpoc @Telogor_ OK weirdo

[You @bngffrd]

@UmpireAuditor So what?

[Ami Dar @AmiDar]

For the first half of my life, the only way people could be in touch with each other was by sending a letter or calling a landline. Now we can have a video call with more than half the people in the world. Given that astonishing change, it's striking how much has *not* changed.

[Robby Kalland @RKalland]

Every time I pass this billboard I laugh cause someone with a gambling problem is gonna take 80-20 odds all day lmao

[ian bremmer @ianbremmer]

some good news for you today: there were 30,000 fewer drug overdoses in the united states in 2024 than in 2023

largest one year decline ever recorded

[You @bngffrd]

@rustbeltkid1 Well … if the CEO of Iron Mountain asks candidates about their parents, then you can, too! [1]

What is the source of the quote that says, in effect, "you can learn everything you need to know about a person by asking them about their father"?

[1] https://t.co/hb0G25uGq2

[You @bngffrd]

@dangmugs You know we'll be seeing this typesetting technique in 2026 trend reports.

[You @bngffrd]

@SimoneSyed @BecomingCritter Is there a “no more than 30 seconds” version?

[You @bngffrd]

@allgarbled Clearly you hit a nerve …

[You @bngffrd]

@nhfoley @geoffreylitt A dumbed down shifter model won't impact expert riders (20% of people), while a complicated model would negatively impact novice/new (80% of riders)

[You @bngffrd]

@nhfoley @geoffreylitt Bikeshare is a totally different beast, though.

The goal is to get tons of people riding bikes—mass adoption—and that requires reducing friction to an absolute minimum.