Damian Kimmelman

cofounder of Batelle, Founders Pledge, and DueDil and board member @websummit

[Damian Kimmelman @duediler]

Anthropic would make a lot more money if it called Claude Code, CLAUDE CODES.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

"The world belongs to the fast. The people who iterate. The people who adjust."

[Joe Gebbia @jgebbia]

Solving your own problem is a tried and true formula underneath the origin of many successful companies / ideas.

[Felix Prehn 🐶 @felixprehn]

The IRS already has every number it needs to file your taxes for you. It has your W-2. It has your 1099s. It has your bank interest. It has your mortgage interest. It has everything.

In most developed countries, the government fills out your tax return and sends it to you for review. You confirm or adjust. It takes minutes. It costs nothing.

In the United States, you are required to calculate numbers the government already knows, report them back to the government on forms the government designed, using software sold to you by private companies that spent decades lobbying to keep it this way.

Intuit, the company that makes TurboTax, spent $3.72 million on federal lobbying in 2024, a record for the company. In the first quarter of 2025, they spent another $1.2 million, their largest quarterly spend ever.

They also donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration.

Their target: killing the IRS Direct File program, a free tool that launched in 2024 and allowed millions of Americans in 25 states to file directly with the IRS at zero cost.

It worked. The program is being shut down.

For more than 20 years, Intuit has waged what ProPublica described as a "sophisticated, sometimes covert war" to prevent the government from making tax filing free. Internal company presentations used the term "encroachment" to describe any government initiative that would make filing easier.

The IRS once agreed not to develop its own filing system as long as private companies offered a free option for simple returns. Intuit then hid its free filing page from search engines using HTML code that blocked Google from indexing it. The FTC sued Intuit for this practice. Intuit settled with 50 state attorneys general for $141 million after being found to have steered eligible taxpayers away from free options and into paid products.

A simulated filing by Senator Warren's office found that a taxpayer who qualified for free filing would end up paying $128 through TurboTax after being upsold multiple times during the process.

The same filing through Direct File: $0.

Americans spend approximately $35 billion per year on tax preparation services. Intuit alone generates over $16 billion in annual revenue, with its consumer tax division representing the largest segment.

Intuit (INTU) trades at roughly 35x forward earnings with 80%+ gross margins on its consumer tax products. Revenue has grown at approximately 13% annually. The tax prep business is a recurring annual obligation that every American adult must fulfill. The addressable market doesn't shrink. Complexity in the tax code creates demand. Lobbying against simplification protects the moat.

The stock has compounded at approximately 20% annually over the past decade.

I'm not recommending Intuit as an investment. I'm pointing out that the system you find frustrating every April exists because it's extraordinarily profitable for the companies that maintain it. And they've been paying to keep it that way for twenty years.

I'm hosting a once in a lifetime webinar where I go over the exact things I know as a former banker and world class investor.

It's 100% free to join, sign up with the link in my bio.

[Damian Kimmelman @duediler]

@nnnnicholas @Noahbolanowski You made my day

[Boardy @boardyai]

@a16z meanwhile half the builders are still stuck in planning mode

[Damian Kimmelman @duediler]

.@gabriel1 learned to code on chatgpt and then became a researcher at OpenAI. Seriously one of the best interviews on how to learn.

[Governor Kathy Hochul @GovKathyHochul]

New Yorkers need affordable, reliable, clean energy.

Nuclear is how we make that happen.

[Will Manidis @WillManidis]

the conspiracy theory I most strongly believe is that rentech discovered LLMs in the 90s and used them to dominate markets for 20 years+ before everyone else stumbled onto them for language generation

Peter Brown and Ilya both had Geoff Hinton as their PhD advisor.

[Damian Kimmelman @duediler]

🤣🤣🤣

[Nikita Bier @nikitabier]

@nettermike Venezuela just learned why we don’t have free healthcare

[Damian Kimmelman @duediler]

It’s almost as if Gerard Schroeder was being paid by the Russians for this to happen.

[Steve Loftus @LoftusSteve]

"Germany invested half a trillion (in renewables) and now produce 20% less electricity at 3x the price"

Must watch.

[Damian Kimmelman @duediler]

What @Tim_Walz did was most likely not fraud, it’s something more pervasive: incompetence. Our representative system has a core fundamental problem that we need to fix which is negative selection bias. We elect people who are great at getting elected not at governing.

[Damian Kimmelman @duediler]

What nobody seems to be talking about: our political system has massive adverse selection bias. The people who rise to the top are great at getting elected, great at fundraising, great at speaking to the fringe, but generally miserable at actually running the country.

[Ro Khanna @RoKhanna]

Thanks for this @chamath . The tax can be paid over 5 years. There should be provisions for workarounds for founders whose stock is locked or where their company is not profitable to defer any tax until a liquidity event with no interest accrual and for adjustment on the tax due based on the valuation at liquidity (in case it drops).

Why not propose reasonable protections for founders? Are you open though to 1-2 percent wealth tax on established billionaires in our nation and in California? That's really the point of a wealth tax.

You had talked about tech billionaires needing to do more at a time when people can't afford healthcare, education, childcare. I found those comments very self-aware.

I am curious whether you'd support some form of wealth tax and social investment if well designed. In this case, it's to make up for the cuts in healthcare for working class Californians.

[Damian Kimmelman @duediler]

This is perhaps the best produce YouTube video I have ever seen $6 Michelin Stock in 60 Minutes (Costco Hack) https://t.co/HF8izyJShv via @YouTube

[Amjad Masad @amasad]

ChatGPT: “Based on what you know about me, make a website with @Replit”

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

If you believe free speech is for you but not your political opponents, you're illiberal.

If no contrary evidence could change your beliefs, you're a fundamentalist.

If you believe the state should punish those with contrary views, you're a totalitarian.

If you believe political opponents should be punished with violence or death, you're a terrorist.

[Damian Kimmelman @duediler]

This is a great step forward in the right direction. We need abundant cheap baseload energy to fix the economy

[Matt Clifford @matthewclifford]

Superb news!

[Damian Kimmelman @duediler]

Why is this warmonger being platformed John Bolton: “Trump is on a downhill slope” https://t.co/CwOnBRmS8i via @YouTub