Malik Imran Safdar

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

Just listened to Marc Rowan on the A16Z podcast and thought the origin story of Apollo was one of the most interesting snippets from the conversation

During the 1990s, Drexel had just collapsed under the weight of the Milken junk bond indictment. It was a bad time in the markets, with real estate prices crashing and a S&L crisis happening at the same time

Marc Rowan and his future co-founders became unemployed bankers in the middle of a financial crisis but continued to work for their clients without any hopes of ever getting paid.

In the midst of this, they received a call from the French government bank, Credit Lyonnais, with an offer to start an M&A boutique firm under their brand name

After taking a meeting with Credit Lyonnais, Rowan and team left with $800M of French government money to invest. By the end of that year, they had accumulated $6B of the bank's money and became the profit center of the French bank

Eventually, Credit Lyonnais begins to struggle and sells the profit center of the business to its largest client, Francois Pinault, a French industrialist billionaire

Apollo used his funding base as a starting point and eventually diversified out to take in other investors across the US and Europe. Credit Lyonnais eventually went under and was later consolidated into what is Credit Agricole today

What a crazy ride

[The Compound @TheCompoundNews]

AI Isn’t a Bubble. It’s a Wave

[The Compound @TheCompoundNews]

Stop Optimizing for the Perfect Portfolio

@awealthofcs @duncanhillphoto

[The Compound @TheCompoundNews]

Smart People Still Can’t Time the Market

@awealthofcs @michaelbatnick

[Eric Balchunas @EricBalchunas]

All the new tech terms reminds me of this great Portlandia bit

[Eric Balchunas @EricBalchunas]

He's like the Buddha of cool music. I've come to similar conclusion in writing and research, it's like digging a mine, boring, but eventually a) you will tap into new energy sources and b) spot something amazing on the side of hole that wasn't even what you were originally digging for. Both those things require the boring digging tho.

[Alex Finn @AlexFinn]

You should NEVER be downloading AI agent skills from the internet

It's the biggest attack vector for security breaches right now

Tons of skills in the public skill sites you see are compromised with prompts that open your computer up

Do this instead:

If you see any skill you want your agent to have, give the link to your agent

Say "look at what this skill does. I want you to do something similar. Think about how this fits into our workflow and how you'd use it. Then build your own version of it, custom for what we do"

Your agent then will build its own, secure version that can't have dirty prompts from random people on the internet

This is the biggest security practice you can implement

[Chris Meder @EVCurveFuturist]

Pakistan may be accidentally building one of the world’s first decentralised #solar economies. The craziest part? Real scale barely shows in official stats. Imported 51.5 GW solar panels by late 2025—nearly = entire grid. Yet registered net-metered rooftop solar just 5.3–6.8 GW.

What makes this story so extraordinary is the speed.

In only a few years, Pakistan appears to have gone from a relatively minor solar market to potentially sourcing around a quarter of its electricity from solar once distributed generation is included.

👉 ~16.6–17 GW solar imports in 2024
👉 ~18 GW solar imports in 2025
👉 ~51.5 GW cumulative imports by late 2025
👉 Rooftop solar: ~1.3 GW → 4.1 GW in 2024
👉 ~5.3–6.8 GW registered rooftop solar in 2025
👉 24+ GW estimated behind-the-meter/off-grid
👉 Solar potentially ~25% of actual electricity use

The massive gap between imported panels and officially registered systems strongly suggests tens of gigawatts are now operating quietly on homes, farms, factories and businesses across the country.

This increasingly looks less like a normal energy transition and more like large-scale consumer-led grid defection.

And economics is driving nearly all of it.

Electricity tariffs surged. Diesel prices climbed. Blackouts remained common. Meanwhile ultra-cheap Chinese solar panels and falling battery prices made self-generation economically irresistible.
So millions effectively made the same calculation:

Generate your own power, or remain trapped inside an expensive and unstable system.

Once solar becomes cheaper than the grid itself, adoption can move faster than governments, utilities and even official statistics can keep up with.

This isn’t gradual transition by any stretch. It may ultimately become a blueprint for how energy-poor nations break free from legacy old-world energy systems dominated by fossil fuels and increasingly expensive centralised power.

It’s decentralisation at escape velocity.

This is #Bettrification.

[Malik Imran Safdar @imran80]

@AlfieJCarter Agents

[Anjney Midha @AnjneyMidha]

there are some decisions that reverberate through the universe across space and time and change the texture of reality as we know it

this is one of them

[Elizabeth Mieczkowski @beth_miecz]

🚨 What if your LLM team could dynamically reorganize itself mid-task? Introducing LATTE: a framework that gives teams a ~caffeine~ boost via an evolving task graph they build and adapt in real time, achieving SOTA performance with fewer tokens and conflicts. New paper 🧵👇

[Malik Imran Safdar @imran80]

@SoulzBTC Trading

[CryptoSoulz @SoulzBTC]

Claude Trading Folder

I’ve compressed the best trading prompts into one PDF

Get it for FREE:

• Like + Repost + Comment “TRADING”
• Follow me so I can DM you

[Lejla Johnsen @custo_lejla]

such an insightful and inspiring RFS call @tocelot

accelerating normies' agents adoption is an insanely powerful mission

this is how we speedrun our species’ into our full potential + abundance levels that are still completely unfathomable

speedrun 007 apps are now live 🔥

[Lejla Johnsen @custo_lejla]

We’re entering a world of infinite output.

AI can generate code, designs, and create even entire product roadmaps in seconds. Building is getting cheaper by the day.

But judgment isn’t.

It’s no longer about who can produce more. It’s about who can decide better.

Taste and discernment isn’t just aesthetics.

It’s:
- Cutting a paragraph that sounds smart but says nothing
- Knowing which slide to delete, not which one to add
- Choosing the one priority that actually moves the needle

And ignoring the flood of “good suggestions” that dilute focus.

The hardest part of most white-collar work isn’t generating options anymore.

It’s choosing well.

And yet most tools optimize for speed and volume, not helping people get better at deciding.

I’d love to see startups building toward products that help individuals train better judgement over time.

What would it look like to create:
- Tools that train people to attach real probabilities to their beliefs - and see, over time, where they tend to overestimate or underestimate
- Systems that can make decision-making visible, trackable, and improvable
- Tools that train you to prioritize ruthlessly, that is to pick the few things that matter - and get comfortable killing the rest

In an age of infinite leverage, leverage without taste creates noise.

I’m especially excited about founders building products that strengthen human discernment.

In a world of abundance, discernment is the scarce asset.

If you’re building here, DM me and let’s talk!

[Anjney Midha @AnjneyMidha]

almost all my grey hair is from my years as ceo of my first startup

i was 25, had raised tens of millions of dollars from Kleiner, Index, Benchmark and had gone from 0 to 70 employees within 24 months

and then the pandemic hit

few things age you like being a startup founder

[Financial Times @FT]

The highest-earning and most experienced workers are adopting AI in their jobs far faster than others, in a divide that risks widening inequality as the technology spreads through the workplace https://t.co/ekDF96Z6TT

[kache @yacineMTB]

you can outsource your thinking
but you cannot outsource your understanding

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Just went to visit Legora. Most impressive startup I've been to visit in years. They're going to surpass Harvey in 2027. After that their only potential rivals will be the model companies. And if ever there was a territory you could defend against the model companies, law is it.

[Christopher Clarke @EconChrisClarke]

Is The War Going To Cause A Recession? Nobody can predict recessions. But safe to say that risk is elevated - uncertainty looms. Signs would be ⬆️ Inventories as consumers stop buying, ⬇️ business investment, ⬆️ layoffs. We aren't seeing any of these, for now. @JesseWeberLive