Internet Monet

Alter ego

[Internet Monet @internetmonet]

Starting anew and excited to learn.

[Spike Brehm @spikebrehm]

they did it. the mad lads actually did it.

i never talked about my time at DOGE last year because it was so controversial and contentious (remember that?)

early last year, @jgebbia recruited a handful of his most trusted early Airbnb engineers to embed at the Office of Personnel Management to solve the "retirement paper" problem.

processing a federal retirement took months, and in the extreme retirees could wait up to 6 months for their full pension to arrive. what was the holdup? paper. remember hearing Elon talk about "the mine" in Pennsylvania? we got to visit it. in deep underground caverns blasted out of limestone, there were literally acres of file cabinets, as far as the eye could see, storing files detailing federal employees' employment and paystub history. a simple "case" might be only a quarter or half inch thick, but really complex cases filled up whole filing cabinets. one famously took up a whole pallet.

each case was hand processed by case workers in cubicles deep underground. they checked calculations, made sure forms were filled out properly (many weren't), and handled a long tail of complex issues. we'd watch as they keyed data into a black and white terminal, transmitting to the COBOL mainframe built many decades ago.

since cases were processed by hand, there were multiple rounds of human review, and additional rounds for complex cases. case files were walked around between one worker's outbox and another's inbox. sometimes it would sit in one place for days, waiting to be picked up.

to OPM's credit, they'd done multiple rounds of "digital transformation" spanning decades, so some systems were newer than others. there was a big effort in the mid-90s. but the systems were disparate, and it was a total maze getting them to talk to each other. there was a big effort to build a web app where employees applying for retirement could digitally fill out the necessary forms — just to be mailed to the mine and stuffed into the paper file. and few federal agencies were even using it.

when we arrived, OPM was midway through a fresh attempt at digital transformation, delivered by a software contractor.

the blackpill was seeing the terrible quality of the software and interacting with the contractors. coming from silicon valley, i couldn't believe how low the talent and quality bar was for selling software to the government. it's clear, as the OG USDS people explained to me a decade ago, the primary skill these vendors have is securing government contracts. it's a huge moat. delivery of quality product be damned.

we fired the vendor and took over the project. they'd been working on it for more than a year, and there was another year before they were going to deliver it. at first we tried to bend it to our will, to actually connect all the various data sources and get to a decent UX for case workers in the mine to use, but we soon realized we were going to have to rebuild the whole stack from scratch.

it was around this time I had to go back to new york — i had a new job waiting for me, a four month old, and a wife whose patience was running out. but i got to watch from afar as the team cranked day and night, hitting early milestones. and now they've fully done it.

huge congrats to Joe and the team. @yatshitcray was the hero in the trenches. indefatigable, unrelentingly optimistic, and determined to see this project through. when i recruited him for "ok i can do two, maybe three months", he stuck it out over a year making this project a reality.

while the retirement project was under the DOGE banner, it operated different from what you heard from the breathless, negative media — we came in with the attitude of partnering with career OPM employees. we were team members determined to bring our software talents to bear on the problem they've been trying to fix for years, which they hadn't had the resources to solve before. they were wary at first, not sure about us, but they quickly saw how authentic and determined we were to work together toward the same goal. props to Joe for developing those relationships, setting the example of how to collaborate together.

what's the end result? lifelong federal employees, veterans, postal carriers get their full pension installments almost immediately. days instead of months. peace of mind for these people to devoted their careers to serving our country. massively streamlined operations inside of OPM. and NO MORE PAPER 🫡🇺🇸

[Internet Monet @internetmonet]

@Innerdevcrypto Do you start accumulating since we are within 10% though? Or all or nothing unless we go to $56K

[Matt Shumer @mattshumer_]

Nvidia is worth $5T because the world realized inference is the new oil.

If Etched’s chips are meaningfully better than Nvidia’s for inference…

What is Etched worth?

This is a worldview-shattering event.

[Internet Monet @internetmonet]

VC rankings are excellent rage bait

[Denzel Rust @AdemLuz]

Everyone is always rooting for you. Your parents want you to be a great son. Wife wants you to be a great husband. Your boss wants you to be a slam dunk hire. Every first date you’ve ever been on they’ve been rooting for you to get laid. Every time you started to tell a joke people hoped it would have a hilarious punch line. Your proximity to anyone is a reflection of themself, meaning the deck is never stacked against you, and your failures are completely your own

[Internet Monet @internetmonet]

@BacardiCapital Old flings is solid

[Internet Monet @internetmonet]

If you have to ask the best song on MAID OF HONOUR just unfollow now

[Gris @gris2049]

This is what Heidegger called thrownness. you didn’t choose your starting conditions, the year you graduated, whether your college roommate happened to be starting a company in 2018 or if you landed at Anthropic or OpenAI.

The people outside that $20M circle aren’t failing. they’re experiencing what every human always has, the radical contingency of life. SF just makes the “throwness” more visible. most people never get that data, here you get it every day in real time.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Heidegger’s answer is authenticity. you don’t overcome thrownness but you own it. stop measuring your throw against everyone else’s and ask what you actually want to do from here? most people never get to that question.

[Blueprintsmb @blueprintsmb22]

Long post but the TLDR is choose your reference points carefully.

I grew up comfortable in Kansas with a father who owned a small business pulling $40k a year. I felt rich until I went to Brown. Then I felt like the poor. There were students that had BMWs parked on different parts of campus so they wouldn't have to walk far to get access to a car.

I needed to make money to pay back my parents for college so I went to Wall Street. After Morgan Stanley, I worked for a single manager hedge fund managing $1.5Bn (alot of money back in the day) in SF that had just received an anchor investment from Yale University.

My boss was making more money than ever and was spending it. He would vacation with Lance Armstrong and Cindy Crawford. He became close with Wes Edens at Fortress. We made investments in Fortress portfolio companies. My boss took board seats on some of these investments. My boss spent alot of time frustrated he was not on the same level as Edens.

My boss was also close with Charles Schwab and we also invested in SCHW. Charles would let my boss and the firm stay at Stock Farm in Montana to host events for our LPs and management of some of our portfolio companies. It was the first time I ever flew private. I met Don Valentine of Sequoia who was an LP in our fund. We ran into Huey Lewis in the men's locker room before playing some golf. It was a world I never knew really existed growing up in Kansas.

We were also investors in Herbalife and would complain to the CEO at the time Michael Johnson (ex Disney) that he was massively overpaid and that the compensation structure of the company needed better alignment for shareholders (based on hitting key KPIs, etc). He would say he impressions mattered in his industry and living in LA was expensive.

When 2008-9 happened, our fund got decimated as we basically were a long only. Heavy exposure to Fortress names with massive leverage was no bueno. My boss had board seats which meant we were restricted. Yale pulled their entire investment. While the world was burning down, my boss in his fancy office in the Transamerica building told me that I was lucky "to not have any money to lose" while the world was burning down lol. I get what he was saying now as we saw clients that had amassed generational wealth in tech or owning boring businesses in Louisiana lose half of their net worth in 12 months. People were scared.

I would move back to NYC and end up working for 3 billionaires at different points during my career as a journeyman buysider. I did well enough at points to have direct contact with some of them. I saw the same dynamic - always someone doing better. Always frustrated. Not that happy.

I stayed in this world just trying to stay alive with some good years and years I got paid nothing when performance was poor. I was fine staying on this never ending hamster wheel until 1) I got married 2) we had a daughter 3) my dad's cancer diagnosis got more grim and I did more self reflection on what game of life I was playing.

Ultimately I left to buy a small business which has been hard. I still have friends on the buyside and in tech that struggle with comparison. But the reference points I was around constantly in my W2 are no longer loud. I wake up early and turn on machines. Most of my team members never graduated high school. My customers are mostly salt of the earth sales people working for small distributors sprinkled with some big publicly traded companies. $4 gas is a huge problem to everybody I interact with during my day - my customers complain daily about it in their daily lives. I sometimes lend money to my team members when they need help. I have to fix problems every day as the business isn't big enough to support hiring a general manager right now. But I'm home for dinner every night. This works better for me and my family.

My life is simple now => bring in business to make sure the 10 team members can feed their families. Last year when tariffs and a big customer shutting down hurt business badly for 3 months, my accountant told me to start firing employees as my competitors were either shutting down or firing 25-33% of their entire staffs. Entire shifts were shut down. I fired no one. It didn't feel right. I just stopped paying myself.

This year things have turned around. Team members are making 25-33% more due to overtime. I have more purpose now as my life is simplified as I'm just focused on making sure my team can eat, we make good product for our customers and the business can continue to pay down debt.

This is a hard path. I wouldn't recommend it for many, but it works better for me at this point in my life. My mental health has never been better. My wife reminds me how big of an asshole I used to be in finance as I was always stressed about my exposure / frustrated I wasn't doing better. What changed? My reference points changed. I no longer live in NYC. I live in this myopic world where I spend my weeks talking to team members, customers and vendors. 4am until 4pm is spent living in this world. 4pm-8pm is spent with my family before I go to bed ahead of a 330am wake up.

I have no doubt if I stayed in finance and was living in the Upper West Side in NYC, I'd still be playing my own version of "why aren't I doing better."

It took having a child and thinking more about my Dad's mortality (he passed this October from cancer) to re-evaluate things. I wish I had been brave/smart enough to consider a pivot earlier in life.

https://t.co/kenM7z2Feh

[Internet Monet @internetmonet]

Going to a Catholic wedding today and they told the DJ to only play ICEMAN, HABIBTI, and MAID OF HONOUR @Drake

Lord Knows I guess

[Internet Monet @internetmonet]

@rachcorrine Lame of him

[Internet Monet @internetmonet]

@edgaralandough Crazy how much alpha Cooper Flagg Ghibli account has lately

[Internet Monet @internetmonet]

@beaniemaxi Shouting into the wind

[$ @jxtsummer]

you literally just have to get really good at continuing

[blue @bluewmist]

fuuuuck i just realized that the future idealized version of myself cant exist without current me being the catalyst for change and doing hard things. has anybody heard about this

[Internet Monet @internetmonet]

NYC is filled with dimes #PiggyBank

[Internet Monet @internetmonet]

@jay_drainjr @domcooke @colossusmag Starting a fund focused on the other 6 interns. Who wants to invest?

[Internet Monet @internetmonet]

Goal is to increase my surface area of luck this quarter

[Internet Monet @internetmonet]

Motion > Moving

IYKYK