Matt Sliedrecht

Fractional CMO. Traveller. Marketer. Kiwi Expat. Dubai Resident. All views my own (or stolen).

[Matt Sliedrecht @mattjhs]

@BoredElonMusk This aged well.

[Matt Sliedrecht @mattjhs]

@moizali Croatia - Pula, Greece, so many places and beaches, probably Crete.

[Matt Sliedrecht @mattjhs]

@Jason I'm in

[Ryan Sarver @rsarver]

https://t.co/mdGbEHnc0s

[Matt Sliedrecht @mattjhs]

@rsarver Open source!

[Matt Sliedrecht @mattjhs]

@moizali Pula in Croatia.

[Matt Sliedrecht @mattjhs]

@levelsio gaggenau > Miele > Bosch

[Milton Friedman Quotes @MiltonFriedmanW]

Milton Friedman on 4 ways to spend money:

1) Your money on yourself (you’re careful about both cost and quality)
2) Your money on others (you care about cost, less about quality)
3) Someone else’s money on yourself (you care about quality, not cost)
4) Someone else’s money on others (you care about neither)

The last one is how government spending works 🚨

[Shaan Puri @ShaanVP]

Turns out the greatest startup idea of the last 10 years was a chatbot where you ask a question and it answers with something a guy wrote on Reddit 8 years ago

[Bearly AI @bearlyai]

Facebook went from follow your friends to follow Kim Kardashian to follow random viral content to follow AI Shrimp Jesus to send 3m messages to sexy AI Step Mom

[Codie Sanchez @Codie_Sanchez]

Working smarter not harder is a beautiful lie.

You will not know how to work smart until you've worked very hard for an irrationally long time.

[Matt Sliedrecht @mattjhs]

@thesamparr @ShaanVP Finally, not quote, video on Spotify.

[Packy McCormick @packyM]

What.
a.
TIMELINE.

[Matt Sliedrecht @mattjhs]

I would short every American apparel brand right now.

If China is going to ignore IP law, they're not going to come for your Magnificent 7.

They're going to come for your sneakers.

[Matt Sliedrecht @mattjhs]

True...

CHAMATH: "Forget midterms. They'll want Trump for the third term

[Chief Nerd @TheChiefNerd]

SCHULZ: “If [Trump] announces at the end of the year … we're eradicating income tax for people making under $150,000, midterms are going red.”

CHAMATH: “Forget midterms. They'll want Trump for the third term.”

[@levelsio @levelsio]

So Trump is vibe presidenting?

[Balaji @balajis]

Ironically, one symptom of deindustrialization is that many commenters have never actually managed a physical business.

So. Suppose your US company imports $1M of high quality parts, and adds in its own components to produce finished goods sold for $1.2M per batch. Your gross profit is $200k per batch.

But wait! Suddenly a new 30% tariff is imposed on that $1M of parts. You now have to fork over $300k to customs before you sell anything. That’s cash you probably don’t have. Oh, and even if you do sell everything, you’re now losing $100k per batch.

With a sinking feeling, you realize your profitable business which you somehow managed to keep in America all these years has suddenly become unprofitable.

You post online about how bad this is but get shouted down by an angry mob, convinced that capitalists like you should die. You can’t tell nowadays if they’re on left or right.

Moreover, you don’t have the time, money, skills, or tools in house to build that $1M of parts yourself. You are being asked to do the equivalent of growing a maple tree when all you needed was a little maple syrup. So now you are faced with several tough choices.

(1) First, you may need to go into debt or fire people to quickly come up with the $300k in cash to pay for these surprise tariffs at customs. Even if the tariff might go away, it might not, so you have to get the cash somehow or risk having your shipment impounded.

(2) Next, you might need to reduce quality to stop losing $100k on each batch. You could order the lower quality $750k parts, grimace and pay 30% tariff at customs, and hope you can build and sell for the same price of $1.2M per batch despite the lower quality.

(3) Alternatively, you could keep the quality parts at $1M and instead raise prices to $1.5M per batch to get back your original margins of $200k per batch, which you need to pay employees after all. But that’s a big hike that your customer will probably not welcome, given that he’s likely dealing with his own tariff shock.

So: these tariffs don’t really give an incentive to build in the US. Because it’s far more expensive to build a screw factory than to pay even high tariffs on a foreign screw.

Instead what they likely mean is debt, layoffs, lower quality, and higher prices for any US company that buys parts abroad.

Just to understand how common that is:

[ Q-Cap  @qcapital2020]

Dave Chappelle in 2017 talking about Trump bringing Chinese jobs back to America LOL

[blockgraze @blockgraze]

@chamath weird!

[Nikki Haley HQ @NikkiHaleyHQ]

Why should Americans care about the war in Ukraine?

Hear Nikki Haley’s response ⬇️