millen | serial entrepreneur

perpetually building | @universacare @modernmangal

[millen | serial entrepreneur @millenrastogi]

@Slackwatercap

[PrivateEquityGuy (Mikk Markus) @PrivatEquityGuy]

I recorded the whole conversation - we talked for 1.5 hours. Herea re link to the podcast. Follow and subscribe to get notified once it goes live.

Apple pod: https://t.co/aJmBcYbIHV

Spotify: https://t.co/Ny3msAmtHQ

YouTube: https://t.co/3GAQ0WbDVH

[millen | serial entrepreneur @millenrastogi]

I wonder who this could be…

[PrivateEquityGuy (Mikk Markus) @PrivatEquityGuy]

Had a long conversation with a 30-year-old business buyer.

Buys distressed home care agency companies in NYC and Connecticut at 1-3x EBITDA multiples. Has done 5 acquisitions so far.

It is a lot of work, but he successfully integrates them into his holding company, which trades at 8-10x EBITDA for the right private equity buyer.

The best part: he is still able to take a month long holiday and 10-day no cellphone & no talking meditation retreats.

Started seven years ago at 23; today still owns 100% of the whole group.

Very savvy at financial engineering, structures, real estate... everything.

This conversation had it all.

But gets even better:

[millen | serial entrepreneur @millenrastogi]

@PrivatEquityGuy Can’t wait to hear all about it 😉

[millen | serial entrepreneur @millenrastogi]

@PrivatEquityGuy @aashu1121 yes - Vipassana :)

[millen | serial entrepreneur @millenrastogi]

Hard is not having control over your destiny because you’re lazy.

Easy is working hard and trying to shape your future.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

My CISO called me at 3 AM last Tuesday.

"We caught someone."

I asked, "Caught them doing what?"

He said, "Typing."

Let me explain.

We have an employee in IT. Great worker. Always online. Never complained. Perfect Slack etiquette.

One problem.

His keystrokes were arriving 110 milliseconds late.

One hundred and ten milliseconds.

That's 0.11 seconds.

The average American remote worker has 20-40ms of latency.

This guy? 110ms. Every. Single. Keystroke.

My security team ran the numbers.

That latency doesn't come from a bad router in Ohio.

That latency comes from Pyongyang.

Our "Senior DevOps Engineer" was a North Korean operative.

Running his work laptop through a laptop farm.

In America.

While he worked from a government building.

In North Korea.

He passed the interview. He passed the background check. He passed the vibe check.

He did not pass the speed of light.

Here's what people don't understand about physics:

Light travels 186,000 miles per second.

But it still has to go through China.

And China adds latency.

Since April, Amazon has caught 1,800 of these attempts.

Eighteen hundred.

I called an emergency meeting with my board.

I said, "We need to implement Keystroke Velocity Auditing across all remote employees."

They said, "That sounds invasive."

I said, "You know what else is invasive? The Democratic People's Republic of Korea in your Jira tickets."

They approved the budget.

We now monitor keystroke timing to the microsecond.

If your latency exceeds 60ms, you get a call from HR.

If it exceeds 100ms, you get a call from the FBI.

We've already flagged 47 employees.

Turns out 44 of them just have bad Wi-Fi.

3 of them are "still under investigation."

The lesson?

You can fake a resume.

You can fake a background check.

You can fake an American accent on Zoom.

But you cannot fake the speed of light.

Physics is the ultimate background check.

Hire accordingly.

[millen | serial entrepreneur @millenrastogi]

@bektosh_28 @rohanpaul_ai Bro we NEED THIS

[millen | serial entrepreneur @millenrastogi]

@pitdesi black stone

[millen | serial entrepreneur @millenrastogi]

@alexisohanian 1992 camry - named her katrina because she had been through a lot.

[millen | serial entrepreneur @millenrastogi]

@litcapital @nikillinit @elonmusk

[millen | serial entrepreneur @millenrastogi]

@texasrunnerDFW not surprising one bit, airbnb is just glorified homeownership

[millen | serial entrepreneur @millenrastogi]

@evolvee33 just getting my voice on the platform, any tips?

[millen | serial entrepreneur @millenrastogi]

@ZohranKMamdani New York is one of the states where you’re required to put salary ranges on a job posting. How come none of these jobs have them?

https://t.co/kyNlJGWz1u

[millen | serial entrepreneur @millenrastogi]

@ChrisJBakke I don’t know why someone would do that, the truth is bound to come out

[millen | serial entrepreneur @millenrastogi]

as the post election dust settles, I think we might see a term that’s not as as extreme as he has as campaign for. I wonder how those who were expecting significant handouts will react to things not changing that much

[X @XaviercMiller]

Here’s what I think will happen in NYC under Mahdami.

The free buses and government grocery stores won’t happen, they never do. They sound good during campaigns, but collapse under basic math. You can’t run a city on ideas that cost billions and produce no revenue.

The only way to make housing affordable is to build more housing. The free market lowers prices, not regulation. Every time politicians try to control rent or force affordability by decree, developers stop building and landlords stop maintaining. Supply dries up, the quality collapses, and the few properties that remain skyrocket in price.

Once landlords can’t make a profit, they sell, lose properties, or walk away. Eventually, the government takes over.

Taxes will rise to pay for the promises, and the middle class will be the ones shouldering the burden. The rich will relocate, the poor will depend on subsidies, and the productive class will be squeezed from both sides.

Thriving businesses are the foundation of any thriving city. When they leave, everything else follows, jobs, schools, grocery stores, stability. Chicago already proved this. Boeing, McDonald’s, Caterpillar, Citadel, nearly 70k jobs, all gone. Now they’re facing billion-dollar deficits, half empty schools and neighborhoods without grocery stores.

I saw someone who lived in a rent-controlled apartment in California put it perfectly, he said his landlord could no longer afford maintenance so the pool was filled with dirt, the floors had soft spots, and the foundation ended up cracking. That’s what overregulation does, it destroys quality.

People who voted for this will eventually feel the pain but they won’t blame the policies or the politicians, they’ll blame the rich for leaving.

This conversation is always difficult because most people simply don’t understand market dynamics or incentives. In a free society, people act in their own self-interest. If you remove profit and reward dependency, productivity dies and the city with it.

If you think things are expensive now, just wait until they’re “free.”

[millen | serial entrepreneur @millenrastogi]

@yuchen__wu pretty cool, would love to explore this further for my brands

[millen | serial entrepreneur @millenrastogi]

@BrianSchmidt9 @litcapital Less about red or blue more about values

[Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling]

If you make $300k+ moving numbers around spreadsheets and boxes around PowerPoint slides, you probably shouldn’t quit and buy a plumbing company