Sam Chandler

Now: Investing at Laneway Ventures. Was: Founder & CEO of @nitrohq. Led to IPO & A$561 million acquisition. Former EY Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year.

[Sam Chandler @nitro_sam]

September 2008.

My Nitro co-founders and I boarded a JetBlue flight from SFO to Boston absolutely pumped. We were heading to pitch OpenView for our Series A.

JetBlue had live TV. During the flight we watched the Dow fall 777 points (largest one day decline in history).

We landed and walked into what was probably the most somber VC meeting of my life.

Incredibly, a term sheet arrived the following week.

Unfortunately, the valuation had apparently fallen 777 points too.

We passed, and stayed bootstrapped for several more years. A good decision in hindsight.

Funny how these things work out.

[Matthew Prince 🌥 @eastdakota]

Two of our worst VC stories:

1. A Sequoia partner passed on Cloudflare because he didn’t think a woman could lead a security infrastructure company. Seriously. 🙄

2. I got introduced to @pmarca. Meeting got scheduled for a Monday, which should have been a clue. I thought it was just a casual meeting. He thought it was a pitch and brought the whole @a16z partnership team. Hilarity ensued. 🤪 At one point one of them said: “You don’t seem very prepared.” Which was true because I wasn’t. I framed the rejection letter they sent.

[Sam Chandler @nitro_sam]

Is there even one police force in the UK that’s fit for service?

[Will Kingston @WillKingston]

I’m stunned. The Sunday Times is reporting Hampshire police wanted to portray Henry Nowak as the aggressor in an official statement three days after his death, but changed their wording following outrage from his family.

I’ll be covering this shocking and contemptible revelation from the hosting chair on The Late Show Live. @GBNEWS 12am.

[Sam Chandler @nitro_sam]

Incredible

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

this is just the most ridiculous AI application i've ever seen lol

a Peter Thiel-backed startup that makes AI collars for cows is now worth $2 billion

and the more I read about it the cooler it gets. here's how it works:

every cow wears a solar-powered collar that talks to a network of radio towers and an app on the farmer's phone

instead of building physical fences, the farmer draws the fence on a map in the app, and the collar keeps each cow inside that invisible line using GPS

when a cow drifts toward the edge, the collar plays a sound to steer her, and a gentle vibration tells her which way to go.

it's like how a car beeps as you back up toward a wall

the cows learn the cues in a few days

so now a rancher can move an entire herd to fresh grass by sliding the fence on a map, without driving out to open a single gate

and that same collar is reading each cow's body the whole time.

it takes five readings per second on every animal, so the AI can catch a cow that's sick, injured, ready to breed, or about to give birth before a person would ever notice walking the field

so it's basically like WHOOP for cows too lol

and they gave the AI behind it the perfect name: the Cowgorithm

it's been trained on more than 7 billion hours of real cow behavior, which is why Halter calls the data its real asset and moat.

they know what a normal cow looks like better than anyone, so they can flag the odd one out instantly

it's already on more than 1M cattle across New Zealand, Australia, and a bunch of US states.

California even used it on public land to graze cattle in patterns that clear dry brush and slow down wildfires

costs about $5 to $8 per cow per month

a job that used to mean barbed wire, gates, and driving the fields all day is now mostly 1 person on their phone

[Sam Chandler @nitro_sam]

Amazing. But if they were genuinely committed to transparency they would also show the post-tax amount (about €10)

[Matthias Schmidt @eurofounder]

Only the EU can unironically present €2,000 pre-tax as competitive salary

[Marko Matvikov @MarkoMatvikov]

Australia’s tobacco policy is producing remarkable outcomes:

• Less legal smoking

• More illicit smoking

• More nicotine consumption overall

• Billions less in government revenue

• Billions more for organised crime

• Higher enforcement costs

An estimated $10 billion per year in lost tax revenue - roughly the annual ‘cost’ of negative gearing or the capital gains tax discount.

Investors 👎

Business owners 👎

Taxpayers 👎

Organised crime 👍

[Rational Aussie @rationalaussie]

The highest house prices in the world, the highest immigration rates in the developed world, the most retarded population in the world apparently (NDIS), and now the highest capital gains tax on Earth.

'The lucky country'

Run by communist despots.

[Sam Chandler @nitro_sam]

Wow. The fastest societal decay in history, surely. We must reverse these trends if we want a bright future for the west

[Kyla Scanlon @kylascan]

One of the most important things to understand about the moment we are living in

[Matt Barrie @matt_barrie]

You can’t make this stuff up

[Sam Chandler @nitro_sam]

Great take

[Daniel Priestley @DanielPriestley]

Under capitalism, socialists are free to build socialism.

Under socialism, capitalists aren’t free to build anything.

Nothing stops a group of socialists pooling their money, forming a company, and splitting every wage and every pound of profit perfectly equally.... Or to donate all profit to the government.

It’s legal. It’s easy. Owning the means of production is as simple as setting up a company.

Marx wrote his manifesto before the invention of limited liability companies. Back then “seize the factory” meant seizing it from the handful of families who could afford one.

That argument expired the day anyone could start a company with limited liability, raise investment and hire who they want.

Socialists are free to lead by example and demonstrate their system works. They can out-recruit, out-motivate, out-build and out innovate based on their ideas if they like. It would prove the philosophy works. Capitalism will happily host their experiment.

The fact that nobody does this tells you a lot.

[Matt Barrie @matt_barrie]

An economist can write a good paper from this on the Laffer curve, how governments create black markets and the repercussions in funding criminal enterprise.

[Milton Friedman Quotes @MiltonFriedmanW]

Milton Friedman: “Keep your eye on one thing and one thing only: how much government is spending, because that’s the true tax.”

“If you’re not paying for it in the form of explicit taxes, you’re paying for it indirectly in the form of inflation or borrowing.”

[Laurent @scion_x_]

Ça fait un moment que je me pose des questions sur le bilan (provisoire) de Milei en Argentine. On lit tout et son contraire. Alors j'ai arrêté de lire les commentaires et j'ai regardé les chiffres bruts.

L'Argentine, c'est l'expérience grandeur nature que les économistes attendaient depuis 50 ans. Même pays. Même peuple. Même culture. On change UNE variable : la méthode économique.

Avant : des décennies de gestion étatiste et péroniste, "redistributive". Le résultat concret ? 211% d'inflation, 42% de pauvreté, un État en déficit permanent qui finance son train de vie en faisant tourner la planche à billets.

Puis arrive Milei. Méthode inverse, brutale, assumée : on coupe, on déréglemente, on arrête d'imprimer.

Deux ans plus tard (photo à son arrivée (fin 2023) vs aujourd'hui) :

Inflation annuelle : 211% → 31%
Inflation mensuelle : 25% → ~2%
Déficit public : −5% du PIB → +1,8% (excédent)
Croissance : −1,6% → +4,4%
Pauvreté : 42% → 28%

Sans débat. Jugez par vous-mêmes.

Et le point essentiel : ces gains ne vont pas "aux riches" ou "aux marchés". Ils vont d'abord aux plus pauvres.

L'inflation est l'impôt le plus injuste qui existe — elle frappe ceux qui n'ont aucun actif pour se protéger. La diviser par 7, c'est rendre du pouvoir d'achat à ceux d'en bas. Et 14 points de pauvreté en moins, ce sont des millions de gens, pas une ligne Excel.

Pendant un siècle, on a expliqué aux Argentins que l'État les protégerait en dépensant toujours plus. Résultat : un des pays les plus riches du monde en 1910, ruiné. On vient d'inverser la méthode. Regardez le résultat.

À un moment, il faut accepter ce que les faits racontent : sur le terrain économique, la méthode libérale a livré en deux ans ce que des décennies de socialisme avaient promis sans jamais tenir. Et ça profite d'abord aux plus modestes.

On peut détester le style de Milei — la tronçonneuse, l'outrance, les sorties improbables, il n'a rien d'un homme d'État classique. Mais on ne juge pas une politique économique au style de celui qui la mène. On la juge à ce qu'elle fait à la vie des gens.

Et les chiffres ont parlé.

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

On every metric, American kids are so much dumber than they were 5 years ago and we are grade inflating away the reality.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Sure you can earn a billion dollars. I've been teaching people how to do it for 20 years. The way you do it is to start a company that grows fast. You don't have to do anything bad to make a company grow fast. You just have to make something people want.

https://t.co/zXWErQqlwV

[Sam Chandler @nitro_sam]

Some of the early stories coming out of this program were terrifying and it has only gotten worse. Hard to believe such incredible stories are true, even though they are

[pagliacci the hated 🌝 @Slatzism]

A Canadian doctor met a mentally ill guy with bowel problems at a Tim Hortons, told him the best treatment option for him was to die, and then drove him to the hospital to be euthanized.

Not even memes can capture the level of retardation Canada has achieved in real life

[Dave Sharma @DaveSharma]

The interest on 🇦🇺 government debt is now higher than Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain

+ the entire G7.

Why? Out-of-control government spending and inflation.

🇦🇺 4.91%

🇵🇹 3.3%
🇮🇹 3.7%
🇬🇷 3.6%
🇪🇸 3.4%

🇺🇸 4.5%
🇬🇧 4.9%
🇫🇷 3.6%
🇩🇪 2.95%
🇨🇦 3.5%
🇯🇵 2.7%

(10yr T-bond yield)

[Sam Chandler @nitro_sam]

Bring it on ♥️🚀

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Ultimately the golden age of abundance will be this kind of tech built and deployed 1000x

[Sam Chandler @nitro_sam]

We live in incredible times

[David Sinclair @davidasinclair]

One shot and you’re protected from heart disease. Imagine that for cancer, dementia and aging

[Andrew Bogut @andrewbogut]

Case in point why raising taxes in Australia achieves nothing.

$ 28million to $ 122 million.

The wastage in Australia is beyond comprehension

[Federico Martelli @fel1de]

1 in 4 packaging machines on Earth was made in one small Italian valley

China is racing to steal it

But every cigarette pack, pill blister, and milk carton probably came from a machine built here

Here's the 100-year story of the secret packaging valley: