ozza

[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

[Emma-Kate Symons @eksymons]

What about Farage paying tax on his £5M 'gift' from a foreign-based crypto billionaire who bankrolled his run for office+Reform UK (£9M 'gift'). Banana republic scale foreign influence+corruption recalls Marine Le Pen's €9M Kremlin loan ✏️@TheNewWorldmag https://t.co/9kVj4OaCsu

[Adam Hammer @adamhhammer]

Who sold their souls to host this garbage?

- Zero stadium parking at all & no tailgating
- $150 transit tickets to/from game
- Trains postgame skip Secaucus and go straight to NYC
- No outbound trains for all of NJ Transit for 4 hours (!!) from NYC before every MetLife game – 5 of which are on weekdays btw
- Cancellation of free, public fan zones

The fan zone on the Rio beach in 2014 was one of the best parts of my trip + Germany offered completely free train transport for the entirety of 2024 Euros.

Hot, hot garbage. Not a single person involved cares about making this accessible for the fans. Shame on you @FIFAWorldCup @NJGov @NJTRANSIT & literally every single person at every single level of US government who agreed to this trash.

[Ryan @ohryansbelt]

The New Yorker just dropped a massive investigation into Sam Altman, based on over 100 interviews, the previously undisclosed "Ilya Memos," and Dario Amodei's 200+ pages of private notes. It's the most detailed account yet of the pattern of behavior that led to Sam's firing and rapid reinstatement at OpenAI. Here's the breakdown:

> Ilya compiled ~70 pages of Slack messages, HR documents, and photos taken on personal phones to avoid detection on company devices. He sent them to board members as disappearing messages. The first memo begins with a list headed "Sam exhibits a consistent pattern of . . ." The first item is "Lying."

> Dario kept detailed private notes for years under the heading "My Experience with OpenAI" (subheading: "Private: Do Not Share"), totaling 200+ pages. His conclusion: "The problem with OpenAI is Sam himself."

> Sam reportedly told Mira his allies were "going all out" and "finding bad things" to damage her reputation after the firing. Thrive put its planned $86B investment on hold and implied it would only close if Sam returned, giving employees financial incentive to back him.

> Sam texted Satya Nadella directly to propose the new board composition: "bret, larry summers, adam as the board and me as ceo and then bret handles the investigation." The two new members selected to oversee an independent inquiry into Sam were chosen after close conversations with Sam himself.

> Before OpenAI, senior employees at Loopt asked the board to fire Sam as CEO on two separate occasions over concerns about leadership and transparency. At Y Combinator, partners complained to Paul Graham about Sam's behavior, and Graham privately told colleagues "Sam had been lying to us all the time."

> OpenAI's superalignment team was promised 20% of the company's compute. Four people who worked on or with the team said actual resources were 1-2%, mostly on the oldest cluster with the worst chips. The team was dissolved without completing its mission.

> Sam told the board that safety features in GPT-4 had been approved by a safety panel. Helen Toner requested documentation and found the most controversial features had not been approved. Sam also never mentioned to the board that Microsoft released an early ChatGPT version in India without completing a required safety review.

> Sam made a secret pact with Greg and Ilya where he agreed to resign if they both deemed it necessary, essentially appointing his own shadow board. The actual board was alarmed when they learned about it.

> Sam struck a deal with Greg to become CEO while simultaneously telling researchers that Greg's authority would be diminished, and telling Greg something different.

> A board member described Sam as having "two traits almost never seen in the same person: a strong desire to please people in any given interaction, and almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences of deceiving someone." Multiple sources independently used the word "sociopathic."

> OpenAI is reportedly preparing for an IPO at a potential $1 trillion valuation while securing government contracts spanning immigration enforcement, domestic surveillance, and autonomous weaponry in war zones.

[Steven Isserlis @StevenIsserlis]

Hans Christian Andersen (b otd 1805) - wonderful!
“The whole world is a series of miracles, but we're so used to them we call them ordinary things.”
“Enjoy life. There's plenty of time to be dead.”
“Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.”
“Where words fail, music speaks.”

[Baufinanciaphaster 👹 @bauhiniacapital]

@Ropespinner2 @jbsteinberg @florianederer Some future Dem pres acting like he/she is King/Queen of the World, might grift billions, pardon every leftwinger, deport every wealthy person with a foreign-sounding name and confiscate their wealth, gifting it to The Board of Democracy, whose lifetime chair is… Hunter Biden?

[Nicholas Shakespeare @dolphinsands]

I’m so sorry. Lobo Antunes was for my money the greatest novelist, better even than Saramago. He deserved the Nobel. (I’ve read An Explanation of the Birds seven times).

[Jacqueline Sweet @JSweetLI]

The woman killed by ICE today was a poet. She won the 2020 Academy of American Poets, University & College Poetry Prize at Old Dominion University. This was her bio:

"Renée Macklin is from Colorado Springs, Colorado and is studying Creative Writing at ODU. Her poetry has been published in Metrosphere and Coronado Literary Review, and she currently co-hosts a podcast with her husband, comedian Tim Macklin. When she is not writing, reading, or talking about writing, she has movie marathons and makes messy art with her daughter and two sons."

(People are posting the wrong woman's photo, the red lipstick photo is not her. This is Renee, from her social media accounts.)

[A.V. Marraccini @saintsoftness]

Part of the reason I stay on twitter despite the ad hominems from the cesspit of accounts like this one is to provide a real, informed, historical counterpoint to reactionary garbage about art history. I stay because I love my field and the humanities. They're not here for that.

[Jamie Richards @JamieRichards3]

What a positive start to the season with four wins in just two meetings! Congratulations to our connections and staff!

[Max Lawton @maxdaniellawton]

I know I’m not exactly unbiased here, but the depth of the @nyrbclassics catalog is astonishing. Here are four you likely haven’t read. BOMARZO just came out and is long. I’d especially recommend buying that one to help them recoup costs :) But all of these are total masterpieces

[Baufinanciaphaster 👹 @bauhiniacapital]

It is definitely the case that non-white people play a greater role in Sesame Street, NPR Tiny Desk concerts, and other content than they do in the community where pmarca grew up (or lives now).

It is definitely the case that news programs like Firing Line which hosted Mike

[Joseph @thethoughtofth1]

Midnight is Not in Everyone’s Reach is waking up my brain to the possibilities of form in the same way Krasznahorkai, Lispector, and Fosse did. In seamless translation from Elizabeth Lowe. António Lobo Antunes has joined the list of writers I’m focusing on this year.

[Dr. Bendor Grosvenor 🇺🇦 @arthistorynews]

What a loss. Heard him playing Schubert once, in a Swiss church. A properly sublime experience.

[Byron's Glowing Filament @OedipasKvass]

Thoughts on Pynchon and the LA Riots.

[goldenlabubuwatch @pandawatch88]

People really dont understand Bytedance/tiktok is +60% owned by US VC funds. The deadline extension is for their benefit, not for China.

US pensions, endowments, insurance etc are sitting on usd500bn of gains (assuming 5x LTM P/S valuation for Bytedance). Well deserved for risk taking.

The total disaster move here, which I haven't seen mentioned yet, is not Trump talking bs about nationalizing Tiktok, but China talking about nationalizing Bytedance, which turns that usd500bn into zero.

Political pundits get the leverage on this negotiation completely wrong (unless they are going bigbrain by incorporating 2nd 3rd order consequences of the moves above, which I doubt).

[Sixth Tone @SixthTone]

Shenzhen Library’s new North Branch is turning heads with its futuristic underground book vault.

[tae kim @firstadopter]

CoreWeave literally told you at IPO that demand was incredible. The bears just decided to ignore it.

[gena ?! @kytalli]

Wahhhh I am on the news… thank you @teo_kai_xiang for writing this :D twitter ODDBALL COALITION PARTY!!!!!!!!

https://t.co/9yQUeKBaMA