Philip Eliot

VC since 2000 (FBR Technology Venture Partners, Paladin Capital, Rock Health Capital). Trying to make the world a better place.

[Tweets from Zach Weinberg @zachweinberg]

People want free stuff but don't want to pay for it (and generally don't understand the math of how much it costs).

This has been true forever.

[Rep. Don Beyer @RepDonBeyer]

Extending ACA tax credits for a year would’ve cost $23 billion, but Trump and Republicans allowed those credits to expire. Nearly 3 million Americans have lost their health coverage since.

This reckless war has already cost more than $38 billion.

We can make different choices.

[Robert E Kelly @Robert_E_Kelly]

This is what happens when you’re so accustomed to the benefits of modernity - sanitation, clean food & water, low infant mortality - that you forget where it all came from, how much effort it took to build, & how bad things were before. This is the literal definition of decadence

[Jessica Riedl 🧀 🇺🇦 @JessicaBRiedl]

Reminds me of my favorite half-serious proposal. Each district should hold separate elections for two different legislatures:

Congress 1: This body never meets & passes no bills. But members get to move to DC, have a staff, and call themselves "Congressman" while just going on TV, tweeting, doing photo ops, and giving fiery speeches to their echo chambers.

Congress 2: Actually convenes, debates policies, and builds coalitions to pass legislation addressing the most pressing policy challenges. It keeps voters informed without all the bombastic media stunts.

So much of our current Congress would be perfect for Congress 1, where they can play the social influencer, political pundit, and WWE-villain roles they seem to prefer.

Meanwhile I'll work with Congress 2 to do the "boring" work of trying to solve budget deficits, Social Security solvency, immigration, health care, global security, energy, etc.

[Axios @axios]

China is secretly fueling America's data center rage https://t.co/ajqbBpsA5w

[Yuri Sagalov @yuris]

Founders often think that raising more money gives them more optionally, but counterintuitively in practice the inverse is often true.

The reason is that money has a way of getting spent no matter how much you raise, and spending more is often uncorrelated with achieving your next milestone.

So the only thing that happens is that 18 months in you have a similar amount of progress to show regardless of how much you’ve raised, but if you raised a lot you’ve taken some paths off the table (bridge rounds, smaller Series As, etc).

[Jessica Riedl 🧀 🇺🇦 @JessicaBRiedl]

Anatomy of a panic:
1) Small group of fact-challenged activists freak out over relatively harmless thing.
2) Everyone else sees them panicking, assumes it must be bad (but not sure why).
3) Politicians baffled by grassroots rebellion, but happy to jump on board in election year.

[litquidity @litcapital]

The irony of using a data center to generate this image and post it on X is outstanding

[nxthompson @nxthompson]

This is an amazing quote from Lindsey Graham about when he realized how politics works. https://t.co/sh04ahQOFq

[Patrick McKenzie @patio11]

The decision to not just forward “sort by amount received” to the fraud department is, always and everywhere, a policy choice.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

If you want to start a startup, don't learn "entrepreneurship." Learn how to build things. The hard part of startups is not "entrepreneurship" but product: to know what to build, and to be able to build it.

[JamesFennell MBE @FennellJW]

The last match up this big between England and Norway was at Stamford Bridge... in 1066...

We won that one, but lost to France in the final. 960 years of hurt..

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

We are probably just seeing the tip of an iceberg. This is the predictable result of the mainstreaming of unlimited sports betting. More rigging - where insiders profit and outsiders are suckers.

[Charlie Savage @charlie_savage]

In the real world, DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel said the WPR 60 day clock provision (the part at issue) *is* constitutional both times it is known to have analyzed it - 1980 & 1993. No president has ever said it applied to a situation but defied it on a constitutional theory.

[Jessica Riedl 🧀 🇺🇦 @JessicaBRiedl]

MAGA may be surprised when all those immigrants are gone and:
- Social Security is still going insolvent,
- Welfare spending & home prices are still rising,
- Crime still exists, and
- Democratic vote totals don't crater,
Because none of those were actually driven by immigrants.

[Jacob Perry @RealJacobPerry]

Genuinely one of the best and most terrifying things I've ever read. More genius from the great @mckaycoppins (with an unexpected @RadioFreeTom cameo)

https://t.co/DSz0kr2jKf

[Michael J.J. Tiffany @kubla]

This is engagement bait *art*. The pattern is:

Personal injustice → hidden villain → insider reveal → actionable protocol

Best techniques:

1. A cold open hook with numbers ("$483 → $547") and a weird claim ("WITHOUT a single seat selling")

2. Fairness outrage ("Guy next to me paid $391")

3. A simple villain ("The algorithm saw me come back...")

4. A quest to go behind the curtain ("I tracked down someone who built it") 🙄 Yeah right, sure you did

4.5 "Someone who actually built pricing algorithms for a European carrier" is a great borrowed authority technique without falsifiable specificity, btw, bravo

5. Contrarian debunk ("VPN is 2015 advice")

6. Actionable protocol (bonus for literally calling it "the protocol he gave me" that's very 2026)

7. Cheat codes with specific constraints ("Go dark for 72 hours" "1-5am")

8. Conspiracy exposé ("Not a bug. It’s the business model") elevates an annoyance into a worldview and makes sharing feel like warning others of an important danger

9. Aphorism that begs to be quoted in a screenshot or QT ("The seat doesn’t have a price. You have a price.")

10. Staccato tempo ("checked… checked… next morning… panicked…"), micro-paragraphs, scroll-friendly and easy to skim...

Honestly his completely made-up story and fake protocol is more mobile-friendly and emotionally punchy than this post of mine dissecting it

But I'd like to live in a world where antidotes circulate as widely as viruses

[Philip Eliot @philipeliot]

@kubla @nikitabier and underestimates the rates of ‘anomalous’ behavior in humans. There is no ‘normal human use’. Not just in bot detection but more broadly across network and enterprise security, lots of companies have learned this the hard way.

[The Bulwark @BulwarkOnline]

"You now live in a country where volunteers deliver babies at home, in secret, off the books, because mothers fear that if they go to the hospital, they will be abducted by masked, armed agents of the state while giving birth. This is not a hypothetical."
https://t.co/8VFgjIrq8H

[Harvard Men's Lacrosse @HarvardMLax]

Never count out the Crimson 🔥

A look back at our historic win over No. 1 Syracuse 📽️⤵️

#HLX1881 // #UndefeatedExperience