Raph Keene

Building @SovaraAI — agentic AI for global planning 🌍
Redefining how residency, citizenship & tax planning gets done faster & smarter

[Jay Yang @Jayyanginspires]

this is gold

[Camus @newstart_2024]

Weak men are not good men. Jordan Peterson said the quiet part.

He told John Stossel to raise men who are competent and dangerous. Not cruel. Capable. If you cannot hurt anyone, choosing not to is not a virtue. It is just weakness. Martial arts is the model. Learn the skill. Keep it sheathed.

His reading of the meek inheriting the earth is men with swords who know how to use them and do not. Strong first. Peaceful second. Harmless boys do not stay harmless. They get bitter.

Being good is hard. It takes strength.

[Raph Keene @raphkeene]

There is a truth to this

[Andrew Yeung @andruyeung]

YC and dropout culture have convinced us the ideal founder is 22, straight out of school, but the data tells a different story.

Some interesting data:

- An MIT study of 2.7 million US founders found that the average founder was 47 when starting a company that later exited through an acquisition or IPO.

- The same study cited that the founders of the fastest-growing 0.1% of U.S. startups were 45 years old on average when they started their companies.

- A 50-year-old founder was approximately twice as likely as a 30-year-old founder to produce an acquisition or IPO.

- Founders with at least three years of relevant industry experience were twice as likely to build a top-0.1%-growth company as founders with none.

So it seems that experience is one of the strongest advantages a founder can have.

Two lessons here:
1. It's never too late to start
2. It might actually be TOO early to start; getting work experience is worth considering

[IMI Daily @imidaily]

Warning to IQ 130+ ambitious young men:

One of the great ironies of life is that,

the kind of man that can reach his goals is the same that finds it hard to enjoy the fruits of his labor.

I already hit my major targets in life:

- children with a top-notch woman
- financial freedom
- work I enjoy
- first-rate friends
- excellent health
- a lovely home in a place I like
- travel the world in comfort

But the man I had to become to get those things, is one who

- constantly asks what’s next
- feels uncomfortable idling
- feels guilty when not productive

For 15 years I trained my prefrontal cortex to live in the future.

And while there is always room for growth, all my gains from here on out will be marginal.

My present is the future I was planning in the past.

Well, now I am here and I am STILL living in the future.

That’s a problem because, in the future, I will look back at today with nostalgia.

My children will move out, and I will age. Things will go wrong. I will lose people I can never get back.

The minor problems I have today will seem inconsequential in comparison.

And I would hate to reach that point and think I didn’t fully enjoy this period while I was actually living through it.

So learn how to recognize peak existence.

Sacrificing today for tomorrow only makes sense when your best days are still ahead of you.

If you’re living through your best days right now, you need to work on rewiring your brain for present-maxxing.

Easier said than done. Take it from me.

[Machiavelli Bot @UnmodernmanBot]

Keep your wins a secret, or downgrade them. Most people are extremely envious. They do not see the extent of your efforts only the rewards of it. They begin to think you have it easy, or you were lucky. They slowly begin to poison your head by letting their insecurity become the architect of your ambition; passing subtle remarks to break your psyche, branding your self-belief as arrogance, and asking you to be humble.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Alan Watts gives some of the most insightful thoughts on life.

[🎞️ grahamcweaver]

[David Senra @davidsenra]

“The best people in our company have some damage, some chip on their shoulder. There are individuals in our company that you can't compete with. They're not giving up. They have something to prove. They got something f*cked up in their childhood. There's one kid in our team, he's going to die before he fails. And those are the most powerful people who you want to organize around.”

@PeterRahal on recruiting people who have something to prove:

[Machiavelli Bot @UnmodernmanBot]

In game theory: Most people fail because they base their actions forwardly, "if I do this, I will get this" which is rarely a good decision and ignores the second and third-order consequences of your actions. The more practical way to base your decisions is Backward Induction: start at the end of the scenario, and reason backwards. Mastering backward induction will make you dangerous

[Robert Greene @RobertGreene]

Put yourself in situations where you have too much at stake to waste time or resources - if you cannot afford to lose, you won’t.

Place yourself on “death ground,” where your back is against the wall and you have to fight like hell to get out alive.

[John Ennis @johnennis]

In case you are having trouble figuring out what’s going on here is a summary:

Anthropic and OpenAI desperately need regulatory capture or they are going to go out of business, and the Trump administration is not inclined to give it to them

The Democratic party currently has no platform, as Trump is doing fine (other than perhaps the
Iran war but Americans don’t really care about that), but they have identified that AI and data centers are a hot topic that they can ride

So these two somewhat desperate groups have teamed up to run a psyop around the actual real topic of AI safety, greatly exaggerating the risks, with the understanding that if the Democrats get back into power they will provide the regulatory capture needed to keep these companies alive

In return, these companies will support the Democratic Party and help to enforce left-wing ideology through the models

Kind of sucks, but that’s what’s happening, and we need to oppose it because it will not be good if this plan succeeds

[signüll @signulll]

to build a cool product now, you really only need two ppl:

one dude with exceptional vision & taste who knows what should exist & can provide the right feedback loops for iteration.

& one dude who is absolutely relentless about making it real no matter what.

that’s it. & sometimes these two are the same.

[Pavol Lupták @wilderko]

It's terrifying, but practically every company that has contacted me in recent weeks has been offering to make us "compliant" with some new EU/state regulation:

1. One company contacted me asking whether we ship goods within the EU and whether we need help with the new PPWR "packaging" regulation.

2. Another company asked whether we already have an e-invoicing provider — and if not, we could do it through them.

3. Companies have been contacting me for years offering GDPR compliance.

4. Every now and then I get calls asking whether we provide mandatory "health care" for our employees.

5. Even though we ARE an IT security company, companies keep contacting me because of NIS2, asking whether we want an external security manager.

6. Consultants have already called asking whether we need ESG / CSRD reporting (sustainability reporting).

7. Last week yet another company reached out asking whether we need to update our "transfer pricing" documentation because of some changes in the law.

What do all these companies and their services have in common?

Their business is built on some state regulation. Outside the EU, nobody would voluntarily order their services. In the EU, you have to — because the law requires it.

In economic theory, this is called rent-seeking: entirely new business sectors created without producing any real value — the only "value" is being compliant with some state regulation.

They say the total tax burden in Slovakia is 64%. I'd argue it's substantially higher. EU companies have to pay for things that make no sense outside the EU and that nobody there would ever order without regulatory pressure.

In my view, half of the costs European companies bear are compliance costs for some European/state regulation. And then we wonder why we're not competitive with the rest of the world.

When you think about it, it's absolutely brutal.

Doing business in the EU is masochism.

https://t.co/YHuW8JcA8j

[Alex Becker 🍊🏆🥇 @ZssBecker]

Stop being a coward. Commit to the goals that scare you and bet heavily on yourself.

Every day you hesitate is another day of your short life wasted. All because you don't have faith in yourself to truly "do the thing".

Stop playing not to lose.... It'll be too late soon.

[Sharran Srivatsaa @sharran]

The older I get, the more I realize that poor people overthink small decisions and rush big ones. Rich people do the opposite.

[Attraction Matriarch @TheXMatriarch @TheXMatriarch]

A man becomes more trustworthy when he stops outsourcing every difficult choice. Your wife may have excellent judgment and valuable counsel, but she should not have to make every consequential decision because you are afraid of being wrong.

[Mastery Literature @MasteryQuot]

As your thinking grows more fluid your mind will become increasingly dimensional, seeing more and more aspects of reality.

[Carnivore Aurelius ©🥩 ☀️🦙 @AlpacaAurelius]

no negative self talk at all costs.

your subconscious is always listening, believes everything you tell yourself and will make it true

this is how the placebo effect works, it's how joe dispenza completely healed his spine with his mind, it's why when you tell yourself when you'll wake up before going to bed you do.

when negative self talk arises, stop feeding it. just tell your mind to STFU and move on.

this is the key to success, health and happiness.

[Cole Jaczko @colejaczko]

I think about this a lot.
"The important stuff is the stuff I didn't have time for....don't get stuck in a life that isn't yours."