Benjamin Ling
@bling0
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Founder and GP at @blingcapital, GP @khoslaventures, Fitness junkie, formerly @YouTube @Google @Facebook
Miami Beach, FL
Joined April 2008
Crime is the primary reason we are leaving SF. My brother was randomly assaulted in the middle of the street, one of our founders was mugged on Market. As of 2021, I avoid walking SF streets when possible, and warn friends to be hyper vigilant when doing so.
Anecdotally, every single one of my friends right now is considering leaving SF (and frankly, myself included). The biggest driver is no longer cost of living. It's crime. My friends are scared for their children, and their husbands are scared for their wives. .
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It is crazy to me how the āleftā is so out of touch with reality to alienate so many lifetime Dem voters in just one election cycle. Good riddance to identity politics, socialism/communism, making excuses for criminals (see prop 36), woke policies, anti-USA sentiment.
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2007: āFacebook is evil and a walled garden. It must share user info and the graph with other developers!ā ā said every critic. 2018: āFacebook is evil and shared all of your information with other developers (with your consent)!ā ā said the same critics.
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This guy has the *audacity* to put a āChinese nameā in his Twitter bio to pander to Asians, but does nothing to protect our elderly #recallChesa
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Some personal news: . Excited to announce that Bling Capital has moved headquarters to Miami! . We will still be pursuing the same investment areas and investing across the US. Iām excited to start this new chapter and to see you all in Miami! š“š.
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Excited to announce Bling Capital Fund II ($113M) to help entrepreneurs find product market fit! ccĀ @blingcapital.
Ben Ling's Bling Capital just rounded up $113 million more from investors by @cookie.
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Moved to Miami š“~30 days ago. Observations:. 1) weather 70-80 F daily āļø. 2) *0* incidents observed of š«.- broken car windows / glass š.- human excrement in streets š©.- drug addicts / needles in streets š. 3) Walgreens stocked, customers pay for their items ā¼ļø.
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SF flunks what I call the "mom test". Walking with one's kid on street, even as a tourist, one shouldn't have to explain:. - why entire row of car windows are broken.- why so many people injecting drugs w/ needles .- why so many homeless tents .- why human feces on the street.
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Uber and @lyft need to fix a platform incentive problem: in rush hour, some drivers purposefully drive away from a pickup point, do not answer repeated phone calls, and hope that a passenger cancels to pocket the $5 cancelation fee. Worst user experience with no recourse.
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ROAS: can we agree to stop using this useless vanity metric (~as useless as āregistered usersā)?. Who cares if you have 5x ROAS if margin is 3%? Spent $1, got $1*5*3% = $.15. Should be looking at .MOAS: margin on ad spend eg margin returned per ad $ spent, + subsequent txn margin.
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Apologists and SF officials keep (wrongly) arguing crime is down in SF . And that those claiming crime is up are ānot interpreting the data correctlyā . So I ran the query for the most recent period (4/1 to today). Guess what the data says?. Drumroll. Crime is up by 15%. 1/x.
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My car was broken into 3x in a year. Reporting crime required I go in person to SFPD. I was warned that "nothing could be done about it" even though on one of the incidents we had a video of the crime happening. So I didn't report it. Crime is not down. Reporting is down.
Crime in San Francisco is not down. Crime reporting in San Francisco is down.
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Today I got an MRI done. Coincidentally I asked what the out of pocket cost of the same MRI would be without insurance. Out of pocket cost (co-pay w/ insurance): .$733. Out of pocket cost (no insurance): .$350. So a patient pays 2x out of pocket w insurance!. Is this normal?.
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SF companies during COVID19: .āWFHā. Gym at 5 pm: .Packed. Like New Years week packed. Not sure āsocial distancingā is working as intended.
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1/2 . Car broken into again today in SF. This is ā¦@LondonBreedā© and ā¦ā¦@chesaboudinā© ās San Francisco.
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@bencasnocha @rsg Here is a shortlist of places:.- Palo Alto.- Manhattan.- London.- Taipei.- Bangkok.- Boston.- Tokyo.- Dallas.- Miami.- Honolulu.- San Francisco, until ~2020.- and *every other* "first world" city in the world I've been to.
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My talk to 700+ Silicon Valley interns on Top 20 "Things you know now that you wish you knew at age 20" http://t.co/34MSI2lws7.
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Thank you regulators for legislation that now requires me and millions of users to click on āAccept cookiesā or āno thanksā on every single page I ever visit! . Massive consumer value added. NB: for non-native English speakers (I am one myself), this is *sarcasm*.
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@anothercohen While I am a Florida resident, I must say HEB is excellent and perhaps much better.
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Honored to be part of the 2024 Forbes Midas Seed List. Thanks to the @blingcapital team and the Bling Capital Product Council, our LPs, and also our CEOs for the opportunity! ā„ļø.
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"I am humbled" is probably the worst way to say "I am proud.". There are moments in life where you deserve to be proud (of yourself, your team, your family), and your friends and supporters will be proud (not humbled) of you.
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This clown š¤” actively spread misinformation to create panic / a run on FRB for personal gain (is short FRB / tweeted it / then deleted) . Now he has removed his firm Alpine Fox from his twitter bio, deleted his LinkedIn profile. Why hide now? . Who are this guyās LPs?.
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āCrime is decreasing in SFā. SF officials have found a brilliant way to cook the books and cheat the stats. How? . Drop the charges. Donāt log the crime, or log it as something else entirely. No record, no crime!.
Iām super mad about violent charges being dropped in @cyantistās home invasion case. This DA violates victims rights and then spends massive government resources on misinformation campaigns and discrediting his political enemies instead of doing his job. Itās truly ridiculous.
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This headline is backward. It should read: āAndroid allows all apps (including Facebook) to scrape call and text messages from its phones.ā
Facebook scraped call, text message data for years from Android phones
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This is from the President of the SF Unified School District, who has lived in SF for a mere 5 years:. āGo back to where you came from!ā.
@IDoTheThinking Iām like, then leave.
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I have frequently cited Christianity as one of the best and most durable business models in all history, e.g. - organic viral growth: existing members recruit and birth new ones.- high LTV through tithing.- members self-organize to engage and retain fellow members.
400 year overnight success.
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Bad news: .This has been going on for decades (this was the norm for my classmates in high school who had higher GPAs and better test scores and extracurricular etc) . Good news: .You do not need to go to Harvard (or, any Ivy or even uni for some) to be highly successful in life.
His GPA score is 97.3%, SAT score is 1560, enrolled in a top high school, does tons of extracurricular work. He was rejected by multiple colleges. They call this equity and inclusion.
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The team that built YC's Demo Day website deserves a raise. It is probably the most intuitive, fast, user-friendly product I've used in the last year.
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This is why āCrime is downā in SF. If you canāt acknowledge this, you are actively lying to yourself (and likely others).
People who are the victim of multiple crimes stop reporting it. If they have the means, they eventually fix the problem on their own by leaving SF. I only reported the first of several car break-ins and home robbery attempts we experienced. Leaving SF was the only solution.
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This says every bit as much about the state of journalism and fact checking as it does about the founder.
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It's no secret that I am long Google and remain a fan of the company and the people there. But this is WRONG . No, it is not reasonable to delete users' reviews when they have a legitimate complaint against the app that hosed them.
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File under: . Last year, 218 firms each paid Inc $1K to be on a pay to play list of āfounder friendly fundsā. Fellow VCs: we should earn our reputations from our actions : support for founders, and endorsements should come from founders. Not a pub preying on new VCs and founders
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Not a knock on the product or audience either. But if youāre spending hours a day on Clubhouse, youāre not a VC focused on returns (youāre a wanna be social media celebrity).
Not a knock on the product or audience but if youāre spending hours a day on Clubhouse, youāre not an operator (youāre a VC).
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Always carefully analyze the actions of those who have asymmetric information.
WeWork CEO Adam Neumann has reportedly cashed out of over $700 million ahead of its IPO by @jshieber
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āCrime is down folks, donāt let the fake news media convince you otherwiseā.
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Thrilled that my longtime friend and colleague @kylelui is joining @blingcapital as our second General Partner!.
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Very excited for @parkerconrad and the entire @Rippling team!. New $200M primary round at $13.4B valuation led by @coatuemgmt .
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How ironic. Over a decade ago, the Facebook Platform team was ādirectedā to shut down the #1 app (built by Slide) to āteach them a lessonā on violating platform policies.
New: Apple says it is banning Facebookās research app that collects usersā personal information in exchange for money. It called FB's app "a clear breach of their agreement" with Apple. FB said last night it was removing the app.
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Thanks to all the @blingcapital founders and @DannyCrichton for the mention! ā¤ļø.
Data from The TechCrunch List shows the 11 VCs who founders love the most by @dannycrichton.
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This is the lot next to what is relatively ācity centerā . It is 0.2-0.6 miles away from the headquarters of Stripe, Pinterest, Airbnb, and Zynga.
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#carjacking. We arrived back to SF from the airport at 11:18 pm PT and found what appeared to be an illegally parked vehicle in the cul de sac (which we will soon discover is not parked at all) . 1/n
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FB in 2007: sheep throwing and super poke are spamming newsfeed and need to stop! <bans Slide>š
. FB in 2016: fake news? Not my problem. š.
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One of our port CEOs just told me he received an offer from [large growth fund] at $2B. I asked him what he wanted to do. He then laughed and said āApril Foolās!!ā. The craziest part of this story: these offers are actually happening in the market weekly if not daily!.
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And to the many commenters: . This doesnāt even include the crimes that arenāt being reported because residents gave up reporting for lack of enforcement . cc: @LondonBreed . 7/x.
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Handshakes: eliminate this useless tradition. For last decade, ppl ridiculed me for not shaking. If you meet new ppl all day, just 1 ill person makes you a super disease spreader. No VC washes hands after every mtg. Today, ppl thank me if I donāt shake. Letās make this permanent.
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In other newsā¦. Water is wet.
Ex-Googlers Discover That Startups Are Hard.
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@Scott_Wiener Scott this is a bad look. Nobody should be attacked in that manner. If you went to speak at an ultra conservative school, you should not be attacked because your views differ.
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Every time I see videos of seniors being attacked, it makes my blood boil. One attack is too many. WTF is wrong with SF.
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US children of the 80s/90s:. Do you remember watching the Olympics as a child, having an enormous sense of US pride? The medal counts, "proud to be an American", all of that?. Does this still exist today? . Or did this never really exist at large scale, just in my little head?.
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The sleaze on this guy is easy to read from a mile away.
Strange that Gavin Newsom, who slept with his campaign managerās wife would have an opinion about Donald Trumpās sex lifeā¦
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āWhen I said 3x in 1 year, I meant venture returns, not number of times my car should be broken into in SF!ā
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Iāve worked with hundreds if not thousands of them throughout my career and they are among the most talented people I have ever worked with, and precisely zero were DEI hires . True excellence is not confined to āwhiteā it comes in all colors and from all nations.
Do you want to know how unskilled these āskilled tech workersā actually are?. Ask anyone whoās actually worked with them. Their degrees are often totally fraudulent. Their programming capabilities are abysmal. And their attitudes are even worse. Itās one big scam.
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This doesnāt even include the fact that population of SF decreased during same period. Which means crime per capita is up by *more* than 15% . 5/x.
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So to all those arguing āyour anecdotes arenāt dataā. Here is your data. Crime in SF is not down. It is up by 15%+. 6/x.
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šÆ re angel investing. For the first 10-20 investments you should be willing to lose it all and treat as learning opportunity or as opportunity to support other entrepreneurs. Still, you likely will not know how you fare until 7+ years later.
@sachinrekhi @sarthakgh @dunkhippo33 I tell my friends who are thinking about it to only put money in that they know they can set fire to without feeling it. Assume you will lose it all. If it will hurt, donāt do it at all.
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And like clockwork.
But local officials and academics who donāt live here reliably inform me crime is down. Donāt believe your lying eyes, people.
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I used Tesla's "Full Self-Driving" in the Model 3 from Miami Beach to Kendall, and back. About 70 minutes total driving. Overall, probably a "B" but there is a clear path to "A". Four observations:.
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@cyantist @cindygallop To add to what you wrote: Instagram was the gateway drug that got people comfortable posting unclothed pictures of themselves en masse, and Snapchat in private . Self promotion became mainstream vs frowned upon āattention seekingā.
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Dear founders,. If you're doing a final pitch with a GP who is a key decision maker at the firm whose money you are seriously considering taking, please book at least 45 min, 60 min preferred. I don't know who is advising you to schedule for 30 min, that's just not enough time.
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Well done @google "the practice of sport is a human right" -- Olympic Charter http://t.co/mrFToqWfr9.
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The fact that this headline could even be published tells you a lot about how systemic the problem is at this organization, along with its crazy implicit biases. Even @Reuters is whitewashing hate crimes for the general populace.
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Crime is the primary reason we left SF. We moved to Miami two years ago where residents do not complain of crime or feel unsafe walking on the streets. In the two years, it seems SF has only gotten worse.
Crime is the primary reason we are leaving SF. My brother was randomly assaulted in the middle of the street, one of our founders was mugged on Market. As of 2021, I avoid walking SF streets when possible, and warn friends to be hyper vigilant when doing so.
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The problem is that it actually turns out to be a benefit to those ex employees, cuz itās possible Rippling will be $100B+ company. Delayed gratification often has massive benefits.
I don't think this is that controversial. If you switch teams and go work for a competitor, you don't get access to special team benefits like tender offers anymore
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Taxes and grift are SF activists answer to everything, which only causes more problems. And more taxes. And grift. Rooting for @garrytan and others to get rid of all of the nonsense.
Muni is badly strapped for cash, but these SF activists have a solution: tax Uber, Lyft and Waymo to pay for it.
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Itās because work-life balance for entrepreneurs is largely a myth, and itās not PC to admit that . If you move twice or three times in a game of chess every time your opponent moves once, even novices stand a high chance of beating the highly skilled.
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@stan_okl @tuliphypomania Far fewer tents, an order of magnitude fewer drug users, far less broken glass everywhere. Little to no visible shoplifting and flagrant disregard for the law. Far more āordinary pedestriansā and open storefronts. Everyone who tells you differently is gaslighting.
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The good news for Biden is that he still works more hours than most VCs.
NEW: Biden is "dependably engaged" between the hours of 10am & 4pm according to his aides who say Biden struggled because the debate was so late (9pm). Sounds like the next debate will need to be at the prime time of Noon ET. White House aides are coming forward to assure the
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1/ In venture capital, it is often said: . "the best companies are cults".
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Cannot repeat this enough. Implications downstream are harsh.
Founder real talk:. If you're raising a $5M seed on an overpriced SAFE from a multi-stage firm, you're an option call. You may think "Oh yay they trust us so much and don't need any governance. We rock.". When in actuality the multi-stage partner is thinking "This is a cool team.
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Katherine, this is good callout on a totally separate issue . The US is overmedicating kids for no real reason. I too had what is now called ADD. But itās absolutely helped me succeed. I cannot fathom drugging young kids en masse, seems totally wrong.
āThese days theyād probably say I had ADDā¦Iād say I just had boy disorder.ā -@PalmerLuckey . This is a funny anecdote about a serious issue. Palmerās mother homeschooled him not because the system thought him a genius. But because the system would have called him weird. This
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I do not agree with Bernie on many/most things, but I believe he is correct on this point.
Some people ask: Why would you impeach and convict a president who has only a few days left in office? The answer: Precedent. It must be made clear that no president, now or in the future, can lead an insurrection against the U.S. government.
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SF officials keep publishing āvanity metricsā that any local will tell you are misleading at best and lies at worst. āCrime is downā. āCar breakins are downā. It is so useless to report crime in SF that locals have given up. SF is on fire and the officials are in utter denial.
Retweet if youāve had your car broken into in San Francisco and didnāt bother reporting it to the police.
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Why do SF officials keep making excuses and ignoring the law-abiding, tax-paying residents who play their part in civic responsibility and instead prioritizing those that do not? . @LondonBreed.
@bling0 Like, Iāve gotten punched in the face by a drunk homeless personā¦ so why would I let my baby girl near that ish. Itās not political, it just is what it is.
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NYC vs SF. NYCās approach to Covid with proof of vaccine for indoors -> .efficient and practical . SFās approach to Covid requiring masks indoors ->.performance art at its best. Typical SF virtue signaling with no real benefits.
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When one says: "Person X on my team is the best eng I've ever met" -- usually has unintended *opposite* effect, esp when one is v early in career vs. if say, s/he has run engineering orgs of 1000s of people. TLDR: Avoid this in pitches (unless you're closer to the latter).
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An important lesson to be learned for all. Spending $50M to get $10M in revenue usually results in disaster . Notable exceptions: high PMF products with insane engagement and massive user bases that monetize much later (e.g. Facebook, YouTube).
A co in our space doubled ARR last yr (~$20-$40M) but they burned ~$100M to do that in a misguided attempt to drive growth for a fundraise or exit. Now they are being shopped for a fire sale. There is no substitute for building a business that *actually* works.
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Parkerās unique combination of brilliance, underdog tenacity, and swing for the fences ambition make it a no brainer to back him again. Congrats @parkerconrad and @ripplingapp on the latest milestone
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Congrats to @parkerconrad and the entire @Rippling team on raising $145M in Series B funding!
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Excited for ā¦@MoawiaEldeebā© and the Tempo team!. SoftBank Leads $220 Million Funding for AI Home Gym Maker Tempo - Bloomberg
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Ok I never thought myself a big @taylorswift13 fan but kudos to her for calling out @KimKardashian 's bullying and trashy behavior. #ThanKyouaIMee.
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ā
Exciting news from @viseinc - we closed a $65M Series C at a $1B+ Valuation. This funding will allow us to make even bigger investments faster. We plan to accelerate investments in our platform, hiring new talent + the rollout of new features. š.
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Pay attention especially to those that have experienced 2001 AND 2008.
If someone older than you with business experience is giving you advice on navigating tough times please listen & donāt argue. Good judgement comes from experience that comes from bad judgment. They used to have the same perspective you do. Thatās why they are trying to help.
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This thread from Justin is šÆ. Also re #3, there is absolutely nothing wrong with running a non-āventureā co (as one example, a co that makes $5-30M in profits yearly, but tops out there). One would be foolish to believe that āventureā is the sole route to be successful.
1/ Feeling like you deserve money and that it is unjust that you arenāt getting it is a very common sentiment among founders . But no business *deserves* to be funded. If you canāt convince investors to give you $, something is wrong with the following: market, metrics, narrative.
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In 2008, Sheryl mandated the #1 app (built by Slide) be shut down and subject to 3rd party audit of its code to verify compliance with FB Platformās ToS before allowing Slide to return. Shouldnāt FB be subject to its own prescribed heavy-handed remedies for violating Appleās ToS?.
Sheryl Sandberg defends Facebook data-collecting app: Users 'knew they were involved and consented'
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MO, she should be able to win without lying but her persistent lying tells me a lot about her actual character.
We know what a second Trump term would look like. It's all laid out in Project 2025, written by his closest advisors. And its sum total is to pull our country back to the past. But America: We are not going back.
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Cannot emphasize enough. Seeing this with founders who have never seen 2001/2008. Key is āwe donāt know what is going to happenā therefore one must protect against systemic downside risk. Best case: all blows over, slightly more dilution. Worst case: company death. Choose wisely.
prediction: 90%+ of the founders of marginal companies who turn down funding offers right now because of greed (protecting against dilution) will likely kill their cos. (vs. taking the $ & operating from fear). i pray for all. i also encourage u 2 eat if dinner is being servedš.
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How *not* to approach a seed stage investor:. Cold email:. "Hi [partner name], we are building [X] and have exciting traction! Could we schedule a call with our founder?. Sincerely,. [Junior staff member who is neither the CEO nor the founder]".
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