Ryan Romo retweeted
Business is problems. The best companies are just highly effective problem-solving machines.
Travis Kalanick on why he loves problems:
“I don’t think about problems in a negative way.”
“I think about problems the way a math professor would think about a problem.”
“A math professor without interesting problems to solve is a sad math professor.”
“So you wanna create interesting things to solve. You wanna create problems to solve. You have to predict well the nature of the problem and your ability and capacity to solve it.”
— @travisk
Ryan Romo retweeted
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a surprising theory about the "confidence" behind great founders: it might not be confidence at all.
When the idea of confidence comes up, Bezos offers a different explanation:
"You say it's confidence, but maybe it's just trying to compensate for that... accepting that that's a human bias and trying to compensate against it."
So what is the bias?
"I think it's generally human nature to overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity."
Your instincts don't just make the risks look bigger than they are. They also make the opportunities look smaller than they are. Both errors push you in the same direction: toward doing less.
Bezos's correction:
"The risks are probably not as big as you perceive and the opportunities may be bigger than you perceive."
This is why he says entrepreneurs "would be well advised to try and bias against that piece of human nature."
Seen this way, the founder who looks fearless may not have a different personality from you.
They may simply have accepted that their instincts are tilted and learned to adjust for it on purpose. That's not a trait you're born with. It's a correction you can choose to make.
And if you don't make it, @JeffBezos warns there's a cost:
"Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy."
Let the bias set your ambitions, and you'll get small results that seem to prove small was all that was possible.
Ryan Romo retweeted
Corient manages $525B for ultra-high-net-worth families.
They offer a unique value: owning private jets for clients to use.
“Through just the size and scale and the relationships that we have at Corient… we could provide them a relatively unique service.”
“We own aircraft on behalf of our clients for their collective use.”
“We take the balance sheet risk from buying the asset. We take the risk associated with the monthly management fee, and then clients effectively pay for the use of the aircraft.”
— Kurt MacAlpine
Ryan Romo retweeted
📹 Elon Musk’s Tesla has unveiled its next-generation Roadster, a literal flying car, with SpaceX-built cold-gas thrusters and a suction system that let it drive upside down and flip over. Musk called it “the best of the last of the human-driven cars.”
Ryan Romo retweeted
We announced an agreement to acquire a nationwide low-band spectrum license portfolio that will pave the way for @Starlink to become a major mobile carrier in the US.
With this new spectrum and our Gen2 constellation, Starlink Mobile can ensure Americans have access to high-speed mobile broadband no matter where they are → spacex.com/updates#starlink-…
Ryan Romo retweeted
Pershing Square CEO Bill Ackman thinks Wall Street has been sleeping on "an amazing corporate structure."
He raised $5B to prove it:
Ryan Romo retweeted
See the property. Understand the numbers. Make your own informed decision.
rfphomes.com
Ryan Romo retweeted
🔥ELON MUSK’S 5-STEP RULE FOR RUNNING COMPANIES:
QUESTION EVERYTHING, DELETE WHAT YOU CAN, SIMPLIFY WHAT’S LEFT, THEN SPEED IT UP, AND AUTOMATE.
Ryan Romo retweeted
The math on Fannie and Freddie is so dislocated it looks like a pricing error.
Fannie printed $14.4 billion in net income last year. Freddie printed $10.7 billion. Combined market cap on the pink sheets right now: ~$12 billion. The market is pricing $25 billion in annual earnings at a 0.48x multiple. Find me another 0.48x earnings multiple anywhere in American finance. It doesn't exist.
The dilution fear is the reason the stock is cheap and the reason the stock is wrong. Treasury put in $187 billion. The GSEs have swept back over $300 billion since 2012. That's an 11.6% IRR. If Treasury exercises its 79.9% warrants at today's price, the government's stake is worth ~$9.6 billion. If it exercises post-relist at 10x earnings, that stake is worth $200 billion. The difference is $190 billion. Washington doesn't leave $190 billion on the table to spite penny stock holders.
Capital requirements look scary until you do the arithmetic. The ERCF says $334 billion. They have $179 billion. The FHFA can lower Tier 1 to 2.5% without Congress. New target: ~$190 billion. Gap: $11 billion. One IPO closes it. One year of retained earnings closes it twice.
G-fees are already at 65 bps. Pre-crisis they were 20. The GSEs have been charging privatized pricing inside a conservatorship for 14 years. Credit losses outside of 2008 average under 5 bps. The margin is so fat that mortgage rates don't move at all on release.
So what are you actually buying at $5? A royalty on the American mortgage system. 65 bps on $7.5 trillion in outstanding MBS. $48 billion in gross annual revenue. Under 5 bps in historical losses. The most predictable spread in finance, backstopped by a guarantee both parties have publicly committed to preserving.
JPMorgan trades at 13x and takes real credit risk. Utilities trade at 15x with half the visibility. These two trade at 0.48x collecting tolls on other people's risk.
The second those warrants convert and the NYSE listing goes live, every index fund and pension fund with a financial sector mandate has to buy. Two of the ten most profitable companies in America, sitting on the pink sheets, waiting for one signature.
Ryan Romo retweeted
Mark Zuckerberg reminds us that ideas only become clear when you start working on them
Ryan Romo retweeted
Airbnb CEO @bchesky says more AI founders should be starting consumer businesses.
"I'm on the board of Y Combinator. 87% of companies are enterprise companies per batch."
"Enterprise is awesome... but the biggest prize is consumer. That is what's going to reach daily life for billions of people."
"Think about all the little parts of daily life that are kind of annoying. Pay attention to whoever's in your life and ask: 'How could their daily life be a little bit easier?'"
From his appearance on the show in January.
Ryan Romo retweeted
"Imagine how hard it is to start your business, then multiply that by infinity. If you're still committed to do it, and you have the stamina to stick with that, then you'll be successful." —@ToddGraves
Ryan Romo retweeted
You need to follow your nose.
“[As CEO] you're always ingesting information and once in a while you're just like, something feels really off over here.
This team seems rudderless. They’re going in no direction, or, I don't trust what's going on over here.
You can just go digging and occasionally you find things [to fix] and you can add a lot of value.
It's intuition, it's pattern matching.
You're absorbing information and a lot of information is being ingested. And once in a while you're like that's the third time I've heard something weird about that.
I need to go dig into it.”
My conversation with @brian_armstrong, co-founder and CEO of @coinbase and @newlimit.
0:00 Crypto Power in DC
0:25 Market Structure Clarity
1:39 SEC Lawfare Origins
5:49 Suing the Regulator
9:09 Winning the SEC Case
11:11 Long Term Founder Mindset
12:20 Autism and Focus
15:04 Mission First Company Culture
21:10 Rebuilding From Scratch
23:05 Follow Your Nose
25:20 From Side Hustles to Coinbase
30:07 Argentina and Bitcoin Spark
32:33 Airbnb to Coinbase Nights
36:25 Finding a Co-founder
37:35 YC Without a Co-founder
38:41 Finding the Perfect Partner
40:18 Losing Money Per Trade
41:23 Support Backlog Chaos
43:29 Banking and Compliance Gauntlet
47:47 Raising Fast to Survive
51:36 Mission Values and Inspiration
57:54 Hiring for Spikes
1:02:14 Centralized vs Decentralized
1:05:51 From Bitcoin Wedge to Super App
1:07:59 How Coinbase Runs Today
1:11:00 Decision Speed and Risk
1:12:43 Internal Venture Bets
1:14:46 Funding Ideas Internally
1:15:18 Coinbase Marketing Experiments
1:16:56 Internet Native Shareholder Updates
1:21:58 Media Diet and Going Direct
1:26:47 Building a New Industry
1:31:44 Starting New Limit Longevity
1:36:17 CEO Stress and Routines
1:40:59 AI Agents at Coinbase
1:44:35 Base App Explained
1:46:47 Other Bets and SEZs
1:49:21 Closing Thanks
Includes paid partnerships.
Ryan Romo retweeted
“I learned about what a quitter looks like, what’s resignation in somebody looks like and it usually begins with body language and complaining. These guys are so used to being successful, they don’t understand what failure truly means,” @rustywhitt
