1/20 Q. “What are the best and worst things about being a CEO?”
A. “If you don’t like working 24/7 7 days a week, this job is not for you; also, it’s a little bit of being a school teacher, meaning like, you know, I have 150 employees, the company I ran

2/20 “before @CelsiusNetwork had 1,500 employees, and every day you have issues: The kids are fighting, somebody didn’t show up to school, somebody forgot their lunch, you name it. A lot of kind of making sure that everybody is happy. Also, if you think of it like OK, you
3/20 “have a bus, but you need to fill it with people and you need to make sure that everybody gets put in the right seat on the bus. If you put the wrong person in the driver’s seat or on the brakes, or whatever, holding the door from opening, keeping the windows
4/20 “closed, disaster will happen. So a lot of it is kind of looking at the macro things that make a company successful. For example, for me with @CelsiusNetwork, we had a lot of employees who kept saying to us, ‘You’re giving too much to the community, we’re never going to
5/20 “‘break even, we’re never going to be profitable’; even CEL token, they kept saying, 'CEL token is stuck at $0.03 for a year and a half.' It was stuck at $0.03. You could have bought millions of CEL tokens for $0.03, it’s now $3.00.
6/20 “So a lot of people were saying, ‘Look, it’s never going to go up.' And I’m like, no, you just have to wait until the community is big enough and then enough of them are going to earn in CEL and we’re going to be buying millions.
7/20 “Now we’re buying $3 million every week, $3 million worth of CEL token out of the market; we are sucking it like a vacuum cleaner. Now it’s easy, now everybody is a genius, 'of course CEL token.' But buying it at $0.03 and believing that the flywheel and everything
8/20 “and acting in the best interest of the community and scaling this… Just believing in the fact that people will give us $4 billion was something -- even my employees were saying, ‘C’mon, Alex.’ So as a CEO, you have to be not just steadfast but you have to have so much
9/20 “conviction. If you show 1% of uncertainty to your employees, then they run away, because they’re like OK, even our leader doesn’t believe in it. So even if you have doubts yourself, you’re not allowed to show any emotion.
10/20 “They say the CEO job is the most lonely job in the world because you can’t share anything with anyone; you can’t share your fears, you can’t share your — you can only share your excitement, but you cannot share anything that is not positive with anyone because it
11/20 “propagates like cancer very, very quickly. If you’re not confident or you don’t see a great future or whatever, the employees just leave, they have plenty of opportunities; they can jump ship in a minute and go and work somewhere else. It is a very difficult job.
12/20 “Again, this is my 8th time being CEO, so for me I’m doing it in my sleep. But if you’re a first-time CEO and you’re facing all these challenges, there’s no one to talk to. Who are you going to talk to? Your VP of finance or your head of sales? Your mom? 'Mom, I need help!’
13/20 “That’s why we say ‘Leaders are not born, they’re made.' Having that experience, being able to manage people, being able to lead people, being able to solve problems faster than they — because with a startup, the problem is, if you have a major problem, it will bring down
14/20 “the whole company if you don’t solve it fast enough. So you don’t have time. You got to solve it real quick. And here, we have the lives and the savings of 250,000 people in our hands, so the responsibility is huge. It’s not like, OK, Alex is going to lose a little
15/20 “bit of money. This is $4 billion of people's — this is their college fund, their dream for retirement, them taking care of their parents, them paying off their loans; it is their livelihood that is in our hands. So we don’t take it lightly. We really understand the weight
16/20 “on our shoulders. That’s why, again, we’re not trying to get you 200% like some of these crazy crypto projects. We are promising high single digits, because we don’t want to take — the key is to earn as much as possible by taking the least amount of risk.
17/20 “On March 12th #bitcoin crashed 40% in 12 hours. We walked out of it smelling like a rose. Everybody else had billions of dollars in liquidations; they lost most of their customers. But also, when the market went up like crazy, we kept paying the same rate; we didn’t go
18/20 “like DeFi and say, oh, here’s 300% return or whatever. Slow and steady wins the race here. We always say that the winners in crypto are the people who finish the race, you don’t have to be number 1, it doesn’t matter if you’re number 1,000.
19/20 “As long as you HODL and you got your coins and the coins increased in value, you’re going to do exceptionally well. You don’t need to be the guy that dies with the most dollars; that doesn’t matter. For most people, they take leverage or they do all kind of
20/20 “crazy stuff, that’s not what we recommend. We are definitely trying to find the safest way to get there, to get to financial retirement.” — Alex Mashinsky | Should You Use Celsius Network? The Truth w/CEO Alex Mashinsky YouTube Interview | Dec 24, 2020

More from Business

A solo media founder like Rogan or Mr Beast can make as much money as a strong tech founder, with significantly less managerial stress.

Tech created this ecosystem but there’s a historical cultural bias in tech towards media as unprofitable. That changed a long time ago.

Many more angels that invest in people will invest in media founders. Many traditional media people will *become* media founders.

But not necessarily big companies. Just solo individuals or small groups doing content, like Notch doing Minecraft. Because media scales like code.

Increasingly feeling like “keeping the team size as small as possible, even to one person” is the unarticulated key to making media profitable.

Substack and all the creator tools are just the start of this ecosystem.


The process of converting social influencers into media founders (a trend that has been going on for 10+ years at this point) will be increasingly streamlined.

V1 is link-in-bio, Substack, and sponcon.

V2 likely involves more angels & tokenization a la @tryrollhq. What else?

Why lack of awareness? Influencer monetization numbers are not as public as tech numbers.

There isn’t a TechCrunch & CrunchBase for media founders, chronicling the valuations of influencers.

But that’d be quite valuable. If you are interested in doing this, please DM with demo.

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THE MEANING, SIGNIFICANCE AND HISTORY OF SWASTIK

The Swastik is a geometrical figure and an ancient religious icon. Swastik has been Sanatan Dharma’s symbol of auspiciousness – mangalya since time immemorial.


The name swastika comes from Sanskrit (Devanagari: स्वस्तिक, pronounced: swastik) &denotes “conducive to wellbeing or auspicious”.
The word Swastik has a definite etymological origin in Sanskrit. It is derived from the roots su – meaning “well or auspicious” & as meaning “being”.


"सु अस्ति येन तत स्वस्तिकं"
Swastik is de symbol through which everything auspicios occurs

Scholars believe word’s origin in Vedas,known as Swasti mantra;

"🕉स्वस्ति ना इन्द्रो वृधश्रवाहा
स्वस्ति ना पूषा विश्ववेदाहा
स्वस्तिनास्तरक्ष्यो अरिश्तनेमिही
स्वस्तिनो बृहस्पतिर्दधातु"


It translates to," O famed Indra, redeem us. O Pusha, the beholder of all knowledge, redeem us. Redeem us O Garudji, of limitless speed and O Bruhaspati, redeem us".

SWASTIK’s COSMIC ORIGIN

The Swastika represents the living creation in the whole Cosmos.


Hindu astronomers divide the ecliptic circle of cosmos in 27 divisions called
https://t.co/sLeuV1R2eQ this manner a cross forms in 4 directions in the celestial sky. At centre of this cross is Dhruva(Polestar). In a line from Dhruva, the stars known as Saptarishi can be observed.
Recently, the @CNIL issued a decision regarding the GDPR compliance of an unknown French adtech company named "Vectaury". It may seem like small fry, but the decision has potential wide-ranging impacts for Google, the IAB framework, and today's adtech. It's thread time! 👇

It's all in French, but if you're up for it you can read:
• Their blog post (lacks the most interesting details):
https://t.co/PHkDcOT1hy
• Their high-level legal decision: https://t.co/hwpiEvjodt
• The full notification: https://t.co/QQB7rfynha

I've read it so you needn't!

Vectaury was collecting geolocation data in order to create profiles (eg. people who often go to this or that type of shop) so as to power ad targeting. They operate through embedded SDKs and ad bidding, making them invisible to users.

The @CNIL notes that profiling based off of geolocation presents particular risks since it reveals people's movements and habits. As risky, the processing requires consent — this will be the heart of their assessment.

Interesting point: they justify the decision in part because of how many people COULD be targeted in this way (rather than how many have — though they note that too). Because it's on a phone, and many have phones, it is considered large-scale processing no matter what.