"Small deals rely on promises and contracts. Big deals rely on alignment and trust."

@naval

Piper Alpha was an originally designed as an oil producing rig in the North Sea approximately 120 miles North East of Aberdeen, Scotland. It was a fixed leg platform in water depth of 475 Feet of water. The installation sat close to 275 Feet above water to the top of the derrick.

2) It started production in December 1976 for OPCAL joint venture. OPCAL being Occidental Petroleum Caledonia, Texaco Britain, Thomson PLC, and Texas Petroleum LTD. Occidental was the majority stakeholder at 36.5%

3) Occidental being majority stakeholder took control of technical and operational duties with running and operating the rig. When oil production started in 1976 it started with a flow of 250,000 BBL/day and eventually increasing this amount to 300,000 BBL/day.

4) 300,000 BBL/day would account for approximately 10% of the UK’s oil production at the time, so needless to say it was one of the most important rigs in the area. Any gas that was flowing would be flared or consumed by gas turbine generators

5) Around 1980 there was a decision to convert the rig to also process gas along with the oil. This was a major conversion, and if it would have been scoped in from the beginning, most likely construction of the rig would have been more accommodating for gas.

I’m a firm believer that more & more entrepreneurial ‘builders’ will evolve their operating company into a HoldCo

Scaling initial capital light successes (like a service co) & redeploying cash flow into concentrated bets leveraging existing know-how, infrastructure, & expertise

Why?

- lower barriers than ever to building asset light/capital light co's
- existing co infrastructure makes acquiring/building another co easy
- more non-dilutive funding options available
- talented operators/investors can use brand, capital, & know-how to scale meaningfully

But first… what is a HoldCo?

It’s fancy term for “holding company” which is an entity that owns/controls the assets of other different companies

Most HoldCo portfolio companies operate autonomously... with their own team, balance sheets, systems, processes etc.

Major capital allocation decisions are performed at the “TopCo” (ie, primary owners of the HoldCo)

Most HoldCo’s are C-Corps due to structural/tax advantages, but sometimes you see them operate as LLCs

Distributions to shareholders are less common, w/ free cash flow used instead for new acquisitions, spinning up new products/services, or using for existing portfolio co needs

Thanks to the growing number of people who @getMaiar & engage with the @ElrondNetwork ecosystem, the number of accounts doubled to over 320k & we’re over 2.5M TXs, an unprecedented adoption level for a 6 months-young mainnet.
#hypergrowth100 Day 40
Weekly #elrondtech ⬇️

1/ The Delegation Manager toolset has been released for testnet integrations, ahead of our imminent mainnet upgrade. It enables staking providers to set up & manage staking pools, nodes, fees & other parameters for their

2/ We updated the libp2p libraries to the latest release & found out that they work seamlessly with their old counterparts. Congrats @libp2p team for the effort put in backward compatibility. We know how complex that is.

3/ Redesigned the async call & token transfer syntax in our Arwen WASM VM. Interactions between contracts are now “return types”, which makes execution flow more intuitive. Callbacks have also been

4/ Arwen WASM VM updates continued:
- Integrated new Arwen and new features of Arwen into elrond-go. Added a set of integration tests for different scenarios.
- Fixed a bug in Arwen VM which did not let one contract to deploy multiple contracts.

11 controversial lessons I learned from my father on running a small business.

While these lessons are not the gold standard.
At times I've seen these to be true.

A Thread.⤵️

1. If you're going to run a business start from the bottom and work your way up.

Knowing how everything works from the bottom up is key to managing properly.

Or in his words, no one can bullshit you when you know what it takes..

2. If you want something done right you have to do it yourself.

Obviously you can't do everything yourself. You have to be in charge of following up constantly to make sure it gets done, and done right.

3. Don't buy anything you can't pay for.

Taking out loans is okay if the work is there to pay it back. The last thing you want is for work to slow down and you'll be stuck with a lease bill.

4. There are three stories. Your story, their story, and the truth somewhere in the middle.

When disputes and rumors start going around. Get all parties involved together to narrow down the truth.