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.

"Making money is bad, unless I do it and then it's fine" -The beating heart of left-wing populism

The real lesson that should be learned early on in life:

No one actually cares about "big money", "big tech", "corporations", or "Wall Street".

They want YOU to be dumb enough to, so they can take YOUR money.

Populism is holding a treat in front of a dog as you give it a shot while it's enamored.

Look at the "populists"

Ted Cruz: Harvard Law grad
Briahna Joy Gray: Harvard Law grad
Chapo Trap House: makes >$120,000 a year
Josh Hawley: owns two homes in different states, Yale grad
Bernie Sanders: owns 3 homes
Tucker Carlson: trust fund TV dinner fortune heir

Walker Bragman: lives in a mansion in The Hamptons, parents are rich
Meagan Day: heiress to multimillion dollar fortune, lives in a mansion, parents are rich
Donald Trump: archetypal rich obnoxious New Yorker

@this_the_burner @typesfast Yes. Worked for a company who leased floor space to a supplier so they could put in a cage to hold inventory. When the goods passed through the door in the cage to the assembly line, the supplier was paid.

“Energy needed a digital revolution – and we are it”

Greg Jackson, boss of Octopus Energy, says the sector was ripe for an Amazon or Uber-style disruptor, but that his version will also boost the UK’s green revolution


Greg Jackson, chief executive of Octopus Energy, wears the unassuming combination of jeans and trainers one might expect from the founder of a wildly successful startup

There’s also a vast open-plan central London office, easy camaraderie with staff, lots of plants

He has the enthusiasm and world-changing idealism too

With all these markers of a tech unicorn – a deal last month with Tokyo Gas valued it at $2bn (£1.5bn) – it’s easy to forget that Octopus is an energy company

Jackson, 49, says the distinction is increasingly irrelevant

Octopus is a new breed of energy supplier, built on cutting-edge technology and unencumbered by the creaking billing systems and fossil-fuel plants that plague the UK’s “big six”

Set up just five years ago, it has been free to view the energy market as a tech startup would: ripe for disruption

- They passed NAFTA over all our objections, bipartisan
- They were caught in corruption, including foreign influence peddling. No one was prosecuted
- They sold out manufacturing and retail sales to China, devastating our middle-class
- 9/11, Patriot Act, Iraq, Afghanistan

Guys, I need a side hustle o. Something that will be bringing me small money like N5k-N10k everyday. As I work full time, I can only spend like 2 hours a day on it. I DON’T want to do forex trading or Crypto. Let’s assume a seed capital of N1 million. Any ideas? #NaijaKnowledgeX

The question of how TV news amplifies disinformation is often discussed but we have little concrete research on this subject. So we partnered w/ @r_macdonald & @kalevleetaru to understand how cable TV amplified Trump’s tweets. The results are interesting.

Between Jan 1 2020 and Jan 8 2021, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC spent 32 hours showing Trump’s tweets on screen, eg. blowing them up full size. This doesn’t include when anchors and correspondents mentioned things Trump had tweeted.

We then focused on the ways in which the three networks broadcast Trump’s tweets that falsely claimed the election would be fraudulent (before Nov 3) and was actually stolen (after the election).

In the weeks after the election, the cable news networks broadcast nearly three times as many Trump tweets about election fraud than they had in the nine months leading up to it. They even broadcast Trump’s old tweets after he was removed from Twitter in January.

4 points: 1) there was a drumbeat of tweets undermining the election throughout the summer. Many were broadcast & there were no labels from Twitter until middle of Sept. We need more research to understand how a foundation supporting the false narrative was laid by platforms & TV

One of my areas of focus in 2020 was to scale the size of our content business across platforms.

Here is our year in review 👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽

1/ Everything starts and ends with Twitter for me.

Jan 2020: ~ 300k followers
Dec 2020: ~ 430k followers

I do over 100 million impressions per month and will continue to use Twitter to drive traffic everywhere else over time.

2/ The daily letter that I send to investors allows me to have nuanced, more analytical conversations with people.

Jan 2020: 38,500 free subscribers
Dec 2020: 102,000 free subscribers

The open rate is around 35% and the click through rate is around 10% when I email everyone.

3/ The podcast is where I get to learn from the world's smartest investors and entrepreneurs.

Jan 2020: ~ 200k audio downloads
Dec 2020: ~ 1 million audio downloads

We have published 450+ episodes since inception and will do a few hundred more in 2021.

4/ This year was the first time I focused on YouTube, which is a highly underrated platform.

Jan 2020: Under 8k subscribers
Dec 2020: 135k subscribers

People watched 3.2 million hours of video content on the platform and we hit the goal of 10+ million video views for 2020.

1/12
In light of the recent events involving the owners of #Cannoli and their manager,
we at the Centre for Labour Research (CLR), in the interest of protecting the
fundamental human #right to #dignity, condemn any and all forms of #harassment.

2/12
The viral video in which the owners of Cannoli are seen singling out and
humiliating their manager due to his inability to speak the colonisers language for
their entertainment depicts a form of #workplaceharassment. Such behaviour is
unacceptable.

3/12
It is the responsibility of the employer to ensure that each and every employee,
regardless of their #employment status, the sector of employment, or their
occupation feel safe, respected and included at the workplace.

4/12
As entrusted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and article 14 of the Constitution
of Pakistan with regard to the inviolability of the dignity of a person,

5/12
#CLR recommends all #labour legislation explicitly prohibit harassment to
ensure promotion of decent work in relation to education, language,
socio-economic status, race, gender, sex, age, colour, caste, domicile, religion, creed, political opinion and disability.

Ray Kroc died in 1984. That year, McDonald's made $9.5 billion in revenue.

Personal net worth? $600 million, about $1.5 billion today.

Kroc grew McDonald's into a brand everyone in the world recognizes, and he started with just one question...

Time for a thread! 👇👇👇

In 1954, Ray was a milkshake salesman. Business wasn't exactly booming.

One day, he called his secretary from the road. To his surprise, someone had ordered six five-milkshake mixers.

Who needed to mix 30 milkshakes at a time?

Ray thought: "What if that's wrong?"

He called the restaurant. The owner was terse.

"What? Six mixers? Yes, that's us. Actually, make it eight! Gotta go!"

Now, Ray was even more confused.

Once again, he thought: "What if that's wrong?"

He decided to drive to the place himself. After a 26-hour drive, he got to San Bernardino.

What he saw was a long queue and people standing around in the parking lot, munching on their burgers.

When he got the front window, Ray ordered a burger, a Coke, and fries.

The cashier returned the food right with his change.

Ray said: "No no, that's wrong! I just ordered!"

And the cashier said: "Yeah, and now, you're food is here."

Time for #PapersThatMakeYouGoHmmm! A weekly summary of new ML papers from arXiv that make me think one or more of:

1. That looks useful!
2. That's an interesting approach!
3. A business could be built around this!
4. How did they do that?!

Argument Schemes and Dialogue for Explainable

Neural Fitted Q Iteration based Optimal Bidding Strategy in Real Time Reactive Power

A design of human-like robust AI machines in object

Single Shot Multitask Pedestrian Detection and Behavior

Time for #PapersThatMakeYouGoHmmm! A weekly summary of new ML papers from arXiv that make me think one or more of:

1. That looks useful!
2. That's an interesting approach!
3. A business could be built around this!
4. How did they do that?!

How can I choose an explainer? An Application-grounded Evaluation of Post-hoc

Validating Label Consistency in NER Data

A two-stage data association approach for 3D Multi-object

Neural Networks, Artificial Intelligence and the Computational

I'm in the later stages of purchasing a niche sub-contractor in the SE US. I'm now working with the sellers on the nitty gritty handover items that need to be transitioned. Here is a summary of my working list:

Insurance: (Staying with current provider)
- auto coverage on fleet of 40+ vehicles.
- General liability policy.
- Workers Comp policy.
- Bonding, done on a job by job basis, for a minority of their work. (I got a backup quote from another bonding agent for a fall back).

Benefits:
- I'm doing an asset purchase, so retirement benefits will likely have to start fresh under new entity. Will keep the same provider.
- Health Insurance will remain with incumbent, but have to migrate and re-enroll everyone under new LLC.
- Exhaustive list of emp perks.

Payroll:
- Currently done in-house, and paid weekly. Will keep the same, but need to get everything lined up based on timing of close and bank account. (See below).

Bank Accounts:
- Goal is to keep the same bank account for now, to reduce number of changes- less to go wrong. Built in a true-up with sellers for any payments post-close that shouldn't have carried over. MAKE SURE to change authorized signers.

"If you create it for yourself, it’s art.

If you create it for others, it’s business."

@naval

After 5126 failed prototypes over 5 years, any inventor would have given up

But Sir James Dyson stayed put and

- Invented a product which completely transformed the market
- Set up a company with 7 billion $ revenues
- Became the richest man in UK

A thread on Dyson 🧵

1/

1970s - James Dyson was a UK born industrial designer. He was fed up using the traditional vaccum cleaner with disposable bag which would stop working because of dust clogging

He tried using a cyclone based system which would extract the dust without clogging

2/

He even constructed a small prototype & connected it with the traditional vaccum cleaner with bag removed. It seemed to work decently

He presented the concept to many. But most of them rejected saying if the idea was so great, big companies would already have thought of it

3/

1979 - But Dyson didn't give up. He was able to raise an initial investment from another inventor friend and via some loan from the bank

He started developing the cyclonic vaccum system in the shed behind his house.

4/

Between 1979 and 1984, Dyson developed 5126 prototypes before getting the right one without a bag finalized

He tried licensing this invention to the companies in UK and US who can manufacture and sell the product. And give Dyson some royalties on sales

5/

How spotify manipulates both its user as well as artists for more profit (a thread):

Spotify displays the monthly listeners of every single artist in their profile and ranks them based in it, for example justin bieber is at #2 right now with 76M monthly listeners

Lets be honest unless ur a part of stan twitter, u will think that justin bieber is the most popular artist right now, but that is where they trick you. Justin bieber is not even in top 10 most streamed artists of this year and not in top 5 most streamed artists of this month

So wats happening here? How he has 76M listeners then? Most of these listeners are passively listening to him from playlists, which means they play a playlist in general and one of those songs turn out to be a justin beiber song...

...so now though this person didnt intentionally listen to Justin bieber, he/ she is counted as a monthly listener for justin. So these monthly listeners are just a reflection of most playlisted artists right now not the most popular ones.

1/ Today we announce immi, a food brand we've been working on for 18 months. @kchanthasiri and I spent the past decade in tech and started over by learning the food industry from scratch. Here's why we're doing this, the $42bn food category we're tackling, and where we're going👇

2/ We met close to a decade ago working as product managers at a company called Kabam. We didn't know each other, but during a work trip in Vancouver one morning, we somehow arrived at the same noodle joint. We became the two PMs in our org. who bonded over noodles for breakfast.

3/ After Kabam, we stayed close friends and roommates, but both of us went separate paths. KChan stayed as a PM at a health-tech startup called Amino, and later went on to be a lead PM at Facebook. I went the early-stage venture route, most recently as an investor at @pearvc.

4/ Over our friendship, we discovered that we share similar family backgrounds in the Asian food industry. My grandparents are farmers in Taiwan and grow a fruit called a rose apple. KChan's grandmother ran a noodle stand in Thailand and his dad ran a Thai restaurant in LA.

5/ Our families immigrated to the U.S. so we could avoid working in the food industry. (Ironically, we've now come back full circle).

As we've grown older, we've noticed an alarming fact: our families are getting sicker due to chronic health conditions from unhealthy diets.

Are you on this list and backing @SMcPartland and @Royston_Smith's amendment to the Fire Safety Bill? Please support our campaign so leaseholders do not have to pay for historic defects. You are ruining lives:
@RobertJenrick @mhclg @ChrisPincher

#EndOurCladdingScandal

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