Allow me to introduce myself if you are new here: I’m an investor and operating executive who currently lives in New York City and spends a lot of time thinking about the future My career in brief: - Built and led Discover’s corporate venture group, Discover Ventures - Worked on strategic investments, partnerships, and acquisitions at Microsoft - Invested in public equity at mutual fund Dimensional Fund Advisors - Started my career in Silicon Valley as a software engineer at Cisco Systems, then worked on the business and product side of the technology industry at infamous startup Magic Leap (I have great stories), and Google startup competitor OpenX - MBA in finance at Wharton, with dual engineering bachelor degrees from Duke University General Interests: - Quirky, off the beaten path adventures (recently competed in a 332 person adult tag competition at the Met museum in Manhattan) - Meeting new people and hearing their stories (I do a weekly dinner with strangers) - Books (in 3 book clubs, one of which I run) - Exploring new countries (45+ countries visited and counting) - Podcasts (I subscribe to more than anyone else in Manhattan) - Real Estate investing - Experimenting with AI - Staying on top of the latest business, finance, and technology trends through lectures at the Economic Club of New York, and other Organizations - Taking classes in fields I am unfamiliar with. Past examples include acting, improv, writing, contemporary art, medicince, and others Follow me @StartupsILike and happy to connect with anyone who reaches out!

Chris Gardner went to work in a suit every day for nearly a year while sleeping in a locked BART station bathroom with his toddler son. He grew up poor in Milwaukee, served as a Navy corpsman, and was selling medical equipment in San Francisco when he saw a broker get out of a red Ferrari and asked him what he did for a living. In 1981 he talked his way into an internship at Dean Witter Reynolds, one of twenty spots, with no college degree and no connections, against candidates holding MBAs. The internship paid nothing. Then his partner left, his 19 month old son came into his care full time, and the rooming house he was living in did not allow children. He also spent ten days in jail over roughly $1,200 in unpaid parking tickets and came out having lost the apartment. For close to a year the two of them slept in shelters, parks, under his desk after everyone had gone home, and in a BART restroom he could lock from the inside so his son could sleep safely. What money he had went to daycare so he could keep showing up, and nobody at work knew any of it. He passed the Series 7, got hired, moved to Bear Stearns and became one of its top earners, and in 1987 opened his own brokerage in Chicago.

A median new US home costs 91 ounces of gold, down from 684 in 1970. Since 2001 gold went from $265 to $4,346, a 16x move. The median new home went from $175K to $395K, a 2.3x move. The chart measures gold. Mortgages are still priced in dollars. One timing note: gold moves daily, so check the price on the day you schedule. Post next week while the figure is close.

NVIDIA's data center revenue went from $57M a quarter in 2014 to over $75B. Data center revenue doubled every 16 months before ChatGPT and every 11 months since. Growth rates normally decay as the base grows. This one accelerated past $10B a quarter.

10 banks arranged a $22B loan for Crux AI, the Blackstone and Alphabet venture, to buy Google TPUs. The debt is secured by the chips themselves and by customer contracts. Wall Street spent 2 years lending against buildings. Now it lends against the hardware inside.

Breadth this thin means a handful of names are carrying the whole index and the last time it looked like this the unwind took a decade to recover from

Owning the trust layer is a much better business than owning any single safety product and open sourcing it is how you make it the standard

John Schnatter sold the car he loved to keep his father's bar from closing. He grew up in Jeffersonville, Indiana, where his father was a judge who also co-owned a tavern called Mick's Lounge. At 16 he was washing dishes and cooking pizzas at a local sub shop, and he spent $1,600 of what he earned on a gold 1971 Camaro Z28, then rebuilt the engine and brakes himself. He has said the car got him through high school and college. By 1983 he had a business degree and the family tavern was close to going under, so he sold the Camaro for $2,800 and put the money against his father's debts. What was left went into $1,600 worth of used restaurant equipment. Then he knocked out the broom closet at the back of the bar, put an oven inside it, and started selling pizzas to the people already drinking there. The pizza did $600 its first week, then $1,500, then $3,000, and inside 14 months the business went from bankrupt to clearing over $100,000 a year. Papa John's went public in 1993 with 232 stores, when Schnatter was 31. In 2009 he offered a $250,000 reward for anyone who could find the Camaro, somebody did, and he paid it.

A chart claims the S&P 500 tops every 7 years. Its own labels show intervals of 9, 6, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 6, 7, 8 and 6 years. It counts a 5% dip in 1994 as a cycle top, and leaves out the 34% decline in 2020.

Here's a Boring Compounder for the last 10 years: $3.87B to $8.20B selling nuts and bolts. $FAST Fastenal, 2015 through 2025: 2015 revenue: $3.87B 2025 revenue: $8.20B, up 8.67% Q1 2025 gross margin: 45.1% FASTBin and FASTVend installations: 129,996, up 12.4% Digital footprint: 61% of sales Customer sites spending $10K+ monthly: 80.7% of sales Q1 2025 dividends paid: $246.7M Fastenal put vending machines inside customer factories and stocked them with the specific parts that factory burns through. Once the machine is bolted to a wall and wired into a customer's purchasing system, changing suppliers stops being a phone call and becomes a project. High-value sites now drive over 80% of sales, up from 78.9% a year earlier.

David Barnett was a tenured philosophy professor who glued two clothing buttons to the back of his phone. He had a PhD from NYU and taught philosophy of language and philosophy of mind at the University of Colorado Boulder. In 2010 his earbud cord kept knotting in his pocket, so he drove to a fabric store, bought a couple of large buttons, and stuck them on his iPhone 3 so he could wrap the wire around them. It worked, it looked ridiculous, and his friends would not let it go. Within weeks he was working on a version able to collapse flat, and it took roughly 60 rounds and hundreds of prototypes before he landed on the accordion mechanism. His 2012 Kickstarter asked for $12,000, raised about $18,000, and he burned through it in a few weeks. Then his house burned down in a wildfire, and instead of replacing what he had lost he put much of the insurance payout into making more grips. The first PopSocket sold in 2014, and revenue grew 17,423% over the next three years to reach $169 million. He has since sold over 290 million units.

Steve Ells opened Chipotle to raise money for the restaurant he actually wanted to build. He had a diploma from the Culinary Institute of America and two years as a sous chef at Stars in San Francisco under Jeremiah Tower. On his nights off he ate at the taquerias in the Mission District, where a burrito came wrapped in foil and cost almost nothing. The plan was to run something like that in Denver just long enough to pay his father back and bankroll a proper fine dining place. His father lent him about $85,000, and the first Chipotle opened in July 1993 near the University of Denver. The two of them had worked out that 107 burritos a day would cover costs. The opening was rough, partly because there was no menu on the wall and nobody could work out what to order. Once the build-your-own idea caught on, the store was moving over 1,000 burritos a day inside a month, and he never opened the fine dining restaurant. McDonald's took a stake in 1998, then sold out for $1.5 billion after the 2006 IPO. That stake would be worth tens of billions today.

Dave Thomas dropped out of school at 15 and moved into a YMCA so he could work full time. He had been adopted as an infant, lost his adoptive mother at five, and spent his childhood moving from town to town with his father. At the Hobby House restaurant in Fort Wayne he met Colonel Harland Sanders, who became the biggest influence on his working life. In 1962 his boss offered him four Kentucky Fried Chicken stores in Columbus that were bleeding money, in exchange for a stake if he could fix them, and Sanders himself told him not to take it. Thomas found the trouble in the menu, which ran to about 100 items and confused everybody who walked in. He cut it to chicken and a few sides, traded buckets of chicken to radio stations for advertising, and came up with the rotating red bucket sign now bolted to KFC roofs everywhere. By 1968 he sold his share back to the company for $1.5 million, which made him a millionaire at 35. He opened the first Wendy's in Columbus in November 1969 and named it after his eight year old daughter Melinda Lou. He went back to school at 61 and earned his GED, and the graduating class voted him most likely to succeed.

4,074 US restaurants is the scale Chipotle is trying to watch for food safety risk from one place. The company confirmed it's piloting a Food Safety Risk Management Platform built on Palantir Foundry. The system pulls together health department inspection scores and pest incident reports. Employee illness reports feed in as well, and each restaurant ends up with a risk score. The goal is to spot trends early and prioritize follow-up before a problem turns into an outbreak. Laurie Schalow, Chipotle's chief corporate affairs and food safety officer, confirmed the pilot. The company hasn't said how many locations are involved, when it started, or whether a chain-wide rollout is planned. The history explains the investment. Chipotle's 2015 E. coli outbreaks hit sales and took the brand years to recover from. It also pulled jalapeños from restaurants in Minnesota over a salmonella concern tied to a supplier. Palantir is better known for government and defense work, and the pilot has drawn questions about how employee health data gets used. Food safety at 4,000+ locations is turning into a data problem, and Chipotle is treating it like one. $PLTR

Palantir $PLTR is building Chipotle a system to score food safety risk at each of it restaurants

Steven Bartlett went on PBD and explained how he is running his podcast like a data company. 2 things he built: 1. Agent Editor, an AI processing 9 camera feeds and producing final cuts faster than human editors. He tested it for 4 months before trusting it. 2. Guest Radar, a tool predicting how a guest will perform based on their appearances on other podcasts. Some names come back with engagement multipliers as high as 3.1x average.

US companies produced 45 of the 50 most used models on OpenRouter in January 2025. By May 2026, about 29. Measured by tokens routed rather than models listed, US share fell from 70% to 30% in a year. Europe went from 10 models in the top 50 to 1.

Paul Orfalea graduated high school with a 1.2 grade point average after flunking two grades and being expelled from four schools. Nobody used the word dyslexia in the 1950s, and nobody used ADHD either, so the explanation on offer was that he was slow. In 1970, walking past the library at UC Santa Barbara, he noticed students queuing to photocopy articles at ten cents a page. He took a $5,000 bank loan co-signed by his parents and rented a 100 square foot space beside a hamburger stand for $100 a month. Inside it he put one used copier rented for $30 a month, and he charged four cents a copy. He sold pens and notebooks out of his backpack on the sidewalk to get people through the door, and named the shop after the nickname his curly red hair had earned him. He has said he cannot operate a copier or fix one, and he could not write a business letter either, so he hired people for both. What he could do was read a room and pick people, and he built the company around delegating everything he was bad at. There were 1,200 Kinko's across ten countries by the early 2000s, and FedEx bought it in 2004 for $2.4 billion.

The Fed raised rates to 3.75% to 4.00%, its first hike since 2023. Across the 6 prior cycles, the S&P fell in month 1 five times and finished positive at 12 months five times. The bullish 1997 analog has a twin. The 1999 first hike returned 7%, then the dot com crash.

Roxanne Quimby was hitchhiking in rural Maine when a beekeeper in a yellow pickup truck stopped for her. She had left San Francisco in 1975, bought a patch of land near Guilford, and built a cabin and an outhouse with no electricity and no running water. By 1984 the relationship was over and she was raising twin boys alone with almost no money. Burt Shavitz kept hives and sold honey out of his truck, and the beeswax left over from the honey was piling up with nothing to do. Quimby found an old beekeeping book full of recipes and started turning the wax into candles, and their first craft fair brought in $200. She kept going, foraging tree resins and herbs out of the woods, expanding into soaps, salves, and eventually lip balm. They ran it out of an abandoned one-room schoolhouse and incorporated in 1991. In 2004 she sold 80% to a private equity firm for $173 million, and Clorox bought the whole company in 2007 for $925 million. She has since donated more than 87,000 acres of Maine woodland to the National Park Service.

A typical ChatGPT query uses 0.3 watt-hours. An LED bulb for 5 minutes uses 0.8. A 75,000 word input query uses 40 Wh, and an agentic request with reasoning runs near 50. The range inside AI is 133x. The comparison to a kettle is the less interesting number.