Private equity investor trying to better understand how the world works. DMs open / encouraged
Manhattan, NY
Joined February 2009
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Need new friends if not always lol'ing
was talking to my friend about humor last night at dinner & i was like well making someone laugh once isn’t all that rare. totally possible. but i have found a person who consistently makes someone laugh is rare af.
doing this consistently requires a ton of engines firing all at once from intelligence, to timing, to quick observation, & a lot of creativity.
you can impress someone with any other thing like beauty or highly produced artifacts or whatever but making someone laugh is powerful simply because it is the ultimate mechanic to induce an involuntary expression of delight. you cannot fake it, it’s not possible.
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Write's doomer piece...clearly hasn't used AI extensively if just now surprised by this
Out of curiosity, what’s the most significant reduction in time to complete a task you have experienced using AI?
Yesterday I had Astra Max do something that I’ve done many times before that takes me about 24 hours of work (typically spread out over 3-5 days).
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I've never heard of cutting a QoE contingency...or even the concept of a QoE contingency (LOIs are non binding u don't have a specific contingency). What is going on in SMB world
The broker calls on Tuesday with three phantom buyers.
Two PE groups and a strategic buyer are submitting full-ask LOIs by Friday. To stay competitive, you need to cut exclusivity to 30 days and drop your QoE contingency.
Do the math on that call.
If a broker actually had three cash offers at asking price with zero contingencies, he would not spend 45 minutes coaching you to bid.
Swallowing that bluff is how buyers end up signing a personal guarantee on an uninspected business.
Tell him to proceed with the other offers. Keep your LOI on the table with standard 60-day diligence.
Watch how fast that Friday deadline disappears on Monday morning.
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At prior fund, when we passed on a deal we were doing a decent amount of work on it was effectively a thoughtful call and to keep us in mind if a few things change that could make it attractive.
In new regime, we put together a value creation plan that we want them to execute against and if things work out let us be the first call. Wayyy more work, but seeing fruits of it ~1 yr -1.5 yrs later...when banker no longer there either.
Feels like, aside from the grifters on here, that everyone is bearish / woe is me on buying companies.
In my opinion, yes, there is more competition in the LMM and the IS model but the value you can demonstrate has never been higher (specifically with AI being a force multiplier for small firms), and the capital markets are mature enough such that it is not a Herculean task to do a deal -- it is still hard or maybe i just make it hard by buying companies that aren't SBIC eligible.
Hopefully, close our third platform and an add-on this month, close our 10th minority deal by eoy (potentially 10th and 11th) and go into the new year with a fat pipeline into '26. Most importantly, EBITDA at the two existing platforms are up 80% and 40% respectively organically.
Not bad for 2.5 years....well, assuming the third platform closes that would suck if not; dead deal fees no fun to put it lightly.
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*Work in PE as an Associate or VP w/ no carry realized
PE is just easy to dump on and make the bogey man. All sorts of public companies and family businesses also cut costs and at times make bad product or pricing decisions.
This isn't helped by some of the anon accounts on here that work in PE but dump on the industry....
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Exactly -- there is no depth to the 3-4 assumptions that drive the whole thing
All the finance nerds dunking on this are hilarious
Like yes let’s obsess over the fine model details which change the outcome +/- 30% and ignore the 3-4 simple assumptions that swing the outcome by orders of magnitude
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You aren't getting dunked on because of taxes or formatting, the ridiculousness of this is
1. Your own stated reasoning is to understand rev/gw capex/gw and it is literally historical numbers and then hard codes...that is not a bottoms up build.
2. Use AI (ur bragging u didn't prompt, what year are we in)- this would have turned out much better and been more thoughtful
3. It took a week, this is a 30 min exercise for an intern and when they turn this in u say what is this garbage at least try to instrincally understand the cost of inputs and the demand drivers for utilization and the constraints to orbital compute
Dude has a PhD from Caltech, clearly brilliant but interesting when applied elsewhere...
Sure you can say it was just something fun or a hobby / not serious...but he posted it as though it was something interesting/ thoughtful / worthy of being commented on.
To the morons that have tried to dunk on this model
The point of it was to try to estimate the core inputs:
1) How many GWs will SpaceX have online in 2027 and 2028?
2) How will rev/GW and CapEx/GW change over time?
3) How will Starship launches ramp?
4) When will the first orbital compute sats launch?
These are the hard things to estimate that matter. Everything else (taxes lol) are trivial outputs based on CapEx decisions in 2028
Saw this after I posted, better said
I am the first to see a 1,000-line model as financial masturbation, and while the "change in working capital and taxes" is obviously provocative, I stand by my comment that it would have been nice to see more.
Revenue
> I totally agree that a model is really dependent on 3 to 5 assumptions, but the issue is that you just hardcode without explaining the logic to us normies.
> You can call me a moron, but that's also how my PM would describe me if I showed him a model built on hardcodes because "management said so."
> Why do you believe these launch numbers are right, or that this terrestrial compute is right? What market size are you assuming for each, what share does it represent, etc. - show us more!
Profitability
> Are we sure we are not missing the forest for the trees? $600bn of EBITDA for the SI segment alone run-rate in Q4'28 is more than Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft... combined.
Capital Efficiency
> It is really interesting to see that capex/GW goes down while rent/GW stays flat... are we saying this is not a commodity?
To conclude: Shaun, you have generated more carry in SpaceX than I ever will in 100 lifetimes, and there is no doubt you are a phenomenal investor + Elon has shocked the world more times than we can count and I am sure he will keep doing so.
That said, a model remains a model, and aggressive assumptions will always result in high valuations.
It would have been nice to see more of the assumptions and logic behind them.
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"Sources close to the negotiations said that Kushner has assured Walter he has raised all the money necessary to complete the sale."
His Equity financing tracker says differently, thought I saw him at McGuire Woods
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Brought to a bullpen near you
This is the most insane demo I’ve seen. Subvocal YC F26 lets you speak completely silently and reads the minute movements of your face. So you can talk to your AI anytime.
AI + sensors is magic.
What’s crazier is they built this in 4 months. This demo was live yesterday evening at the YC office.
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Man, didn't realize Kushner was an independent sponsor. its tough out there
Josh Kushner is still $5-6 BILLION short on the Lakers deal and Bob Iger is only putting in "like 63 million dollars," per @BillSimmons
"I think they're using the Buss family as scapegoats for why the deal's dragging along, but he can't find the money."
"hey i saw you typing, what were you going to say"...nothing...i no longer wanted to say it... That's why i stopped typing and didn't send.
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Equivalent of a VP twenty years later taking credit / saying it's a 5x for a portco they didn't underwrite but were on the board of 8 months after starting .
Hi Sandy. Are you well? This is wrong. On January 1, 1993, we sent a press release saying that multiplayer would be in DOOM, a full 8 months before you joined the company. We knew deathmatch would be huge. In that press release, in January 1993, we said multiplayer would be "the number one cause of decreased productivity in businesses around the world." We were sure of it, and we needed no convincing. I understand you are proud of your work on DOOM, and you should be, but please also respect the accuracy of your statements, particularly around game history. My concern is that these false statements are designed to trigger replies (like this one), reposts, and outrage discussion, all with the view of increasing your followers and subscriptions, particularly since this false deathmatch story (among others) is so easily disproved. I’ve even welcomed you to reach out to me ahead of time. You seem to appreciate game history as much as I do. Could you not also make yours accurate?
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