walt (@waltrcox) header
walt (@waltrcox) profile picture

Hard earned opinions mine.

⛰️
Joined May 2009
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As a parent with kids approaching middle school, fuck this (respectfully)
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need a way to access fb marketplace without ever, even for one second, encountering facebook
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walt retweeted
My friend worked at a startup for 3 years. Took a $20,000 pay cut for equity they promised would change his life. Wore the hoodie. Believed the mission. Worked every weekend without being asked. Company got acqui-hired last year. Founders walked away with $8,000,000 each. Employees got 90 days notice and a LinkedIn recommendation. The equity was worth $0. He’s 31. Starting over. Startups sell you a dream because dreams are cheaper than salaries.
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We didn’t have “HR” when building Palantir, for similar reasons - I avoided Ryan’s mistake. And when we needed some PeopleOps, we hired technical leaders. Going into the vast majority of companies and firing most of their HR and Marketing departments would tend to create value!
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Corporate life will teach you that knowing the job is only half the battle. The real skill is staying calm in meetings, reading the room, managing ego, receiving vague feedback, and not replying emails with your real thoughts.
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I’m calling it. Marc Andreessen is a fucking moron.
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I don’t think there is enough reporting on the idea that in the last 3 years , a standard startup playbook has been to lie, cheat, make things up, scam people , break the law, steal things, lie more and then pass it off as “growth hacking”
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A price cap on credit card interest rates would, if adopted, lead radical change in underwriting standards, product availability, and probably credit limits, which many people who want to borrow money would perceive as negative.
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I like rugged individualism
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Holy shit is Meta evil lmao ***10%*** of Meta's revenue is from ACTUAL SCAMS that they KNOW ARE SCAMS When Zuck found out, he shut down... the ANTI-scam team Imagine trusting this man - or any of these cartoon villains - with Actual Fucking Superintelligence
Latest podcast from @Gregory_C_Allen has an insane section on criminal activity at Meta. Internal docs leaked to Reuters show: • 10% of all Meta revenue comes from ads for scams & banned goods ($16B/year) • Meta estimates it's involved in 1/3 of all successful scams in the US • That suggests they drive $50B in scam losses for US consumers alone each year • Meta earns ~$3B annually from scam/banned goods ads run by Chinese operations alone The China case study: • In 2024, Meta made $18B+ from Chinese companies advertising to foreign consumers • Internal teams found ~19% was scams/banned content • An anti-fraud team successfully cut these ads in half • When Zuckerberg saw the revenue impact, he told them to "pause" and the team was disbanded • By mid-2025, banned ads climbed back to 16% of China revenue • This results in money being stolen and going directly from ordinary Americans to Chinese criminals The deliberate enabling: • Fraud earns 10% of all revenue, but anti-fraud teams were blocked from any action costing >0.15%, so they couldn't effectively do anything • Meta charged higher rates for suspected fraudulent ads — a "scam tax" • Their algorithm naturally identifies people vulnerable to frauds and feeds them more and more The cold calculation: • Meta anticipated up to $1B in regulatory fines for this • But they make $3.5B every 6 months from high-risk ads • They view these fines as just "cost of doing business" Senators Blumenthal & Hawley now calling for FTC/SEC investigations in a blistering letter, noting that all this happened while Meta cut safety staff and moved billions over to VR and AI. WTF.
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Breaking: an auto source tells me Toyota never even considered California, instead announcing a $912M investment in the states of Kentucky, Mississippi, West Virginia, Tennessee and Missouri. Why? "California is lost. Not one of our employees wants to live there because it's too expensive and your taxes would be too high for our families." • Missouri's state tax rate is 0 to 4.7% • Mississippi has an individual tax rate of 4% with a multi-year phase down to 3% by 2030. • Kentucky's state tax rate will decrease to 3.5% effective January 1, 2026. • West Virginia's tax rate is 2.22 to 4.82% • Tennessee does not have a state individual tax California has a state tax rate of 13.3%
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raising from Andreesen is negative signal, has been for years
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Started thinking about this: Will small businesses bank with the platforms where they get paid (like Stripe, Square, and Shopify), or the ones they use to pay others (like Ramp, Brex, Melio and Bill)?
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You're laughing? People aren't paying Klarna back for their burritos and you're laughing?
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Trillion dollar idea: More high school shop classes. Less student loans for unmarketable college degrees.
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“I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today” as a business model
DoorDash and Klarna have signed a deal where customers can choose to pay for food deliveries in interest-free installments or deferred options aligned with payday schedules.
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I feel like I'm going insane but Notion is not actually very good software How did they trick everyone?
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1/ Stripe dropped over a billion on Bridge, a stablecoin startup, fueling dreams of frictionless digital dollars. But as anyone who remembers Libra knows, stablecoins can’t live on high interest rates alone. When the Fed pivot comes, you’d better have a real business model.
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BREAKING: President Trump signs executive order to ban central bank digital currencies.
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If I could only give founders 20 seconds of advice after leading seed round, it’d prob be this: Keep your team small and your burn low while searching for PMF. Focus on learning, not selling. Don’t scale until you have a product customers love and a clear strategy for selling it.
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