Welcome Back to The Hurdle Rate Episode 75: Growing Trust Grows Liquidity In this week's Hurdle Rate, the crew breaks down Strive adding 1,355 BTC, Bitcoin's breakout, and why short-term traders may miss the move. They also discuss how digital credit could reshape the next bull market, why liquidity is the clearest measure of trust, and what @saylor and Warren Buffett teach about building balance sheet companies. Here's the latest with @ColeMacro, @PunterJeff, @Werkman, and @TimKotzman Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 02:40 - Strive's Balance Sheet Growth 06:13 - Bitcoin's Breakout 08:23 - Warrants and Short-Term Trading 13:38 - Zoom Out and Stay in the Game 21:31 - Digital Credit Changes the Bull Run 23:09 - $SATA Volume and 75 Dividends 26:00 - Liquidity Is Trust 32:03 - Why Digital Credit Isn't for Everyone 37:20 - Building Strategy's Liquidity Engine 41:49 - Lessons From @saylor and Buffett 50:04 - The Return of Balance Sheet Companies $MSTR $STRC $ASST $SATA $BTC

Matt Cole says open-source AI is a safeguard against a handful of companies controlling speech. His concern is a future where OpenAI and Anthropic function as a “quasi-government,” close enough to government to influence what people can say. Keeping competition open ensures there is still an alternative. “If you don’t allow the ladder to be pulled up, open source will always be a fallback option.” - @ColeMacro

Matt Cole thinks rising Treasury yields will eventually push policymakers to intervene. His best guess is around 5.25-5.75% on the 10-year. A move above 7%, with $BTC falling to $40,000-$50,000 before a liquidity-driven rebound, is a low-probability scenario he says he doesn’t expect. The reason he remains constructive on Bitcoin is what policymakers would likely have to do in that kind of crisis. “It’s flood the market with liquidity or kill the Treasury market.” - @ColeMacro

Jeff Walton says slowing U.S. frontier AI development creates an opening for others to win the race. Open-source developers, China, and other countries still have strong incentives to build the best models. He sees plenty of focus on what could go wrong with AI, and not enough on what could go right. “I do think there’s a need to steer the direction of these models.” - @PunterJeff

Matt Cole says regulation by enforcement made crypto’s rules unknowable. A company could ask the SEC whether an activity was allowed, get no answer, then face an enforcement action after doing it. That makes it hard to build trust in the rules. “They won’t tell you what the rules are and then they’ll charge you as if you broke the rules after you do something.” - @ColeMacro

Jeff Walton says regulation can make trust cheaper. Most people buy insurance without studying an insurer’s balance sheet. They trust its track record and the institutions overseeing its capital. He sees the CLARITY Act as a framework that could make it easier for traditional financial institutions to work with $BTC and crypto. The bill doesn’t create a new risk-weighting framework, but Jeff believes clearer rules could eventually influence how banks treat digital assets on their balance sheets. “Regulation itself, just the fact that some regulation exists, makes trust cheaper.” - @PunterJeff

Ben Werkman says a bear market gave Strive $ASST a track record investors could actually judge. Buying Bitcoin $BTC through a roughly 50% drawdown showed how the company handled pressure. Waiting for markets to recover would have left less time to build the capital structure it needed. “If you don’t have the structure in place, you’re already too late to capture that.” - @Werkman

Adam Livingston questions whether Anthropic’s messaging is contributing to public fear around AI. He points to warnings about cybersecurity and dangerous capabilities appearing around new model releases, and wonders how much that shapes increasingly negative public opinion. “You have to wonder how much of that opinion has been programmed by what I perceive to be a lot of marketing tactics from Anthropic.” - @AdamBLiv

Matt Cole says Strive’s podcasting starts with the work inside the company. Research comes first. Talking publicly is a way to explain work the team is already doing, much like asking the players on the field to explain the game. “It’s work first, take that knowledge, and then go tell people.” - @ColeMacro

Matt Cole says Strive $ASST was willing to walk away from $SATA’s IPO over restrictions on future issuance. Investors wanted an incurrence test that would block new SATA issuance if amplification rose above roughly 25–30%. Strive said no, negotiated additional investor protections, and has since taken amplification above 50%. “If this doesn’t work for you, we will not IPO SATA.” - @ColeMacro

Jeff Walton says Strive $ASST has spent the past year earning investor trust through execution. When Bitcoin $BTC hit $58,000, he was on the floor of the NYSE explaining why Strive remained constructive on Bitcoin and confident in its cash reserves and capital structure. That track record builds over time. “That trust is earned. It’s not just distributed.” - @PunterJeff

Matt Cole says Adam Livingston’s public research stood out to Strive $ASST before he ever joined the company. Strive had never paid Adam a penny. Even with internal systems, data, and access unavailable to the public, his analysis still stood out in a major way. “We need smart people with high agency that are free-minded thinkers and that love this space.” - @ColeMacro

Welcome Back to The Hurdle Rate Episode 74: Podcasters Per Share In this week's Hurdle Rate, the crew discusses Adam Livingston joining Strive as VP of Investments. $MSTR buys back $139M of $STRC with it back near $99. $ASST adds 469 $BTC and hits an all-time high market cap of $2.75B. They get into trust as market infrastructure, the Clarity Act, AI doomers building moats ahead of their IPOs, and the 10-year touching 5%. Here's the latest with @ColeMacro, @PunterJeff, @Werkman, @AdamBLiv, and @TimKotzman. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 01:17 - Adam Livingston Joins Strive 08:52 - Trust as Capital Markets Infrastructure 19:48 - The Amplified Bitcoin Story and $SATA 22:44 - Building Through the Bear Market 24:54 - An Outsider's View of Strive 28:35 - The Clarity Act and Regulatory Trust 36:23 - AI Doomerism and the Messy Middle 45:03 - Don't Let the Ladder Get Pulled Up 51:28 - Macro: The 10-Year Touches 5% 55:27 - What a Bitcoin Flush Would Look Like 1:01:46 - Capital Markets Recap

Strategy $MSTR came out of the stress test with a changed playbook. @Werkman on what the market saw: • Common issuance used, then stopped last week • New buyback frameworks put in place • Cash on the balance sheet now being deployed • The dividend bucket separated from operating cash A management team needs flexibility with treasury assets, which means not being rigid about every dollar of cash. The whole focus over there right now is getting $STRC back to 100. "If that isn't clear, you're not paying attention."

Strategy $MSTR repurchased $176 million of $STRC last week without issuing a single share of common. All of it came from the new USD cash reserve, the one held separately from the STRC reserve. • Zero common stock sold on the week • $1.44 billion left in that separate pile • 8 more weeks of buybacks at that same size, no common needed The goal behind all of it is getting the instrument back to par, because par is what lets you issue the product on the market again. $SATA is already there. The buybacks look set to continue. @PunterJeff

Matt Cole says Strive $ASST designed its compensation structure around one goal: outperforming Bitcoin. That meant pushing against the standard approach preferred by compensation consultants and proxy advisors, with the largest portion of long-term incentives tied directly to beating $BTC. He points to @elonmusk's Tesla $TSLA compensation as a similar example of rewarding performance over guaranteed pay. “It was a contrarian incentive style that we pushed for shareholder alignment.” - @ColeMacro

Strive could have raised a lot more common last week and chose not to. $ASST volume left plenty of room: • No day under $225 million • One day over $450 million What held it back is amplification, how much the common moves relative to Bitcoin. If Bitcoin goes from $80,000 to $100,000, you want that sensitivity still on, and warrants coming in de-amplify it. So the raise leaned on $SATA demand instead, and Strive still bought more than 1,000 $BTC on the week. "We want the amplification on the balance sheet." - @Werkman

"We have never seen a bull market with a perpetual preferred equity model in place" - @PunterJeff Past cycles ran on convertible debt. That's a one-time injection with a lid on it, since the convertible market is only so big. Preferred shares that never mature are a steady stream instead, and it can keep going into perpetuity. The volume is showing up: • $ASST traded about $1.5 billion the week ending September 4 • 3 weeks earlier, week ending August 14, it was $161 million • That's a 9.7x increase • Strategy $MSTR traded $6.5 billion in one day, its largest since April, and $18.2 billion for the week, top 15 to 20 of all publicly traded equities Convertible debt had a ceiling. This model doesn't. $STRC $SATA

$SATA sits at $999 million outstanding. One million dollars from the billion mark. @PunterJeff on the first year: • Initial issuance was $200 to $250 million in November • 4 to 5x the size since launch • Just over $2 billion balance sheet today, counting cash, Bitcoin and $STRC held The common equity ($ASST) is scaling next to it. With several instruments open at once, each one pulling from a different pool of capital, there's a world where companies buy billions of dollars of this stuff a week.

Matt Cole says the right mentality for Strive $ASST and the broader Bitcoin $BTC industry is similar to Kobe Bryant’s approach to competition. You can deeply respect the people building alongside you and want to see them succeed, while still competing to win. Mamba mentality. “We’re brothers, but we’re going to win this game.” - @ColeMacro