Very fun time at the Allocators and Operators Happy Hour last night at @paulswaney3 office. Many new connections made and connections I was able to meet in person…and there’s just nothing like in person. Favorite pic of the night is this one with @MatthewChang @adamislucky @friendlybooks (Brittney Phillips partners with @RobertMSterling ) and Hunter. We talked about EB5’s, crypto, Robots, life, death…while drinking @WymansFruit blueberry juice. This is my mocktail!

We met the face of @friendlybooks last night in Tampa. From here on out we will be skipping @RobertMSterling’s invites and go direct to the operator, Brittany. PS - if you don’t have a good book keeping solution, give Friendly a try. They are in fact, friendly. Cc: @huntercdurham, @adamislucky

Katy Mimari joined us at Simple Modern to share the amazing story of how she built Caden Lane. Six things I learned from Katy's story. 1. Tenacity - She built the company over 22 years and it took a ton of grit. She made it through the great financial crises, being a CEO single mom with young kids, and once having her entire team quit in the same year. Entreprenuership is hard and comes with a lot of adversity. You have to be determined. 2. High Agency - "Figure it out" is a motto at Caden Lane. At one point in the history of the business Katy fired all her wholesale customers to go all in on e-commerce. She had no experience, but she taught herself. She shared several stories about being resourceful when she had no idea what she was doing. To me, this is what it means to be high agency. Being convinced you can figure it out no matter what life throws at you. 3. Huge OU fan - Katy went to the University of Texas, but as you can see from her jersey she's a massive OU fan. 4. She has a mission. Katy has built a company that is worth a lot of money, but the thing that drives her is "making life easier for moms". They have started donating to fertility support for women. Over 5 million moms have had their life made a little easier because of the excellence of Caden Lane. 5. Katy didn't take a lot of pictures during the years of building Caden Lane so she used Claude to create pictures of the things she went through. It was amazing. 6. You get paid for improving people's lives. Everyone wants to know how they can earn more money. As I listened to Katy today I had a moment of clarity. Business is getting paid for making other people's lives better. The more you are able to improve the lives of others, the more money you are able to earn. I love that markets reward making the world better for others. Katy has a remarkable story. If you have a chance to spend time with her I would highly recommend it!

WTF is going on with my old party of Democrats? -"we stand with Platner" (Nazi + Sexual Assault) -"we stand with Abudl" (Islamist, Muslim Brotherhood) -"we stand with Ilhan"... when you stand for EVERYONE like this you stand for NOTHING

Good idea 👇 Founders, you need to be sending bid templates to your VC prospects. ____ base valuation per share ____ information rights ____ pro rata rights Reject anyone who doesn’t fill out the form or writes “included”.

If you spend your life on X, you’d think Americans are deeply concerned about the war with Iran. As I’ve been saying for months, and as countless sources have confirmed, the vast majority aren’t. And I suspect even fewer give a damn where their diesel comes from Russia or Canada or Timbuktu. That’s what stripping our manufacturing and refining capabilities for decades has produced: apathy when you cry about sourcing. But there’s a deeper problem with this post… Between Ukraine’s devastatingly successful strikes on Russian refineries, the acute global shortage of available oil tankers to move diesel long distances and the abundance of potential buyers closer to Russia than the United States, I suspect very little Russian diesel will actually reach American shores. Then there’s the logistics. A VLCC supertanker carries roughly 2 million barrels of diesel. A highway tanker truck carries about 200. Do the math. You’d need 10,000 truckloads to replace the cargo of ONE supertanker. Not. Gonna. Happen. And even if you could somehow find tens of thousands of trucks, moving crude oil by road is vastly less fuel-efficient than moving it by sea. Trucks burn more than 10 times more diesel per ton mile than supertankers do. You’d burn considerably more diesel getting the cargo to market, eating into whatever diesel output at the docks in Russia you hoped to gain. But here’s what I really don’t understand. Why is it so difficult for people to recognize that Putin has repeatedly prioritized saving face over delivering tangible victories for the Russian people? If handing Putin a minor, fleeting PR victory helps end the war… or even gives Ukraine a meaningful strategic advantage… that’s a win. And for those who haven’t read The Art of the Deal, perhaps you should. Trump has spent decades trading symbolic concessions for tangible gains. Let the other guy claim victory in the headlines while you walk away with something that actually matters. The man has been president for roughly six years. Why do you people keep falling for the same routine? If Putin wants to move massive logistical mountains to move diesel at an outrageous cost from Iran all the way to the United States and sell it to us at a discount to his cost just to save face… why wouldn’t you let him? Actually, never mind. The fact that so many gullible Europeans allow their hatred of Trump to cloud their judgment is precisely why many of these deals work. They’re so busy obsessing over who won the headlines that they forget to ask who actually won the deal. But whatever. The fact is most Americans don’t care what you post on X about Russian diesel anyway.

Anyone willing to condemn Hamas is someone I’m glad to stand with. We appear to strongly disagree about other issues related to Israel and Palestine, but that doesn’t bother me. Sounds like we both accept that reasonable people can, in good faith, disagree here. Appreciate the productive and respectful discussion on this, Brian!

To be honest, I’m good with anyone willing to agree that the timing was horrible. I have strong opinions about who was at fault on October 7th and whether Israel’s response was justified, but I also accept that reasonable people will disagree. My anger isn’t toward those who believe Israel should have showed more restraint—I disagree with them, but, again, reasonable people can disagree in good faith here. My anger is directed at those who minimize the severity of Hamas’s actions and who claim the atrocities were acceptable given the historical context of the I/P situation.

Agree that yesterday was definitely not the time for a statement like this. Agree that the loss of innocent life is always tragic, no matter the side or the circumstances. Do not agree that the government of Israel has committed war crimes. Have they made mistakes? Of course. But that’s the nature of warfare, and why it’s worth doing everything possible to avoid wars in the first place. Agree that Israel is not perfect. No country is. But they are absolutely not the bad guys in this conflict.

(Warning: Long post about Israel. Possible slow-motion crash out. Might want to skip this one.) This statement from @NYCMayor is evil. There’s no other way to describe it. “Despicable” isn’t nearly strong enough; “lamentable” implies that it’s something over which we might feel sorrow, rather than the outrage it demands. “Evil” is the only word for it. Deeply, profoundly evil. Perhaps the most vile statement a prominent US elected official has ever released. On the third anniversary of the worst loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, Mayor Mamdani—leader of the city with the world’s largest Jewish population outside of Tel Aviv—has released a statement that minimizes the attacks, ignores the severity and depravity of Hamas’s crimes, and—in a manner with just enough skillful subtlety to provide necessary levels of plausible deniability—inverts the day’s attackers and victims, even obliquely blaming the victims themselves. A statement that references the attacks’ perpetrators, Hamas, but once, and the attacks’ target, the Jews of Israel, not at all. Let me repeat that: The mayor of a city with nearly one million Jews spread across its five boroughs can’t find it within himself to use the word “Jew” on the anniversary of the worst loss of Jewish life since the genocide of Nazi Germany. Mamdani dedicates one—and only one—paragraph in his statement to the attacks themselves. One perfunctory, halfhearted paragraph; a token gesture of mourning that conveniently omits the savagery of Hamas’s crimes, the widespread sexual violence of the day, the glee with which terrorists butchered young and old alike, and the deplorable conditions in which 251 innocent victims of kidnapping were kept in subterranean tunnels in Gaza. One paragraph. That’s all. And, with that out of the way, with that box conveniently checked, Mamdani is able to get to his real aim: Condemning Israel. And this he does with detail and gusto, without pause, reservation, or equivocation. The entire second paragraph is worth reviewing line by line, for it is rich in subtle but deliberate manipulation. Sentence 1: “The suffering did not begin or end that day.” This is the classic Marxist rhetorical tactic of “contextualizing,” in which any actions that might reflect poorly on The Cause (e.g., the mass rape, murder, and kidnapping of innocent Israeli civilians) are positioned in the context of information meant to mitigate their severity, deflect blame, and shift responsibility from the victim to the offender. In this case, Mamdani wants the reader to subconsciously think that Hamas’s acts of terrorism can only be viewed in the context of Israel’s historical and ongoing oppression of Palestine (hence “did not begin…that day”). And, with that context established, how could anyone hold Hamas at fault? After all, they didn’t start this war; they were only responding to “suffering [that] did not begin…that day.” If anything, it’s Israel that’s at fault, right? If this sounds like reversing the victim and the offender—the RVO in the DARVO acronym used to describe the gaslighting of domestic violence victims—it’s because it is. It’s subversive, it’s diabolical, and it’s only the first sentence of the paragraph. Let’s keep going. Sentence 2: “It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza…” Hamas’s terrorism was not a de novo act, occurring without cause or justification; rather, it was merely the “ongoing” continuation of a long chain of “suffering” whose origin and fault lie with the state of Israel. Also, note the choice of the words “devastating” and “genocide” and compare them to Mamdani’s first paragraph. He is condemning Israel’s response to the attacks with language far more forceful than that used to decry the attacks themselves. Sentence 2, continued: “…in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians—including more than 21,000 children.” This is additional contextualization. The reader is directed to compare 74,000 dead Palestinians with the aforementioned 1,100 Israelis and come away with the interpretation that Israel is orders of magnitude more violent than Hamas. Note that Mamdani also includes a body count for Palestinian children but not for Israeli children. Left unsaid, of course, is the proportion of those 74,000 dead Palestinians who were active Hamas fighters. Or whom Hamas was using as human shields. Or who were—unfortunately—collateral damage from being in the vicinity of the Israeli military’s justified airstrikes on Hamas fighters who deliberately intersperse themselves among the civilian populace of Gaza. Sentence 3: “Even since the so-called ceasefire, more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed.” This is more contextualizing. The implicit message is that Israel has killed more Palestinians “since the so-called ceasefire” than Hamas killed in total. Israel’s response must therefore clearly be disproportionate. Sentence 4: “That suffering has intensified with every Israeli bomb dropped on ambulances waiting outside hospitals, every drone strike targeting a residential building or journalist, and every shipment of food aid turned away at a border crossing.” Setting aside factual errors and omissions of relevant context (ironic, given all the false contextualizing elsewhere!), note the specificity with which Mamdani condemns Israel. Israel’s response to October 7 warrants vivid detail—its bombs fall on ambulances, its drone strikes target residential buildings and journalists, its soldiers turn away food shipments—while the details of Hamas’s attacks on October 7 are described with… Nothing. No mention of the murders. The rapes. The desecration of bodies. The smiles on the terrorists’ faces; their laughter while livestreaming the carnage on social media and while calling their own parents. Not one word. When Israel responds to terrorism, graphic details are called for; when Hamas commits the underlying acts of terrorism in the first place, though, it warrants only a cursory mention in the introduction to the statement, no details necessary. Sentence 5: “Many New Yorkers are reckoning with this unbearable grief, and we mourn alongside them – all while knowing that our tax dollars fund these war crimes.” Note the similarities in language between this sentence and the final sentence of the first paragraph. The reader is meant to draw parallels between Israel’s dead civilians and Hamas’s dead fighters. The parallel language is meant to convey a false moral equivalence between the two. Also note the reference to “our tax dollars”: You paid for this. You are morally complicit. Therefore, if you object to the mayor’s statement, you are just trying to willfully ignore your own guilt. How dare you. The last two paragraphs (yes, he keeps going) are more of the same. More moral equivocation, more inversion of responsibility, more criticism of Israel. The word “apartheid” is thrown in for good measure, of course, because no statement on the anniversary of the worst day in modern Israel’s history would be complete without undermining the nation’s very existence. Every word of this is shameful, every sentence detestable, every paragraph overflowing with covert lies and overt moral cowardice. But we should expect nothing less of Zohran Mamdani, a man whose only talent is the ongoing profanation of an office he doesn’t deserve, in a great city he will slowly—or maybe not so slowly—destroy. This statement—and the man behind it—are worthy of nothing but our scorn and should warrant nothing but our contempt.

We put nine women in charge of a jury for two weeks and they tried to let a mom get away with strangling her kids. Then they launched a vicious smear campaign against the one black man who stood in their way. So I’m confident Obama is full of shit here.