The statement by NY Mayor Mandami is an outrageous & disgusting rant & made on a day that ought to honor the over 1200 civilians butchered by Hamas including 46 Americans.  His comments are as insensitive & insulting as saying on the 9-11 Anniversary that “While we mourn the loss of those murdered by terrorists we condemn the response of the United States equally .”  There is NO genocide in Gaza.  The death toll there is due to Hamas having continued to hold hostages (including Americans) and starving, raping, torturing and killing them. An apology for his obtuse and utterly ignorant remarks are not enough.  God help the people of New York for electing a a jihadist sympathizer!

Built a pretty cool automated outbound sales system with @ClaudeDevs and @Muse Claude helped build the entire workflow using a few Python scripts, Google Sheets, Gmail, and Muse for research. Here’s how it works: A daily script scans my last 14 days of published content and identifies companies we’ve covered, mentioned frequently, or that recently raised funding. It filters out existing sponsors, previous outreach, and bad leads, then sends qualified companies to Muse through Google Sheets. Muse researches decision-makers, finds their emails, and returns sources. An hourly script validates the results and feeds them back into our CRM. Claude picks up the qualified leads, verifies inferred emails through Clay, and writes personalized pitches referencing our actual articles. Everything lands in Gmail Drafts for my approval. Follow-ups and responses are tracked automatically. The cool part is that Claude and Muse aren’t directly connected. The scripts and Google Sheets act as the bridge between them. We’ve gone from ~30 Claude steps per email to just 3–5. Content → Leads → Research → Personalized Outreach → Sponsors → More Content. An AI-powered sales flywheel that largely runs itself.

One of the biggest red flags in venture capital is a founder who agrees with everything an investor says. The VC suggests a new market. Great idea! Change the pricing? Absolutely! Pivot the product? Already thinking about it! You’re supposed to know your business better than the person who spent 30 minutes looking at your deck. Take feedback. Listen carefully. Change your mind when someone makes a good point. But stop treating every investor opinion like an instruction. They’re investing in your judgment, not hiring you to follow theirs.

Everyone wants a warm intro to a VC. It’s overrated. A warm intro might get your email opened faster. It doesn’t make your company better. If the business is great, investors will find a way to meet you. If the business isn’t great, having their college roommate introduce you isn’t going to save the round. Spend less time hacking the intro. Spend more time making yourself impossible to ignore.

Fun AI hack I’ve been testing: I had ~30B tokens on Muse and wanted Claude to use it as a research engine. No native connection between them, so initially I used Google Drive as the bridge. Claude → writes task to shared Drive folder → Muse researches it → writes Google Doc/Sheet back → Claude reads it. It worked, but there was a problem: Claude had to ingest the entire Google Doc through the Drive connector every time. I was saving tokens on research and then burning a ton of tokens just moving the research back into Claude. So we changed the architecture. Now a normal script runs hourly and uses the Google Drive API to pull new Muse docs directly. It reads the title/metadata, routes the output to the right workflow, pulls the cited sources directly, verifies them, and moves the doc to Processed. Claude only gets the small amount of information that actually requires reasoning or approval. Muse = research Google Drive = shared message queue Python/API = transport + routing + verification Claude = reasoning/judgment AI talks to AI without making an AI do the plumbing. Still testing it, but so far this feels like a much better way to connect different AI systems that don’t natively talk to each other.

ok I listened to all of this @HarryStebbings good job trying to push back and be a little sassy 1) 99% of funds cant do this but they want to 2) they are like 50yrs old with 1 major anchor LP so they can take risks 3) they won this cycle already with early bet on Anthropic turning $500M in 2024 into $15B in 2026 4) So now they are playing with house $ 5) They are already rich which is a competitive advantage (he said it and I agree)

Pinterest ($PINS) has hired Amazon ($AMZN) finance executive James Dibbo as its next CFO, starting Oct. 26. CEO Bill Ready called Dibbo an “exceptional finance leader” with experience across consumer tech, shopping and advertising.

VCs love saying they invest in “outliers.” Then they pass because: The market is too early. The founder is too unconventional. The idea sounds too crazy. The numbers don’t fit the model. You can’t brag about hunting outliers and then only invest in things that look normal. Normal is kind of the opposite.

Three years ago today, Hamas terrorists tortured, mutilated, and murdered 1,200 innocent civilians in Israel. Among those slain were men, women, and children — including dozens of Americans. We will never forget this act of barbarism against an ally and recommit ourselves to the defense of civilization.

Most LPs and investors are full of it. When I was raising my first fund, they told me: “I don’t want to be first. Make it real.” So we grinded. We got our first believers, called capital, and made our first investment. Now we were real. Then it became: “Show me some markups.” So we made more investments and got markups. Then it became: “Okay, but show me DPI.” It had barely been a year. But we did it anyway. A little over a year in, we returned 1x DPI. And guess what? They still didn’t care. The goalposts just moved again. That experience taught me one of the most important lessons in fundraising: Stop obsessing over what investors tell you they want. Most of the time, they don’t actually know. They’ll give you a rational reason for why they’re not investing today, then turn around and invest in the hot fund, founder, or company that breaks every rule they just gave you. Watch what investors do, not what they say. And never forget the people who believed before everyone else did. Love those who love you first.