Jason William Gordon

Meanwhile on threads these days:

Miami PD has the opportunity to do the funniest thing at the Vice City game for the GTA 6 release

This is actually more complicated on the VC side than on the LP side. I worked for a firm who was an early Tesla investor. They distributed the shares as soon as they were allowed post IPO even though the firm founder believed in the company and told the LPs not to sell. Unless the fund agreement gives a specific process for distributing proceeds post IPO, this is a hazy part of VC. If the company IPOs at $10 and trades to 9 at the lockup do you eat the discount when you distribute? Could mean millions in carry. Do you hold post IPO for a while if you still believe in the company and take the risk before distributing to LPs? Is that scope creep and “playing hedge fund” which could piss off your investors? But if you’re right, it could mean a ton of money…

I can't code. A month ago, never opened a terminal. Now 4 AI agents run for me: building a website, trading a $1k acct, writing a SaaS app, & pitching biz ideas every Monday. I'll start live-tweeting progress cuz even tech noobs can do a lot these days.

This is why every fat person who got frustrated that their doctors only focused on their weight was wildly wrong

Dallas makes the aspen and palm beach rotation for seasons very easy. Hampton’s are more difficult but doable. Cost of living is much lower. Save 10% on income taxes per year alone. 3mm for a big ass house in highland park, raise the next Scottie Scheffler, play golf every weekend for at least half the year… Dallas is a wonderful city

A partner at a PE firm told me I “wasn’t mentorable” 2 months into the job. Well, I’ve been working for a mentor for the better part of a decade now and that PE partner is now a research assistant in a chemistry lab after the firm he ran blew up

I vividly recall my high school in Palm beach county buying new MacBooks at the end of the year and a teacher telling me IT had to make sure they spent their budget so they could get the same budget the next year. Just broken thinking. Plenty of waste.

Today I learned that people think Jews worship “Moloch”. Well we worship Melech, aka “King” aka the God of the Torah. We do not worship Moloch, which was intentionally altered to have the same vowels as the Hebrew word for “shame” to highlight the Israelites disgust at the pagan child sacrifices in the name of their god. This is literally Jews saying child sacrifice is bad through ancient text.

In the IPO game “pushing it to retail” is what you do when you’re filling out the leftover allocations of the order book as a gimme to the investment banks’ wealth management clients. Being a wealth management client of Goldman could get you some shares, but the major allocators come first

How to fix public schools: 1. Phonics based reading vs whole word 2. Re-institute performance-based hold backs. If you fail 8th grade you don’t just get promoted to 9th grade. 3. School vouchers With these 3 VERY easy changes, schools will become more effective educators for less money. It comes down to results-based learning techniques, outcomes based advancement, and free market school choice.

It’s amazing what Israelis will do to ensure they can eat their bambas 🤣

This example is just not extreme enough to express the value of pledge asset lines of credit. It’s more like: 1mm initial capital, 10 mm current value, pledged assets line for 3mm. Interest rate is almost at mortgage rates and minimum payment is just interest (more flexible). Math: 3.5mm capital drawdown, at 20% tax on 2.5mm of gains, 500k in taxes, net 3mm cash Now you have 6.5mm in the bank, assuming it grows at 9% pre tax annually for 30 years: 86.24mm in 30 years. 10mm still in the bank, with just interest paid off per year: 132.68mm, less 3mm of debt, so 129.68mm. So that decision to pull money out versus using a PAL cost an extra 500k in taxes upfront, and then kneecapped your growth in the future by 43mm!! Yes, you could continue to replenish that savings over time and work your way back to that initial 10mm of savings, but every year that goes by without the original 10 in there is a year of compounding missed on the remainder that has yet to be replenished. This is the value of borrowing against your assets.

I’ve been reading on this: 1. The top players don’t want to quit. They stay in the game longer than ever. 2. Companies and boards are biased towards past performance and safer bets, so they prefer experience over fresh blood 3. Many companies used to have mandatory retirement ages to prevent this exact issue but those are all long gone

Avis having its moment feels like the right time to share the wildest story I’ve learned this week: There is a Canadian car theft ring preying on car rentals across the northeastern US (New York, etc.). They rent cars in the US, drive them to Canada, and then ship them overseas for sale. They use Canada because of looser shipping log requirements. It’s so bad that most rental companies will only rent a minivan to you if you’re taking the car to Canada at all during your travels. Apparently the thieves don’t like minivans 😂

Example of How AI Is Changing the Game: We had unstructured data from call center logs for a business: 750k lines in Excel. I gave it to Copilot (for internal purposes only). I asked it to find all examples of callers leaving voicemails and check if our team called them back within 48 hours. Then remove all third parties, spam, and B2B callers. Next, analyze how frequently people who left voicemails are calling back within 5 days. Then generate suggestions on how to improve our call center and how to automate this analysis for weekly KPI tracking. Now I have a list of real, actionable insights for our team to review tomorrow, along with a way to seamlessly track progress. I did it all while watching the Masters and sipping coffee.

In World War Two the old guys were a legit elite force. 77th infantry division.

This looks freaking awesome. I have a few thoughts critical to success: 1. Manufacturing isn’t just big projects. The minimum checks are $100M, and they have $2B to spend in 3 years. The entire manufacturing industry relies on massive supply chains because small parts suppliers can each make independent efficiency decisions that collectively optimize the whole manufacturing base. We need that full supply chain to have strong US sourcing potential- and that means a lot of smaller players. They need to understand the value of small manufacturing to the big players for this to work. 2. Employee issues. One example I know is the drastic shortage of welders in Louisiana after the New Orleans Navy yard closed. There’s no new talent pipeline. One of their critical investments may need to be in training programs and companies to rebuild that workforce. 3. The prestige trap. They’ll likely assemble a team of top bulge-bracket firms and megafunders, plus an advisory board of retired Fortune 100 execs. That’s great- except it risks massive blind spots on boots-on-the-ground realities without careful planning. A classic example is the Affordable Care Act, which suffered in part because it was shaped mainly by big-company execs (insurers and hospitals) with no real input from practicing doctors. Without bringing in less prestigious but highly experienced advisors who know the tangible issues in this space, we may not make as much progress as possible.

The reason we’re upset about the chabad stuff is because it’s like saying the Amish are a threat. They are incredibly harmless and to implicate that they are anything but that is dangerously misguided thinking.