The Ledger
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Wong runs five to six isolated cloud instances of OpenClaw
“Now I have not, I have now, Five, maybe six instances of open cloud installed, but they're all in the cloud, isolated. I give them limited access.”
Cakir conducts 90% of his daily work directly in the terminal
“90% of my work now is on the terminal, you know, and it's awful. It's just a bunch of texts in a black screen, you know, and it's like lots of texts going and it's really boring when you think about it, but I get very excited because it's achieving a lot of th…”
Ustinov: Automating Operations With AI Saved Us From Hiring Five Employees
“We haven't hired at least
Four or five people to date that we were considering hiring like a new person for this new role.
And we decided not to, because it was faster and easier to automate some processes and workflows instead of having a dedicated person for…”
Lazerow: We made bad angel investments because we couldn't say no
“We made a lot of bad investments because we weren't strong enough to say no to certain people who maybe have supported us in the past, and so it just took a little, kind of, getting back on our feet.”
Weisbrot Built a $6K Monthly Passive Commission Stream via Revenue Splits
“He was doing all of the work and I got 50% of the revenue. It was an amazing deal. And within like the first three or four months, I scaled it to, it was like five, 6000 dollars a month in passive commission for me.”
Narkar Rejected an Acquisition Offer From a Large Contact Center
“In fact, we got one opportunity two years back from a very large contact center to sell our business. We didn't proceed that time. We didn't even discuss the numbers. They were interested. And we said, we are not ready as yet. We still love what we're building…”
Lechner: Only about 20% of coaching clients personally use AI daily
“I don't think very many. I think maybe 20%.”
Bhargava: NB Group charges portfolio companies advisory fees for operational support
“In most cases, take a advisory fee from the companies, which is, you know, in exchange for the support we give our businesses and we are active hands-on investors. You know, I've gone down into the weeds, taking on interim CFO roles for our companies or taking…”
Bhargava: NB Group avoids using AI primarily as a cost-cutting tool
“There are certainly private equity investors who are pursuing Strategies that incorporate AI as a cost cutting tool to, you know, improve profitability of invest, you know, in businesses that they invest in. That's not something we've. Really pursued.”
Shelton targets asset-heavy acquisitions over software for borrowing leverage
“I'm looking for an asset heavy business, a business that has assets that gives me something to leverage, as opposed to, for example, a software business that doesn't have.”
Shelton: Target acquisition sellers are retiring Baby Boomers who slowed down
“I tend to buy from baby boomer age, men or women, they're older, they're looking to retire. They haven't been very aggressive with their business lately.”
Blue: Saltbox Requires Six Months of Full Billable Utilization to Hire
“Our philosophy is we want to see line of sight to at least six plus months of full utilization, meaning, you know, 40 hours a week billable time in the future to feel confident that we are going to pull the trigger on, on a full-time hire for that role.”
Weldon: Prospect Desk pairs human SDRs with five named AI agents
“So instead of getting rid of the SDRs, what we're doing is, is we're creating a digital twin org chart, which is how do we use these agents and name them? So if there's somebody's we're doing in-market audiences, that process is called IMA. So IMA works with V…”
Weldon: Prospect Desk's biggest sales blocker is agency fear of replacement
“It's our number one knee capper is an agency feels like we're going to take from them instead of supplementing.”
Giving a failing overseas supplier blank checks prevented an immediate collapse
“There was an interim period there where it was cheaper for me to take a big financial risk by giving them a blank check, effectively, rather than rolling the dice and them potentially collapsing, and then I don't have A supplier. Until I could bring my own fac…”
McKay: I refuse to use AI for net-new idea generation
“My answer to that right now is that I try and not go to it for net new thinking. I use it as a reviewer. I use it as a summarizer, but I don't come to it for idea generation because I like to train my brain to come up with ideas.”
Jamison: Recent deals include dry cleaners, HVAC, and rehab centers
“Like I'm investing in the companies that don't really care about AI, the things that can't be disrupted, think more boring businesses, blue collar businesses stuff like that. The, I go for more of the small business thing. So some of my more recent deals was l…”
Jamison operates a Generative Engine Optimization firm targeting LLM product recommendations
“I have a company that we are very actively Basically doing SEO for the different LLMs. You know, essentially there's different names for it. There's AEO, GEO, AIO, whatever you want to call it. But we're essentially training the LLMs to answer the way that we …”
Weisbrot avoids investors after past backers breached contracts and killed his business
“But I'm not looking to get investors because I've done that before, and that, I think, was a huge reason why my business failed. I give it fifty-fifty. 50% was my fault. 50% was the investors because they just didn't give me the money that they signed the cont…”
Jamison targets 30%+ IRR by passively acquiring profitable small businesses
“Started building up a portfolio of these small businesses that I could own passively. You know, targeting like 30% plus IRR.”
Stuart Cohen: SuperStock Ceased Content Distribution to China Over Tracking Failures
“Well, and of course the first place that our rights went away was when they were, when we had resellers for our content in China and those all spiraled out of control because you lost all ability to track any usages. When did that happen? It's probably about 1…”
Davis: 10–15% of brand clients only buy video assets without posting
“A good 10, 15% of the clients who work with us, they don't even want the follower, they don't even want the creator to post, they want the video.”
Nanavati: Cimphony moved from SaaS to outcome-based transaction pricing
“We've moved away from the SaaS model and it's a pure transaction based model. Like we pay for the outcome. You pay for alignment of the incentive with what the customer needs, rather than just paying for something when the customer does.”
Nanavati: Cimphony generates 75% to 80% margins
“And the fact that the cost of our infrastructure is low compared to the human power cost of the traditional model it allows us to generate very strong margins of 75 to 80% margins.”
Brand drops founders obsessed with funding before conducting basic product discovery
“The founders that are focused on, I need to get funding, I need to get funding, and it's like, well, you don't know what your product is yet, you don't know what your, you don't have a prototype, you don't know who your audience is, you don't need funding now,…”
Sauer: Replacing expensive hires with lower-cost staff raised agency valuation
“Cause I'm here to tell you that the expensive people actually, we didn't make any money those years. And at the end of the day, those expensive people weren't even there because they, once, once they left or naturally we didn't replace them, we replaced them w…”
Guha: Thesis raised a $4.2M seed round without an existing product
“Especially at our stage, the seed stage, when we raised, we didn't have a product. We just had an idea and we wanted to bring this in front of people.”
Guha: Thesis trains LLMs to dynamically generate UI on the fly
“What we do is basically train the LLM to understand these design patterns. And instead of you having to manually encode them into your application or manually hard code them into your application, You can just use RLLM to generate it on the fly and just engage…”
Sullivan: Tying angel investments directly to advisory board seats helps secure checks
“One of the ways that we help our founders secure those angel checks is by directly connecting an angel check to their advisory board.”
Weisbrot: Startup paid salaries in Bitcoin and Ethereum before securing funding
“In the first half of last year, before we got funding we were using like Bitcoin and Ethereum to pay for things with salaries and software and things like that. And then once we got investment from people we started using, you know transfer wise, we're using S…”
Lacritz plans to fully bootstrap his next company
“In my head though, my next company would be bootstrapped and we'll take it all the way bootstrapped.”
Blakney: Paid a Coach Five Figures Monthly for Six Months with Zero Results
“I hired a coach that costs five figures a month for six months and it didn't do crap.”
Markevics: Seed Communications uses zero full-time staff, only long-term contractors
“That's our whole model is we don't have full-time hires for anything. We actually have a group of consultants that are signed on long-term contractually to work with us.”
Weisbrot: Switching to referrals boosted close rates from 10% to 90%
“And at first I started with cold outreach and I would close like maybe eight percent, 10%. When I went, when I switched to referrals, I was closing 80, 90%.”
Lopicolo: Noble Studios bills SaaS tool costs to clients as tech fees
“We actually build that into our SOWs and it's a, and we call it a technology fee. And we expose that hard cost to our clients and saying, look, in order for us to produce the best work we ha we can, We have these tools that are very specific to the work that w…”
Caruana D: A $55,000 Coaching Investment Generated a Multiple Six-Figure Day
“The greatest investment was on a coach, and it was probably about 55,000 dollars, but this coach actually had the knowledge that I needed to break into. And literally by learning the concepts that he had to teach me, I actually made had a multiple six figure d…”
Gendelin paused hiring to intentionally avoid potential layoffs during an economic downturn
“So we are actually very understaffed right now. And we do need to fill a lot of positions and I am specifically not doing that because the last thing I want to do is hire someone who I would have to let go just because the economy downturn.”
Bimani: BPS Security Turned Down a Prospective $13.2 Million Client Contract
“I turned down a client that would have brought in about 13.2 million dollars to in revenue to the company.”
Bimani: BPS Security ties operating expenses directly to individual client contracts
“The way we structured our company on our operation, we tied everything to the individual client. So if we lose the client, none of our other profit margins are affected.”
Bimani: BPS Security Quoted a 20% Surcharge to Force Weekly Payments
“I started telling clients we charge upfront before sources are rendered. And then they would tell me, well, we only do net 30 and net 45. Those are your two options. That's what they would tell me. I'm like, well, we charge a 20% price increase. So if we're go…”
Bramlett operates all his businesses entirely without holding physical inventory
“And I particularly don't have any inventory in any of my businesses. We do everything with an on demand supply.”
Rutledge: RDMS Group uses its accounting firm to drive other business ventures
“And truthfully, the accounting firm isn't our primary goal. It is the Sun to which all of our other businesses orbit. It draws attention. It gives us expertise, but it's really a great tool for us to grow our other businesses is how we utilize it.”
Web Street Takes 10% Carry; Zero-Salary Operators Receive 23%
“Investors receive two-thirds, one-third goes to the is split between Web Street, we actually get 10% of the profit, and the operator, so the operator running the businesses they get the other 23%, and the reason they get that portion is they have no salary, th…”
Web Street Withholds Quarterly Distributions to Buffer Working Capital Reserves
“So a lot of times we will hold back distributions for a quarter or two to help with fluctuations in inventory. So some of these that are FBA, Amazon businesses you know, these are very experienced operators. They can definitely be trusted to run the business a…”
Sean Weisbrot says microdosing psilocybin uniquely stopped his racing thoughts
“And I found that the only thing that makes the anxiety go away that also quiets the thoughts is microdosing psilocybin mushrooms.”
CEO Saxena still codes for 100-employee BetterCommerce for personal joy
“Even today, you know, a lot of people say you are the CEO and the founder of the company. You have a hundred people working under you. Why do you still have to code? You shouldn't be coding. I said, no, I draw joy out of it. It's not out of compulsion. It's my…”
Preisinger: WriterGirl starts every meeting of three or more with meditation
“When people first join our organization, they're kind of shocked because every meeting that is more, that is three people or more starts with a meditation.”
Fairweather: Her 14-year-old son earns spending money by scraping real estate data
“I when my son, my oldest is 14, when he wants to earn extra money, when he wants to get a new snowboarding pass or whatever it is that he happens to want, that's not A birthday or Christmas or whatever, you know, I make them work for it. And so I have an extra…”