Sebastian Villarreal
@elbasti
Small TAM tweets. Ex fintech guy (cofounder http://kin.com, http://super.mx) now working on manufacturing. "Classical liberalism + State Capacity"
Unfounded opinions I hold with zero evidence: Gusto would be multiples larger if they had kept the name "Zen Payroll" and if their logo wasn't red.
I love this picture from Apollo 17 because it has a color calibration chart in it. My brain thinks "these old apollo pictures are grayscale" but they are not. The moon is just really f'n gray! It's strange to see "colors" in moon pictures.
*Whistler's Mother* perfectly exemplifies the French psyche. Despite it being American, they have enough appreciation for art to include it in the Orsay: the most "French" of all the art museums in Paris. However, they are too proud to display it prominently. It's the best…
VCs used to think vertical SaaS TAMs were too small. But if you own distribution and data, the real money is in fintech. Toast now gets over 80% of its revenue from offering financial products where their customers already work. That took years to build. With Unit’s new…
Today we’re making @unit_co_'s biggest announcement to date: ready-to-launch solutions. They help software companies offer a full money dashboard to their customers: capital, banking and bill pay ✨ We’ve built ready-to-launch to make it the simplest to launch + succeed in…
This slide is amazing. It reveals simple and disciplined decision making. Even better, it's simple language. Simple language = clear thinking. As a thought experiment try to come up with what a slide like this would look like for tech startups! (You might get a heart attack).
Thought you might appreciate seeing this slide, which we have used to raise capital for small discretionary value-add apartment funds in the past. (Note that I'm not raising for anything right now.) Unfortunately, for various reasons, LA rentals have under-performed these past…
En lugar de protestar la gentrificación de la condesa, por que no mejor protestan que no haya más condesas? Que no haya accesos a Chapultepec de la col. Américas. Que no haya calles arboladas y seguras y tranquilas al oriente y norte de la ciudad. Que no haya más transporte…
In the hierarchy of Silicon Valley, 'partner at Sequoia' is the second most prestigious and commanding credential there is. #1? Unicorn founder. You know what I'm talking about.
You guys are way too invested in the mayoral race of a Very Important City (in decline). It's simultaneously true that mayors (cities) are becoming more important *in the aggregate*, with each individual one becoming less important. This is because large cities are becoming…
One of the advantages of software vs manufacturing is that your software never messages you to brag about the beautiful landscape they are living in.
Messages like "the highest marginal tax rate should be higher" have far more support across the political divide than "we should have no billionaires." More wonkish? yes. Less viral? also yes. But also less divisive. And, critically, also more *true*.
Few of them realize it, but people who say "I don’t think that we should have billionaires" are also saying "I don't think there should be startups," because successful startups inevitably produce billionaires. paulgraham.com/richnow.html
Everything The Beatles ever recorded--from Love Me Do to Come Together, changing pop music again and again in between--was recorded over the span of SEVEN years.
Me but now and northern Mexico.
POV: it's 1983 and you just moved to pittsburgh to pursue your career in manufacturing
The Waymo/Tesla issue is a great example of what I call "shallowthink." Humans don't have lidar, so you should be able to have a vision-based system that matches human performance. That's true. But if you go one level deeper, you realize there's something pretty fundamental…