Most entrepreneurs are bad investors.

They often consider investing boring and pay a charlatan to manage their money for an absurd fee.

Most investors are bad entrepreneurs.

They are usually overconfident and have no clue of how to actually operate a business.
Operating a business is hard.

It’s easy to look at a business as a spreadsheet or through the lens of strategy decks and KPIs at a board meeting, but in reality a company is a group of people.

People are hard to inspire and drive towards a goal.

On the flip side...
Investing is hard.

It requires decoding all of the silly finance terms that the world uses to obscure relatively simple concepts so that they can charge huge fees.

It also requires the opposite of entrepreneurship: inaction. Sitting on your hands. Waiting...
But, if you can learn both sides of the coin, it can be transformative.

The best entrepreneurs I know think like investors and vice versa.

“I am a better investor because I am a businessman, and a better businessman because I am no investor.”

–Warren Buffett
Ack Buffett quote got autocorrected:

“I am a better investor because I am a businessman, and a better businessman because I am an investor”

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More from @awilkinson

27 Dec 20
An Update:

I successfully got the Botox Nov 3.

I can now burp like a god 🪄😮

I haven't had serious acid reflux in over a month 😷

I feel SO MUCH BETTER.

Much more patient, calmer, and happier.

Most importantly, I'm no longer in chronic pain for hours a day...
I struggled with this for 7 years.

Daily, miserable, erosive acid reflux.

I tried everything. I went to good doctors.

Ultimately, it took me years of self-diagnosis and reading Google Scholar nightly.

The #1 thing it drove home is: the only thing that matters is health...
I used to hear about "chronic pain" and think of it as some abstract thing.

It's not. It's real. It ruins people's lives and makes them miserable. It can dampen your ability to be yourself.

And mine was MILD. Some people have pain so severe they have to take opioids....
Read 4 tweets
26 Dec 20
I'm a total wuss when it comes to sleep...

On 9 hrs sleep = you could tell me my business is hrs away from bankruptcy and I would be EXCITED to tackle the problem 💪

On 6 hrs = The slightest disagreement or problem and I'm an anxious wreck 😭

I used to be a TERRIBLE sleeper...
I was an insane night owl. I'd stay up until 5AM most nights working, then sleep in until 1 or 2PM.

When I had kids, this stopped working. To say the least.

I realized I had to get my shit together and learn how to sleep!
Over the past few years, I bought every silly sleep tracker device money can buy.

This is what I've learned from personal experimentation:

🪟 Blackout curtains are key

🤿 When travelling, bring a sleep mask (amazon.com/Tempur-Pedic-S…)

🌡️ Cold room (15-18 degrees)...
Read 9 tweets
22 Dec 20
There are four types of entrepreneurs:

1. People who try, give up, and get a job 🤦

2. People who get overwhelmed or comfortable, and stop growing ⚖️ (lifestyle)

3. People who grow steadily, year after year 📈 (compounders)

4. People who blitzscale 🚀(venture) ...
Each is specific to personality....

Some entrepreneurs feel an insatiable need to grow.

Others get to a certain point and stop, due to lifestyle or personality.

So, once you get to a point of comfort, why keep growing?...
So many people think growth = greed.

The reality:

If you don't grow your revenue, you can provide ZERO upside to your employees.

No growth = no raises. No promotions. No new roles. No new interesting people to work with. No new challenges.

The best people will leave...
Read 7 tweets
19 Dec 20
The ultimate businesses are uncapped and non-linear 📈

They can grow to massive scale, with no or limited additional capital (compound their own earnings), and have no inherent cap on growth:
✅Unregulated - move as fast as they want without approval

✅ Limited marginal cost to growth - very small cost difference between serving 10 and 10,000 customers

✅ Asset and Capex light - don't need to buy expensive machinery/build things that take a long time to scale
✅ No wholesale transfer pricing problems - not reliant on a commodity or middleman that can swing P&L lines wildly or can cut you out

✅ Compound earnings - Can reinvest the businesses own profits into itself to grow, not reliant on outside capital (dilution)

For example:
Read 7 tweets
10 Dec 20
Everybody loses sleep over the big stuff:

🏢 Rent
🧑‍💼 Salaries
⚕️ Benefits

What they often forget about are the thousand paper cuts from software fees.

They compound slowly over time, and people don’t realize that you almost always get a significant discount...
This year, we started @BuyerInc to help companies negotiate without all the associated stress.

It’s Negotiation As A Service.

Just CC them and they do the rest.

Here’s a recent example:
A customer was implementing an enterprise ERP.

2 days till deadline for end of quarter discount. They already got them down from $115k to $85k.

Buyer came in and brought it down to $72,600.

First year savings: $12,700

3 year savings: $28,666.

Just by asking.
Read 4 tweets
2 Dec 20
In 2013 I got a call from @stewart.

His gaming startup, Glitch, had failed.

He seemed gutted. They had burned through millions and laid off their entire staff.

He had an idea he wanted us to help with.

A last ditch effort to get his investors money back...
It was an IRC-inspired chat app.

Womp womp.

There were already similar chat products like Campfire and HipChat.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him, but it seemed like a “me too” product.

I didn’t really get it. I thought it had low odds of success...
They called it “Slack” internally.

He hired @Metalab to help turn it into a launchable product.

Because of the situation, he could only afford to pay us $60,000 to do everything.

For a logo, marketing site, mobile and web apps—the works.

medium.com/@awilkinson/sl…
Read 7 tweets

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