I rarely brag on here but what the hell. Here’s the story of how I built and sold a niche startup in late 2021 while running @plntary: It was 2020 and COVID just hit. I had also recently become the treasurer of my condo board for my building in Brooklyn (a different story for another time) and was friendly with our property manager.

The personal loan and Buy Now/Pay Later (Affirm, Afterpay) markets seem like they may be headed for a real reckoning. Was looking at some numbers and it seems bleak… First, it’s worth noting that delinquency rates are still low for mortgages and other debt.

Credit card delinquency rates are up, but still are near historical lows — only a hair over 2% right now, vs. nearly 7% in '08/09:

Been working on a little holiday-themed passion project at Planetary, pumped I get to finally share it just in time for a bunch of holiday parties 😉

The Web Yule Log: webyulelog.com We got a bunch of great folks together to re-interpret the traditional "Yule Log" video. You know, this one:

Across all 5 boroughs, only 45.6% of NYC residents own a car.

Approximately:
• 95.4 sq. miles (76%) of DOT public space are dedicated to roads (more than 4 Manhattans!)
• 29.5 sq. miles (23%) are dedicated to sidewalks
• 1.6 sq. miles (1.2%) are dedicated to bike lanes

😐 Oh and just for fun: there are only 248 miles of subway routes—less than 4% of the total amount of linear roadway (6,300 mi).

I bet you recognize this room. Maybe you’ve seen it in a music video…

Five years ago, I shared the @airtable-based CRM we used at Planetary: blog.airtable.com/how-planetary-…

In that time, the company has changed and grown *a lot* and our CRM has changed, too. Here's what I’ve learned since this article was published (and a link to the new template!) 🧵 First, a quick aside: we've never really used a traditional CRM at Planetary—we found it adds more overhead than helpful for the small size of our sales team. Airtable has remained our go-to tool for new business management.

As an agency founder, one of the things I’ve always strived for are healthy work hours. It was difficult when I was working *for* agencies, and nearly 10 years later, still difficult as an agency owner myself—but it is doable. Here’s how I’ve approached it… Set clear expectations with the client: be up front and include it as part of your process. Be clear you work hard and go home. Most clients actually seem to appreciate this!

i find nyc politics exhausting sometimes

trash piled 10 ft high and 5 ft wide on the sidewalk every week? "this is just part of living in the city!"

street sheds for outdoor eating that have made the city more vibrant and pleasant? "they're a menace to the city! they must go!" my favorite argument I’ve seen against the sheds are that they "attract vermin" and "look bad."

have you *seen* what hides in those trash piles? it’s rats and leaky garbage juice

TIL about the Fisher Price PXL2000, which recorded video+audio on standard audio cassettes. It was only on the market for a single year, with less than half a million units produced. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PXL2000 You could run it using 6 AA batteries (wonder how long it takes to burn through those).

It records at 9x the speed of normal cassette recording speed. Due the limitations of the media, resolution is only 120x90.

It records only *11 minutes* of video on a standard cassette.

"I’d like my house to look like 20 separate structures smashed together" the builder: "you got it. also, roofing was on sale, so we thought you'd like more roof. just roof everywhere. most of the house is just roof."

I may have gone down a bit of a hole and made a chart of the best toilet paper based on price per sqft (with ply) because the naming of the products MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE.

I went through Amazon listings and found ply, sheet size, pack size, and price for each pack I could… Then I determined the total sqft per sheet and roll, then used that calculation to determine the price per sqft both ignoring and factoring in the ply as additional footage.

Oh, hello.

/cc @jstn Also the Tron: Legacy light bike scene on this is just so perfect.

Want to see two absolutely crazy, shady, frustrating charts? (warning: they're confusing, I'll explain)

These charts, which show stock price, volume, short interest, and short volume, tell the story of what happened over the past few days.

Left: $AMC, Right: $GME On Wednesday night, Robinhood and several other apps limited trading of a number of tickers to just a few shares & options. You could sell as many as you owned, but you couldn't buy any more than a couple of each ticker. It included $AMC, $GME, and a few others…

Robinhood will let you buy a whole 5 shares or 10 options contracts of $GME today… which I assume means they expect most of these options to expire OTM or not be weeklies? Otherwise they'll still have to deliver 100 shares for every option at expiry. * assuming the option expires "in the money," of course.

Today has been such a bizarre turn of events to this whole $GME story. @AOC, @chamath (yesterday on CNBC) weighing in on it all, Robinhood, Webull, TD, and more banning opening new positions…

There’s a lot of noise right now, so let me try to break it down as best I can. First, the apps. Late last night, I saw Robinhood had ended trading weekly options on GME, then delisted it and several other stocks. Which, understandably, angered everyone.

My understanding of this is that they are beholden to the folks that settle the trades (clearing houses)

So many folks (esp. the media) are missing the complete backstory on $GME and how we got here.

This has been simmering for over a year and the story behind it is great. I’ve been tracking this since September and devoured all of the details from the origin through today. So back in September 2019 (!) some guy named DeepFuckingValue posted this on r/wallstreetbets: reddit.com/r/wallstreetbe…