"You can be disliked, you need to be respected, and if your sales leader is beloved by everybody, you’ve got the wrong guy. I want someone who will call me on my sh*t and make me better. You cannot win without conflict, and leaders who need to be popular avoid conflict and end up avoiding the right decisions." Love to hear your thoughts @maggie_hott @pedroh96 @austin_rief @vxanand

Here's something fascinating happening in the apartment market right now. The cheapest, oldest apartments (Class C) are getting crushed right now. But ONLY in cities that just delivered tons of new apartments. Let me show you the numbers: Denver: Class C rents down 13.9% Naples: Class C rents down 13.5% Austin: Class C rents down 13.3% Phoenix: Class C rents down 10.5% San Antonio: Class C rents down 7.2% Dallas: Class C rents down 6.5% What do all these cities have in common? They just absorbed a massive wave of new apartments. But here's the twist... In cities that DIDN'T get a big supply wave? Class C rents are actually RISING. 20 cities saw Class C rents go UP more than 3%. 19 of those 20 cities had supply BELOW the national average. So what's going on? It's basically musical chairs. When a brand new luxury apartment opens up, where do those renters come from? They don't appear out of thin air. They move from slightly older apartments. Those apartments now have vacancies. So they drop their rents to compete. That pulls in renters from even older apartments. And down the chain it goes. Eventually it hits the oldest, cheapest apartments at the bottom. And here's why they get hit the hardest: People living in Class C apartments are already spending a huge chunk of their paycheck on rent. To fill empty units, landlords have to cut prices A LOT. Sometimes enough to attract people who couldn't afford market-rate apartments before. It's like a waterfall effect. The water (new supply) at the top pushes everything down. But here's the important part: This proves that building new apartments - even "luxury" ones - reduces rents all the way down the spectrum. If it was just an affordability crisis, you'd see Class C rents falling everywhere. In high-supply cities AND low-supply cities. But we're not seeing that. We're seeing a perfect split: Lots of new apartments = falling Class C rents Few new apartments = rising Class C rents New supply at the top creates relief at the bottom. Also: wages have been growing faster than rents for 3 straight years. More people can afford apartments today than before. The bottom line? This is what happens when you actually build housing. Supply works. (Chart and analysis from Jay Parsons - one of the sharpest real estate economists out there)

100%. I call them #ChangeMakers. They are #DifferenceMakers

Brian Armstrong on what he learned about management from Balaji Srinivasan “Balaji is a brilliant guy. He’s probably one of the top couple smartest people I’ve ever met in my life,” Brian begins. “He was briefly the Chief Technology Officer of Coinbase. He came in through an acquisition and did some amazing work. And he taught me how to manage a totally different type of person.” Brian continues: “Balaji is kind of unmanageable. He’s what some people might call a ‘free radical’ within an organization. He kind of bounces around, absorbing vast amounts of information — even things that aren’t his responsibility — and occasionally he would come back to me with these incredible insights.” Brian gives one funny example: “At one point he came back to me and said, ‘These are all the salespeople that are making more revenue than their salary, and these are all the people that are not.’ And the first thought I had was, ‘You’re not supposed to have access to anybody’s salary. How did you get that?’” Balaji replied, “Don’t worry about it. I found it in some database that I wasn’t supposed to have access to.” The next question Brian asked was, “How did you connect that all up?” The previous week Brian asked the data team to connect Salesforce to Coinbase’s salary data so they could start running some reports to have more accountability. But it was supposed to be a three-week project. Balaji responded, “Oh well I couldn’t sleep this weekend, and I just knew something felt off. So I had to code it up and put it all together.” When the data team completed their analysis three weeks later, they confirmed that Balaji was 100% right. “He was continually doing things like that,” Brian explains. “And he’s incredibly high in disagreeableness, which I learned from him as well. He would go into a team and ask, ‘Why isn’t this functioning well?’ And he would suffer no fools. He would not be afraid to go in there and turn half the people on a team — whether he had the permission to fire them or not… He was a very contrarian figure. I’d say about once a week someone would come into my office and say, ‘I can’t work with Balaji. He’s causing so much collateral damage.’ And I’d say, ‘Yes, but he’s also generating an enormous amount of value and I need you to learn how to work with him.’” Brian knew Balaji wasn’t going to last forever at Coinbase because it was incredibly disruptive, but ultimately he taught Brian how to be a “turnaround CEO” when needed: “In the past I was opting a little more toward trying to be liked instead of being clear about what we’re doing, where we’re going, and what the bar is. He helped me become a better CEO and have a little more disagreeableness.” Video source: @stripe (2025)

Growing Careers Families link.medium.com/sxj3A088DPb

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

Wow, big role. Congrats @DavidSacks !

Healthcare spends on the wrong things, but won't fund the right ones. Far too often, it's healthcare companies that direct care, and not your doctor...they don't often approve the things that are optimal.

If the Republican Party becomes the leader in new housing production, multi-modal transportation and walkable communities, the Democratic Party will lose the millennial generation and decades of votes. This is the #1 issue of young voters—>cost of housing @DougBurgum #LetsBuild

such a great perspective. we need to build new housing & transportation

I can vouch for downtown Providence! The bike lanes, pedestrian walkways and events along the river makes you plan a trip such as bringing my daughter for some food and playing in the park Cc @PVDMayor

My daughter’s favorite daycare teacher is now part time so she can receive Medicaid. She will babysit under the table to make ends meet. How does a wealthy country allow this to happen to our front-line caregivers?

Love seeing this expansion to address housing shortages: turnto10.com/amp/news/local/…

Founders: Eat meals with your prospects. The act of breaking bread together is baked in as a powerful relationship builder by millions of years of evolution. If it's a face to face meeting, make it over breakfast or lunch or dinner. Even if it's coffee, get some cookies from the sweets case. Eat together with your prospects.

PSA for junior VCs or MBAs looking to join a startup: there are no "strategy" or "corp dev" jobs You can join to either: → Sell (Sales/BD) → Build (Product) → Manage Burn (Finance)

12/12 The people do not pull to the side, nor should they. Anyone worried about the future of American democracy should be concerned foremost with the elites’ bizarre belief that the road is theirs. There's an off-ramp! How to find it? Read the essay: nytimes.com/2024/07/06/opini…

A great leader reminds everyone around them that it's okay to tell the truth, even if it's uncomfortable. That's how you build the strongest teams.

Bloomberg offers a perk for clients that is known as the “lose-your-job free trial.” It works like this: if you are a paying customer who gets fired, you can request access to a Bloomberg terminal at no cost for some number of months. The program helps explain one reason Mike Bloomberg has been so successful: he understood his real clients are the traders who use his product, not the firms that pay for it. The idea was hatched early on during a bump in the market. It was pretty straightforward: Wall Street is a volatile place where people are constantly getting fired and rehired. Mike wanted to help smooth out that process. The Bloomberg terminal was one constant in the professional life of traders who were frequently forced suddenly to find new jobs. The terminal’s vaunted message system in particular served as a communications lifeline, allowing continued access to the financial community. The offer was as generous as it was unusual. It’s hard to think of another professional information system paid for by an employer which is offered for free to individuals after they are fired by the company footing the bill. It’s worth unpacking because it sheds light on one of Bloomberg’s deep competitive advantages: it’s connection to the individual user. The Holy Grail for many software and fintech companies is to establish a one-to-one relationship with users. Bloomberg, like most vendors, is usually purchased by a company for the benefit of financial professionals like traders or portfolio managers. By offering a free trial when people are fired, Bloomberg garnered goodwill and cemented a direct relationship with the individual user of the product. When those same individuals went looking for their next job, many would insist that the new package include a Bloomberg terminal. This is why Jeff Cohen, who headed terminal sales at Bloomberg in the 1990s, says that the real sales people at Bloomberg are the customers. Jeff said that Mike figured out better than most other companies how to get paying customers to sell the product more effectively than any salaried employee could. Over time the lose-a-job free trial has become a part of the Bloomberg culture. It is — like the legendary Costco $1.50 hotdog – both a brand marker and super effective marketing. Officially, the brand name for the lose-your-job free trial program is Stay Connected. Nobody on the Street calls it that, of course. Jeff and I were talking about the program because we came across an old email from Nov. 20, 2002 sent out by Lex Fenwick who was running the company at the time. The market was reeling from the dotcom crash. Amid widespread pessimism, Lex wanted the sales force to remind customers that if fired, Bloomberg would help them try to stay in the game. Wall Street is portrayed in Hollywood films as a cut throat place. And there’s a lot to that. But it’s also a place that remains to a surprising degree a relationship business. (Part of a series of business lessons I learned from three decades working at Bloomberg LP) @business

Hey managers: to keep your people, let them work from home 2 days a week. Landmark experiment (1600 ppl, 2yrs): random assignment to hybrid work -Increased satisfaction -Reduced quitting by 33% (especially for women & long commuters) -No costs for performance or promotion rates