Owner of Alpine Modern Cafe in Boulder, CO/ Place Maker / Husband / Dad of 3

Joined March 2009
185 Photos and videos
Pinned Tweet
2 Apr 2023
A bit about me: • Live in the mountains just outside Boulder, CO • Married 14 years. 3 kids under the age of 12. • Co-own Alpine Modern Cafe in Boulder, CO (two locations in Boulder and looking to expand in the Rocky Mountain West and beyond) • 3rd Place Maker - My mission is to create a new generation of spaces for people to gather and connect. • Interested in Small Business, Real Estate, Entrepreneurship • Here to connect, learn, grow. DMs open and would love to learn about you-
85
6
694
364,695
I think graduating from a top college becomes more important, not less, in the age of AI.
3
120
I have @Superhuman connected to @claudeai via the superhuman mcp . I asked it triage my inbox. I had (116 emails). It came up with a plan and began executing and then stopped because it went through all my usage. Must be insanely token heavy. Frustrating
2
4
168
Clavicular’s world view is a road to nowhere- proven to produce unhappiness. Obsessive self interest, constant fixation on status and hierarchy, etc. is a guaranteed way to lose your soul. It’s troubling that young men would regard that as a lifestyle to aspire to.
1
2
81
Occasionally someone will come into our cafe and sit at a table with a book and a coffee. And that’s it. No phone. Just a book. And it’s awesome. And rare. And I’d love to see it more.
1
12
154
I just want a self driving car that will drive itself to the car wash once a week.
3
174
Jon Baker retweeted
10/10 explanation of the marginal revolution, subjective theory of value, the failure of Marxian economics, and free economies as the antidote to poverty. Followed.
Hello Julia, sans aucune ironie, c'est top que tu prennes le temps de te renseigner. Mais le problème quand on lit Marx aujourd'hui, c'est qu'on prend pour acquis sa prémisse de départ, alors qu'elle a été démontée scientifiquement il y a plus de 150 ans. Toute la pensée de Marx repose sur la théorie de la valeur-travail. L'idée que la valeur d'un bien vient de la quantité de travail nécessaire pour le produire. Si tu acceptes cette prémisse, alors oui, tout son raisonnement tient. Le capitaliste "vole" la plus-value du travailleur, l'exploitation est mathématique, la révolution est inévitable. Sauf qu'en 1871, trois économistes (Menger en Autriche, Jevons en Angleterre, Walras en Suisse) découvrent indépendamment la même chose : la valeur n'est pas objective, elle est subjective et marginale. Un verre d'eau dans le désert vaut une fortune. Le même verre à côté d'une rivière ne vaut rien. Le travail incorporé est identique. Donc le travail ne détermine pas la valeur. C'est le consommateur qui valorise un bien selon son utilité marginale dans un contexte donné. Exemple concret : tu peux passer 1000 heures à tricoter un pull moche que personne ne veut. Selon Marx, ce pull a énormément de valeur (beaucoup de travail incorporé). Selon la réalité, il ne vaut rien. Parce que personne n'en veut. À l'inverse, Bernard Arnault crée des milliards de valeur non pas parce qu'il "exploite" mais parce qu'il a su anticiper et organiser des désirs humains à grande échelle. La valeur est créée par la coordination, pas extraite par le vol. Cette découverte (la révolution marginaliste) a invalidé tout l'édifice marxiste. Pas pour des raisons idéologiques, pour des raisons scientifiques. C'est pour ça que plus aucun département d'économie sérieux au monde n'enseigne Marx comme un cadre d'analyse valide. On l'enseigne en histoire de la pensée. Maintenant, le truc important. Si ton intention en lisant Marx c'est d'aider les pauvres (c'est une intention noble), alors tu vas être surprise par ce qui suit. Regarde les chiffres de la Banque mondiale. En 1820, 90% de l'humanité vivait dans l'extrême pauvreté. Aujourd'hui, moins de 9%. Cette chute historique ne s'est PAS produite dans les pays qui ont appliqué Marx. Elle s'est produite dans les pays qui ont libéralisé leur économie. Chine post-1978, Vietnam post-1986, Inde post-1991, Pologne post-1989. À chaque fois qu'un pays libéralise, des centaines de millions de gens sortent de la pauvreté en une génération. À chaque fois qu'un pays applique Marx (URSS, Cambodge, Corée du Nord, Venezuela), c'est la famine et les goulags. Ce n'est pas une opinion, c'est l'expérience la plus massive jamais menée en sciences sociales. Plusieurs milliards de cobayes humains, sur un siècle. Donc paradoxalement, si tu aimes vraiment les pauvres, la position la plus cohérente n'est pas d'être marxiste. C'est d'être pour la liberté économique. Parce que c'est empiriquement la seule chose qui a jamais sorti massivement les gens de la misère. Pour creuser, je te recommande trois lectures qui vont changer ta vision : "La Loi" de Frédéric Bastiat (court, lumineux, gratuit en ligne) "La Route de la Servitude" de Hayek "Économie en une leçon" de Henry Hazlitt Bonne lecture, et vraiment chapeau de chercher à comprendre plutôt que de rester dans tes certitudes. C'est rare.
24
159
2,581
123,087
Hope gives us the motivation to persist despite the gap between where we are and where we want to be. Pessimism allows us to avoid the hard work of confronting that gap and exercising agency to transform the world. Pessimism is a road to nowhere. Reject it.
1
122
there's thumbs down arrow on replies now??
1
164
I want to help restaurants make the transition to AI. i'm building out an internal playbook for my own business but there's huge opportunities in this industry at the intersection of restaurants and AI I have domain expertise and a broad network within the industry. Who is AI native and wants to help build in this domain? huge TAM. very fragmented. Many playbooks to be written. operators hungry for operational leverage Shoot me a DM. My business can be the guinea pig.
4
10
1,808
What's become very clear to me as I've started to integrate AI in my own business is that while AI is super powerful, it needs to be adapted to each and every business in unique ways. Restaurant people are not technical. They need ways to on-ramp into AI that don't feel totally overwhelming. I think there will be opportunity in every industry to operationalize AI and act as a bridge between technical know-how and operational know-how.
3
199
Jon Baker retweeted
The reason I am an AI optimist is that the world is full of brilliant, driven, creative people Now these people - across science, medicine, technology, business and more - can create and iterate faster than ever before How could you not be hopeful?
61
36
661
34,005
Productivity doesn't follow a bell curve. It follows a power law. The top 1% of workers produce as much as the bottom 57% combined. AI is an amplifier of this difference The 10x person becomes the 50x person. People that are already highly productive are becoming even more productive. Outcomes will be super divergent as those at the top run laps around those that are not very productive to begin with.
1
3
224
Jon Baker retweeted
One common issue with personalization in all LLMs is how distracting memory seems to be for the models. A single question from 2 months ago about some topic can keep coming up as some kind of a deep interest of mine with undue mentions in perpetuity. Some kind of trying too hard.
1,750
1,073
21,140
2,751,031
There is so much trash on this site. Stuff that I just don’t want to see. The viral rage posts, the AI hype bois with no real substance, the BREAKING! posts…etc I want more signal and less noise. I’d pay double to have the Algo remove this crap. It’s such a waste of my attention. So tired of it.
1
8
267
Normal people are not going to use Claude Code or open claw. It’s too technical. The learning curve is too demanding and confusing. A major player, like google, who already has tons of consumer adoption and data needs to solve this problem and make the UI/UX dead simple and easy to understand. The agent needs to be able to read across gmail, google drive, sheets, docs, etc.. etc.. Not sure how google solves this. Convert all google docs to markdown files that it can hold in memory or reference easily?
2
6
566
I predict that small businesses that heavily integrate AI into their operations will benefit from higher valuations and easier sale processes. Imagine if agentic systems have full context on the business past and present? What if those agents persist regardless of ownership? This unlocks the potential to make ownership transitions much more seamless and alleviates key man risk, owner dependency, etc. Has the potential to make the SMB market much more liquid. Thoughts? @ClintFiore
4
6
357
Apple marketing their products as ‘built for Apple intelligence’ when I have not used Apple Intelligence… ever… such a missed opportunity.
2
4
515
Update: We closed early in preparation. And the power never went out.
When @XcelEnergyCO proposes to cut power to prevent wild fires, businesses like mine (2 cafes in Boulder) have to make plans for the worst. You can’t just wait for the power to get cut and then close the restaurant. So what does that look like us for today? - whether or not the power actually gets cut, we have to decide if we are closing early. The restaurants take an hour to close. You can’t run dishes, clean the espresso machine etc without power. Today we have a planned outage at 2. That means we will close at 1. Will they actually cut the power? Still no idea…. - We have to set a deadline for making the decision about closing early. The needs to be before we have all the info as these decisions are usually down to the wire.We do our best to get the latest info but excel is terrible at communicating. - given that info we have to set in motion a plan of action for preparing for refrigeration to be backed up or put EVERYTHING on ice. In our case that’s a backup generator. So I’ll be spending a few hours today getting fuel, setting up the generator, getting extension chords ready. Etc - we have to adjust / cut staffing in advance so that people don’t show up for a shift for one hour, commuting up to thirty minutes just to be sent home an hour later. It’s all very frustrating. I get wanting to be safe, but these things have real impacts.
10
1,413
If I were to start a restaurant today that i wanted to scale, my process would be the following in order: 1. What is my real estate strategy? 2. What is my product? It’s easy to build a product and brand only to find that the RE opportunities are either too competitive, unavailable, etc.. The biggest brands find product / real estate fit early. For example, are you: - stand alone drive thru on large lot? - stand alone drive thru on half an acre? - in line sub 1500 sq ft? - local strip mall focused? - Etc.. Some of these are more or less competitive depending on market conditions.
Replying to @moseskagan
I’ve experienced Landlords (usually sophisticated- Macerich, Asana) want local, less credit worthy brands (mine) because it’s an antidote to this trend and draws in a different crowd. So there are market mechanisms in place to prevent this, but is highly dependent on the needs/motivations/vision of the LL. For single tenant independently owned commercial RE, you’d be hard pressed for that owner to turn down a sweet green for an Alpine Modern. But your point is correct and sad to see. Ive wished there was some elegant solution for this. Securitization for LL and opportunity for emerging brands. But alas…
5
742
When @XcelEnergyCO proposes to cut power to prevent wild fires, businesses like mine (2 cafes in Boulder) have to make plans for the worst. You can’t just wait for the power to get cut and then close the restaurant. So what does that look like us for today? - whether or not the power actually gets cut, we have to decide if we are closing early. The restaurants take an hour to close. You can’t run dishes, clean the espresso machine etc without power. Today we have a planned outage at 2. That means we will close at 1. Will they actually cut the power? Still no idea…. - We have to set a deadline for making the decision about closing early. The needs to be before we have all the info as these decisions are usually down to the wire.We do our best to get the latest info but excel is terrible at communicating. - given that info we have to set in motion a plan of action for preparing for refrigeration to be backed up or put EVERYTHING on ice. In our case that’s a backup generator. So I’ll be spending a few hours today getting fuel, setting up the generator, getting extension chords ready. Etc - we have to adjust / cut staffing in advance so that people don’t show up for a shift for one hour, commuting up to thirty minutes just to be sent home an hour later. It’s all very frustrating. I get wanting to be safe, but these things have real impacts.
6
20
3,121