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BORING COMPANY TUNNELS: BILLION-DOLLAR PROBLEMS AT MILLION-DOLLAR SOLUTIONS Traditional transit tunnel costs seem like a joke compared to the Boring Company! Cost Crash: •⁠ ⁠Traditional tunnels: $2.5B per mile •⁠ ⁠Boring Company: ~$27M per mile •⁠ ⁠Prufrock’s next target: ~$10M per mile •⁠ ⁠Savings so extreme cities can build...

353,479 görüntüleme • 7 ay önce •via X (Twitter)

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🚨 The CEO of Antrhopic said a one-person billion-dollar company will exist by 2026 sounds crazy until you see what non-technical people are doing with Claude Code right now $10-50k/mo selling automation pipelines that take 1-2 weeks to set up Some ideas almost nobody's running yet: 1. Proposal & SOW generator for agencies and consultancies every agency writes proposals from scratch or copy-pastes from old ones and forgets to change the "client name" Claude reads the prospect brief or discovery call transcript, generates: - branded proposal with scope, timeline, deliverables - quick win plan (how exactly we will do a good output) - SOW with payment milestones - pricing options (good/better/best) - follow-up email sequence charge $500/mo per agency agencies close 20-30% more deals when proposals go out same day.. you're selling speed and save them $1k+ on the guy who does it manually and anyway not quality, without personalisation 2. Job posting-to-intel pipeline for sales teams companies reveal everything in their job postings and don't realize it Claude monitors target account career pages daily, flags: - "Head of AI" posted = they're buying, not building - 3 DevOps roles = scaling infrastructure = budget unlocked - new VP of Sales = restructuring = old vendor contracts up for review package it as buying signals delivered to Slack every morning $500-1,500/mo per sales team this is data that Apollo and ZoomInfo don't sell 3. Support ticket-to-documentation pipeline for SaaS every SaaS with 1,000+ users has the same problem.. docs are 6 months behind the product Claude crawls your help center, pulls recent Zendesk/Intercom tickets, cross-references finds questions asked 200 times last month with no matching article drafts the missing docs in your existing format.. flags stale articles for update $1,500-3,000/mo retainer the ROI math: 30% of support tickets deflected = thousands saved per month.. pipeline pays for itself week one 4. Vendor contract review & renewal tracker mid-size companies have 50-200 active vendor contracts sitting in folders nobody opens Claude reads each contract, extracts: - renewal dates and auto-renewal traps - termination notice windows - price escalation clauses - SLA commitments vs what you're actually getting delivers a dashboard with "contracts expiring in 30/60/90 days" and flags where you're overpaying $1,000-2,000/mo per company CFOs will approve this before you finish the pitch.. one caught auto-renewal pays for a year of your service 5. Employee onboarding doc generator for HR teams every company with 20+ employees has the same problem.. new hire starts Monday and nobody has their docs ready Claude reads the role title + department, generates: - personalized welcome packet - 30/60/90 day plan with milestones - tool access checklist by role - manager-specific onboarding schedule - policy summaries tailored to their department charge $300-500/mo per company HR managers spend 4-6 hours per new hire on this.. companies hiring 5+ people a month will never cancel the pattern is always the same most people will use Claude Code to build apps a small number will use it to sell pipelines to businesses still running on manual labor only the second group builds real recurring revenue the niches are wide open right now because every developer thinks this work is "too boring" boring = no competition = you set the price screenshot this. save this. repost it to save a friend's next year

Ronin

66,151 görüntüleme • 3 ay önce

Look at these photos Falcon 9 soaring into the sky. Falcon Heavy and Starship ready for the next mission. Starlink antennas simple, clean, ready for any terrain. The Boring Company’s machine that looks like industrial sculpture. Futuristic tunnels full of Teslas. And the man whose vision stands behind it all. It’s not a coincidence. It’s not just “technology.” It’s class itself. Zero unnecessary ornaments. Zero exaggeration. Just a pure, very high-quality product. You hold it in your hand, step inside, or look at it and immediately feel that everything is refined to the last detail. It works. It looks right. It lasts. Elon Musk has this rare quality: he’s a man with class. He doesn’t flaunt luxury or add things just “because they photograph well.” He chooses simplicity but the kind that’s executed perfectly. And he transferred exactly that same philosophy to his companies. The result? Engineering at the level of fashion. Design that’s modern yet has timeless elegance. Products that don’t just do the job they impress with their quality and quiet confidence. It’s no accident that the rocket looks like a work of art. That a Tesla interior feels minimalist yet luxurious. That a Starlink dish looks like it was designed by someone who understands aesthetics, not just connectivity. They all share one common thread: class. Not the loud, flashy kind. The real kind quiet, self-assured, and uncompromising. If you value things that are simply well-made without unnecessary bling, but full of character and top-tier quality this is the essence of what Elon has built. Elon Musk Starlink The Boring Company SpaceX Tesla Neuralink

Natalia El Ferrara

384,018 görüntüleme • 2 gün önce

I am the person at Hut 8 who designed the American Bitcoin partnership. The structure is elegant. We gave the Trump family 20% of a publicly traded mining company. They contributed zero capital. Zero infrastructure. Zero employees. Zero operational experience. Zero risk exposure. They contributed a name. Per our partnership agreement, that is consideration. Twenty percent of our equity for access to the most valuable retail distribution channel in American finance. "It has to have 'America,'" Eric said in our first meeting. "And it has to have 'Bitcoin.'" He said this twice. Both times he pointed at the whiteboard. There was nothing else on the whiteboard. I realized then that he understood the product better than I did. The product is not bitcoin. The product is the belief. The entire business model. Two words and a surname. I wrote the term sheet on one page. The lawyers billed for forty. We call that alignment of incentives. Forty pages means they believed in the durability of the arrangement. We mine bitcoin at an all-in cost of approximately $90,000 per coin. Hash rate, power purchase agreements, ASIC depreciation, facility lease, headcount, Coinbase Prime interest — $90,000. Bitcoin trades at $77,000. Every coin we mine loses $13,000. Negative unit economics on every block reward. Eric tells investors we mine at $57,000. He strips out depreciation, SG&A, and the debt service. I asked him once if he understood what depreciation meant. He said it means when things go down. I said yes. He said: "But the stock goes up." I said yes. His only contractual obligation. Salesmanship. Per the partnership agreement, salesmanship is Eric's sole KPI. Technically, he is a fiduciary to shareholders. On paper, his vesting is tied to total comp benchmarks. We run the rigs. He runs the ticker. Asset-light. The company at peak reached a $13.2 billion valuation. Two employees. That is the entire headcount. One is our CEO Mike Ho, who is simultaneously Hut 8's Chief Strategy Officer. He reports to us at Hut 8 on Monday mornings and reports to American Bitcoin shareholders on Tuesday mornings. Dual-reporting structure. Very efficient. The other employee manages Eric's media calendar. $6.6 billion per headcount. We call this capital efficiency. 70% of our bitcoin did not come from mining. It came from selling stock. Retail investors purchase American Bitcoin shares at 50 times book value because the name contains "America" and "Bitcoin" and "Trump" is in the filing and they believe, with the quiet religious certainty of people who have never read a balance sheet in their lives, that a company named American Bitcoin is underwritten by something more substantial than two words and a surname. We take their cash and buy bitcoin on Coinbase at spot. Lodge it on the balance sheet. Call ourselves a mining company. We do mine. At a loss. Technically, the earnings are negative per our Q4 filing. The margin lives in the distance between what the stock costs them and what the bitcoin costs us. The stock is down 92% from peak. Investors have lost approximately $500 million. One of them posted on the shareholder subreddit that he moved his daughter's 529 into American Bitcoin at $14. It trades under $2. He said he believed in the mission. That means he believed in the name. The name performed exactly as designed. Eric's net worth went from $190 million to $280 million. Asset-light. We pledged 3,090 bitcoin as collateral against a Coinbase Prime custody loan. We have mined 1,800. The LTV ratio is inverted. If bitcoin compresses or the loan accelerates, every coin mined since inception could be forfeit by August 2027. All of it. Gone. Liquidation event. I explained this in a memo to Eric. Bullet points. Large font. He asked if the stock could go up before August. I said probably. He said that was fine. He said he'd handle it. Salesmanship. Eric told the press he launched American Bitcoin because banks were "debanking" the Trump family. I checked. JPMorgan refinanced $700 million in Trump Organization debt during the identical period. But debanking is better salesmanship than refinancing. The narrative inflates the stock price. The stock price generates the bitcoin. The bitcoin secures the loan. The loan generates cash. Every link in the chain is a product I built or a story Eric told. Asset-light. I orchestrated the celebrity endorsements. Tyler Winklevoss. Anthony Scaramucci. Grant Cardone. We call this pipeline development. Each broadcast the stock to their audiences during the run-up. The stock collapsed afterward. The celebrities did not lose money. Their audiences lost money. I never mentioned that we hemorrhage $13,000 per coin mined. I told them it was asset-light. They understood immediately. They are also asset-light. Eric cannot legally serve as a corporate officer in the state of New York. A judge barred him for two years. Civil fraud. So his title is not CEO. Not officer. Not executive. His contractual role is salesmanship. He cannot manage the company. He can sell it. One distinction. $90 million in personal net worth gained. Asset-light. Our CEO lives in the UAE. He held discussions with ADQ and TAQA, Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth apparatus. The same sovereign apparatus that paid $500 million for 49% of World Liberty Financial, the family's other crypto operation. This is the same Abu Dhabi whose semiconductor imports the administration greenlit over national security objections. I did not design World Liberty Financial. I designed the mining subsidiary that feeds into it. Separate projects. Complementary revenue streams. Eric runs salesmanship for both. I admire the portfolio diversification. I gave Eric 20% of a company for free, a company with real miners and real facilities and real electricity bills that I built over seven years in Alberta and Texas and Ontario, and in exchange he gave me access to every American who hears "America" and "Bitcoin" in the same sentence and reaches for their brokerage app without checking whether the company mines at a profit or at a loss or at all. They drove the stock to a $13.2 billion market capitalization. We bought bitcoin with the proceeds. They lost $500 million. We kept the bitcoin. Eric kept $90 million. I kept the apparatus that manufactures both. Everybody got what they paid for. Asset-light means we carry nothing. Not the miners. Not the facilities. Not the risk. Not the losses. The investors carry those. We carry the bitcoin. Asset-light.

Peter Girnus 🦅

105,910 görüntüleme • 2 ay önce

Unique footage has emerged showing remote control of interceptor drones. The 190th Training Center of the SBS reportedly used a drone-interceptor to shoot down a Shahed UAV remotely, with the pilot located at a significant distance from the launch site. The system used was LITAVR, developed by FDrones. According to the company, an operator can control the interceptor from hundreds of kilometers away from the launch point. The F7 LITAVR is already a well-known and highly effective system. As a reminder, here are the technical details (this is all open-source information): Development of the system began in autumn 2024. It was successfully tested and officially adopted in summer 2025. Serial production and deliveries to the military started in autumn 2025. Maximum speed: 350 km/h Flight time: up to 15 minutes Equipped with two cameras: daytime and thermal imaging The officially stated tactical range is 36 km, though in practice it can reach up to 60 km and operate at altitudes of up to 9.5 km. The warhead (separately codified) weighs 500 g. Detonation can occur via kinetic impact, self-destruction upon contact with the target, or manual activation by the operator. The system uses inertial guidance without GPS and features automatic terminal guidance (“last mile” / target lock system). At present, it reportedly destroys hundreds of targets per week, including Shaheds, Gerberas, Molniyas, Orlans, Lancets, and others. What is fundamentally new? Until now, mobile air defense fire groups and frontline crews using interceptor drones required a qualified pilot on-site. It has now been successfully demonstrated that a different tactic is possible: pilots can operate from protected, remote locations. The only requirement is internet access at both the control center and the launch site. Ukraine’s defense sector continues to develop innovative solutions. 📹 Oleksii Kopytko/Facebook

Anton Gerashchenko

22,311 görüntüleme • 3 ay önce

AI just hit a wall that no amount of money can move. The planet itself. There is not enough power, water, or land on Earth to build the data centers the AI race now demands. So the most valuable bet in artificial intelligence is no longer a chip company or a model. It is a rocket company. The plan is to leave. In January, SpaceX filed with the FCC to launch up to 1 million solar-powered data center satellites into orbit. In February it bought xAI, the maker of Grok, folding an entire frontier AI lab into a rocket company in the largest corporate merger ever recorded. On June 8 it unveiled the AI1, a compute satellite with a 70-meter wingspan, wider than a Boeing 747, powered by the sun, cooled by the vacuum of space, and wired to the ground through Starlink. Four days later it went public in the largest IPO in history, near 1.77 trillion dollars, touched 2.1 trillion on its first day, raised close to 86 billion, and made one man the first trillionaire alive. Now read the direction of that merger, because it is the whole story. A rocket company bought the AI lab. Not the reverse. For three years everyone assumed the constraint on AI was chips, or data, or talent. It is none of them anymore. It is energy and heat and dirt. The head of Anthropic said his company grew faster than the exponential, 80 times in a single year, and that is exactly why it ran out of compute. The answer was not to build more data centers in Virginia. It was to leave the atmosphere, where the sun never sets and a solar panel does five times the work. The moat in artificial intelligence is no longer the model. It is the launch. And the first rent is already being paid. A rival lab, Anthropic, is reported to be sending roughly 1.25 billion dollars a month to Musk for compute. Google near 920 million. If intelligence moves to orbit, the company that owns the only affordable road there becomes the landlord of the next layer of the internet, the way one bookstore became the landlord of the cloud. The merger is the proof of concept. The IPO is the war chest. Those monthly checks are the lease. Here is the part the price tag does not want you to read. Close to a trillion dollars of that valuation rests on orbital data centers that do not yet exist, and on a chip factory, Terafab, that SpaceX's own public filing calls a general framework with no binding deal, one that may not achieve commercial viability. Musk said it on camera. This is not a promise. The largest IPO ever written is priced on a future the filing itself cannot verify. The other side is just as real. Compute in orbit costs about four times what it costs on the ground today, and the curve may not cross for fifteen years. The machines that print the chips are backordered for years. Shedding heat in a vacuum at this scale has never been done. Musk's timelines have a long history of meaning later. And Bezos is racing the same orbit with a constellation of 51,600 satellites of his own. But strip it all away and the trade underneath is one sentence. Earth has run out of room for intelligence, and whoever owns the road off the planet owns whatever gets built next. Call it the most expensive science fiction ever sold, or the first time the map of the internet pointed up.

Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡

54,183 görüntüleme • 22 gün önce

Hey friends, we're excited to announce that an additional 2,000 H100s will be added San Francisco Compute's on-demand market. It's the largest* interconnected cluster, from any provider (including hyperscalers), that you can get on a per hour basis. You're not locked in with San Francisco Compute. If DeepSeek can compete with OpenAI using 2,000 H800s, you too can train a state of the art RL model without ever having to sign a long-term contract that you can't exit. You could have trained DeepSeek-v3 for $4.5m for 1.5mo on SFC or $35m if you could only buy a 1 year contract off market. This was the dream Alex & I had since our audio model company (Junelark) died because it couldn't procure enough GPUs, and it's what we've been working towards for nearly two years. Long-term contracts are a trap; they make it so only the biggest of the big can compete in AI. They force startup founders to raise at massive valuations pre-revenue, which dilutes founders and employees and sets them up to fail when they can't raise their next round. This cluster will roll out over the next few weeks as we scale our infrastructure. Soon you'll be able to access it via our managed Kubernetes service or by reaching out to set up a custom solution. We're also exploring other ways of partnering with service providers to let them offer GPU-based services, like workers and inference endpoints, without being forced into a long-term contract with a hyperscaler. You no longer need to bet your company on GPU prices to offer GPU-based services. * We think! If you know of a larger, please correct us!

evan conrad

92,590 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce

“I’m willing to be accountable… but how dare you film me cheating on my wife even though I literally signed a media release when I bought these tickets.” The audacity of Andy Byron is hilarious. This Astronomer CEO got caught cuddling his HR chief on the Coldplay kiss cam and immediately dove behind a barrier like he just got caught stealing cookies. Meanwhile the Coldplay singer says, “either they’re having an affair or they’re very shy” while 50,000 people are watching this billion-dollar man panic in real time. What’s wild: this dude runs a billion-dollar company. He’s got employees, investors, a wife, kids depending on him. When you’re operating at that level, you can’t afford to be publicly stupid. Most people chase success because they think it gives them more freedom to do whatever they want. The opposite is true. Success means more people are counting on you to show up as the man you said you were. I work with guys who make serious money, and I have to explain this constantly: money doesn’t make you invisible. It just extends how long you can pretend and makes the fall hurt worse when reality shows up. You can’t build an empire on the outside while being a mess on the inside and expect that to stay hidden forever. Money doesn’t make you invisible. It just extends how long you can pretend and makes the fall hurt worse when reality catches up. This whole Astronomer situation is what happens when men think they can compartmentalize their character. They convince themselves they can be one person at work and another person in their marriage and somehow that house of cards will stand forever. The guys I know who’ve maintained success over decades? They figured out early that their personal and professional lives needed to be congruent. So when something comes out, nobody’s shocked because they already know who you are. This dude is learning the hard way that hiding behind a corporate title and a billion-dollar valuation doesn’t protect you from yourself. The question you should be asking yourself right now: what would happen if everything about how you really operate got exposed tomorrow? Would people be surprised, or would they just nod and say “yeah, that tracks”? Start building the character now that can handle the success you’re chasing. Because the world is watching, cameras are everywhere, and your choices always come home. Are you the man you’ve been pretending to be online?

Kyree

1,384,544 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce

32 coins. $2.5 million. 0.0038% of the stack. That is the sale the market is now blaming for a $3 billion liquidation cascade and a Bitcoin price nearly halved from its peak. A $2.5 million sale cannot move a trillion-dollar asset. It is a rounding error. In the same week, Strategy raised $128.3 million selling its own stock, 50 times larger. It did not need to sell coins. It chose to. The crash has real drivers: a record 13-day run of ETF outflows, a rotation into AI, a Fed in no hurry to cut. But the accelerant the market keeps naming is 32 coins. The coins were never the point. The signal was. And the signal was deliberate. Michael Saylor told the Q1 call he would “probably sell some bitcoin to pay a dividend just to inoculate the market and send the message that we did it.” His logic was sound: prove the Bitcoin is usable capital, not a vault that can never be opened, and show he is not a prisoner of his own vow. His “never sell” always meant be a net accumulator. He is up more than 170,000 coins this year against the 32 he sold, and he scores himself on one number, Bitcoin per share. By that math, defending the dividend with a sliver was discipline, not distress. The market read it as the opposite. The dose became the catalyst now blamed for the crash. The inoculation became the infection. Because what changed was never Strategy’s solvency. It was its identity. The market has stopped pricing a permanent holder and started pricing what the filings always described: a state-contingent allocator now funding its own preferred dividends, at the margin, from the Bitcoin beneath them. And the buffer is thinning. The cash reserve behind those dividends has fallen from $2.25 billion to $900 million. Against a preferred bill near $1.7 billion a year, that is roughly 6 months of runway. Be precise. This is not a death spiral. Strategy still holds 843,706 Bitcoin, worth more than $50 billion even now, and has more funding levers than almost any company alive. A real rally makes this a footnote, and the sell-side calling the reaction overdone is not wrong on the fundamentals. But the regime has changed. The question is no longer Bitcoin’s price on any given day. It is the cadence of the dividend declarations and the path of that reserve. Bitcoin did not acquire a yield. The wrapper acquired liabilities. This week the market learned that difference costs far more than 32 coins.

Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡

165,572 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce

This guy cracked the code on AI-powered fashion ecommerce using synthetic face technology and now pulls $50,000 to $150,000 per month from two Shopify stores without paying a single real model. He got tired of watching DTC fashion brands burn $20,000 monthly on photoshoots while their competitors tested 40 product angles in the same timeframe, so he built a system that generates hyperrealistic fashion content using his gaming PC and real-time AI masks instead of studios, contracts, or casting calls. His monthly profit hit $150,000 last month from just 2 stores and organic TikTok traffic, while traditional fashion brands cap out at $30K after paying models $400 to $800 per shoot and studio rentals of $200 to $500 per session. Here is the exact breakdown: → Real-time synthetic face technology becomes the only tool you need, but most people butcher the setup by skipping motion sync calibration in the first 30 seconds → Product selection comes first, and if you mess this up nothing saves it. Stick to women's accessories (bags, sunglasses, jewelry) because that is where organic TikTok engagement lives → Avatar casting is not random. You build one consistent AI face that repeats across all content so your audience recognizes the "model" and trusts the brand continuity → You are picking who your customer projects onto, not who looks expensive. That is your positioning baked into the face → Motion capture runs before generation, and this is what kills the uncanny valley effect that destroys watch time in 4 seconds → You mirror your own gestures through webcam: wave, chin tap, finger point, shoulder dance. The AI mask tracks every micro-movement and applies it to the generated face in real time → Batching is the move 94 percent skip: same outfit base, multiple product swaps, one recording session. No re-shooting, no model schedules, no usage rights negotiations → The system generates 3 to 5 TikToks before lunch, while traditional brands test 2 per week and wonder why their conversion rates are stuck at 0.8 percent The economics are stupid: each video costs him $0 in talent fees, pulls 1.5 million views organically, converts at 0.03 percent into 450 orders at $45 to $60 retail with $30 to $45 margin per sale. That is $15,750 profit per viral video, while fashion brands pay $1,200 per shoot and net $3,000 after ads. The key move nobody talks about: you cannot skip the motion synchronization test. If you generate the AI face without mirroring your own natural gestures first, the avatar moves like a mannequin. The blinks lag. The smile timing breaks. The whole thing screams "synthetic face technology" and your hook rate dies at 1.1 seconds. His system records him doing the exact dance trend first, so the AI mask inherits human timing, natural head tilts, and spontaneous energy that reads as a real creator showing off a product find, not a rendered advertisement. One accessories store generated 10 variants of the same handbag reveal in 18 minutes with different outfits, different backgrounds, different trend audios, and found the winner in 72 hours without spending $6,000 on influencer gifting. They were previously paying $800 per UGC creator and burning $4,800 per week on content that plateaued at 40K views. Now they spend $0 for 10 variants and their cost per acquisition dropped from $62 to $18. UGC agencies now panic because their entire margin was built on talent scarcity, and this removes the human bottleneck. The outfit changes between clips like a wardrobe filter. The lighting matches bedroom setups. The hand gestures sync with beat drops. No casting call. No model release. No location permits. Just a webcamera, a real-time AI mask, and the discipline to batch-test product angles before you commit ad spend to one creative.

Shade

20,010 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce

The math behind a Christmas light business is insane: • 140,000,000 homes in America • Average install: $800-$2,500+ • Seasonal service = Recurring every year • Low overhead (ladder, lights, insurance) • 60-70% profit margins once you dial in ops • Most competitors can't even hang lights straight Here's the breakdown: Let's say you charge $1,200 average per home. Install 3 homes per day (totally doable). → That's $3,600/day. Work 5 days a week during peak season (Nov-Dec). → That's $18,000/week. Run it for 8 weeks. That's $144,000 in gross revenue in 2 months. And people will call you NEXT year to do it again. This is what people miss about "boring" businesses. They're not exciting. They're not innovative. Nobody's going to write TechCrunch articles about your Christmas light company. But the math? The math is insane. That same 140M homes? They also need their lawns mowed. Their gutters cleaned. Their windows washed. Their driveways sealed. Their pools maintained. The opportunity is massive, and there's room for everyone. This is exactly why I started a home cleaning business. Same massive market. Same recurring revenue model. But I could run it 12 months a year instead of just 2. I started with $2,000 and scaled to $40k/month in 9 months. I don't touch a mop. I live wherever I want. I work when I want. If you want to learn more about how I did this and the opportunity in home services… DM me “Biz” & we’ll chat.

Mike Cleans

537,284 görüntüleme • 6 ay önce

Today I'm excited to announce that Opal has raised a $6M Seed round in just 4 hours. Our first angel, Ian Crosby, made one call on my behalf when I moved to San Francisco. That call changed everything. I moved to SF on October 17th. The next morning, my phone rang. Lan Xuezhao from Basis Set was on the other end. I’d never met her before. She said: "Ian tells me I need to meet you immediately. Can we go for a walk tomorrow?" We lived five blocks apart. The walk was supposed to be one hour. We ended up walking for four. She was asking questions to get to know me as a person. Feeling me out for one thing: Am I the kind of founder crazy enough to build a credit card company with no finance degree and no banking connections? By the end of the walk, we had agreed on terms. Today, Opal is announcing our $6M seed round, led by Basis Set, with participation from Founders Co-op, Ian Crosby, and Adam Orser. We didn't start as a credit card company. But our customers told us we had to be. Here's what we've built: - A Visa credit card built exclusively for ad agencies and the brands they manage - Credit limits that reach seven figures - underwritten on managed ad spend, not agency revenue - 1%+ cash back on all ad spend - A fraud system that actually understands ad spend, so Google and Meta charges never get flagged and kill your campaigns Traditional banks look at an agency's revenue and give them a $50K limit. We look at the millions they manage for clients and give them what they actually need. To Lan Xuezhao and the team at Basis Set - thank you for betting on this on day two. To Ian Crosby - you opened a door I didn't even know existed. None of this happens without you. To the Opal team - you're building something that doesn't exist anywhere else. That takes a specific kind of crazy. I'm grateful for every one of you. If you run an ad agency and your credit limits are costing you - reach out. We built this for you.

Alex Steele

25,175 görüntüleme • 4 ay önce

This is one of the most expensive silent movie stunts of all time. This shot from Buster Keaton's "The General" (1926) cost $42,000 (equal to $600,000 today). The production company left the wreckage of the train in the Row River, south of Cottage Grove in Oregon. The site became a tourist attraction until 1944 when the wreckage was finally salvaged and scrapped during World War II. "The General" went way over budget, costing $750,000 (equal to $11 million today) in total. Some of the unforeseen costs included "Keaton being knocked unconscious; an assistant director being shot in the face with a blank cartridge; a train wheel running over a brakeman's foot, resulting in a $2,900 lawsuit; and the train's wood-burning engine causing numerous fires. The fires often spread to forests and farmers' haystacks, which cost the production $25 per burnt stack." In the end, the film only made $500,000 at the box office and was panned by film critics. Despite failing financially and losing his artistic independence, Keaton considered "The General" to be his crowning achievement. "I was more proud of that picture than any picture I ever made," he said. Today, "The General" is regarded as one of the greatest films of all time. Roger Ebert gave the film 4 stars and listed it on his top 10 in 2002. He had this to say about Buster Keaton: "Today I look at Keaton's works more often than any other silent films. They have such a graceful perfection, such a meshing of story, character, and episode, that they unfold like music. Although they're filled with gags, you can rarely catch Keaton writing a scene around a gag; instead, the laughs emerge from the situation... And in an age when special effects were in their infancy, and a 'stunt' often meant actually doing on the screen what you appeared to be doing, Keaton was ambitious and fearless. He had a house collapse around him. He swung over a waterfall to rescue a woman he loved. He fell from trains. And always he did it in character, playing a solemn and thoughtful man who trusts in his own ingenuity."

Historic Vids

24,248,656 görüntüleme • 2 yıl önce

With Nowhere Else to Turn, Niger Begs Nigeria for Fuel Amid Severe Shortages By: Zagazola Makama For nearly two weeks, Niger Republic has been crippled by a severe fuel crisis, bringing vehicular movement and economic activity to a grinding halt. Long queues stretched across cities, with desperate motorists and businesses struggling to obtain a few liters of petrol. The situation was so dire that the military junta, which once prided itself on rejecting external influence, had no choice but to swallow its pride and turn to Nigeria for help. Despite months of hostile rhetoric and diplomatic friction, Niger’s rulers quietly dispatched their Minister of Petroleum and Renewable Energy, along with top officials from the Niger Petroleum Company (SONIDEP), to beg Abuja for urgent fuel supplies. Nigeria, ever the regional big brother, obliged, approving the immediate delivery of 300 fuel trucks across the border to Niamey. Niger’s fuel crisis didn’t happen overnight. It was the direct consequence of a disastrous confrontation between the ruling junta and Chinese oil companies, which have long dominated Niger’s petroleum sector. The trouble began in March 2024, when China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) granted the Nigerien government a $400 million advance, using future crude oil deliveries as collateral. This deal was meant to help Niger cope with the crippling economic sanctions imposed by ECOWAS following the July 2023 coup. However, when it came time to repay the debt, the junta found itself strapped for cash. Rather than negotiating, the military rulers decided to strong-arm China. In a move that stunned industry insiders, they slapped an $80 billion tax demand on SORAZ (Zinder Refinery Company) despite the state-owned Sonidep already owing SORAZ a staggering $250 billion. When China refused to provide additional loans, the junta retaliated by expelling Chinese oil executives from the country and seizing SORAZ’s bank accounts. A Self-Inflicted Crisis This reckless decision backfired almost immediately. Niger’s entire petroleum sector which is heavily reliant on Chinese expertise and investment began to collapse. The SORAZ refinery, the lifeline of Niger’s fuel supply, ground to a halt, and fuel shortages spread like wildfire. This crisis could not have come at a worse time. The Niger-Benin oil pipeline, a project designed to boost Niger’s crude exports to 100,000 barrels per day by 2025, was also at risk. With Chinese engineers gone and no viable alternative in place, the junta’s decision plunged the country into economic uncertainty. Turning to Nigeria for Help For weeks, the military leadership refused to acknowledge the crisis publicly. State-controlled media was ordered to stay silent about the fuel shortage and the growing unrest among Nigeriens, who were forced to buy petrol at sky-high black-market prices. But as the situation worsened, the junta had no choice but to seek external help even if it meant approaching Nigeria, the very country they had repeatedly criticized since the coup. Without any public announcement, Niger quietly sent a delegation to Abuja, appealing for an emergency fuel supply. The irony was lost on no one this was the same junta that had openly defied ECOWAS sanctions, severed ties with France and the West, and aligned itself with Russia. Yet when faced with economic collapse, it was Nigeria that they turned to for salvation. Nigeria Plays the Good Neighbor Again Despite months of insults, false accusations, name calling, diplomatic snubs, and hostility, Nigeria once again stepped in to help. It was gathered that the Nigerian Government approved the release of 300 fuel trucks, which immediately began crossing into Niger to ease the crisis.

Zagazola

327,792 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce

🚨 ANNOUNCEMENT: STABLECOINS ARE LIVE ON Meow. SEND AND RECEIVE USDC, FOR FREE, ALL FROM YOUR EXISTING CASH BALANCE! Now on Meow, you can send and receive USDC for free. All from your existing cash balance. That's right: the days of needing to pre-fund, maintain, and log in to a crypto exchange just to send and receive USDC are over, permanently. The SAME balance that you use for ALL your business finances, payroll, and corporate cards — is the one you can now use to send and receive USDC. This has huge ramifications for: — Crypto companies: that transact in USDC — Crypto VCs: who fund investments in USDC — Businesses: that receive vendor payments in USDC, and pay contractors internationally And the best part? These USDC transactions integrate natively with your accounting software, like QuickBooks, NetSuite, Puzzle, and more. And if that’s not enough? You can set up: — Custom spend controls, per dollar amount — Multi-user permissions And 2FA is enforced on every transaction This is one of our MOST REQUESTED FEATURES and we believe Meow is the first major business banking fintech in the U.S. (over $1 billion in assets on the platform) to support free sending and receiving USDC. Business finance is business finance, whether it's cash or stablecoins. The "bridge between Web2 and Web3" is finally here, for real. No more maintaining separate accounts at crypto exchanges for businesses. Crypto companies and crypto funds, apply today: Meow is a financial technology company, not a bank. Bridge is a licensed Money Services Business operating out of the United States.

Brandon Arvanaghi

126,427 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce

A reporter recently asked what we might see in China that would really surprise people — something we wouldn’t find in the U.S. Across most of the technologies we looked at — quantum, eVTOL, EVs, AI applications — I wouldn’t say there’s anything entirely unique to China. There’s usually a counterpart in the U.S., whether in a lab, a startup, or a pilot. The real difference is scale — how quickly things move from concept to implementation. If I had to point to one example that captures this difference, that you might actually see on a trip to China in the next year or two, it would be autonomous deliveries. At the Logistics Expo in Shenzhen last month, at the new Automation exhibition hall, we met teams from autonomous logistics vehicle providers such as Neolix, ZelosTech, Meituan, and $JD. Neolix had just reached 10,000 vehicles, roughly ten times what it had a year earlier, and ZelosTech had hit the same milestone. In contrast, U.S. companies such as Nuro have been developing similar systems for years (9 to be exact) and have raised over US $2.3 billion, but their operations still seem to be “pre-scale” and "upcoming." (Correct me if I'm wrong.) It's probably a confluence of reasons but I'm sure it helps that the government is so hands on with the rollout in China. In my Deep Tech Trip Takeaways, I wrote that what stood out most in China wasn’t any single company or product, but the structure that tied them together, enabled by the government's strategic policies and services. Shenzhen’s rollout of autonomous delivery fits that description well. The city just published a report on “functional autonomous vehicles,” giving rare visibility into real-world activity. The August 2025 report — released in time for the Expo — summarized the following: - 764 vehicles operating across the city, including delivery, sanitation, and inspection units - 3,185 km of public roads open to autonomous operations - 230,000 km traveled and about 900,000 deliveries completed in one month (750,000 express parcels, 150,000 fresh goods) - SF Express (a big client of Neolix) led with 504,000 orders, followed by Meituan with 152,000 - Each vehicle averaged roughly 200 deliveries per hour, about twice a traditional courier van - Cost per delivery was around ¥0.1 (≈ 1 U.S. cent) lower than human delivery — not a major saving by any means, but important because new tech is often loss making in the beginnning - Accident rate: 0.04 per 10,000 km; manual intervention: 0.016 per km; public complaints: 23 cases citywide - And of course, I should highlight that Shenzhen isn't the only city working on this, it's just the most advanced that I found It’s not yet a profit story, but it does show that autonomous logistics in China has reached a level of operational maturity and regulatory acceptance that’s still emerging elsewhere. Shenzhen illustrates how local governments in China are building the deep infrastructure — physical, regulatory, and logistical — that allows new technologies to scale in practice, not just in theory.

Rui Ma

120,643 görüntüleme • 8 ay önce