Alright, with my Powerball tickets acquired and many of you hoping to become independently wealthy tomorrow…

💰$782M cash option is a lot of moola💰

Let’s talk about billionaires and private charitable foundations.

Come with me, and you’ll be… 🧵👇

First, what do you do if you win big on Powerball?

1. DO NOT TELL A SOUL.
2. Refer to #1
3. Get a fire and water proof safe or safety deposit box for the ticket.
4. Call the most expensive estates & trusts lawyer you can find.
5. Setup a private foundation to claim the 💰

Why a private charitable foundation?

1) You can claim the money in the foundations name
2) As long as you donate 5% of the assets every year, is income is *exempt from federal income tax*

(There’s a 1.39% excise tax on investment income, but that’s a lot less!)

Let’s talk about that 5% though…

It’s reduced by reasonable operating expenses of the foundation! So you actually reduce how many assets you have to give away *by paying yourself*

Ok, so think about those things all put together.

You have $780M in your new private foundation. Tres commas soon come.

You hire yourself, your family members, and your best friends to run the foundation, attend events, and help give your money away!

You have to donate $39M a year *less* expenses.

So let’s say you hire your crew of 10-15 people at a total of $10M a year. Good living for all involved, very nice salaries anywhere in the world.

Now we’re donating $29M and investing the remaining $741M, which needs >5% ROI.

Well, treasury bills are paying 4% right now. You’re nearly home.

If you follow this math…what you’ll see is, overnight, you’ve created a perpetual wealth machine.

Grow the assets *tax free*, pay big salaries to your people, do some good in the world.

Not too shabby, huh?

Wait…

You didn’t think billionaires gave money away out of their love for humanity, did you?!

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/GoldsteinMatt_/mOdzeTR

Billionaire Dreams

Imagine if you could invest in post-revenue, early-stage companies with:

• reasonable valuations
• the risk profile of growth equity
• asymmetric upside of venture
• no correlation to your existing VC allocations

A brief 🧵👇

https://twitter.com/mylesdanielsen/status/1587080836788105216?s=46&t=lHgikeSfx6X5wwjMES6pvQ

Turns out you can, through @calmfund.

We invest in what we call "Calm Companies."

Calm Companies are building canonical modern day software/software-enabled businesses that later-stage growth equity & PE firms love.

We’re the early-stage institutional partner for them.

With our unique thesis and approach, we have highly differentiated deal flow, meaning we’re uncorrelated to overheated “hot” VC deals & valuations.

We operate from first principles. We believe talent is everywhere, so we built a global team and a global portfolio.

And since we’re built by builders, we practice what we preach and operate highly efficiently. With a team of only 11, we’re built to scale.

Interested in learning more? Get in touch.
https://calmfund.com/for-investors

*accredited investors only, returns not guaranteed, past performance ≠ future results etc*

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/GoldsteinMatt_/5eDNBif

Calm Company Fund

Founders: if you take a $13M valuation pre-seed…

You are *by definition* signing up to chase insane targets.

Your idea isn’t worth that much *at* pre-seed, sorry to say. That’s a VC’s entry ticket for a low % theoretical future.

In no way commenting on Nichole, to be clear.

https://twitter.com/nwischoff/status/1586043854817734656?s=46&t=uZuPUggfqrZS6KeXoTwPjg

Set realistic, achievable goals, grow thoughtfully, and maintain optionality.

Unless your idea is necessarily a moon shot, the odds are *very good* you’ll see more success not dumping rocket fuel into your business.

Fundamentally sound, sane strategies are the way.

Come see us. There’s a better way to build.

www.calmfund.com

Better way to build.

Therapy is the best investment I’ve ever made.

It’s paid dividends every week for the last 5 years.

Here’s the Top 3 most impactful things I’ve learned from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) 🧵:

1. Action is everything.

The core of CBT is the 🔄 of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

They’re interwoven. It’s most difficult to control your emotions and thoughts, so the highest leverage step is to change your behavior.

Take small, achievable actions.

Feeling down and drawn back to bed? Go take a walk.

Feeling sad and withdrawn? Exist with it and have a cry.

Overwhelmed & anxious with too much to do? Write it all down and choose one to tackle.

Small, simple actions make a world of difference.

However…

2. Simple ≠ Easy

Just because you’re making smart, simple steps doesn’t mean the road will be easy. Manage your expectations and be kind to yourself when you stumble, because we all stumble.

Want to lose weight? Eat fewer calories than you burn. Simple! But easy? Nope.

You’ll get tempted to bite off too much at once.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll think *one* simple action is not ambitious enough. Instead, you’ll jump right to your desired ideal.

“I’ll work out 5 days a week!”

Try just working out once. Then once more. And once more…

3. Acceptance = Change

This paradox eluded me for years. I hated the things I want to change about myself. Why else would I want to change them?

But the harder I pushed away, the stronger the issues were. Remember “equal and opposite reaction”?

Resistance is the enemy.

By accepting where you are *now*, you can more easily find the path toward where you want to go.

That’s why being lost is so scary. How can I get where I need to be if I don’t know where I am?!

“You are here.”

Accept first. Then change.

/end

So I’m some kind of enlightened, mindful master yeah?

Hell no! This as much a note to myself as it is to you. They call it a mindfulness *practice* for a reason.

But as G.I. Joe taught us, knowing is half the battle.

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/GoldsteinMatt_/wbk9PHX

Therapy changed my life

Thinking a lot today about what Orson Welles had to say in 1946.

We must simply say "no" to those who hate others.

"Tomorrow's democracy discriminates against discrimination."

Enter Orson Welles, a man ahead of his time:

"We must each day earn what we own.
A healthy man owes to the sick all that he can do for them. An educated man owes to the ignorant all that he can do for them. A free man owes to the world's slaves all that he can do for them

“And what is to be done is more, much more, than good works, Christmas baskets, bonuses and tips, and bread and circuses.

There is only one thing to be done with slaves:

Free them.

“If we can't die in behalf of progress, we can live for it. Progress, we Americans take to mean, a fuller realization of democracy.

The measure of progress, as we understand it, is the measure of equality enjoyed by all men.

We can do something about that.

“The way our fighting brothers and sisters looked at it, some of them dead as I speak these words, the way they looked at it, we're lucky. And they're right, we're lucky to be alive.

“But only if our lives make life itself worth dying for, we must be worthy of our luck or we are damned.

“Our lives were spared, but this is merely the silliest of accidents, unless we put the gift of life to the hard employments of justice.

If we waste that gift, we won't have anywhere to hide from the indignation of history.

...

“I want to say this:

The morality of the auction block is out of date. There is no room in the American century for Jim Crow.

Tomorrow's democracy discriminates against discrimination. Its charter won't include the freedom to end freedom.

“Race hate isn't human nature, race hate is the abandonment of human nature.

...

Over several generations, maybe there'll be men who can't be weaned away from the fascist vices of race hate.

“But we should deny such men responsibility in public affairs, exactly as we deny responsibility to the wretched victims of the drug habit.

“There are laws against peddling dope, there can be laws against peddling race hate. But every man has the right to his own opinion as an American boasts, but race hate is not an opinion.

It's a phobia.

It isn't a viewpoint, race hate is a disease.

“In a people's world, the incurable racist has no rights. He must be deprived of influence in a people's government.

He must be segregated, as he himself would segregate the colored and semitic peoples.

“Anything very big is very simple, if there's a big race question, there's a big answer to it.

And a big answer is simple, like the word "no."”

-Orson Welles

Well worth a listen:
https://archive.org/details/1946OrsonWellesCommentaries/460811_To_Be_Born_Free.MP3

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/GoldsteinMatt_/cgXkORh

Orson Welles: a man ahead of his time

Let’s discuss how thoroughly dumb this take on @taylorswift13 is, a brief 🧵:

There’s the shit sandwich opening “Mild compliment, but…”

If you enjoyed her music, surely you’d appreciate the way she uses lived experiences and trauma to inject core human emotions into her songs. That’s a big part of what makes her great.

This is also a fundamental purpose of art. To channel emotions into artistic resonance.

Is Dylan unreasonably angry? Bruce? Michael Jordan?

No, they all channel their emotion into artistry despite previously achieved great success.

Suggesting successful people can’t or don’t hurt because “success” is plainly wrong, at best.

Outright dumb and lacking all sense of empathy at worst.

Perhaps an artist might define “success” as exploring and sharing their inner world…is expressing anger “unreasonable”?

Taylor Swift has reached unthinkable heights *despite* the industry power dynamics and sexism stacked against her. Even if you don’t like her music, respect her game ffs.

PS: I wrote this thread with @typefully. https://typefully.com