https://xitter.cf/t.co/Leqp6B6kfj - digital design on subscription⎮#Startup Borgen MD⎮#CphSW⎮Community Builder⎮Action Aleks⎮#HalaMadrid
Copenhagen Denmark
Joined May 2013
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medium.com/@ABordvik/intro-c…
Aleksander Bordvik retweeted
Dear Secretary Bessent @SecScottBessent,
My name is Everett Stern. In 2010 I was a compliance officer at @HSBC. From a back office in New Castle, Delaware, I watched billions of dollars move to drug cartels, sanctioned regimes, and terrorist organizations. The enemies of the United States. I documented it, I escalated it, and when the bank would not act, I took it to the @FBI, the @CIA, and eventually the @SECGov.
The result was a $1.92 billion settlement. At the time, it was one of the largest in American history. It was also about five weeks of the bank’s profit. Not one banker was charged. Not one went to prison.
I paid a different price. I lost my career, my savings, and my place in the industry I had trained for. I was blacklisted. Every door in American finance closed at once. I slept on a camping cot in a 300 square foot apartment because I could not afford a bed, and I waited tables at @PFChangs to eat. I tell you this not for sympathy, but so you understand that I know exactly what it costs to do the right thing in American finance, and exactly how little the system does in return.
I made that sacrifice because I believed it would change something.
Yesterday, your department fined @BankofAmerica $1.2 billion for failing to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions, some of it tied by your own findings to Chinese laundering networks, narcotics, and the southwest border, alongside 475 apparent sanctions violations touching Russia, Iran, and global terrorism. The bank admitted it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act.
Fourteen years after HSBC. A bank with “America” in its name. And once again, not one individual charged.
Secretary Bessent, I want to say plainly what I believe you already know. The fines are not working.
A fine is paid by shareholders, absorbed by the balance sheet, and forgotten by the next earnings call. Bank of America reported earnings this morning. Nobody who set the alert thresholds, nobody who decided the 2024 cease and desist could wait, nobody who chose the backlog over the law will lose a single thing they value. Their lives are untouched. That is the entire reason the behavior repeats.
This is money laundering. This is blood money. Money that reaches a cartel buys fentanyl that kills Americans. Money that reaches a terrorist organization buys the next attack. This country has fought a war on drugs and a war on terror for decades, at enormous cost in lives and treasure, and all the while we have allowed the financing to flow through institutions we charter and regulate. Cut off the money and we win. We have never seriously tried.
There is also a question of equal justice that I cannot let go.
Before I walked into the FBI building to report HSBC, I stopped in front of the Great Seal on the wall and read the words engraved beneath it: “Justice is the defense of our liberty.” I believed that. I still want to. But every day in this country, people go to prison for crimes that are nothing next to moving money for the people who want Americans dead. A suit, a title, and a corporate badge should not be a shield from the consequences that apply to everyone else. If a street dealer goes to prison for what he sells, the banker who moved the cartel’s money should be standing next to him.
I also want to raise something that is rarely said in these conversations. Why has no one inside Bank of America come forward the way I did? The answer is that everyone in American banking knows what happened to me, and to the whistleblowers who came after. The last person who spoke up is the only policy anyone believes. That is a culture problem, and it starts with leadership, in the banks and in the agencies that regulate them.
This is not a political issue. It has spanned administrations of both parties. It is a national security issue, and I am asking you to treat it as one.
Three things would change the math overnight.
Refer individuals for criminal prosecution. Not the analyst in the queue. The executives who set the thresholds and chose the risk. One banker in handcuffs would do more than every fine in Treasury’s history combined.
End “too big to jail.” An institution cannot be too big to fail and too big to jail at the same time. If it is the first, it must be held to a higher standard, not a lower one.
And if Bank of America will not act as America’s bank, review its charter. A national charter is a privilege granted on behalf of the American people. It should be conditioned on not moving money for the people trying to kill them.
Secretary Bessent, you said yesterday that these actions send a clear message that even the biggest institutions are not above the law. With respect, the institution was never the problem. The people inside it are above the law, and they know it. Until that changes, I will keep writing letters like this one, and the next bank will keep paying the next fine.
I gave up everything I had to stop this. I am asking you to use the power you have to finish it.
Respectfully,
Everett A. Stern
HSBC Whistleblower
Founder and Intelligence Director, Tactical Rabbit
Aleksander Bordvik retweeted
I spent 48 hours in SF hanging out with billionaires, data labs and AI founders and execs running $1B to $100B companies.
My observations:
1. Sooo MANY stories of data brokers making like $2M a WEEK selling company data to labs. I can't tell if it's the beginning or a bubble, and I kept wondering which niches are left. Digging into it actively.
2. At dinner, someone asked the table, "If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?" HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now.
3. The bar people talk about now is hitting $1B in revenue in 12 months (I guess that's the new unicorn?). What I didn't hear much about is retention. AI revenue can come in fast and leave fast, and I think we're going to see a lot of stories of AI companies with huge revenue and terrible retention.
4. It's pretty clear we're living through the reinvention of the computer. The model is the CPU, the harness is the operating system, and skills and plugins are the apps. Thinking about it that way makes it easier to see where the whitespace is.
5. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now.
6. Agent harnesses feel like the new GPT wrappers, in a good way, especially vertical ones. The best teams I talked to treat the model as swappable. One founder walked me through routing different models to different jobs: one for taste and visuals, a cheaper one for the everyday stuff, another for text.
They use prompts they can move across models over fine-tuning, and A/B test the output on what users actually do with it: do they edit it, export it, share it? A vertical harness is basically four things: the connectors for that industry's data, evals written by people who know the work, rules for what the agent can and can't touch, and a clean screen for a human to review. The model is maybe 20% of it.
7. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on/cloning going on more than I've ever seen. People are decompiling software and rebuilding it with agents, and someone showed a suite of like 10 apps that are worth $5B+ each all that he cloned open source. Me and everyone are still thinking through what it means when software gets this easy to copy.
8. My guess is the value moves to data. If the software can be rebuilt quickly, what's worth paying for in a legacy SaaS company is the years of customer data and workflows inside it. Some SaaS companies are secretly data companies.
Gets me thinking about how do you truly value data for this saas companies? Like if we were buying these dying saas companies at 2x ARR before (as example), maybe there is a better metric. Idk, just thinking out loud here.
9. It feels like a good chunk of legacy software won't make it to the agentic era, especially anything built around people clicking through a lot of screens.
10. Every company I talked to wants to pipe its internal data into one place and expose it to agents through MCP. Then they look at the data and realize it's a mess: five versions of the same customer, old Slack channels, PDFs nobody can search. Cleaning that up feels like a big consulting opportunity!
11. A lot of founders are building the basic building blocks for agents: APIs, data layers and tools. Some of the companies I saw barely have a UI because the main user is an agent. I really believe the startups that build primitives to this agentic era will do extremely well. Building blocks is the best way to think about it.
12. Labs can get plenty of training data, but it's harder to get real examples of agents failing inside companies. Whoever has those logs has something valuable.
13. Someone running a big consumer company told me the next fight is over memory. The model that remembers the most about you wins, and the smartest model matters less than people think.
14. Physical AI came up a lot. Astra I think was the first model that got people into AI can actually do CAD, and I think a lot of people are thinking what does vibe manufacturing really look like. The line I keep thinking about came from a robotics founder: the hardest problems in AI are deployment problems now, not research problems. Their robots work on their own, call a human when they get stuck, and every one of those calls becomes training data.
15. Cybersecurity companies are having a moment and are actually cool companies to build now, especially the ones that clean up after a breach. Every agent with access to your systems is a new door into your company, and a lot of those doors were left open.
16. Some startups are worth more dead than alive now. A shutdown company with 5 years of Slack, email and code can get paid for licensing all of it. I wouldn't be surprised if founders start factoring that into when they shut down.
17. People are starting to talk about monetizing the agent web. It feels really early, but when the most popular user of the internet is an agent, what startups should you be building?
18. I think agent insurance is coming. Once an agent makes an expensive mistake, insurers will want audits before they cover anyone.
19. Several people said the hire they want most is someone with taste who can write evals. The models are getting good at generating ideas, so the hard part is judging which ones are good.
20. New trend I observed: startup raises VC, uses venture dollars to become a creator, startup fails, founder falls back on being a full-time creator and incubates other products bootstrapped.
21. Getting SIGNIFICANT distribution is HARD right now. Founders are sponsoring buses, buying billboards like crazy and throwing parties with famous DJs to get noticed. Kinda feels dotcom era in that sense.
Attention is what's scarce! The growth guy going viral sharing his UGC strategy from Wispr Flow is a good example. It's the sauce everyone wants, and I truly believe there are probably only 50 people on the planet who know how to scale these types of businesses efficiently in this era.
Always good to get that dose of SF. I felt sooo lucky to have such an incredible trip during such an incredible time in building businesses. Surreal in so many ways.
Happy to be home and locked in.
Until next time!
Aleksander Bordvik retweeted
So many people asked me to make it open-source, so here you go:
MailCheap — Self-hosted newsletters on Amazon SES:
💸 $0.10 per 1,000 emails
✍️ Editor with live preview
📰 Multiple newsletters
📝 Signup forms + API
🌐 Public archive
📊 Stats & growth charts
🧹 List cleanup
📬 Bounce + spam protection
→ github.com/marclou/mailcheap
92% cheaper than Beehiiv (for me).
Have fun!
Bye bye Beehiiv 👋
I vibe-coded my own newsletter platform:
📧 Campaign management w/ editor
🖥️ Web archives (newsletter.marclou.com)
🔗 API support
🫧 List cleanup, deliverability reports
It took a few prompts with Opus 5.5.
I left Beehiiv because they raised prices for the 3rd time in 2 years.
- My first yearly bill was $1,000.
- My future bill would have been $4,000.
Now I'm using AWS SES + MongoDB, and I will pay less than $300/year.
Newsletter platforms charge per subscriber, when in fact the real cost is the number of emails sent. Subscribers will naturally become inactive, so you end up paying more for something that hurts your deliverability (sending to dormant subscribers = spam trap).
So I've set a cleanup cron job for my newsletter alternative. It marks inactive subs as dormant, sends one last re-engaging email, and stops emailing them. Money saved. Deliverability increased.
I also gain a priceless feature: Freedom. I can change the UI, add features, connect all my apps - anything is possible with just a prompt.
I'm replacing Resend next. I love it, but it's very expensive ($400/mo)
Kudos to Max
Keeping the motivation and happiness in motor sport high
HOW IT STARTED V/S HOW IT ENDED 🏁
Max Verstappen was given 30 LAPS or 75 MINUTES to overtake 100 amateur karters (content creators, athletes, journalists, and fans).
Starting P101, Verstappen completed the “Max vs 100” challenge in about 35 MINUTES, taking just 13 LAPS.
Is there any driver on the current Formula 1 grid who could've beaten Max's time? 👀
(📽️ @SC_ESPN)
Aleksander Bordvik retweeted
🇩🇰 Magnus Cort has ridden the final race of his career. We say goodbye to an exceptional stage hunter with a remarkable ability to keep winning year after year. The nine Grand Tour stage wins naturally stand out above everything else. Great career. 👏
prestigelisten.dk/en/rider/6…
Aleksander Bordvik retweeted
‼️ LG has issued a statement on their TVs recording audio and scanning local networks shown in the Gamers Nexus video. It says voice data is only processed when the remote's voice button is held down or after the "Hi LG" wake word, the company told Gizmodo.
The network scanning is in fact real, but LG calls it a standard smart TV function needed to deliver smart features.
The Automatic Content Recognition that identifies what's on your screen is opt-in, LG adds.
Critics note Gamers Nexus rooted the TV to get there, and HDTVtest says that only US models were tested, nobody has checked whether European sets under the GDPR behave the same way.
Even if LG is right, smart TVs are still a privacy and security problem. LG's own privacy policy allows sharing data with advertising partners and law enforcement and US police have been caught buying ad-broker data before.
Rtings found most modern sets track every device you plug in, down to the game console, and opting out is deliberately hard.
Researchers who reviewed the Gamers Nexus findings suggested keeping the TV off the internet entirely, less over tracking than over the vulnerabilities sitting in an internet-connected screen nobody patches.
‼️ BREAKING: Your LG TV is eavesdropping on you. It transcribes what you say, copies what is on your screen, and scans every device on your network, and researchers say the collection keeps running after you disconnect it, uploading the moment it reconnects.
LG's ad-tech arm says it out loud: "We own the glass." It pitches marketers on the ability to "own the living room," using data harvested from the TV you paid thousands for.
Gamers Nexus, working with Level1Techs and independent researchers, compromised an LG G5 and turned it into a listening device: it recorded room audio while the screen appeared off and the Ethernet cable was unplugged, then exfiltrated the file once the TV was back online.
LG has publicly said its TVs "do not collect, record, or store ambient conversations." Gamers Nexus found the TV converts speech to plain text and stores it in on-device logs, and that the mic window stays open 10 to 15 seconds after talking stops, sweeping up bystanders who never addressed the TV.
These sets are everywhere: hospitals, waiting rooms, boardrooms, hotels. ACR keeps running even when the TV is a dumb HDMI monitor, and a compromised set can pull the audio of a call off that HDMI feed. A surgeon asked Gamers Nexus where that leaves patient confidentiality.
Researchers advise disconnecting LG TVs from any network.
Aleksander Bordvik retweeted
The three Kings of Norway 🇳🇴, Denmark 🇩🇰 and Sweden 🇸🇪 in Oslo today. We belong together in the Nordic world.
Aleksander Bordvik retweeted
Martin Braithwaite on the inequality he has witnessed in Brazil:
“What strikes me is the difference between the rich and the poor.
“Every day I feel sad when I go to training because I see things I’ve never seen in my life.
“People living on the streets. In Denmark, that doesn’t exist.
“I’m always asking what we can do to help, as individuals and as a country, because to me these things cannot happen.
“We have to find a way to improve that and make our society a little more equal.”
Class from Martin Braithwaite. 🙏❤️
Trying to decide if it called Lake Ontario or Lake America 🧐
Thesis: I got cut off from various AI tools (US based) since I haven’t declared side. 😱😱
Plastic is still easy to wrap every darn thing in.
It doesn’t mean you should.
Challenge yourself with packaging and expect your brands to do the same.
Less plastic is a great start, redundant plastic packaging is the goal.
Aleksander Bordvik retweeted
Put August 12 in your phone now. Genuinely.
Before sunrise, six planets spread across the sky. Afternoon, the eclipse. After dark, the Perseids Meteor shower.
Four events on one day, NASA says, and the new moon that same date keeps the sky dark enough to actually see the meteors.
You don't need a telescope for most of it. A field, a coat, and twenty minutes for your eyes to adjust.
Aleksander Bordvik retweeted
AND NEW. 👑🥊
Dina Thorslund conquers Orlando and becomes the UNDISPUTED WBO Bantamweight World Champion.
All the belts. One champion. 🏆
#BeltsMatter
